Eleven
Schoenberg and the Canon:
An Evolving Heritage

Christopher Hailey

The current debate swirling around the literary canon is notable less for its novelty than for its self-consciousness. Every age wrangles over values and priorities, but seldom have the parameters of discourse been so studded with the brittle shards of contending ideologies. The forces of feminism and multiculturalism in the academy, the neuroses of political correctness in the society at large, the collapse of socialism, crises of late capitalism, and the postmodernist disintegration of metanarratives of progress and enlightenment are all signs of cultural adjustment to emerging global political and economic realities. In the United States shifting immigration and demographic patterns, economic dislocations, and the politics of affirmative action have heightened awareness of ethnic, racial, linguistic, gender, sexual, religious, and class differences and challenged long-standing assumptions about shared cultural values. As a repository of such values, literary canons, whether defined by reading lists, anthologies, or publishing projects such as the University of Chicago's Great Books series, are under scrutiny as to their makeup, their uses, the power structures they supposedly reflect, affirm, and perpetuate, and the diverse interests, backgrounds, and perceptions they demonstrably fail to represent.^[1] Barbara Herrnstein Smith has pointed out that texts that endure are usually "those that appear to reflect and reinforce establishment ideologies,"^[2] or, as Charles Altieri has paraphrased Smith's argument, those that speak to "nostalgia, conservative political pressures, stock rhetorical needs, and the inertia of established power."^[3] In this spirit ideological challenges, from Marxism to feminism, have sought to demonstrate the relationship between canonicity and larger structures of oppression or coercion. This crisis has triggered responses ranging from the anxious hand-wringing of neoconservatives and political demagogues manning (literally) the ramparts of fortress culture against

assault from the unwashed multitudes, to the objections of a committed rationalist such as Jürgen Habermas, who has identified a "legitimation crisis" that threatens to relativize values and criteria and derail the "incomplete project of Modernity."^[4] Although it is appealing to regard the canon as a self-adjusting image of societal consensus, there is an increasing understanding that any relevant — that is, practically applicable — canon will have to become a heteronomous construct subject to conscious modification and expansion.^[5]

Such challenges to the legitimacy of the canon and the assumptions that undergird it must necessarily affect our understanding of Arnold Schoenberg, for whom a musical canon was axiomatic.^[6] Few composers have been so shaped by their identification with a canon — which for Schoenberg served as both his own artistic frame of reference and the source of those criteria by which he insisted that others judge the meaning and value of his works. His ideal was a music of organic process whose impetus and justification were the fulfillment of its own self-defined and historically grounded needs. Indeed, in making his modernist style the consequence of history, he aimed the canon in his direction. The result was an aesthetic of limited context, in which a premium was placed on the integrity of organic relatedness both within a work and between works in a historical continuum. In a real sense, then, Schoenberg's musical persona was a response to and a self-conscious fulfillment of a century of musical-canon formation that had resulted from a combination of aesthetic advocacy and the changing material conditions of musical practice.^[7] His experience is paradigmatic for understanding the relationship between twentieth-century canonic ideology and the rise and crisis of modernism.

It is readily apparent from the works that Schoenberg performed, taught, analyzed, and wrote about that his active canon — those works upon which he continually drew and from which he learned as a composer — was relatively limited, indeed much more limited, for instance, than the range of his literary interests and influences. In his 1931 essay "National Music," Schoenberg cited Bach and Mozart as his principal teachers, and Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner as secondary influences. Arrayed around these core figures Schoenberg set Schubert, Mahler, Strauss, and Reger, to whom one might also add Haydn, Schumann, and Wolf. A handful of others, such as Liszt, Berlioz, C.P.E. Bach, and Handel, appear only on the periphery. In all it is a list that is almost wholly German and restricted to two hundred years of music history. This is of course not to suggest that Schoenberg was ignorant of other music, but it does delimit a relatively closed sphere of productive relevance.

It is nonetheless important to recognize Schoenberg's encounters and involvement with a broader spectrum of musical styles — one end of which is represented by his firsthand familiarity with Viennese operetta and his cabaret experiences in Berlin, the other by the programs of the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen — which show a remarkable catholicity of interests if not tastes. After his move to Berlin in 1926 Schoenberg, now remarried to a woman many years his junior and engaged in a far more active social life, was exposed to a still wider range of musical impulses through concerts, theater, radio, and film. Moreover, his essays from the twenties and early thirties document his awareness of contemporary explorations of non-Western and early music.^[8] In the United States, and more specifically in Los Angeles, Schoenberg was drawn into domains of popular culture he had until then witnessed only from afar. As a private tutor to studio musicians, a social guest sought after by celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, George Gershwin, and Harpo Marx, and a member of an émigré community largely co-opted by the entertainment industry, Schoenberg found himself in an environment in which many of his established hierarchies were inverted.

These experiences brought him into contact with ever more diverse audiences, students, social circles, and cultural references, in a world ever more saturated with technology and disparate information sources, and these elements were not without influence upon his ideas of canonicity. Through his letters and essays one can follow the transformation of a relatively stable hierarchy of high and low art in Vienna into a tentative acknowledgment of wider pluralities in Berlin and into, in America, an attempt, however cursory, to posit a cultural continuum extending from Maeterlinck to Mickey Mouse, from Tolstoy to the Marx Brothers.^[9]

These observations suggest that while over the course of his career Schoenberg's core musical canon remained relatively stable, the instrumentality of that canon changed. The influences were of course many, and included cultural, psychological, professional, political, geographic, and temporal factors, among others. But it is possible to isolate three distinct phases relating to Schoenberg's experiences in, respectively, Vienna, Berlin, and Los Angeles — three settings in which the concept "canon" shifted from a record of historical cultural identity to a tool of cultural politics to, finally, a project of cultural enlightenment.

Karl Kraus once observed, "The streets of Vienna are paved with culture; the streets of other cities with asphalt."^[10] Schoenberg's Vienna was comparatively small physically, and highly centralized. The media of her cultural identity — art, literature, and above all theater and music — were cultivated

with an intensity scarcely known elsewhere. For Viennese musicians the weight of history was particularly heavy, for they lived in the city where many of the central figures of the canonic repertory had made their home. This gave Vienna's musical life its vibrancy but also encouraged a degree of complacency that by the turn of the century threatened to ossify a rich legacy into sterile academism and unthinking tradition. If there was a musical "crisis of language" corresponding to Hofmannsthal's search for literary integrity and authenticity, then it was in large part brought on by the appalling experience of a rich syntactical inheritance being bled dry of meaning. Mahler recognized as much with regard to performance practice. His famous dictum "Tradition ist Schlamperei" was less an injunction against tradition than against Schlamperei, and he did much to rescue hallowed performance traditions by elevating them to a level of conscious articulation.

Similarly, a generation of composers and theorists — Schoenberg most radically among them — sought to rescue the techniques of the classical tradition from the stale formulae of the academy. The remarkable number of gifted teachers emerging from the generation of the 1870s and 1880s (including Schoenberg and his circle, as well as Hauer, Marx, Schenker, Schmidt, Schreker, Weigl, and Zemlinsky) shared a devotion to a legacy of craft and the conviction that the complete assimilation of that craft could serve as a basis for aesthetic judgment, the mastery of its grammar as the means to original, individual expression. These self-appointed inheritors of the legacy became its protectors as well. They were an extraordinary collection of composers, performers, and theorists whose commitment to the continuing value of a shared canon of classical works and techniques made Vienna a rich resonating chamber for its own cultural history. Their works represent a revitalized dialogue with that legacy and a process of self-discovery within that culture, creating the kind of dense tangle of associations within and between works of the larger canon that Kraus would have appreciated. For Schoenberg and others, the crisis of integrity and authenticity was resolved in favor of creative individuality achieved through the mastery of craft.^[11] Not surprisingly, Schoenberg's canonical priorities reflect the cultural practices of turn-of-the-century Vienna.

Although Vienna was a point of geographic intersection, with a significant representation of Italian and French opera, and Slavic and Scandinavian music, Schoenberg's canon (at least through Brahms) is the sanctioned pantheon of the Vienna Conservatory and as such differs little from the preferences of his more conservative contemporaries.^[12] The fact that Schoenberg and so many of his contemporaries were drawn to teaching, and taught primarily through examination and analysis of this limited canon, reinforced the canon's normative, disciplinary value as a criterion for critical judgment. More important, mastering the canon and its language as craft was an act of creative imagination, actively knitting past with

present into a cohesive whole. It was both a linear legacy and a pedigree. In this sense the canon in Vienna was self-defining and self-legitimizing.

The idea of the canon as a means of individual definition and expression within a historical continuum continued to resonate in Schoenberg's thinking at a time when he was becoming increasingly aware of the canon as an agent of self-definition within a political context. It is not surprising that during the First World War Schoenberg identified his canon with the larger cause of the German nation, but it was in fact a rhetorical stance he would maintain throughout his remaining years in Europe, though with shifting emphases. There is a world of difference between writing in 1919 of the need to "ensure the German nation's superiority in the field of music"^[13] and the 1931 essay "National Music," in which Schoenberg defends his own music, "produced on German soil, without foreign influences," as "a living example of an art able most effectively to oppose Latin and Slav hopes of hegemony."^[14] Between those two essays are the incidents in Mattsee, the assault upon Schoenberg's "bolshevist modernism" by cultural conservatives, and Schoenberg's own embattled position as a political appointee in a highly politicized German capital.^[15] From an unabashed identification with a national cause to an appeal to hallowed tradition as a credential, Schoenberg had come to recognize the canon as an instrument of cultural politics.

Beyond that, now removed from the safe cocoon of Vienna, Schoenberg found his sacrosanct canon under attack from within, by a younger generation lured away from Mozart and Beethoven, Wagner and Brahms, by American jazz, Russian primitivism, French ésprit, Italian soul, experimental technology, and a feverish succession of fashions and fads from Neue Sachlichkeit to Gebrauchsmusik, Spielmusik, and neoclassicism. For a time, 1922 to 1930 by his own account, Schoenberg lost his influence over youth and, like other leading figures — Busoni and Schreker among them — was bewildered and dismayed by his students' craving for novelty.^[16] In this context an appeal to the hallowed repertory was an appeal for stability — an appeal that befitted his position as a professor of the august Prussian Academy of the Arts. It was also an appeal with more than a hint of his own conservative agenda, which by 1930 had become a balancing act between artistic responsibility and the appearance of political opportunism.

Schoenberg's emigration to the United States offered release from the anguished tangle that cultural identity in Germany had become, but at a price. In America, Europe's highly structured supports for cultural identity and authority were lacking. Schoenberg, now more object than subject, was

a representative of an "old world" European culture. His writing is more patient, pragmatic, and cautiously articulated; his vision of the canon, more tolerant and inclusive, takes on a supranational cast that advertises itself as vaguely European, or simply "Western."^[17] Both feted and marginalized, Schoenberg submitted to his own commodification as the "learned professor," though not without irony, as when he once tellingly likened his public persona to a statue on a pedestal.^[18]

In the United States Schoenberg's students lacked the preparation and breadth of experience he could have expected in Europe. Their knowledge of music literature, he wrote in 1938, "offers the aspects of a Swiss cheese."^[19] In the absence of a context, the canon could no longer serve as an anchor of identity as it had in Vienna, or as an article of political and aesthetic confession as in Berlin, but was instead marketed like a medicinal balm for which Schoenberg, the distinguished physician, offered testimonial. Schoenberg had become the kindly missionary patiently instructing the natives in higher truths.

But Schoenberg's canon was not simply competing against ignorance and an omnipresent popular culture; it was also challenged by a specifically American art music consciously seeking to free itself of its European — that is, German — heritage. Many of the colleagues and music students from whom Schoenberg most needed support were themselves torn between their search for indigenous roots and those alternative influences — most particularly from France, Stravinsky, and neoclassicism — that might assist them in that quest. The result was that Schoenberg's canon was further relativized by the presence of several contending canons.^[20]

It is to his credit that Schoenberg recognized the necessity of this process, and recognized also the complexity of America's cultural growing pains.^[21] He could even rationalize the marginalization of his music, for by this time he felt sufficiently secure of his own place in the canon to await the judgment of history.^[22] At the same time he had become a modernist icon, more written about than performed, more cited than sighted. This is the point at which certain aspects of Schoenberg's attitude toward the canon become pertinent to his identity as a modernist.

During the late 1930s the art critic Clement Greenberg began to formulate a view of modernism as a process by which each medium discovered its own inherent forms and techniques. "It is by virtue of its medium," he wrote in 1940, "that each art is unique and strictly itself."^[23] In eliminating effects borrowed from other media and other arts, Greenberg argued, "each art would be rendered `pure,' and in its `purity' find the guarantee

of its standards of quality as well as of its independence."^[24] This formalist preoccupation with medium-specific autonomy is explicitly present in literary and artistic modernism and is arguably a key element running through musical modernism from expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit and neoclassicism.^[25] It also came to be associated — at least as a subtext — with central tenets in Schoenberg's modernism. In such a quest the canon fulfilled a crucial role as means of assuring autonomy, for by crystallizing and applying to one's own work those "timeless" techniques that give the canon its coherence and integrity, one could assure both purity of lineage and resistance to temporal influences. What is more, I do not doubt that for a composer like Schoenberg, subject to a succession of cultural and geographic dislocations, the canon was a valuable guarantor of continuity and moral identity.

Concomitant with Schoenberg's quest for continuity and identity was the need to posit an ideal audience, an audience steeped in his canon and defined in his terms. In his compositions, performance coaching, analyses, and insistence upon structural listening Schoenberg created a canon viewed from a modernist's perspective, the artwork as a chiseled entity of self-referential perfection.^[26] This, more than the leap — or slither — into atonality, more than the development of the twelve-tone system, has been, I would maintain, the most influential legacy of Schoenberg's teaching.^[27] The result is not merely an idealized canon but also an idealized audience, an audience that took shape in Schoenberg's Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen, whose members were to be that model community, conversant with the canon and the lessons it taught. Performance was realization and listening a contemplative immersion. Strict injunctions against any public display of favor or disfavor, and the exclusion of critics, were intended to purge Verein performances of the theatrical impurities of normal concert life.^[28] But the very nature of performance encourages interpretive interplay, challenges autonomy, and undermines intentionality and control; any performance, no matter how carefully prepared and faithfully executed, no matter how intelligently and respectfully heard, creates a dialogue in which all sides set terms. Such a dialogue, ever changing, is the currency of contemporary relevance.

Schoenberg is in need of contemporary relevance, but it will not come on his terms. The price of taking Schoenberg into the musical canon, of accepting him as a modernist icon, has been to accept his definition of the canon and his place within it. That price is too high. His works, both as historical artifacts and as a part of living experience, can come alive to us

only through unfettered dialogue, and a first step toward that dialogue is restoring Schoenberg to his time through a process of historical contextualization.^[29]

The effect of Schoenberg's attempt — or our perception of his attempt — to associate his work with timeless canonic principles has been to rob it of its temporality.^[30] This has not only tended to remove his music from what Steven Connor has called the "dust and heat of history" but also sped the process by which it has become an inert artifact of the past, more readily subject, as Connor observes, to being commodified and "museumized" by cultural institutions and the academy.^[31] This ossification into monumentality has been accompanied by the flattened historical perspective of post-modernist theories, resulting in what Connor has called a "furious polyphony of decontextualized voices."^[32] This is a trend to which Schoenberg's articulate self, for all its insistence upon historical origin, offers scant resistance. And yet it is precisely Schoenberg's articulate self, with his embrace of performance and pedagogy, that undermines his own quest for autonomy and open perspectives for revitalizing his creative legacy.

The interest in reader response and reception history that has helped revolutionize literary theory over the past quarter century is not a mere academic fad but a reflection of the way in which literature, art, and history itself have been called to account by the increasing self- and "other"-consciousness of our culture. Lay and professional audiences have begun to set terms of engagement that reflect an increasingly pluralistic cultural environment and a heightened awareness of the contingencies of individual perspectives. This array of contending perspectives has stimulated the search for critical categories that are more all-encompassing and that address perspectives such as those of gender, race, and class.

These same processes have been operative in transforming musical culture and have at long last begun to be reflected in musical criticism and scholarship.^[33] Theoretical discourse, for instance, long dominated by a bias toward pitch and harmony (which assured a central position for works reflecting the development and dissolution of tonality and the structural and thematic means of tonal articulation), has recently begun to accommodate a range of music (including areas of new music as well as popular and non-Western styles) governed by other organizational principles such as timbre and rhythm. What is more, extramusical parameters such as the significance of popularity, gender identification, and psychological response have become sanctioned areas of inquiry. This has not only opened new repertories to critical scrutiny but also created an arena in which disparate works and repertories, from plainchant to punk rock, can be discussed within a single framework.

To abandon a narrowly defined set of critical criteria is to undermine the authority of any single canon as well as of individual works or bodies of

works that derived their authority from their consonance — or defiance — of its principles. The authority of Schoenberg's works (and as a man and artist, authority was one of the central categories of his life) derives from both their consonance with and defiance of his chosen canon. The question thus arises: How central is the maintenance of that authority for assigning quality, value, or relevance to Schoenberg's work? That question can best be answered by asking whether, within the shifting categories of contemporary evaluation, Schoenberg's works can continue to engage and reward our interest.

At this point it is well to remember that Schoenberg's canon was in part a construct of personal choices; his understanding of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms was selective and self-serving. Our own no less selective and self-serving ideas of canonicity (or even multi-canonicity) are a reflection of the processes by which we adjust ourselves to transformations in our own culture and find a means to assign value and meaning. The eclectic quality of our culture has fostered interdisciplinary dialogue, cross-cultural exchange, and a hermeneutics of heteronomy. Under such circumstances the autonomy of Schoenberg's music, its integrity on its own terms, becomes but one evaluative factor among many. Of greater significance is its contextual richness.

Schoenberg was passionately engaged with his times — in his activities, in his writings, and most importantly in his works. It is evident that his artistic temperament was shaped by a range of influences in literature, theology, art, and philosophy, as well as by music far outside his admitted canon. And one can follow his shifting preoccupations through the various stages of his career and in a series of influential and provocative works, most of which lay outside the traditional canonical formal categories.^[34] Moreover, an extraordinary number of Schoenberg's works are datable by the very nature of their genre, form, content, musical language, and style. The gargantuan dimensions of Gurrelieder could scarcely have been conceived in 1920 any more than the moral and theatrical austerity of Moses und Aron belongs to a prewar mentality. Pierrot lunaire, Von heute auf morgen, the Satires for chorus, the Serenade, op. 24, and the Piano Suite, op. 25, the Suite for String Orchestra, A Survivor from Warsaw, and the Ode to Napoleon are just a few of the works linked to specific contexts deriving from Schoenberg's intense and ever broadening discourse with his time.^[35] The intensity of this discourse also accounts for the large number of fragments and torsos whose concerns and musical means had outlived their moment of inspiration.^[36]

There is a sense in which Schoenberg's oeuvre is refreshingly dated, and no more so than in his insistent appeal to historical truths.^[37] And yet it is what Schoenberg made of that canonic inheritance within concrete cultural and political conditions that lends him and his works new relevance. Contextualizing Schoenberg, reintegrating his work into the historical and tem-

poral flow of his time, has the double benefit of rescuing him from his defenders as well as creating a richer, more complex figure capable of resisting both facile commodification and reactionary deconstruction. Thus even if the authority of Schoenberg's canon can never be restored, even if the very idea of canonicity is undermined, one can create a context that allows Schoenberg and his works to resonate across a wider network of associations. It is part of what Steven Connor calls the "struggle between a modernist restricted field, with its stress on individuality, purity and essence, and the postmodernist expanded field, with its embrace of the contingent conditions."^[38] The contingent conditions in Schoenberg's work are what create its most valuable and instructive tensions. We must be willing to separate Schoenberg's articulate vision of himself and his canon from his works and allow the historical connectedness of both to inform our vision of the whole. We must free his canon from being a preserve of timeless truth to becoming a theater of present possibilities. To delimit Schoenberg is not to abandon him but to welcome him into the productive discourse of our time.