I

Although "New Music," as both an idea and a catchword, is now outdated, the term had a formative influence on Schoenberg's understanding of art. He was outspoken in setting emphatic requirements: "Art means: New Art "; and earlier he declared: "Music insofar as it has to do with art, must always be new! Because only something new, something previously unexpressed is worth saying in art."^[2] This demand for newness in art has of course nothing to do with innovation at any price. For Schoenberg, novelty in itself was

neither an asset nor a liability; rather, he was concerned with the reasons for art being new. What he prescribed so emphatically for composers — the idea of New Music — he rejected with vehemence the moment he saw it reduced to a catchword by critics and historians. There is hardly a composer in the history of the twentieth century who combined, indeed merged, tradition and innovation more radically than Schoenberg. It was with good reason that in his dedicatory 1934 article "Der dialektische Komponist" Theodor W. Adorno quoted Stefan George's dictum "Höchste Strenge ist zugleich höchste Freiheit" (the greatest stringency is at the same time the greatest freedom),^[3] for this most productive paradox pervades Schoenberg's music. The dialectic that characterizes Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff was recognized and captured early on in such article and book titles as Hanns Eisler's "Arnold Schönberg, der musikalische Reaktionär"^[4] and Willi Reich's Arnold Schönberg oder Der konservative Revolutionär.^[5] The fact that Schoenberg was so persistently conscious of tradition prevented him from taking a "modern" position akin to that artistic modernism that since Baudelaire has associated itself with randomness, with the everyday and commonplace, but also with "épater le bourgeois. "^[6]

The poles of tradition and innovation are not the only ones that define the dialectics of Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff. Another formulation — to draw on Schoenberg's own words about compositional process — is defined by the concepts "heart" and "brain" in music; this configuration implies that even the categories of rationality and intuition (or inspiration) in Schoenberg's musical poetics are governed by a singular dialectic. This dialectic is particularly applicable where reception history has created an impression of one-sidedness — namely, in the period of free atonal expressionism (suspiciously irrational) in which Schoenberg's sense of form, governed solely by the rational basis of traditional musical expression and its syntactic mechanisms, was summed up in his declaration "Ich entscheide beim Komponieren einzig und allein durch das Gefühl, durch das Formgefühl " (in composing I make decisions only according to feeling, according to the feeling for form).^[7] Conversely, though, the dialectic is also reflected in the twelve-tone period (suspiciously rational) in which Schoenberg, while admittedly employing a technique of greater rationality as regards the selection of pitch classes, composed as before so far as the art of developing variation was concerned — composed "as before," with the old rationality of spontaneous fantasy, without any hint of constructivism for its own sake.

But what of Schoenberg's dialectical/dynamic Kunstbegriff in his own compositional development from work to work? If we presuppose a very individual synthesis in Schoenberg of the tradition of German art music from Bach to Wagner/Brahms and Mahler/Strauss, on the basis of which he was able to create his new art, then the question follows whether we can assume if not a teleological then at least a problem-historical compositional

progress. Certainly the main lines of development can be recognized, even sometimes a progression from work to work, but it would be an oversimplification to say that the succession of works in Schoenberg's oeuvre follows a model where, in seamless continuity, a musical problem is established in one work and solved in the succeeding one. Such a view would pervert the concept of a history of musical problems, a history that certainly cannot disregard the paradigm Schoenberg. Rather we should, in this respect, take as our point of departure the idea of a dialectical form of art production, one that favors the unorthodox and in which the rationally deducible is found alongside the unexpected, and recourse to compositional and genre tradition alongside bold inroads into new musical and music-historical territory.