III

In the context of twentieth-century music history, depending on the operative phase, it has been alternately either the innovative or the conservative features of the Schoenbergian Kunstbegriff that were manifest. All in all it is unprecedented with what consistency and innovative richness Schoen-

berg salvaged the concept (as derived from Schopenhauer's metaphysics) of an absolute musical art well into the twentieth century, all the more remarkable for the period after World War I, when new paradigms were established and the prewar era was considered a bygone world.

It would be well to outline here, very briefly, the various stages of Schoenberg's development. In his youth, and indeed during his whole life, Schoenberg was for the most part an autodidact. In his 1949 English-language essay "My Evolution" he names three people who played an important role in his artistic development: Oscar Adler, David Bach, and Alexander Zemlinsky.^[12] There is unquestionably a connection between Schoenberg's unacademic side, his awareness that only original solutions endure, and this nonscholastic education. It helped him attain greater independence in his musical thinking and allowed him to develop his Kunstbegriff in so original a way.

As of 1899, the date of the string sextet Verklärte Nacht, op. 4, and in what is generally referred to as the first and second main periods — those of the tonal early works and subsequent free expressionistic atonality — work succeeded work in an intense, vigorous development of his musical thinking. In the context of musical modernism (in the sense in which that turn-of-the-century period is best understood),^[13] there were overlapping, epochspecific traits — for instance, the trend toward programmatic subjects, toward the transcendence of genre, toward the monumental song — but already here Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff developed more radically and more dynamically than that of any of his European colleagues. The dynamics of the development charted by this series of works, written one after another in an incredibly short period of time, were historically unprecedented. Schoenberg recalled this burst of creative energy when he admitted at the 1910 Vienna premiere of the George-Lieder, op. 15, that in this work he had succeeded for the first time in realizing a new ideal of expression that he had had in mind for years. The heading "Schoenberg and Progress" for the chapter on Schoenberg in Adorno's Philosophy of New Music was absolutely justified. Strauss, Mahler, Reger, Debussy — all the leading contemporary composers — being children of their own time, were in one way or another committed to the idea of progress, but none realized it as radically in his work as did Schoenberg when around 1910 he ventured into totally new territory with his expressionistic art.

In the twenties Schoenberg embarked on a new stage of his work, and of music history, with his method of composition with twelve tones related only to one another. At this time his Kunstbegriff, without any involvement on his part, became subject to the dichotomous misunderstanding that it was on the one hand "brain music," the dead monster of a musical engineer who tries to compensate for his lack of artistic inspiration with mathematical calculations, and on the other "heart music," the Romantic echoes of

an outmoded composer whose legacy no longer represented a truly contemporary musical art. The first of these two polemical arguments against Schoenberg — which taken together serve to illuminate the composer's complexity — stemmed from the position of a preserved post-Romantic traditionalism (for example, that of Pfitzner); the second, from an alienating neoclassicism (for example, that of Stravinsky). Nonetheless, despite such attacks it was precisely at this time that Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff asserted itself in its complete individuality. Yet its author saw himself as an unappreciated artist. Having at the end of 1925 attained the pinnacle of public recognition with his position as the director of a master class in composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, he was forced to acknowledge that a younger generation of composers, seeing the times in a new way and with their concept of "mittlere Musik,"^[14] had already passed him over and that it was they who were at the focal point of the music world's attention, an interest that could not be ascribed to mere fashion.

It is not easy to assess the extent to which Schoenberg's Kunstbegriff changed during the last two decades of his life in the United States, after his exile from National Socialist Germany. On the one hand "committed works" take on greater significance as a result of Schoenberg's declaration that he would make the political struggle for Judaism his main mission. On the other hand his Kunstbegriff changed hardly at all, since his commitment was a fermentation more of autonomous than of functional art, and his occasional works, unlike those of composers of "mittlere Musik," remained, as in the nineteenth century, separate from his proclaimed Kunstbegriff. In no sense did Schoenberg conform to popular contemporary taste in the thirties and forties;^[15] his artistic personality was too fixed to have allowed the pressure of external circumstances substantially to change his Kunstbegriff. During those two decades he gives the impression of an antediluvian boulder resistant to any softening toward a musical populism with an eye on the tastes of the broader public. Schoenberg knew that that isolated him, but because of his unshakable belief in himself and his idea of art he also foresaw that the future would belong to him.