Fourteen
Schoenberg the Contemporary:
A View from Behind

Reinhold Brinkmann

Let me begin outside the picture, as it were.^[1] The last book of the late Bruno Bettelheim, the famous psychiatrist, bears the title Freud's Vienna.^[2] From the title essay of this book, I cite the following passages:

It is not by chance that psychoanalysis was born in Vienna and came of age there. In Freud's time, the cultural atmosphere in Vienna encouraged a fascination with both mental illness and sexual problems in a way unique in the Western world — a fascination that extended throughout society. . . . The origins of this unique cultural preoccupation can be traced to the history of the city itself, but most especially to the concerns and attitudes foremost in the minds of Vienna's cultural elites just before and during the period in which Freud formed his revolutionary theories about our emotional life. . . .

With the appearance of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, psychoanalysis became established. This greatest of Freud's works is one of introspection; in it all interest is devoted to the innermost self of man, to the neglect of the external world, which pales in comparison to the fascination of this inner world. That this turn-of-the-century Viennese chef d'oeuvre was indeed the result of desperation at being unable to change the course of the external world and represented an effort to make up this deficiency by a single-minded interest in the dark underworld, is attested to by the motto which Freud put at the beginning: Virgil's line "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo " ("If I cannot move heaven, I will stir up the underworld"). This motto was a most succinct suggestion that turning inward toward the hidden aspects of the self was due to a despair that it was no longer within one's ability to alter the external world or stop its dissolution; that therefore the best one could do was to deny importance to the world at large by concentrating all interest on the dark aspects of the psyche.

Bettelheim's text may be reread as a statement on Schoenberg's new music with but a few changes of words in these passages — substituting "Schoen-

berg" for "Freud," "atonality" for "psychoanalysis," "Erwartung, " for example, for "The Interpretation of Dreams "; and introducing historically significant musical categories (such as "the emancipation of dissonance" or "the dissolution of the tonal system") instead of psychoanalytical terms. The underlying sociocultural analysis and the central idea of introspection as the primary figure of thought characterize the origin and the structure both of Freud's psychoanalytical theory and of Schoenberg's atonal compositions. Thus, with an identical social and historical accentuation, "Freud's Vienna" could also be named "Schoenberg's Vienna," just as philosophers rightly call it "Wittgenstein's Vienna" and art historians could claim it to be "Schiele's Vienna."

Schoenberg's foundation of the Viennese atonality as a new paradigm for a contemporary music, besides being embedded in a music-historical process, was indeed the reflection of a very specific and problematic historical, social, cultural, and psychical situation in Vienna around 1900. Schoenberg's music is at once a direct expression and reflecting mirror of this situation and, for some exceptional moments, its anticipation: it is at once a subject of this state of mind and its complex symbolic representation. And its most general principle seems to be the gesture that Bruno Bettelheim named "introspection" — the concentration on the "inner world," its exploration, reflection, and manifestation. Ernst Bloch would later characterize this principle as "der interne Weg " (the internal way) — "der interne Weg, auch Selbstbegegnung genannt, die Bereitung des inneren Worts, ohne die aller Blick nach aussen nichtig bleibt, und kein Magnet, keine Kraft, das innere Wort auch draussen anzuziehen, ihm zum Durchbruch aus dem Irrtum der Welt zu verhelfen. "^[3] Elsewhere I have related this thought to the gesture with which Schoenberg in an oft-quoted aphorism of 1910 characterizes the creative act.^[4] In this Fragment, to use a Romantic term, art is defined — and I paraphrase Schoenberg — as the "cry of despair uttered by those who experience at first hand the fate of mankind." Artists are seen as sensitive individuals "who hurl themselves in among the moving wheels, to understand how it all works." They open their eyes — they "open them wide" — "to tackle what must be tackled" so as to grasp the world and its mechanisms. But, most important, they "often close their eyes, in order to perceive things incommunicable by the senses, to envision within themselves the process that only seems to be in the world outside. The world revolves within — inside them: what bursts out is merely the echo — the work of art."^[5]

I am interested in what I have called the specific gesture, or figure of thought, contained in these three statements (by Bettelheim, Bloch, and, in particular, Schoenberg) and their three layers. The first layer betrays desperation about the "external world," an attempt to intervene, and the experience of one's inability to change its dissolution; in a second layer we find a turning inward, an introspection, and the stipulation that there

is an inner world that is intact — unhurt and intact in spite of everything, and therefore superior; and, finally, we have a third layer: the artistic outburst, the figure of the Durchbruch (breakthrough) — the work of art as the utopian message, confronting the "world" with truth — that is, spiritual truth. It seems to me not only that this figure of thought is Schoenberg's most fundamental aesthetic creed — a creed deeply rooted in European middle-class culture and nineteenth-century history — but that this intellectual gesture can serve as a metaphorical characterization of his life and work.

In parentheses, and briefly: The term Durchbruch is familiar as a representational category in musical criticism, in particular since Adorno's Mahler monograph; the term mediates art form with what Adorno called the Weltlauf, the course of the world.^[6] But it certainly goes back to nineteenth-century compositional strategies and was probably introduced into the critical vocabulary for music by Paul Bekker in his book on Mahler, dating from 1920.^[7] And it should be noted that both Ernst Bloch and Schoenberg himself use this energetic term to characterize the creative situation — Bloch in the sentence quoted above — the Durchbruch of the "inner word" to the world "outside" — and Schoenberg in his well-known statement of 1910 that with the George-Lieder he was "conscious of having broken through every restriction of a bygone aesthetic."^[8]

Schoenberg's quest for contemporaneity in his art can be concentrated first in the question of how to realize artistically the paradigmatic Durchbruch; this question governs his search for a pertinent musical language. His quest for contemporaneity can be concentrated second in the question of what — of, in other words, the goal of this strategy; this governs his search for meaning. To illustrate this vague general statement I will use three images from different periods of Schoenberg's life: a pictorial image for "Schoenberg's Vienna" (notice the genitivus possessivus! ), a linguistic image for "Schoenberg in Berlin," and a musical image for "Schoenberg in America." In my understanding of this life's work and its historical place, the first period sets the fundamentum. I will therefore devote considerably more time and space to Schoenberg's "project Vienna" than to "Berlin" or "America."

Schoenberg's Vienna

Shortly after World War I Darius Milhaud visited Schoenberg in his Mödling home. Decades later he still vividly recalled a visual impression:

We had coffee in a dining room, the walls of which were hung about with Schoenberg's paintings. Faces and eyes, eyes, eyes everywhere!"^[9]

This experience can be corroborated by a number of images: an amateur photo of a wall from the 1974 Schoenberg exhibition in the Vienna Secession displaying Schoenberg paintings; a photo of Schoenberg sitting in his Brentwood home in front of a wall hung with self-portraits;^[10] one of the self-portraits from 1910; and the Red Gaze, also from 1910.^[11] All of these paintings display Schoenberg's central pictorial idea: the human being's existence concentrated in open eyes — eyes of a specific intensity, direct, active, burning, confronting, questioning.^[12]

Iconologically these faces resemble and at the same time differ from Edvard Munch's famous Scream, with its expression — in lines and eyes — of defensiveness and angst.^[13] A particularly telling difference is that Schoenberg's portraits depict isolated individuals, concentrating them in their open eyes, whereas Munch's screaming face and body are shown within a realistic context of landscape and other background figures.

For me Schoenberg's "eyes" are pictorial realizations of the first layer of his artistic creed of 1910, eyes "wide open" as the "cry of despair" of the isolated individual, the artist attempting to grasp "world" and its mechanics, eyes wide open so as to "understand how it all works." These are eyes that are letting "world" enter — eyes, too, that leave the artist almost defenseless.

And I recall Schoenberg's remark, late in life, to Halsey Stevens: ". . . what painting meant to me. In fact, it was the same to me as making music." A painter friend of mine insists that these eyes are in fact "sounding," that they have an almost musical quality. The painted "cry of despair" can be aurally perceived. Indeed, there seems to be a strong connection between eye and ear in Schoenberg's perception of his world; seeing "world" and hearing "world" are linked, almost identical.^[14] Schoenberg once remarked that a professional painter would always be able to express the entire person through the eyes, whereas Schoenberg himself, as an amateur painter, felt that his capacity in this field was limited, the "eyes" being primarily confined to representing only one side — that is, emotions, the expressive inwardness of their subject. That may well be true. But the active, confronting directness of these eyes indicates to me, in addition, a reflecting, critical quality, reflection as the basis for a critical distance, an assessment of both world and self.

The second level of Schoenberg's aphorism — close the eyes and listen to the world within — calls to mind Hegel's definition of the lyric:

In lyric . . . it is feeling and reflection which draw . . . the objectively existent world into themselves and live it through their own inner element, and only then, after the world has become something inward, is it grasped and expressed in words. In contrast to the spread of epic, lyric has contracted concentration [Zusammengezogenheit ] for its principle.^[15]

Schoenberg's 1910 aphorism is like an expressionistic specification of this general perspective on the lyric; even the vocabulary is strikingly similar. Lyrical introspection is Schoenberg's Viennese answer to the artist's inability any longer to embrace and grasp the "world."

This introspection could be demonstrated in compositional terms. Strategies as applied to Schoenberg would include the antimonumental, antisymphonic poetics of the "critical years" around 1910; his speaking out against the representation of the "world" in Mahler's symphonies, his pointed withdrawal from the large genres and large, complicated formal constructions of the Viennese and German tradition; his rejection of the symphony, symphonic poem, and oratorio (this impulse would return later, but both the oratorio Die Jakobsleiter and the opera Moses und Aron would remain fragments). Rather would there be a predominance of lyrical genres such as lied and character piece. The subject of Viennese atonality around 1910 is a lyrical one. There are a chamber symphony for solo instruments (op. 9), a string quartet (op. 10), lieder (opp. 14 and 15), lyrical piano pieces (opp. 11 and 19), character pieces for orchestra (op. 16), and the mono drama Erwartung.^{[ 16]}

Hegel's Zusammengezogenheit (contracted concentration) as a compositional category quite obviously coincides with Schoenberg's, Webern's, and even Berg's seemingly short pieces from around 1910, those intense moments of inwardness that are in fact contracted, compressed long ones. Erwartung is the paradigmatic work, and Marie's death in Wozzeck is its concentrated reflection. I could demonstrate similar strategies in compositional and dramaturgical details. Take, as one example only, the light-and-storm scene at the center of Die glückliche Hand. Schoenberg's stage directions instruct the Man to act "as if" the crescendo of light and storm originates in himself; in other words, the events of the outer world are mere projections of an inner world.

It is illuminating to note, in this context, that Schoenberg's lieder belong to a very specific period in his compositional output — namely, the period from his early works to the freely atonal ones: that is, the time leading up to World War I. From the 1920s onward Schoenberg abandoned the genre of the intimate musical lyric, and his later oeuvre, his vocal music in particular, is located beyond the realm of the lyric as a paradigm of contemporary thought.

Among Schoenberg's numerous self-portraits from around 1910 one painting is of specific interest for our discussion of inwardness as the second layer. It is the well-known Self-Portrait from Behind, painted in 1911.^[17] The composer is walking, obviously on a sidewalk, arms crossed behind the body, holding a walking stick and a cap (it does not, unfortunately, seem to be a sketchbook); the shadow shows that the sun is behind him. The gesture of the moving body suggests that the walker is concentrating, meditating,

[Full Size]

Fig. 12.
Schoenberg, sketch for Self-Portrait from Behind. Reproduced courtesy of
Lawrence Schoenberg.

thinking. One particular aspect of the genesis of this painting interests me at this point. There is a pencil sketch, a drawing, that precedes the oil painting (see figure 12).^[18] Here the artist is walking in the inner city, approaching an intersection with people and traffic. We see tall houses, two streetcars, a Fiaker, and two women and another man, either going in the opposite

direction or crossing. Though the artist is already isolated in the sketch, an important decision is made in the step from sketch to final painting to exclude reality, the "world outside" — or, viewed positively, to concentrate on the isolated individual and, with that, and within the context of the Viennese "psyche," on the problem, the crisis, of the Self. Thus the genesis of the self-portrait follows Bloch's "inner way."

The third layer of Schoenberg's artistic creed is concerned with the breakthrough of the work of art from its inner existence to the world outside. This step entails the question of representation or communication. Schoenberg's problem seems to lie in the finding, or defining, of the message or goal of his art; in a letter to Rudolf Kolisch he refers to "what it is " overriding the "how" of artistic communication.^[19] During these Vienna years, the need to go ahead, to walk, and the direction of the path seem clear; what is not clear, at this point, are the ends (the quasi-Nietzschean "the new man" in Schoenberg's Harmonielehre defines them in an abstract manner). In the words of the Archangel Gabriel in Die Jakobsleiter, "Whether right or left, forward of backward, uphill or down, one must go without asking what lies behind or ahead."^[20]

There are well-known compositional strategies to realize the Durchbruch and to communicate the message "from within," particularly those strategies related to the nineteenth-century symphonic plot archetype. These include not only formal processes but structural dispositions as well. Schoenberg made use of such strategies throughout his career. Characteristic of his Viennese free atonal period, however, is the uncertainty about the "what" of the artwork, the final destiny of the artist's engagement.

The early Gurrelieder defines the grandiose climax of the work's massive choral ending as "Panic" nature; it is, to use Rudolf Stephan's term, "Weltanschauungsmusik " in the post-Gründerzeit spirit, deeply influenced by prevailing ideas from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.^[21] Mahler's Third Symphony seems to indicate a similar, though more sophisticated, philosophical stance. Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, with its purely aesthetic goal of a new musical language ("Ich löse mich in tönen " — I dissolve myself in sounds), characterized with Stefan George as "luft von anderem planeten" (air from another planet), combines its aestheticism with the proclamation of the artist as a prophetic voice at the climax of the last movement: "Ich bin ein dröhnen nur der heiligen stimme" (I am only a rumble of the holy voice). The monodrama Erwartung then ends with a utopian gesture toward an unknown and uncertain future. The Woman's last words are "Ich suchte. . . .," which close without identifying, or allowing us to identify, what she is searching for. And the orchestral wedge with which the two lines disappear in the highest as well as deepest registers — breaking off, not ending — leaves the final musical motion wide open; the "what" remains unspecified indeed. Ernst Bloch would call this gesture "Sich ins Blaue hinein bauen" (to

build oneself into the unknown future); it appears here, at the open end of Erwartung, as a similar searching for "the true, the real, where the merely actual disappears"^[22] without the certainty of the "incipit vita nova." What remains at this point is the artist's reflection of his own situation: his being an object only of the world's dissolution (for which a particular sensitivity must have existed in the capital of the fading Hapsburg empire), limited to an expressive, perhaps prophetic, statement but unable to offer a goal, let alone any advice for actually changing the course of the external world. The open eyes — the orchestral wedge — "ich suchte . . ." — in search of meaning.

Here Schoenberg's Self-Portrait from Behind can again come into play. I should like to make a few iconographical remarks — quite incomplete, given the complex history of this image. I will not even touch on the gothic figures from behind, or the baroque repousseurs, or Tischbein's Goethe at the Window in Rome — to name just a few more distant examples. But the nineteenth-century history of the Rückenfigur can be illuminating for my purpose. And certainly Caspar David Friedrich must be mentioned. I offer three examples: Friedrich's Traveler Looking over the Sea of Fog, painted in 1818; Woman in Front of the Setting Sun, also from 1818; and the later Evening Landscape with Two Men, from the early 1830s.^[23]

Depicted are isolated back-view figures resting before a silent landscape, preferably in the twilight. They are alone, solitary, sometimes in pairs, confronting nature, sometimes as though sanctified by the spectacle of nature. It is an important formal quality of the Rückenfigur in general that the back view has the tendency to draw the beholder into the canvas, tempting the beholder to assume the protagonist's place. The traditional scholarly interpretation of Friedrich's paintings, renewed by Jens Christian Jensen, stresses the unifying quality of the silent conversation with nature and includes the beholder in this assessment:

These figures do not so much stand in front of the picture, they are part of the picture. Man and nature meet: the divine universe unfolds in the tableau of nature, it manifests itself in transcendental infinity. . . . The individual's solitude is replaced by the fusion of contemplation, visibility and thought, the arrival of the godly in the infinite and the entrance of man into this unearthly realm. One might generally say that Friedrich's back-view figures fulfilled a demand which he himself called perhaps the greatest demand on the artist: "Thus it is the artist's great, and possibly greatest, merit to stimulate the viewer spiritually and arouse thoughts, feelings, and sensations."^[24]

This reflects the Romantic quest for the unity of man and creation, the traditional interpretation of Friedrich's Rückenfiguren already expressed by his contemporaries, Carl Gustav Carus in particular; further, this interpretation extends its claim of a unifying experience of "man and nature"

to include the beholder too (the perspective on the viewer is already present in Friedrich's own statement as quoted above by Jensen). It views the beholder as being drawn, through the Rückenfigur, into the picture and thus becoming part of the divine tableau of nature. A new and contrasting, destabilizing, and more skeptical approach to Friedrich's landscape paintings, most recently developed by Joseph Leo Koerner, takes its criteria from another contemporaneous source, Heinrich von Kleist's essay on Friedrich, published jointly with the dialogical review of a Friedrich painting by Achim von Arnim and Clemens von Brentano. Koerner stresses the ambiguity of an experience of the paintings that tries to mediate the solitary back-view figure with the landscape it is facing. For Koerner this experience results not in unity but in separation. Or rather, in an explication of Romantic irony, the experience of both, figure and beholder, remains ambiguous, remains the motion of entering the picture and bringing figure and nature closer together, at the same time as it explicitly distances figure and beholder from nature because the separation between them seems unrevokable. "The Rückenfigur," says Koerner, "indeed draws the beholder into the canvas, making the landscape seem closer and more immediate, yet his otherness to landscape makes nature something experienced only from afar, from the standpoint of the Burger who has lost a natural bond to the land and seeks it now with his gaze. His gaze, which defines his surroundings not as his home but as something `beautiful,' distances him from the landscape."^[25] Schoenberg's Self-Portrait from Behind too depicts an individual distanced from, or distancing himself from, his surroundings.

I move on to two other examples from the rich arsenal of nineteenth-century Rückenfiguren, examples much closer to Schoenberg's time — namely, Edvard Munch's The Lonely Woman, a woodcut from 1896, and The Lonely Ones, a mezzotint engraving from 1899.^[26] Again, like Friedrich, the I and nature. But now the emphasis is clearly not on spiritual unity. Expressed in these works are isolation, loneliness, and alienation. If there is a pair, as in The Lonely Ones, the two are separated (despite the fact that in this painting the man seems ready to take a step toward the woman); this is most poignantly seen in the oil-painting version of The Lonely Ones from 1908, which is on loan in Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum.

Schoenberg's Self-Portrait from Behind, with its concentration on the self, the isolated subject, is in this pictorial tradition. Here, too, the structural, compositional strategy of the figure from behind seems to draw the beholder into the canvas, into moving along with the protagonist. But this protagonist is not confronting nature; rather, he is part of a modern city — a street scene, so to speak. And the man is not standing still, not resting in contemplation, but walking forward, even uphill, while thinking. This motion within the picture away from the beholder counteracts the possibility of an identification in a way different from Friedrich's Rückenfigur. The

beholder, even if seemingly drawn into the canvas, will never reach the protagonist, who will always be ahead; the beholder will be able to do no more than follow. In Schoenberg's self-portrait as the "upright walker" (I allude to Bloch's later metaphor of the "aufrechter Gang" and its ethical connotations),^[27] placed within the tradition of the nineteenth-century Rückenfigur, we have the artist presenting himself as a divinely inspired, moral leader; he proposes that he is leading to the new, to the realm of the future, or — in Schoenberg's words from his 1911 Harmonielehre, with its strong Nietzschean resonances — anticipating in art the "new man," announcing a renewed human world through the "new sound."^[28]

There is also another source for Schoenberg's identification of the isolated Rückenfigur with the modern artist. It is a popular one, and it gives his back-view figure a specifically musical and, as such, a specifically Viennese component. I refer to drawings depicting Ludwig van Beethoven walking through the streets of Vienna. Among them there is one from behind, an isolated figure whirling his walking stick; there is another one from the side, Beethoven wearing a hat, his arms crossed behind him (as are those of Schoenberg's pedestrian), with buildings in the background and a couple watching from the distance; and there is a third one, also with a hat, but again isolated and from behind. These drawings refer to Beethoven's well-known habit of composing, thinking in music, while walking in and around Vienna, lost in thoughts and in his sonorous inner world.^[29]

The image of the walking composer originated in the early nineteenth century; it became prominent within the emerging public middle-class culture of the big cities, and is first tied to Beethoven as its paradigmatic figure. It developed from there and became very popular toward the turn of the century, iconologically as part of the prevailing Beethoven reception, particularly in Vienna. Depicting a composer as a lonely pedestrian on the streets of the city placed him in the great Beethoven tradition; its was an act of legitimation — in our case, of self-legitimizing. Like the pictures of conducting musicians, the image also played its role in caricature and satire. There are pictures of Bruckner walking through Vienna with his umbrella (with little Hanslick, Kalbeck, and Heuberger following him), as there are of Bruckner conducting. We have Brahms, with his cigar and his heavy tread, on his way to the "Roter Igel" restaurant.^[30] And we continue into the age of photography with the late Brahms "from behind" (again with arms crossed behind him — a photo that was clearly staged and thus refers to Beethoven), and with Direktor Gustav Mahler walking around his Viennese Hofoper.^[31]

There is yet another source for the tradition of the reflective walker. I would very much like to think that Schoenberg knew this drawing. Unfortunately I cannot prove it. Wilhelm Busch, the north-German caricaturist, drew the old Schopenhauer "from behind," also with his arms crossed be-

hind the body, a stick in one hand, a hat in the other, with an almost bald head, and in addition with his beloved poodle.^[32] Despite its ironic distancing (already as a picture within a picture, as if it were a sheet of paper, torn out of a notebook), this drawing adds the philosophical thinker to our series of reflecting Rückenfiguren. Moreover, it adds the one philosopher who, both because he identified musical art with the universal principle "will" and because Wagner championed his ideas, meant so much to Schoenberg and his fellow composers at the turn of the century.^[33]

In his painting Schoenberg sees himself in the Viennese tradition after Beethoven,^[34] as the reflective artist leading his generation, at a critical moment within the historical process and through the paradigmatic art form music, into the future. The question, however, remains: Where is he leading to; what is the content of his message to be followed? The self-portrait poses the same questions as the compositional strategies of the Durchbruch. And again the questions remain open at this point.

It is obvious that almost all the "plots" of Schoenberg's free atonal works deal with the dark side of life and the psyche, with distress, disorder, even madness and destruction, and at best with no more than a longing for a positive solution:

— the Second String Quartet, op. 10, with its "nimm mir die Liebe — gib mir dein Glück" (take love from me and give me your bliss);

— the George Songs, op. 15, with the crisis of the "I" in no. 14, and the isolation and loneliness at the end;

— Erwartung, op. 17, with the experience of death, disorder, and madness, and the unanswered "Ich suchte . . .";

— Die glückliche Hand, op. 18, with its last words of pain and longing: "Und suchst dennoch. Und quälst dich, und bist ruhelos" (And nevertheless you search. And torture yourself, and are restless);

— Pierrot lunaire, op. 21, with the self-sacrifice and self-destruction of the artist in no. 11, the exact center of the twenty-one melodramas.

Thus at the end there is, as a final word for this stage, Pierrot the fool, the Hanswurst, or better, the ironic mask of the artist, who, knowing the truth, can survive only as a fool. Schoenberg's dedication letter of the Pierrot score to Zemlinsky, dated Christmas 1916, explicitly makes this identification:

It's banal to say that we're all such moonstruck fellows; yes, the poet thinks that we insist on trying to scrub the stubborn moonbeams from our clothes, as we pray to our crosses. We should be happy that we have wounds; because from them we gain something that helps us, and that is not to set much store by material things. Out of the contempt for our wounds comes the contempt for our enemies, comes our strength to sacrifice our lives for a moonbeam. We become suddenly solemn when we think about the Pierrot poem. But, for heaven's sake, isn't there more than the price of grain?^[35]

This immediately calls to mind Robert Schumann's illuminating remark on Berlioz and "the spirit of the day, which tolerates a burlesque Dies Irae. . . . For a few moments in an eternity, Poetry has put on the mask of irony to cover her grief-worn face. Perhaps the friendly hand of a genius may also one day remove it."^[36] Schumann's commentary, from around the beginning of the "historical century," rightly understands the artists's alienation as a historical phenomenon, as caused by history. But history did not bear out the mild optimism Schumann expresses at the end of the passage. On the contrary, what Schumann indicated was in fact the beginning of "modernism," the movement of an age for which alienation, suffering, and sacrifice were fundamental artistic experiences. Looking at the twentieth century and at Schoenberg's life, it seems that there were an eternity of grief and at best a few moments of Glück. Schoenberg's lifelong striving for the "new" in art and society can be seen as an attempt to overcome this situation, to enable the artist to "remove" the mask of irony, to anticipate eternal Glück in a world of peace and outer as well as inner freedom.

With this diagnosis as a background, a third look at Schoenberg's Self-Portrait from Behind may offer another perspective on the painting. (A premise for this would be to accept the actual realization of the various pictorial elements at face value as aesthetic qualities and to put in abeyance, for a moment at least, any doubts about Schoenberg's craftsmanship as a painter.) Wolfgang Rihm, in a conversation I had with him, insisted on the skeptical, "broken" quality of Schoenberg's portrait. Indeed, the walking composer does not, on the surface, show an optimistic, self-confident attitude, is not moving forward with his head held high as did Beethoven or even Brahms. Instead, he is walking with a stoop, the shoulders as if weighed down by a heavy burden. In addition, the coloring of the entire painting is subdued, a mixture of gray and pale blue. Acknowledging this self-presentation as a bundle of compositional strategies, I see these "shadings" as indications of the "nevertheless," "in spite of everything" in Schoenberg's creed, discussed earlier. Metaphorically, even if confronted by a wall of difficulties, the walker is moving on; even if the outward appearance seems to indicate a skeptical mood, he continues inwardly upright. Ernst Bloch's "aufrechter Gang" does not refer to a physical stance, but is an inner category, a moral imperative.

Thus "Schoenberg's Vienna" provides the basic structure for his life and work; "Vienna" poses the central questions. The 1920s would develop Schoenberg's "Vienna project" as an answer to this basic configuration.

Schoenberg in Berlin

Here I will be brief and extremely general. My starting point for an assessment of Schoenberg's work in the twenties, and of the twenties in general,

is Schoenberg's 1922-1923 correspondence with Vasili Kandinsky. In his letter of 20 July 1922 he writes:

I expect you know we've had our trials here too: famine! It really was pretty awful! But perhaps — for we Viennese seem to be a patient lot — perhaps the worst was after all the overturning of everything one has believed in. That was probably the most grievous thing of all.

When one's been used, where one's own work was concerned, to clearing away all obstacles often by means of one immense intellectual effort [Gewaltakt ] and in those 8 years found oneself constantly faced with new obstacles against which all thinking, all power of invention, all energy, all "idea" [Idee ], proved helpless, for a man for whom everything has been "idea," this means nothing less than the total collapse of things.^[37]

And it is at this point that Schoenberg introduces religion. The "overturning of everything one has believed in" refers not only to Schoenberg's pre-World War I artistic or aesthetic principles but to conditions of his human existence in general. The twenties, the decade after the collapse, were to be, or were intended to be, or had to be, a period of stabilization. (In addressing attempts at stabilization, I will not talk about concrete political and social aspects, though the term stabilization, probably first used by Adorno for music of the twenties, aims at bridging artistic and social matters.)

As for the artistic perspective, from our present view Schoenberg's formulation of rules governing composition — that is, the foundation of his twelve-tone method — is in its general historical signification an act of stabilization not unlike Stravinsky's neoclassicism or the younger Hindemith's neobaroque. But there was more than an artistic method at stake. In the wording of Schoenberg's letter to Kandinsky, the pure belief in "idea" had been falsified by history and therefore a much deeper and more concrete fundament had to be laid out. Schoenberg was aiming at a law, a unifying law for both life and art — that is, for his actual and real, as well as for his spiritual and artistic, existence.

I see his work of the 1920s following a double strategy. There is on the one hand the foundation and expanding application of his new method of composing. Retrospectively we witness a carefully designed approach, incrementally extending to include all genres, from the soloistic and monochromatic piano to different kinds of chamber ensembles to the large orchestra and the stage. There are, first, the piano works, opp. 23 and 25; there is, then, music for chamber ensemble: the Serenade, op. 24, Wind Quintet, op. 26, Suite (with piano), op. 29, String Quartet, op. 30; parallel, there are chamber ensembles plus voices, opp. 27 and 28; then comes the orchestral score, op. 31; and, finally, there is the stage work Von heute auf morgen, op. 32. (One remembers the sequence of genres around 1910: lied,

piano piece, orchestra piece, stage work; and one recalls the famous examples in music history: Beethoven's "new way" with piano and violin sonatas, piano variations, the Eroica symphony, then Fidelio; Schumann with the years of piano works, then the realm of song, the orchestral dimension, chamber music, oratorio, and opera; and Brahms with his careful approach to the grand symphony over more than two decades.) And there is, at the same time and running in parallel, Schoenberg's preparing for another dimension — namely, the realm of the artist as Homo religioso-politicus, the political prophet. This thread is represented by the text of Der biblische Weg, by some of the vocal pieces from opp. 28 and 35, and by the Hauptwerk — that is, Moses und Aron.

The cause for this double strategy and for the concretization of Schoenberg's artistic creed is to be found in the political conditions in 1920s Europe, especially in Germany and Austria; for Schoenberg in particular it is the growing threat of anti-Semitism. I see this development as follows. At the same time that Schoenberg was intensely working on the conceptual and practical stabilization of his art (following the collapse of the "project Vienna"), an eroding destabilization of his personal existence took place. The 1921 Mattsee experience^[38] and the offensive anti-Semitism he encountered in Berlin after being appointed Preussischer Kompositionslehrer questioned not only his artistic integrity but the very basis of his human existence; this sharpened his political mind as well as his awareness of being a Jew. The 1923 letters to Kandinsky reveal that Schoenberg had a clear vision of what Hitler and the Nazi movement were striving for: the exiling or even extermination of the Jews. I shall quote one paragraph only from his 4 May 1923 letter to Kandinsky:

But what is anti-Semitism to lead to if not to acts of violence? Is it so difficult to imagine that? You are perhaps satisfied with depriving Jews of their civil rights. Then certainly Einstein, Mahler, I, and many others, will have been got rid of. But one thing is certain: They will not be able to exterminate those much tougher elements thanks to whose endurance Jewry has maintained itself unaided against the whole of mankind for 20 centuries. For these are evidently so constituted that they can accomplish the task that their god has imposed on them: to survive in exile, uncorrupted and unbroken, until the hour of salvation comes!^[39]

This is a diagnosis and, in the second part of the passage, a program: to survive and to prepare for salvation. And this program was to be transformed into an artistic project. In the plot of Moses und Aron — that is, the Exodus — Schoenberg's project was to receive its first artistic realization. The metaphor for his program is to be found in an unpublished letter to Alma Mahler. Written on 19 January 1929, Schoenberg's letter refers to the scandal surrounding the 1928 premiere of the Variations for Orchestra, op.

31, with Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic. The central passage, in translation, reads as follows:

Since the scandal at Furtwängler's I have lost all joy and interest in living in Berlin. Berlin has had almost no other advantage for me, than that there are a good many people one does not need to see; at the same time it is possible to perform Wozzeck undisturbed. The latter privilege could not be transferred to me [the following image is untranslatable, so I continue in the original German] denn mit mir ist es ein Hakenkreuz: ich bin ein schuftiger, unverständlicher Jude.^[40]

The traumatic experience of a violent anti-Semitism is turned into a horrifying image, a metaphor of biting irony. Schoenberg's command of language forces together the popular everyday simplification of the Christian cross metaphor (colloquial sayings such as "Es ist schon ein Kreuz mit dir " or "Jeder hat halt sein Kreuz zu tragen ")^[41] with the Nazi Hakenkreuz, or swastika. This is similar on the surface to, but quite different in essence from, Brecht's song text about the swastika, with its cabaretlike tone: "das Kreuz hat einen Haken" (the cross has a catch to it). And Schoenberg's subsequent explanation of the metaphor is very carefully composed, combining a moral judgment ("schuftig" — that is, "rascally" or "mean") with an aesthetic one ("unverständlich" — that is, "incomprehensible," which certainly refers to the critical reception of his music).

Schoenberg's acts are metaphorical in a demonic way. A Jew, being persecuted by the Nazis, tacks their emblem, the swastika, on himself: "mit mir ist es ein Hakenkreuz. " But this ability of the victim to name, to denounce the torturer is intended to ban the threat, and bans it. The act of intellectual defense is a sign of spiritual victory. It is in this sense that I see Schoenberg's Hakenkreuz metaphor as the new decisive signature for his future life and work. It is reflected in his various serious attempts to devote his life and artistic activities to politics, to the foundation of a Jewish party, a Jewish state. And it is reflected in his Spätwerk, the late works. The case of Jewry becomes a central focus; artist and Jew are seen as identical. And the artwork must express this identification.

This is a dramatic change for the composer. The 1916 Pierrot letter to Zemlinsky, with its devotion of the artist's life to the moonbeam (as the image for artistic creation and spirituality), the proudness in being wounded — this Pierrot interpretation was still primarily concerned with artistic rejection and alienation. But now, in the 1920s, a new situation has arisen, one fundamentally much more dangerous: to be denied as a German, as a Homo politicus, as a human being. This is indeed an attack on his entire existence and becomes a question of life and death. And for Schoenberg, the political conservative and German musical nationalist, it is of the utmost importance that his membership in the great German cultural tra-

dition is threatened. The 1926 first version of the preface to the Satires, op. 28, is entitled "No longer a German" and addresses precisely this denial. Now it seems no longer possible to think in terms of a purely aesthetic creed. Out of this situation grows the new focus of Schoenberg's artistic production. It can be observed in his compositions with text, his choice of plots and topics, and his turning to his Jewish faith and to politics. All this governs his late work.^[42]

Schoenberg's late work utters the voice of Verbannung (exile) and of victory. Acts 1 and 2 of Moses und Aron, the only ones composed, end with Moses' spoken words: "O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt" (Oh word, that word that fails me). But these words are spoken to the most expansive, most expressive melody Schoenberg ever wrote, played in unison in the first and second violins. The melody is anticipatory, projecting something that still cannot be pronounced in words.

Schoenberg in America

As with "Berlin," I will be very brief. As is well known, Schoenberg's American output differs from that of the two European periods in various respects. One tendency defining the American works could be labeled classicism; the turn to traditional genres of the concert repertory, such as piano concerto or violin concerto, belongs here. And there are the works displaying a strong retrospective attitude: the Variations on a Recitative for Organ, op. 40, with their tonal orientation; or the Second Chamber Symphony, op. 38, begun in Vienna and only now completed. Here, too, belong the Brahms instrumentation and the German folk songs for a cappella choir, op. 49. Closely related to this group are the compositions with pedagogical intent: the Variations, op. 43, and the Suite in Old Style for String Orchestra. Besides those there are commissions such as the Prelude, op. 44 (originally for a projected Genesis film); even the Fourth String Quartet, op. 37, resulted from a commission. As a highly personal, intimate piece of chamber music, the String Trio, op. 45, stands isolated in this period; only the Fantasy for Violin with piano accompaniment, op. 47, comes close to the sphere and the language of the Trio. Central for the American period, however, are the religious and political compositions, which give the Spätwerk its unique physiognomy: Kol Nidre, op. 39, Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, op. 41, A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46, the works for choir, op. 50 (A, B, and C), and the continuing attempts to complete Moses und Aron. For my understanding of Schoenberg's life and work, it is in these works of a religious-political engagement that his path reaches its goal and fulfillment. It is no accident that Moderne Psalmen is his last word.

To characterize this Spätwerk it must suffice to concentrate on one work only. I take A Survivor from Warsaw as an example. In this, Schoenberg's

most explicitly political work, the composer uses his own prose text and concludes with the Jewish prayer "Schema Israel." As stated in the text itself, the seven-minute work is a memory of the one "moment," brief but loaded with history. It is constructed as the report of one surviving witness — that is, a story told in the first person — as a sequence of a preceding reflection and a following narration, the story's perspective alternating between direct reportage and more distant reporting. The work is, from the very beginning, directed toward the "grandiose moment" where the melody of the old prayer, the "forgotten creed," emerges out of the holocaust and transcends this situation of bestiality and desperation into a moment of political eschatology. The work ends with the hymnlike prayer, sung in unison, and does not return to the narration. This again is the Durchbruch. The grandiose moment of A Survivor is in line with the formal strategies mentioned earlier, connected to Gurrelieder, to op. 10, and to Erwartung. The Durchbruch here is in the same tradition indeed — but with a new and precise goal and statement. As with the Hakenkreuz metaphor, Schoenberg takes the position of the victim who will be victor.

Late style has been characterized by Goethe as "stufenweises Zurücktreten aus der Erscheinung" (stepwise retreat from the phenomenon) and "sich selbst historisch werden" (seeing oneself historically). Schoenberg's late style is not a "Zurücktreten." Schoenberg did not "paint the velvet in a symbolic manner only," as the old Goethe believed both he and Titian were doing ("Tizian, der den Samt nur symbolisch malte. ") Schoenberg's late style is a "Hineintreten" and an "Eintreten" in the twofold sense of the latter: "entering" or "facing," and "representing" or "standing for." But the older Schoenberg looks back at his own compositional career, sees himself historically, and "uses" formal strategies, textures, and stylistic elements of his expressionistic and his earlier twelve-tone periods for specific representational purposes.^[43] The first part of A Survivor, with its broken textures, "fields" of colors, and motivic fragments, its dispersed "shocks" and illustrative gestures, is very close to the textural principles of Erwartung. The second part, beginning with the triumphant entry of the prayer melody, displays stable textures, a cantus firmus, and a coherent melody with accompanying figures. Christian M. Schmidt here sees a historical perspective on Schoenberg's own development, a critical commentary by Schoenberg about his free-atonal period versus his twelve-tone composition. I believe that in addition there is a broader perspective.

First, this design represents Schoenberg's "quest for language," his concern and insistence that music be language — understandable, conceivable, communicable, able to express, to transport ideas. To me the prayer, the music of liberation and of salvation, is this language. It conveys a message; even if the words were not added, tone, texture, plot, formal position, and entry would deliver this message of liberation.

Second, there are several levels of presentation in the text itself, and there are three verbal languages being spoken: English (by the narrator), German (by the sergeant), and Hebrew (by the Jews, singing the Prayer). Even more pointedly, the Sergeant speaks in a Berlin dialect. This refers back directly to Schoenberg's experiences during the twenties and to the Hakenkreuz metaphor. And in the formal gesture of A Survivor with the prayer hymn at the end, the program from the 1923 letter to Kandinsky now seems fulfilled: "to survive in exile, uncorrupted and unbroken, until the hour of salvation comes!"

Schoenberg's late works, the Ode to Napoleon and A Survivor from Warsaw in particular, are the fulfillment of his "Vienna project"; here his early artistic creed finds its appropriate plot and realization. From this perspective the prayer at the end of A Survivor, music as "language" again, is the corrective to Moses' "word that fails me," since it is the fulfillment of the great anticipating melody that counteracts these words.

With this, in a sort of coda, I can return to the staring eyes and the walking artist. In his late Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen (Theses on the philosophy of history), completed in 1940, Walter Benjamin gives an interpretation of a 1920 painting by Paul Klee. Thesis IX reads as follows:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees only one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.^[44]

Here again are the staring eyes, again wide open, as we remember, and they certainly are "experiencing the fate of mankind." But, to be more precise, they are, in Benjamin's view, looking back, and they are looking at the debris of the world, viewing a catastrophic development of which they themselves are a part.

Benjamin's text gives a contaminated view of historical materialism and Jewish messianism.^[45] Within this conflation the collective and abstract power of the violent storm — that is, the view of "history" as an irreversible process — is Marxian. There is no subjective factor; the subject seems to remain powerless, reduced to an impulse of thought. But the notion of the

Paradise is Judaic: the storm, though blowing "irresistibly," comes from Paradise. One might want to assume that naming "Paradise" in this context already sends a signal of hope. (And Gershom Scholem in his commentary on thesis IX does exactly that, with a quasi-cyclical understanding of Benjamin's imagery.)^[46] But I do not see that a messianic appearance is mentioned in, or could be concluded from, Benjamin's text. The storm blows from Paradise toward the future; it blows, and continues to blow, over the remaining debris of the world, which has already reached Heaven and continues to grow; the angel has his back turned to the future, and the future is, at best, unknown and cannot be anticipated. There may be an emotional-intellectual impulse toward the future hidden behind the text, but the text itself does not allow for such an assumption. Though the storm blows, moves forward, the angel remains in a quasi-fixed position. This indicates to me that Benjamin's thesis IX indeed represents the "Dialektik im Stillstand" (dialectic at a standstill),^[47] a carefully designed position between the poles of political pessimism and spiritual optimism. The "Dialektik von Zukunft und Vergangenheit, von Messianismus und Eingedenken" (dialectics of future and past, of messianism and remembrance) that Peter Szondi refers to in his congenial essay on Benjamin^[48] is brought to a halt, as if frozen in stone. Benjamin's thought "looks" back to see the future, because only in the past, in its origin, is the utopian idea of the future preserved, preserved as an undistorted promise. For the present this image is perverted, obliterated, ruined.^[49] However, "[t]he angel would like to . . . make whole what has been smashed. But. . ." (Benjamin). A critical assessment comparing Benjamin's late text with his earlier essays would certainly acknowledge a touch of melancholy in this view, a melancholy^[50] born of skepticism, if not pessimism, created at the strange crossroads of hope and despair.

In sharp contrast, Schoenberg's message in A Survivor is decidedly messianic. It carries the positive image of the artist as leader into the future through all political and spiritual breakdowns and, as such, articulates an old-fashioned, individualistic, nineteenth-century optimism. Schoenberg's image remains the artist as the leader into the future, the walking composer, to be seen by his contemporaries only from behind. But now, toward the end of his life, the direction and goal of the walk are finally defined. The artist, now bound to his roots, is the political prophet. Thus Schoenberg maintains his Viennese artistic creed of the Durchbruch to the better world, now as the anticipation of paradise, confined to his Jewish constituency. The Viennese creed for an aesthetic culture is redefined as the quest for a political culture based on religious grounds. As such Schoenberg's late work and word are not Leverkühn's Dr. Fausti Weheklag and the "Zurücknahme," they are not the revocation of the Ninth Symphony. The Durchbruch in A Survivor, the "grandiose moment," is political eschatology — almost another, a modern "Ode to Joy," born out of the deepest desperation and terror of

the twentieth century. The truly conservative Viennese individualist has become a commentator on matters of world politics. Composing and proposing this, the artist is back walking on the street, no longer lonely and isolated, but singing and strolling with his contemporaries. Will he be heard, and can he be understood?