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.