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.