Not a genius
Hans Ke!ler
Anton von Webem: A Chronicle of his Life and Work Hans Moldenhauer in collaboration with Rosaleen Moldenhauer (Gollancz £20) Many years ago, I undertook a comparative analysis of a Webern piece and Gershwin's 'The Man I Love'. The tertium cornparationis was — major mastery of minor forms. And the eventual differential diagnosis was that while Webern was, essentially, a simple-minded master whose language made his miniatures sound complex, Gershwin's was, essentially, a complex genius whose language made his miniatures sound simple — 'The Man I Love' being the most complex, which was why it repeatedly. flopped, until it led the way towards new structures, right up to the Beatles.
Hans Moldenhauer supports me, whether he wants to or, more likely, not. But at least, his motto throughout has been Eutmythisieren!' ('De-mythicize!' in my translation, not his, but then he writes better than he translates); and on the whole, he lets the facts — countless unknown facts — speak for themselves: even when he interrupts them you can still hear them. His is indeed a towering biographical achievement, and although at this stage, there can't be any such thing as the flap's professed 'definitive work', Webern has now been better served, a mere thirty-three years after his death, than any other composer at a comparable stage in his posthumous life.
Since the mid-Fifties, moreover, the author has been suffering from retinitis pigmentosa, a severe visual impairment which has made him dependent on assistance for all the factual reading required for his task: 'this underlines the all-important role of Rosaleen', his wife. Now, it so happens that I have been able to check, admiringly, on quite a few facts inaccessible to anybody else — for two reasons. Dr Oskar Adler, Schoenberg's first teacher and Webern's adviser (and a man of undemonstrative, demonstrable genius) became, generations later, the only teacher I myself am able to acknowledge. Secondly, the imaginative pianist Etta Werndorff (née Jonasz), who played an important part in the Viennese school's earlier activities, was my sister's aunt, i.e. the sister of my mother's first husband.
And here, amusingly, is the only downright mistake my frantic searches have been able to uncover: my sister's maiden name was `Jonasz', but Moldenhauer makes Etta's 'Jonas'. Where did Moldenhauer, or she herself, lose the 'z'? My sister says it may well have been her own doing: 'Jonas' looks less Jewish, just as 'Werndorff, , her married name, looks distinctly less Jewish than 'Kohn' (equals Cohen), the name with which, as Moldenhauer doesn't say, her physician husband was born. It was he, incidentally, who was co-responsible for Webern subjecting himself to an intensive course of psychoanalysis.
The chief prompter, however, was Oskar Adler — and the highly successful analyst of Webern's conversion hysteria another great Adler: Alfred, the all but forgotten founder of 'individual psychology', whose revival I would predict with confidence: the preclassical row between psychoanalysis and individual psychology — castration complex v. the 'will to power' — has become a bit of a bore, power itself more than a bit of a problem. However, this was still Freudian times (1913), and Alfred Adler's impressive analysis proceeded on fairly orthodox lines, though the birth of individual psychology can, retrospectively, be foreseen; fortunately for us, Webern reported it all to Schoenberg, in a series of letters.
A crucial passage occurs in his letter of 6 August 1913: Well then, yesterday I was for the second time with the psychoanalyst. I just do not know at all what he is driving at. Yesterday, by means of a thousand questions, he tried to establish how much of the effeminate there is in me. Ah, what sense does all this make! I then went to [Oskar] Adler in order to ask him again whether some good could come from the treatment, and how lam to get well from it. He thought that I should at any rate try out the method. He himself believed in it.
For one thing, Oskar Adler's insight into a new therapeutic method which, at the time, was below medical contempt gives one an inkling of the stature of that young mind. But for another, Alfred Adler's diagnosis of Webern's effeminacy corroborates what Oskar Adler once told me about Webern the cellist. Like Schoenberg and Webern, but two generations later, I played quartets with Oskar Adler for many years. On one occasion, when there was an indistinct cello entry or two, he said to me afterwards, privately, 'He played like Webern. You' never knew when Webern had come in. His entries always were uneasy, feminine.'
A clue, this, to Webern's creative personality: he developed a passive, feminine attitude towards compositorial problems, together with his almost infantile, lifelong dependence on Schoenberg, while at the same time — in the terminology of Alfred Adler's individual psychology — 'overcompensating' for this weakness to the point of anti-sentimental extremism. A wealth of talent went into the masterly solutions of the conflict —which, however, is not a conflict characteristic of original genius.
It was outside the area of his gifts that his 'timidity', his 'softness' and 'exaggerated sensitivity' — the words, all these, of Alfred Adler, who knew nothing about Webern's music! — had the most disastrous consequences. The hero worship of Schoenberg — almost a bobby-soxer's — may have been embarrassing, but it bore fruit. How he could combine it, when the time (1940) came, with his barely concealed hero worship of Hitler is a rhetorical question which, psychologically, is banal: we beg it if we expect a grown-up answer. Having been 'much enlightened' by Mein Kampf, he reports: progress in the process of inner purification. This is Germany today! But the National Socialist one, to be sure! Not just any one! This is exactly the new state, for which the seed was already laid twenty years ago. Yes, a new state it is, one that has never existed before!! It is something new! Created by this unique man!!! . . . Each day becomes more exciting. I see such a good future.
Genius can be wrong-headed; it can produce the spectacle of a seer blinding himself. There have been many amoral, and some immoral geniuses. But the one dependable negative condition of genius has always been that it will not give in to its environment — that it does not wish to be led.
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