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Richard Luckett on Schoenberg and his search for structure
'Tor me the only exposition deserving the name of analysis is that which brings out the idea of a work and shows it has been presented and developed." Schoenberg's Words, which must surely apply to his own works just as much as they apply to those of Other composers, give particular point to the Publication of a cheap edition of Erwin Stein's selection from his letters.* There was a brief Period, during the 'twenties and 'thirties, when Schoenberg was of real importance in English musical life. In 1923 — eleven years after its composition — Pierrot Lunaire received its first British performance under the auspices of the Kensington Music Club. In the next year the Second String Quartet was given its first complete British performance, though three movements had been heard as early as 1914. During the decade the time-lag between date of composition and first British Performance closed, so that the Third String Quartet formed part of a BBC chamber concert in 1928, less than a year after its completion. But the gap was soon to widen, and even at the time when Schoenberg was coming to England to conduct his music for the BBC some of his works failed to receive an English performance. The London Sinfonietta, in its recent series of concerts, has thus been able to achieve one or two 'firsts,' an extraordinary situation considering Schoenberg's reputation and his assured position in even the most cursory of histories of music. Why this lack of any real popularity for Schoenberg? The debate has floundered on for a long time, and little has been established beyond Hans Keller's undoubted preeminence as a serial whistler. One reason seems to be that the only alternative to a dauntingly technical approach has been the attempt to Place him as a 'Viennese Impressionist.' Yet there is no evidence to suggest that any audience in this country has been helped by Pondering such associations, and the label is in any case a misnomer: though Schoenberg, as a painter, adhered to Kandinsky's Blaue Reiter group, the effect of his musical comPositions is far more convincingly described in terms of the paintings of Kokoschka and his s,chool, which most people would describe as expressionist rather than 'impressionist.' The Monodrama Erwartung, in which a white-clad Woman makes her way through a dark and ,threatening forest and finds her lover dead in moot of a blank and shuttered house, might well be taken as a musical realisation of a Painting by Edvard Munch. But to present it as this, or, worse, to try to explain it as this, Is simply to substitute a good excuse for a Poor one; it may make Schoenberg sound less Provincial, but it still implicitly denies him the Independence and authority of a great artist. Schoenberg himself was in no doubt of his greatness. At the age of thirty-five, im * Arnold Schoenberg: Letters edited by Erwin Stein (Faber Paper Covered Editions E2.95)
poverished, assaulted by the critics and largely ignored by the public, he wrote to the board of the Vienna Academy of Music asking if he might be allowed to lecture in the Academy. In his letter he contends that the teaching of composition in the Academy is reactionary, that a new school of composition has come and cannot be ignored, that he, Schoenberg, is largely responsible for this and is thus the person to teach it, and that for the Academy of Music not to appoint him is "a wrong passively done to me." The letter sums up much that is distasteful in Schoenberg: his arrogance, his conviction that history is with him and that he is history, his characteristic need to see the world in terms of movements and schools — in short, his fanaticism. Yet it is significant that what Schoenberg was asking for was in fact comparatively trivial, since he was anxious for permission to teach within the Academy on a private basis and was not seeking a permanent position, and it is also significant (and disconcerting) that he was right in his estimate of his historical importance. The letter makes him seem humourless, whilst others demonstrate both his wit and a capacity for modesty; the essence of it is that it is a claim for his art and his vision, and not for himself. In other letters he engages in ruthless controversy, upbraiding a pupil for something that may or may not have been said about him during a conversation in a railway carriage, or telling Klemperer exactly what he thinks of the conductor's attitude towards him and his work. But in neither case is there any personal animosity; a position is defined and asserted, and that is the crux.
A comparison which Schoenberg was fond of implying was between himself and Einstein. Both had inauspicious beginnings, and there was an obvious similarity between Einstein's time in the Patent Office and Schoenberg's years as a bank clerk. Einstein's early academic career had not been startlingly successful, whilst Schoenberg lacked any formal training in music. In later years both emigrated to America as a result of a political situation which forced upon them an increasing awareness of their Jewishness, though of the two it was Schoenberg who responded most powerfully to the growth of European anti-Semitism. Living in Vienna must have played a significant part. In 1923 he wrote a long and extraordinarily moving letter to Kandinsky, whom he believed to be associated with anti-Semites. He realised that one principal effect of the war and of the Russian revolution had been the growth of anti-Semitism, he discerned the menace of "that man Hitler," and he saw a situation ahead that was likely to get worse rather than better. Yet one of his observations comes close to the absurd, for there is a moment at which it seems that his chief objection to anti-Semitism is that it interferes with his work. It is, in fact, simply one point among many; taken as a whole the letter demonstrates that persecution effectively intensified Schoenberg's art, and confirmed him in a sense that he should pursue his aims with no less devotion than the Jews had displayed in keeping alive their faith and identity through twenty centuries in which every man's hand had been turned against them.
This superimposed vision, the national struggle for survival seen as emblematic of the artist's situation, was not new. Something like it had been glimpsed by Heine in the years when he came to resent and regret the impulses that had caused him to be baptised. His baptism he regarded as a betrayal, and he became increasingly concerned with the Jewish cause as a symbol of strength in adversity. Schoenberg, however, went much further than Heine, for Heine had an innate scepticism entirely alien to Schoenberg. During the World War, Schoenberg told Kandinsky, religion had been his "only support," and, though it was to be several years before he formally returned to the Jewish faith, religion had become his overriding concern. That Schoenberg had reached a turning point had been obvious from the opera Die gluckliche Hand, which he completed in 1913; in this brief work the action of the drama is also a paradox — man recognises the need to turn away from sensual enjoyment, to transcend the merely mundane and animal, yet his apprehension of the supernatural is achieved through the same organs that have given him his awareness of the world around him.
Presumably it was meditation arising from an awareness of this problem that attracted Schoenberg to the idea of reincarnation which plays so important a part in his later works. But the dilemma can also be seen as having purely musical effects, in that there is a clear connection with the problems of structure and texture that are the basic impediments to a popular appreciation of Schoenberg. To read the letters is to become alive to his preoccupation with structure to the exclusion of almost everything else. This is not to say that he ignored other factors; in terms of his compositions Farben, the third of his Five Orchestral Pieces, is proof enough of an acute awareness of what could be done with instrumentation and tone colour. Nevertheless, the central concern was structure, and the whole serial system is in itself a solution to problems which are essentially those of structure. When, Schoenberg came to assess his debt to other composers, he placed himself firmly in the Austro-German tradition; he had learnt, he said, chiefly from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner. In his description of what he had learnt, however, he stressed shape and development above everything else. It is not surprising that, despite their disagreements, he greatly admired Klemperer as a Beethoven interpreter, since Klemperer's grasp of Beethoven was, above all, a structural grasp; it was this that enabled him, even when he had become very deaf, to shape performances of the symphonies that were full of vitality and originality. Yet behind all this there is an insidious possibility: that in his search for structure Schoenberg was shackling European music to the exigencies of number, that he was reforging the fetters from which composers had painfully freed themselves in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that the fetters were once again religious and theological in their origins.
If discussion of Schoenberg is to be worthwhile it must return, as he suggested, to the "idea of the work," and the works them selves must be played and heard. It is hard to imagine a better aid to the understanding of the "ideas" than Stein's selection of the let ters, or two translators better able to cope with the onerous task of rendering them than Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. The only regret about a "cheap" edition of this kind is that, paper bound as it is, it still costs the better part of three pounds.
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