The Rest Is Noise - Arnold Schoenberg

Schoenberg
Schoenberg was born in 1874. His father, Samuel Schönberg, came from a German-speaking Jewish community in Pressburg, which is now Bratislava, in Slovakia. (Schoenberg dropped the umlaut from his name when he fled Germany in 1933.) Samuel Schönberg moved to Vienna as a young man to make a living as a shopkeeper. There he met and married Pauline Nachod, who came from a family of cantorial singers. The couple lived in modest circumstances and did not own a piano. Their son learned much of the classical repertory from a military band that performed in a coffeehouse on the Prater. Arnold taught himself several instruments and played in a string quartet that occupied a room set aside for messenger boys. He learned instrumental forms by subscribing to an encyclopedia, and waited for the S volume to arrive before composing a sonata.
One way or another, Schoenberg absorbed so much music that he had no need for formal instruction. He did take some lessons from Alexander Zemlinsky, a slightly older composer who wrote fine-grained, lyrically potent music in the vein of Mahler and Strauss. Zemlinsky’s father was Catholic, his mother was the daughter of a Sephardic Jew and a Bosnian Muslim. In 1901, Schoenberg married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde, who, a few years later, would set off the central emotional crisis of his life.
After working for a time as a bank clerk, Schoenberg took on various odd musical jobs, conducting a workers’ chorus, orchestrating operettas, and writing sentimental songs. In late 1901, he moved to Berlin to serve as a musical director for high-minded revues at the Überbrettl cabaret, or, as it was later called, the Buntes Theater. This organization was the brainchild of Ernst von
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Wolzogen, who hoped to import to Berlin the streetwise sophistication of Paris cabarets such as the Chat Noir and the Auberge du Clou. In the wake of financial difficulties, Wolzogen quit his enterprise in 1902, and Schoenberg, short on work, returned to Vienna the following year. Aspects of the cabaret reappeared in the 1912 song cycle Pierrot lunaire, where the soloist floats between speech and song. If Schoenberg later characterized his atonal music as a gesture of resistance to the popular mainstream, in the early days his stance was significantly more flexible.
Sharp-witted, widely cultured, easily unimpressed, Schoenberg made himself at home in the coffeehouses where the leading lights of fin-de-siècle Vienna gathered—the Café Imperial, the Café Central, the Café Museum. The great men in Vienna all had their circles of disciples, and Schoenberg quickly assembled his own. In 1904 he placed a notice in the Neue Musikalische Presse announcing that he was seeking pupils in composition. Several young men showed up as a result. One was Anton Webern, a stern young soul who may have seen the ad because it appeared directly beneath a report on the desecration of Parsifal in America. (The previous year, Heinrich Conried, Mahler’s future employer, had staged Parsifal at the Met, breaking the rule that made Wagner’s sacred opera exclusive to Bayreuth.) Another was Alban Berg, a gifted but feckless youth who had been working in the civil service.
The early works of Schoenberg always come as a pleasant shock to listeners expecting a grueling atonal exercise. The music exudes a heady, luxurious tone, redolent of Klimt’s gilt portraits and other Jugendstil artifacts. Brash Straussian gestures mix with diaphanous textures that bear a possibly not coincidental resemblance to Debussy. There are spells of suspended animation, when the music becomes fixated on a single chord. The chamber tone poem Transfigured Night, written in 1899, ends with twelve bars of glistening D major, the fundamental note never budging in the bass. Gurre- Lieder, a huge Wagnerian cantata for vocal soloists, multiple choruses, and super-sized orchestra, begins with a great steam bath of E-flat major, probably in imitation of the opening to Wagner’s Ring. Yet all is not well in Romantic paradise. Unexplained dissonances rise to the surface; chromatic lines intersect in a contrapuntal tangle; chords of longing fail to resolve.
The young Schoenberg encountered opposition, but he also received encouragement from the highest musical circles. The Mahlers regularly invited him to their apartment near the Schwarzenbergplatz, where, according to Alma, he would incite heated arguments by offering up “paradox of the most violent description.” Afterward, Gustav would say to Alma, “Take good care you never invite that conceited puppy to the house again.” Before long, another invitation would arrive.
Mahler found Schoenberg’s music mesmerizing and maddening in equal measure. “Why am I still writing symphonies,” he once exclaimed, “if that is supposed to be the music of the future!” After a rehearsal of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, Mahler asked the musicians to play a C-major triad. “Thank you,” he said, and walked out. Yet he made a show of applauding
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Schoenberg’s most controversial works, knowing how destructive the critics and claques of Vienna could be.
Strauss, too, found Schoenberg fascinating—“very talented,” he said, even if the music was “overloaded.” The two composers met during Schoenberg’s first stint in Berlin—Wolzogen, the director of the Buntes Theater, had collaborated with Strauss on his second opera, the anti-philistine comedy Feuersnot—and Strauss helped his younger colleague locate other sources of income. When Schoenberg later founded the Society for Creative Musicians in Vienna, Strauss accepted an honorary membership, and expressed the hope that the new organization would “blessedly light up many minds darkened by decades of malice and stupidity.”
Schoenberg withheld from Strauss the impertinence that he showed to Mahler. “I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, honored master,” the future revolutionary wrote obsequiously in 1903, “once again for all the help you have given me at a sacrifice to yourself in the most sincere manner. I will not forget this for the whole of my life and will always be thankful to you for it.” As late as 1912, Schoenberg still felt nervous and schoolboyish in Strauss’s presence: “He was very friendly. But I behaved very awkwardly ... I stammered and surely left the impression of a servile devotion on Strauss.” Schoenberg told himself that he should have been more of a “Selfian”—as proudly self-determined as Strauss himself.
In May 1906, the Schoenberg contingent had gone to see Salome in Graz. Beforehand, Schoenberg painstakingly studied the vocal score, which Mahler had given to him. It stood on his music stand, open to the first page. “Perhaps in twenty years’ time someone will be able to explain these harmonic progressions theoretically,” Schoenberg told his students. Aspects of Salome’s fractured tonality show up in the First Chamber Symphony, which Schoenberg wrote that summer. Yet this new piece was very different in tone and style from Strauss’s opera. Its strenuous working out of brief motivic figures recalled Viennese practice in the Classical period from Haydn to Beethoven. In a deliberate rejection of fin-de-siècle grandiosity, it was scored for a mini-orchestra of fifteen instruments, its sonorities rough rather than lush. Schoenberg was throwing off excess baggage, perhaps in anticipation of lean years to come. The process of condensation led to Pierrot lunaire, in which the soloist is accompanied by an agile band of two winds, two strings, and a piano.
Just as Debussy imagined new sounds while perusing images in Verlaine and Mallarmé, Schoenberg let poetry guide him. He relished the erotic visions of Richard Dehmel, who furnished the story of Transfigured Night. He also investigated, at Strauss’s suggestion, the plays of Maeterlinck; and in 1902 and 1903, he fashioned a large-scale orchestral tone poem on the subject of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, purportedly unaware that Debussy had just made a setting of the same text. But Schoenberg’s most crucial literary encounter was with the poetry of Stefan George, then the leading Symbolist among German writers.
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George stood apart from his compatriots on account of his ardent Francophilia; he had gone to Paris in 1889, attended Mallarmé’s “Tuesdays” (the poet dubbed him “one of us”), and translated the major French poets into German. He might have met Debussy, though there is no evidence that he did. So determined was he to honor his French masters that he dropped capital letters from German nouns. A self-styled artist-prophet in the fin-de-siècle mode, George surrounded himself with a bevy of acolytes, among whom could always be found several beautiful adolescent boys. George’s circle inspired Mann’s satire “At the Prophet’s”; minus the homosexual element, it might also have served as a model for Schoenberg, who treated his students as disciples and seldom appeared in public without them. More important, George showed Schoenberg a way out of the easygoing pleasures of Viennese aesthetics. The sheer density of the poet’s imagery did not permit easy access, although sensual secrets resided in the labyrinth.
Schoenberg’s voyage to the other side began on December 17, 1907, when he set a poem from George’s collection Year of the Soul, much of which is concerned with an intense scene of farewell. It begins: “I must not in thanks sink down before you / You are the spiritual plain from which we rose.” The music hangs by only the thinnest thread to the old harmonic order. It purports to be in B minor, yet the home chord appears only three times in thirty measures, once beneath the word “agonizing.” Otherwise, it is made up of a ghostly flow of unrooted triads, ambiguous transitional chords, stark dissonances, and crystalline monodic lines, approximating the picture of an “ice-cold, deep- sleeping stream” with which the poem concludes. The date of composition is telling: eight days earlier, Schoenberg had bid farewell to Mahler at the Westbahnhof in Vienna. If, as seems possible, the fact of Mahler’s departure impelled the choice of text, then it carries a double message: the young composer has been abandoned by a father figure, yet he is also liberated, free to pursue a different love.
The next leg of the journey took place in the midst of personal crisis. Schoenberg had admitted into his circle an unstable character named Richard Gerstl, a gifted painter of brutal Expressionist tendencies. Under Gerstl’s direction, Schoenberg had taken up painting and found that he had a knack for it: his canvas The Red Gaze, in which a gaunt face stares out with bloodshot eyes, has come to be recognized as a minor masterpiece of its time and place. In May 1908 Schoenberg discovered that Gerstl was having an affair with his wife, Mathilde, and that summer he surprised the lovers in a compromising position. Mathilde ran off with Gerstl, then returned to her husband, whereupon Gerstl proceeded to stage a suicide that exceeded Weininger’s in flamboyance: he burned his paintings and hanged himself naked in front of a full-length mirror, as if he wanted to see his own body rendered in Expressionist style. The suicide took place on November 4, 1908, on the night of a Schoenberg concert to which Gerstl had not been invited; evidently, that rejection was the final straw.
Schoenberg himself struggled with thoughts of suicide. “I have only one hope— that I will not live much longer,” he wrote to his wife at the end of the summer. In a last will and testament that may have been an unused suicide note, he wrote, “I have cried, have behaved like someone in despair, have made decisions and
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then rejected them, have had ideas of suicide and almost carried them out, have plunged from one madness into another—in a word, I am totally broken.” He warned that he would “soon follow the path, find the resolution, that at long last might be the highest culmination of all human actions.” But, in an intriguingly vague turn of phrase, he could not foresee “whether it be my body that will give way or my soul.”
Suicide was not Schoenberg’s style. Just as Beethoven, in his Heiligenstadt Testament, resolved to forge ahead into a life of misery, Schoenberg pressed on. That same summer of 1908 he finished his Second Quartet, in which he hesitates at a crossroads, contemplating various paths forking in front of him. The first movement, written the previous year, still uses a fairly conventional late-Romantic language. The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo, unlike any other music of the time. It contains fragments of the folk song “Ach, du lieber Augustin”—the same tune that held Freudian significance for Mahler (or so Freud said). For Schoenberg, the song seems to represent a bygone world disintegrating; the crucial line is “Alles ist hin” (all is lost). The movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made up of fourths separated by a tritone. In them may be discerned traces of the bifurcated scale that begins Salome. But there is no longer a sense of tonalities colliding. Instead, the very concept of a chord is dissolving into a matrix of intervals.
In the final two movements of the Second Quartet a soprano voice joins the string players to sing two George poems, “Litany” and “Rapture.” The texts come from a larger cycle that George wrote in memory of a handsome boy named Maximilian Kronberger, who died of meningitis one day after his sixteenth birthday, leaving the poet in spasms of grief. Schoenberg seems to identify not only with the poet’s emotion but also with his urge to manipulate pain to expressive ends, in the name of self-abnegation and purification. “Litany” cries out for a quick end to sexual and spiritual agony: “Kill the longing, close the wound!” “Rapture,” the culmination of George’s “Maximin” cycle, presents the solution. It begins in a state of profound estrangement, with the alienation of the individual turning universal:
I feel the wind of another planet.
Growing pale in the darkness are the faces Of those who lately turned to me as friends.
This Martian breeze is mimicked in soft, sinister streams of notes, recalling the episode in Salome when Herod hallucinates a chilly wind. Special effects on the strings (mutes, harmonics, bowing at the bridge) heighten the sense of otherness, as singing tones become whispers and high cries. Then comes the transformation:
I dissolve in tones, circling, weaving ... I am but a spark of the holy fire
I am but a roaring of the holy voice.
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The soprano declaims her lines in a cool, stately rhythm. The strings dwell on sustained chords, most of which can be named according to the old harmonic system, although they have been torn from the organic connections of tonality and move like a procession of ghosts. At the climactic moment, under the word “holy,” the composer’s motto chord, the dissonant combination of a fourth and a tritone, sounds with unyielding force. Even so, Schoenberg is not ready to go over the brink. At the close the motto chord gives way to pure F-sharp major, which, in light of what has gone before, sounds bizarre and surreal. The work is dedicated to “my wife.”
Schoenberg stayed in his Stefan George trance through the fall of 1908, when he completed a song cycle on the poet’s Book of Hanging Gardens. The otherworldly serenity persists, together with vestiges of tonality. Then something snapped, and Schoenberg let out his pent-up rage. In 1909, as Mahler was sinking into the long goodbye of his Ninth Symphony and Strauss was floating away into the eighteenth-century dreamworld of Rosenkavalier, Schoenberg entered a creative frenzy, writing the Three Pieces for Piano, the Five Pieces for Orchestra, and Erwartung, or Expectation, a dramatic scene for soprano and orchestra. In the last of the Three Piano Pieces, the keyboard turns into something like a percussion instrument, a battlefield of triple and quadruple forte. In the first of the orchestral pieces, “Premonitions,” instrumental voices dissolve into gestures, textures, and colors, many of them derived from Salome: agitated rapid figures joined to trills, hypnotically circling whole-tone figures, woodwinds screeching in their uppermost registers, two-note patterns dripping like blood on marble, a spitting, snarling quintet of flutter-tongued trombones and tuba. Erwartung, the monologue of a woman stumbling through a moonlit forest in search of her missing lover, is distended by monster chords of eight, nine, and ten notes, which saturate the senses and shut down the intellect. In one especially hair-raising passage, the voice plunges nearly two octaves, from B to C-sharp, on a cry of “Help!” This comes straight from Wagner’s Parsifal; Kundry crosses the same huge interval when she confesses that she laughed at the suffering of Christ.
Schoenberg’s early atonal music is not all sound and fury. Periodically, it discloses worlds that are like hidden valleys between mountains; a hush descends, the sun glimmers in fog, shapes hover. In the third of the Five Pieces for Orchestra—the one titled “Farben,” or “Colors”—a five-note chord is transposed up and down the scale and passed through a beguiling array of orchestral timbres. The chord itself is not harsh, but it is elusive, poised between consonance and dissonance. Such utterly original experiments in shifting tone colors came to be classified as Klangfarbenmelodie, or tone-color melody.
The same rapt mood descends over the Six Little Pieces for Piano, Opus 19, which Schoenberg wrote in early 1911, as Mahler lay dying. The second piece is nine bars long and contains about a hundred notes. It is built on a hypnotic iteration of the interval G and B, which chimes softly in place, giving off a clean, warm sound. Tendrils of sound trail around the dyad, touching at one point or another on the remaining ten notes of the chromatic scale. But the main notes stay riveted in place. They are like two eyes, staring ahead, never blinking.
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Scandal
“I feel the heat of rebellion rising in even the slightest souls,” Schoenberg wrote in a program note in January 1910, “and I suspect that even those who have believed in me until now will not want to accept the necessity of this development.”
Nothing in the annals of musical scandal—from the first night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to the release of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.”—rivals the ruckus that greeted Schoenberg early in his career. In February 1907, his thornily contrapuntal, though not yet atonal, First String Quartet was heard against a vigorous ostinato of laughter, catcalls, and whistles. Mahler, leaping to Schoenberg’s defense, nearly got into a fistfight with one of the troublemakers. Three days later, the First Chamber Symphony caused “seat-rattling, whistle- blowing, and ostentatious walk-outs,” according to Schoenberg’s student Egon Wellesz. When the Second Quartet had its premiere, in December 1908, the critic Ludwig Karpath couldn’t wait until the following morning to make his feelings known, and shouted, “Stop it! Enough!” A critic friendlier to Schoenberg shouted back, “Quiet! Continue to play!”
The resistance to Schoenberg was deep-seated. It came not only from reactionaries and philistines but also from listeners of considerable musical knowledge. One early scandal, we are told, was fomented by pupils of Heinrich Schenker, a giant in the new discipline of musicology. Anti-Semitism played no significant role, despite some latter-day claims. (Two of Schoenberg’s most vehement critics, Robert Hirschfeld and Julius Korngold, were Jews, and their colleague Hans Liebstöckl was a Prague-born German of antinationalist and proDebussy tendencies.) Even Mahler had trouble accepting the “necessity of this development,” in Schoenberg’s words. “I have your quartet with me and study it from time to time,” Mahler wrote to Schoenberg in January 1909. “But it is difficult for me. I’m so terribly sorry that I cannot follow you better; I look forward to the day when I shall find myself again (and so find you).” When Mahler saw the Five Pieces for Orchestra, he commented that he could not translate the notes on the page into sounds in his head. Nevertheless, he continued to encourage his “conceited puppy” and, in his last days, was heard to say, “If I go, he will have nothing left.”
Strauss, for his part, thought that Schoenberg had gone off the deep end. That reaction must have been especially disappointing, for Schoenberg had written the Five Pieces in answer to Strauss’s request for some short works for his Berlin concert series. Schoenberg was so eager to show Strauss what he had done that he mailed off the Pieces before they were complete, and only ten days after the fourth of the set was finished. “There is no architecture and no build-up,” Schoenberg explained in an accompanying letter. “Just a vivid, uninterrupted succession of colors, rhythms, and moods.” Strauss politely wrote back that such “daring experiments” would be too much for his audience. Outwardly, he maintained his support, sending his colleague one hundred marks in 1911. But his true opinion surfaced three years later, when he made the mistake of writing to Alma Mahler that Schoenberg “would be better off shoveling snow than scribbling on music paper.” Alma showed the letter to
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Schoenberg’s student Erwin Stein, who decided that his teacher should be apprised of its contents. Schoenberg snapped that whatever he had learned from the composer of Salome he had misunderstood.
In the middle of these setbacks came a massive success, which, in the end, only magnified the composer’s anger. This was the 1913 world premiere of Gurre-Lieder, which had been sketched ten years earlier and exhibited a late- Romantic style that Schoenberg had since abandoned. The setting was Vienna’s Musikverein—the legendary hall where symphonies of Brahms and Bruckner had first been heard. The conductor was Franz Schreker, another Austrian composer who was moving through liminal realms of post-Wagnerian harmony. Signs of a triumph were already evident at intermission, as admirers crowded around the composer. But he was in a foul mood, and declined to receive new converts. When the performance was over, even the anti- Schoenbergians, some of whom had brought along whistles and other noisemakers in anticipation of a scandal, rose to their feet along with the rest of the crowd, chanting, “Schoenberg! Schoenberg!” The brawlers were weeping, one witness said, and their cheers sounded like an apology.
The hero of the hour failed to appear, even as the applause swelled. He was found, according to the violinist Francis Aranyi, “huddled in the most distant and darkest corner of the auditorium, his hands folded and a quiet, quizzical sort of smile on his face.”
This should have been Schoenberg’s hour of glory. But, as he recalled many years later, he felt “rather indifferent, if not even a little angry ... I stood alone against a world of enemies.” When he finally walked to the podium, he bowed to the musicians but turned his back on the crowd. It was, Aranyi said, “the strangest thing that a man in front of that kind of a hysterical, worshipping mob has ever done.” Schoenberg had rehearsed this gesture; in 1911 he had made a painting titled Self-Portrait, Walking, in which the artist’s back is turned to the viewer.
The scandal to end all scandals erupted on March 31, 1913, again in the storied Musikverein. The program mapped Schoenberg’s world, past, present, and future. There were songs by Alexander Zemlinsky, Schoenberg’s only teacher; if the police had not intervened, the audience would also have heard Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Schoenberg was represented by his First Chamber Symphony. And new works by Berg and Webern offered up sonic phenomena that not even Schoenberg had yet imagined. The breaking point came during Berg’s song “Über die Grenzen des All,” or “Beyond the Limits of the Universe,” a setting of a brief, tantalizing poem by Peter Altenberg, at the beginning of which the winds and brass play a chord of twelve separate pitches—as if all the keys between two Cs on a piano were being made to sound at once.
“Loud laughter rang throughout the hall in response to that squawking, grinding chord,” one witness recalled. (It must have been a poor performance, because the chord is supposed to be very soft.) There were physical scuffles, and the police were called. A Dr. Viktor Albert complained that Erhard Buschbeck, the youthful organizer of the concert, had boxed him on the ears. Buschbeck
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responded that Dr. Albert had called him a “rascal,” making physical retaliation necessary. A lawsuit followed. “The public was laughing,” the operetta composer Oscar Straus testified in court. “And I openly confess, sir, that I laughed, too, for why shouldn’t one laugh at something genuinely comical?” The sound of the scuffle, Straus quipped, was the most harmonious music of the evening. The report of the trial took up almost an entire page of the Neue Freie Presse, pushing aside the murder trial of one Johann Skvarzil.
Atonality
The source of the scandal is not hard to divine; it has to do with the physics of sound. Sound is a trembling of the air, and it affects the body as well as the mind. This is the import of Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone, which tries to explain why certain intervals attack the nerve endings while others have a calming effect. At the head of Helmholtz’s rogues’ gallery of intervals was the semitone, which is the space between any two adjacent keys on a piano. Struck together, they create rapid “beats” that distress the ear—like an irritating flash of light, Helmholtz says, or a scraping of the skin. Fred Lerdahl, a modern theorist, puts it this way: “When a periodic signal reaches the inner ear, an area of the basilar membrane is stimulated, the peak of which fires rapidly to the auditory cortex, causing the perception of a single pitch. If two periodic signals simultaneously stimulate overlapping areas, the perturbation causes a sensation of ‘roughness.’” Similar roughnesses are created by the major seventh, slightly narrower than an octave, and by the minor ninth, slightly wider. These are precisely the intervals that Schoenberg emphasizes in his atonal music.
Psychological factors also come into play when the music is set in front of a crowd. Looking at a painting in a gallery is fundamentally different from listening to a new work in a concert hall. Picture yourself in a room with, say, Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert), painted in 1911. Kandinsky and Schoenberg knew each other, and shared common aims; Impression III was inspired by one of Schoenberg’s concerts. If visual abstraction and musical dissonance were precisely equivalent, Impression III and the third of the Five Pieces for Orchestra would present the same degree of difficulty. But the Kandinsky is a different experience for the uninitiated. If at first you have trouble understanding it, you can walk on and return to it later, or step back to give it another glance, or lean in for a close look (is that a piano in the foreground?). At a performance, listeners experience a new work collectively, at the same rate and approximately from the same distance. They cannot stop to consider the implications of a half-lovely chord or concealed waltz rhythm. They are a crowd, and crowds tend to align themselves as one mind.
Atonality was destined to raise hackles. Nothing could have been more perfectly calculated to cause consternation among the art-loving middle classes. But Schoenberg did not improve his situation when he set about answering his critics. He was a gifted writer, with a knack for turning out sharp-edged barbs: not for nothing was the acidulous Karl Kraus his literary hero. Starting in 1909, he issued a stream of commentaries, polemics, theoretical musings, and aphorisms. At times, he argued his case with charm and wit. More often,
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though, the fighter in him came out, and he summoned up what he called “the will to annihilate.”
In a way, Schoenberg was most persuasive in justifying his early atonal works when he emphasized their illogical, irrational dimension. As far as we can tell, he composed them in something like an automatic state, sketching the hyperdense Erwartung in only seventeen days. All the while, the composer was in the grip of convulsive emotion—feelings of sexual betrayal, personal abandonment, professional humiliation. That turbulence may be sensed in some of the explanations that Schoenberg provided to friends in the period from 1908 to 1913. To Kandinsky he wrote: “Art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill.” To the composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni he wrote: “I strive for: complete liberation from all forms, from all symbols of cohesion and of logic.” And he instructed Alma Mahler to listen for “colors, noises, lights, sounds, movements, glances, gestures.”
In public, however, Schoenberg tended to explain his latest works as the logical, rational outcome of a historical process. Perhaps because he was suspected of having gone mad, he insisted that he had no choice but to act as he did. To quote again his 1910 program note: the music was the product of “necessity.” Instead of separating himself from the titans of the past, from Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, he presented himself as their heir, and pointed out that many now canonical masterpieces had caused confusion when they first appeared. (That argument failed to impress some educated listeners, who felt with full justification that they were being treated like idiots. From the fact that some great music was once rejected it does not follow that any rejected music is great.) Schoenberg also cast himself in a quasi-political role, speaking of the “emancipation of the dissonance,” as if his chords were peoples who had been enslaved for centuries. Alternatively, he imagined himself as a scientist engaged in objective work: “We shall have no rest, as long as we have not solved the problems that are contained in tones.” In later years, he compared himself to transatlantic fliers and explorers of the North Pole.
The argument made a certain amount of sense. Levels of dissonance in music had been steadily rising since the last years of the nineteenth century, when Liszt wrote his keyless bagatelle and Satie wrote down the six-note Rosicrucian chords of Le Fils des étoiles. Strauss, of course, indulged discord in Salome. Max Reger, a composer versed in the contrapuntal science of Bach, caused Schoenberg-like scandals in 1904 with music that meandered close to the atonal. In Russia, the composer-pianist Alexander Scriabin, who was under the influence of Theosophist spiritualism, devised a harmonic language that vibrated around a “mystic chord” of six notes; his unfinished magnum opus Mysterium, slated for a premiere at the foot of the Himalayas, was to have brought about nothing less than the annihilation of the universe, whence men and women would reemerge as astral souls, relieved of sexual difference and other bodily limitations.
In Italy, where the Futurists were promoting an art of speed, struggle, aggression, and destruction, Luigi Russolo issued a manifesto for a “MUSIC OF
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NOISE” and began to construct noise-instruments with which to produce the roaring, whistling, whispering, screeching, banging, and groaning sounds that he had predicted in his pamphlet. In the United States, Charles Ives, a young New England composer under the influence of Transcendentalism, began writing music in several keys at once or none at all. And Busoni, in his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music of 1907, theorized all manner of extra-tonal experiments, and realized a few of them in his own works.
The teleological historian might describe all this activity as the collective movement of a vanguard, one that was bent on sweeping aside the established order. Yet each of these composers was following his or her own course (to take Scriabin’s projected gender ambiguity into account), and in each case the destination was unique. Out of all of them, only Schoenberg really adopted atonality. What set him apart was that he not only introduced new chords but eliminated, for the time being, the old ones. “You are proposing a new value in place of an earlier one, instead of adding the new one to the old,” Busoni observed in a letter of 1909.
Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler all counterbalanced their novel sonorities with massive statements of common chords; dissonance and consonance existed in mutually reinforcing tension. Debussy, likewise, populated his foggy harmonic terrain with quaint melodic characters. Scriabin maintained a feeling of tonal centricity even in the most harmonically far-out stretches of his later piano sonatas. Schoenberg was the one who insisted that there was no going back. Indeed, he began to say tonality was dead—or, as Webern later put it, “We broke its neck.”
The first report of the death of tonality came in the pages of Harmonielehre, or Theory of Harmony, which Schoenberg published in 1911, with a dedication to the “hallowed memory of Gustav Mahler.” From the start the author makes clear his detestation of the prevailing musical, cultural, and social order. “Our age seeks many things,” he writes in the preface. “What it has found, however, is above all: comfort ... The thinker, who keeps on searching, does the opposite. He shows that there are problems and that they are unsolved. As does Strindberg: ‘Life makes everything ugly.’ Or Maeterlinck: ‘Three quarters of our brothers [are] condemned to misery.’ Or Weininger and all others who have thought earnestly.” A musical morality is introduced: the easy charm of the familiar on the one side, the hard truth of the new on the other.
Harmonielehre turns out to be an autopsy of a system that has ceased to function. In the time of the Viennese masters, Schoenberg says, tonality had had a logical and ethical basis. But by the beginning of the twentieth century it had become diffuse, unsystematic, incoherent—in a word, diseased. To dramatize this supposed decline, the composer augments his discourse with the vocabulary of social Darwinism and racial theory. It was then fashionable to believe that certain societies and races had corrupted themselves by mixing with others. Wagner, in his later writings, made the argument explicitly racial and sexual, saying that the Aryan race was destroying itself by crossbreeding with Jews and other foreign bodies. Weininger made the same claim in Sex and Character.
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Schoenberg applied the concept of degeneration to music. He introduced a theme that would reappear often as the century went on—the idea that some musical languages were healthy while others were degenerate, that true composers required a pure place in a polluted world, that only by assuming a militant asceticism could they withstand the almost sexual allure of dubious chords.
In the nineteenth century, Schoenberg says, tonality had fallen prey to “inbreeding and incest.” Transitional or “vagrant” chords such as the diminished seventh—a harmonically ambiguous four-note entity that can resolve in several different directions—were the sick offspring of incestuous relationships. They were “sentimental,” “philistine,” “cosmopolitan,” “effeminate,” “hermaphroditic”; they had grown up to be “spies,” “turncoats,” “agitators.” Catastrophe was inevitable. “[T]he end of the system is brought about with such inescapable cruelty by its own functions ... [T]he juices that serve life, serve also death.” And: “Every living thing has within it that which changes, develops, and destroys it. Life and death are both equally present in the embryo.” Weininger wrote in similar terms in Sex and Character: “All that is born of woman must die. Reproduction, birth, and death are inextricably linked ... The act of coitus, considered not only psychologically but also ethically and biologically, is akin to murder.” Moreover, Schoenberg’s description of those rootless chords— “homeless phenomena, unbelievably adaptable ... They flourish in every climate”—actually resembles Weininger’s description of the effeminate, cosmopolitan Jew, who “adapts himself ... to every circumstance and every race; like the parasite, he becomes another in every host, and takes on such an entirely different appearance that one believes him to be a new creature, although he always remains the same. He assimilates himself to everything.”
The weird undercurrent of racial pseudoscience in Harmonielehre raises the question of Schoenberg’s Jewish identity. He was born in Leopoldstadt, a section of Vienna that was heavily populated by former members of the eastern shtetl communities, many of whom had fled the pogroms. Like cultivated Austrian Jews such as Mahler, Kraus, and Wittgenstein, Schoenberg might have felt the need to distance himself from the stereotype of the ghetto Jew; perhaps this explains his conversion to Lutheranism in 1898, which, unlike Mahler’s conversion to Catholicism the previous year, was not motivated by the offer of an official post. Later, as anti-Semitism became ever more unavoidable in Austro-German life, Schoenberg’s sense of his identity underwent a dramatic change. By 1933, when he went into exile, he had returned to his faith, and remained intensely if eccentrically devoted to it thereafter.
In a way, Schoenberg’s journey resembles that of Theodor Herzl, the progenitor of political Zionism, whose early attacks on self-satisfied assimilated urban Jews could be mistaken for anti-Semitic diatribes. The scholar Alexander Ringer has argued that Schoenberg’s atonality may have been an oblique affirmation of his Jewishness. In this reading, it is a kind of musical Zion, a promised land in whose dusty desert climate the Jewish composer could escape the ill-concealed hatred of bourgeois Europe.
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Schoenberg would prove uncannily alert to the murderousness of Nazi anti- Semitism. In 1934, he predicted that Hitler was planning “no more and no less than the extermination of all Jews!” Such thoughts were presumably not on his mind circa 1907 and 1908, yet to be Jewish in Vienna was to live under a vague but growing threat. Anti-Semitism was shifting from a religious to a racial basis, meaning that a conversion to Catholicism or Protestantism no longer sufficed to solve one’s Jewish problem. Rights and freedoms were being picked off one by one. Jews were expelled from student societies, boycotts instituted. There were beatings in the streets. Rabble-rousers spouted messages of hate. Hitler himself was somewhere in the background, trying to make his way as an artist, building a cathedral of resentment in his mind. As the historian Steven Beller writes, Jews were “at the center of culture but the edge of society.” Mahler ruled musical Vienna; at the same time, Jewish men never felt safe walking the streets at night.
All told, a Freudian host of urges, emotions, and ideas circled Schoenberg as he put his fateful chords on paper. He endured violent disorder in his private life; he felt ostracized by a museum-like concert culture; he experienced the alienation of being a Jew in Vienna; he sensed a historical tendency from consonance to dissonance; he felt disgust for a tonal system grown sickly. But the very multiplicity of possible explanations points up something that cannot be explained. There was no “necessity” driving atonality; no irreversible current of history made it happen. It was one man’s leap into the unknown. It became a movement when two equally gifted composers jumped in behind him.
Disciples
“This book I have learned from my pupils,” Schoenberg wrote at the top of the first page of Harmonielehre. With Webern and Berg he was able to form a common front, which eventually became known as the Second Viennese School—the first having supposedly consisted of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The notion of a “Viennese school,” which another pupil, Egon Wellesz, put into circulation in 1912, had the effect of lending Schoenberg an air of historical prestige, not to mention guru-like status. But Berg and Webern quickly made clear their independence, even as they remained in awe of their teacher. Schoenberg confessed in his diary in 1912 that he was sometimes frightened by his disciples’ intensity, by their urge to rival and surpass his own most daring feats, by their tendency to write music “raised to the tenth power.” The metaphor was apt: the modernist strain in twentieth-century music, as it branched out from Schoenberg, would complicate itself exponentially.
Webern was reserved, cerebral, monkish in his habits. The scion of an old Austrian noble family, he earned his doctorate at the Musicological Institute of the University of Vienna, writing a dissertation on the Renaissance polyphonic music of Heinrich Isaac. In his early works he drew variously on Wagner, Strauss, Mahler, and Debussy; the 1904 tone poem Im Sommerwind is a not exactly kitsch-free affair of lustrous orchestration, post-Wagnerian harmonies, and fragrant whole-tone chords. After entering Schoenberg’s orbit, Webern enthusiastically changed course and joined in the search for new chords and timbres, and, it would seem, he sometimes moved ahead of his teacher in the
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expedition to the atonal pole. Webern later recalled that as early as 1906 he wrote a sonata movement that “reached the farthest limits of tonality.”
In the summer of 1909, while Schoenberg was composing his Five Pieces for Orchestra and Erwartung, Webern wrote his own orchestral cycle, the Six Pieces, Opus 6. It is an incomparably disturbing work in which the rawness of atonality is refracted through the utmost orchestral finesse. Webern’s pieces, no less than Schoenberg’s, are marked by personal experience—here, lingering anguish over the death of the composer’s mother, in 1906. We hear successive stages of grief: presentiment of disaster, the shock of the news (screaming, trilling flocks of trumpet and horns), impressions of the Carinthian countryside near where Amalie Webern was laid to rest, final memories of her smile.
In the middle of the sequence is a funeral procession, which begins in ominous quiet, with a rumble of drums, gong, and bells. Various groups of instruments, trombones predominating, groan chords of inert, imploded character. An E-flat clarinet plays a high, wailing, circling melody. An alto flute responds in low, throaty tones. Muted horn and trumpet offer more lyric fragments, over subterranean chords. Then the trombones rise to a shout, and the winds and the brass fall in line behind them. The piece is crowned with a crushing sequence of nine-and ten-note chords, after which the percussion begins its own crescendo and builds to a pitch-liquidating roar. The age of noise has begun.
The Six Pieces was arguably the supreme atonal work. After writing it, Webern forswore grand gestures and found his calling as a miniaturist. When he heard Pelléas et Mélisande in 1908, he was amazed at Debussy’s ability to make so much from so few notes, and sought the same economy in his own music. The Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 10, show Webern’s art of compression at its most extreme: most of the movements last less than a minute, and the fourth piece contains fewer than fifty notes. A smattering of dolce tones on mandolin; soft repeated tones on clarinet; a couple of high muted cries from the brass; more plucks and plinks of harp, celesta, and mandolin again; and, to conclude, a tiny song on solo violin, “like a breath”—this music is practically Japanese, like brushstrokes on white paper. By clearing away all expressionistic clutter, Webern actually succeeded in making his teacher’s language easier to assimilate. He distributed his material in clear, linear patterns, rather than piling it up in vertical masses. The listener can absorb each unusual sonority before the next arrives.
Intellectuals of fin-de-siècle Vienna were much concerned with the limits of language, with the need for a kind of communicative silence. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, marking a boundary between rational discourse and the world of the soul. Hermann Broch ended his novel The Death of Virgil with the phrase “the word beyond speech.” The impulse to go to the brink of nothingness is central to Webern’s aesthetic; if the listener is paying insufficient attention, the shorter movements of his works may pass unnoticed. The joke went around that Webern had introduced the marking pensato: Don’t play the note, only think it.
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Webern’s works hang in a limbo between the noise of life and the stillness of death. The ease with which the one melts into the other is one major philosophical insight that arises from them. The crescendo in the funeral march in Opus 6 is among the loudest musical phenomena in history, but even louder is the ensuing silence, which smacks the ears like thunder.
Alban Berg was a debonair, handsome man, self-effacing and ironic in his attitude to the world. There was great empathy in his large, sad eyes; he was physically fragile, a chronic sufferer of severe bronchial asthma, and he identified strongly with all for whom life did not come easily. “Such a dear person,” one friend said after his death—not a common eulogy at the funerals of geniuses. Yet, as the novelist and essayist Elias Canetti said, “[Berg] wasn’t lacking in self-esteem. He knew very well who he was.”
Blessed with a fine-tuned sense of the absurd, Berg stayed somewhat aloof from the utopian fantasies of the Schoenberg circle. On one occasion Berg had trouble keeping a straight face when his comrade-in-arms Webern, at a rehearsal of his Quartet for violin, clarinet, tenor saxophone, and piano, Opus 22, told the saxophonist to play a descending major seventh with “sex appeal.” Berg feigned an asthma attack, fled the room, and burst into hysterical laughter.
Berg liked to think that he was descended from the aristocracy, cultivating the air of a dilapidated baronet who knows how far down in the world he has come. He was, in fact, a thoroughbred bourgeois, whose father, Conrad Berg, worked in an exporting firm and later went into business selling Catholic devotional items. (One of the family’s regular customers was Anton Bruckner, who brought in a favorite crucifix for repairs.) Conrad Berg died suddenly in 1900, leaving the family in financial difficulties. Johanna Berg, the widow, considered sending the then fifteen-year-old Alban to New York, so that he could work alongside his brother Hermann at the toy distributor George Borgfeldt & Co., with which their father had been associated. At the last minute, an aunt stepped in to subsidize Alban’s studies. Hermann, incidentally, later scored a sales coup by marketing the first teddy bears, three thousand of which he purchased at the 1903 Leipzig Toy Fair.
Berg had an unpromising adolescence. He fathered an illegitimate child with a family servant, suffered academic failures, and, in the wake of another love affair, attempted suicide. Although he had been writing songs in Romantic and impressionist styles since the age of fifteen, his talent was hardly prodigious.
Schoenberg molded Berg into a substantial musical force, but there was a price to be paid for the transformation. For much of his youth Berg was essentially subjugated to Schoenberg’s will, sometimes functioning as little more than a valet. His tasks in the year 1911 included packing up a van when his teacher moved to Berlin, looking after bank accounts, engaging in fund-raising schemes, addressing legal problems, and proofreading and indexing Harmonielehre. After one barrage of demands, Schoenberg had the temerity to ask, “Are you composing anything?!?!” He dismissed as worthless several of Berg’s finest early works. The student never ceased his adoration, although a proud determination grew in him, together with hidden resentments.
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Like Schoenberg and Webern, Berg was incubated in the golden age of Mahler and Strauss. So ardent was his Mahler worship that he once trespassed on the Master’s dressing room to steal a baton. Opulent, upward-and downward- lunging melodies of the Mahlerian variety appear in Berg’s scores from beginning to end. Strauss’s Salome made him swoon; he heard the opera in Graz, of course, and six more times in 1907, when the Breslau Opera brought its production to Vienna. “How I would like to sing to you Salome which I know so well,” Berg wrote to an American friend. His Altenberg songs, which incited the climactic outbreak of violence at the “scandal concert” of 1913, are structured around a mildly dissonant collection of five notes—C-sharp, E, G- natural, G-sharp, B-flat—which appears throughout Strauss’s opera and sounds as a single chord at the beginning of Salome’s final monologue. Luxuriating in this ambiguous sonority, the young composer seems reluctant to give up the degenerate, inbred language that Schoenberg condemned in Harmonielehre. Berg would soon be labeled the approachable Romantic of the Schoenberg school, the one who, as the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas says, makes a turn toward the audience.
Yet it wasn’t Berg’s bent for nostalgia that worried Schoenberg. Instead, he chastised his pupil for displaying a “rather too obvious desire to use new means”—perhaps thinking of the twelve-note chord in the Altenberg songs. There were always two sides to Berg; he pined for sweet, kitschy sounds, but he also had a mathematical fetish, a love of complexity for complexity’s sake.
Berg’s contrary tendencies collided in the Three Pieces for Orchestra, which were written in 1914, five years after Schoenberg’s Five Pieces and Webern’s Six. They are fully symphonic in conception, Schoenbergian in content but Mahlerian in form. The final movement is a phantasmagoric March for full orchestra, replete with thudding drumbeats and craggy brass fanfares. Notes blacken the page; instruments become an angry mob, spilling from the sidewalks into the streets. Right at the end comes a brief mirage of peace: phrases curl upward in the orchestra like wisps of cloud, and a solo violin plays a keening phrase. All the while, the harp and the celesta strike monotonous notes, which sound like the ticking of a bomb. It explodes in the last mearures, with a booming trombone-and-tuba tone, a flailing, upward-spiraling movement of the brass, and a final percussive hammerblow in the bass.
The date of the completion of the March—Sunday, August 23, 1914—happens to be an infamous one in military history. The First World War had commenced at the beginning of the month; a million German troops had marched through Belgium and broached the French border. On the twenty-third, French armies began a humiliating withdrawal to the Marne, and the British Expeditionary Force fell back after the Battle of Mons. Hundreds of thousands were already dead. German soldiers were carrying out reprisals against civilians who resisted. That same Sunday night, German troops gathered the citizens of the town of Dinant and began firing into their midst, killing almost seven hundred people, including a three-week-old baby. Two days later the medieval library of Louvain was set on fire. In a few short weeks, Germany had done irreparable damage to its reputation as a cradle of modern civilization.