From the Winter 2004 MT
A Schoenberg reader: documents of a life
Joseph Auner
Yale University Press (New Haven & London, 2003); xxvi, 428pp; £30. ISBN 0 300 09540 6. reviewed by Arnold Whittall
Hans Keller’s verdict was characteristically forthright: Schoenberg was ‘musical history’s most tragic figure – its most uncompromising clarifier and its leading confuser at the same time’. Schoenberg himself didn’t put it quite like that, but Joseph Auner’s selection from his writings confirms the vehemence with which he consistently sought to explain – and lament – his difficult position in the contemporary world. A pair of extended quotations must suffice to give the flavour of this vehemence, first from a speech in English, c.1936, entitled ‘Some objective reasons to educate rising generations to contemporary music’. Near the beginning Schoenberg declared that ‘I feel the necessity to act as a fighter, as a battering ram for the interest of the development of the art’, and this pugnacity in the cause of what he believed to be progress is sustained throughout.
Whoever today calls himself a conservative does it exclusively with the intention to suppress every development of mind, to hinder new ideas from coming about, to paralyze the inventive capacity of the spirit, to suffocate every tendency of life – for life is changing, developing, growing. But on the contrary, whoever wants to call himself a conservative in the very meaning of life, has the duty to protect new ideas, has to promote development, has to animate inventive capacity of spirit, has to encourage true tendencies of life for life has to be conserved – to conserve the possibilities of development means to conserve life, means to protect it against roteness, against decay, against decomposition (pp.276, 278).
As late as April 1949, in comments prepared for the San Francisco Round-Table on Modern Art but not delivered by him, Schoenberg was proclaiming his belief in ‘l’art pour l’art. In the creation of a work of art, nothing should interfere with the real idea’, and while he had no objections to the intentionally popular compositions of Offenbach or Gershwin,
it is wrong of a serious composer to write or include in his works such parts which he feels would please the audience. [...] Why should there not be music for the ordinary man, for the mediocre, for the un-understanding, for the uninitiated on the one hand, and on the other hand, such music for the few who understand? Is it necessary that a composer who can write for the few, just this same composer must also write for all? Is it not better if they are specialists, one writes for all, and the other writes for the few (pp.329–30).
In both these instances, the aggressiveness of the literary style compounds the mixture of impassioned idealism and exasperated intolerance that is likely to strike most readers today. That Schoenberg himself saw it rather differently is suggested by the extract Auner includes from the well-known essay ‘My evolution’ (also 1949) in which Schoenberg thanks his early mentor David Joseph Bach, who ‘greatly influenced the development of my character by furnishing it with the ethical and moral power needed to withstand vulgarity and commonplace popularity’ (p.11). What Schoenberg had to say in 1949 was certainly of a piece with the energy and intensity of a composition completed that year, the Phantasy for violin with piano accompaniment, music which displays absolutely no confusion about why it exists and where it is going. You must take it or leave it.
Taking or leaving was the onerous task confronting Joseph Auner, who has had to consider a complex range of sources, and achieve a balance which, while not excluding everything familiar, justifies the enterprise with enough new and significant material. It is obviously helpful to have previously unpublished documents from the Arnold Schoenberg Centre in Vienna (formerly the Schoenberg Institute, Los Angeles) and extracts from a wide variety of publications, many of which are not easily accessible, available within a single pair of covers. Specialists will cavil at some of the choices made: I for one could have done without 20 pages of extracts from early opera librettos (Odoakar, c.1900, Superstition, c.1901), even though the brief music examples with the latter are of some interest. But the Reader is best thought of as a work of reference: it is a source to dip into, not a biographical narrative. The book’s seven sections are organised chronologically, although – particularly when it comes to the composer’s comments on his earlier works – Auner uses documents written much later to fill out the picture. His introductory comments are always helpful, but I don’t find the presentation ideally user-friendly. It was probably a mistake to relegate information about sources to a separate ‘Bibliography of sources’ at the back, since after a document has been located there, you might still have to turn to the ‘List of abbreviations’ at the front of the volume to find out which source is actually involved, and whether the original language was German or English. The usefulness of the Reader as a work of reference would also have been enhanced by the placement of notes and references on the relevant page, though I appreciate that the extensiveness of such referencing would probably have resulted in some pages with more reference material than text.
The citations above give some evidence of Schoenberg’s idiosyncratic English – hardly surprising, never seriously confusing – and there are a few places where Auner’s translations might be questioned, though more for elegance than sense. Schoenberg’s own presence is vivid throughout, whether in an aphorism from 1909 proclaiming that ‘art is the cry of distress uttered by those who experience firsthand the fate of mankind’ (p.64) or the fervent assertion (1935) that it is the artist’s duty ‘to produce the unexpected, and to surprise by the newness and originality of his subjects and by the manner in which he treats them: [...] the only correct attitude towards a new or unknown work is to await patiently what the author wants to say’ (p.262). A Schoenberg reader may be less persuasive as a portrait of the composer in his time than such recent critical studies as Constructive dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the transformations of twentieth-century culture (edd. Juliane Brand & Christopher Hailey, University of California Press, 1997), Schoenberg and his world (ed. Walter Frisch, Princeton University Press, 1999), or the two volumes edited by Charlotte Cross & Russell Berman, Schoenberg and words: the modernist years and Political and religious ideas in the works of Arnold Schoenberg (Garland, 2000). But there is always a special value in hearing Schoenberg’s own voice, and on occasion the less guarded, explicitly polemical aspects of his thinking which come through in Auner’s selection add something significant to the more polished essays and theoretical works through which his literary legacy has been most constructively transmitted. |
