I have read a lot of stuff this week to prepare posts and my eyes need a rest. Here's a little piece I wrote in 2012. I've given a few links that weren't in the original. I especially recommend listening to the second one, a link to a Youtube of the recordings Eduard Stuermann made of Schoenberg's piano pieces, they are incredibly deep interpretations, beginning with the Op. 11. Stuermann was one of Schoenberg's closest associates, he coached him on all of the piano works, I believe. Some of the other links, like the one of Transfigured Night, are to live performances which I liked.
Denying We Have Placed Ourselves On The Edge of Extinction: The Book of the Hanging Gardens
Alfred Brendel, that great pianist, once said that the reason Arnold Schoenberg's music was disliked wasn't that it was cold "musical mathematics", the most unoriginal of frequently parroted attempts at musical put downs*. Brendel said that Schoenberg's music was hated because it was some of the most intensely emotional music ever written. I recall he mentioned the mono-drama
Erwartung and the early
Three Pieces op.11 as examples. Anyone who is really familiar with those pieces of extremely condensed emotion expressed in ultra-saturated, chromatic melody and harmony would find his description of Schoenberg's music confirmed. It is some of the most emotionally intense music ever composed.
I've loved Schoenberg's music since the first time I heard the
quintet arrangement of the First Chamber Symphony as a teenager. It grabbed me in the third measure and it has never let me go. The
orchestral versions of it are even more intense.
The
Book of the Hanging Gardens is a song cycle from around the same time. I've been listening to it for decades and have played piano for some of the songs. I love the music very much for the same reasons I do every one of Schoenberg's published pieces. It is extremely beautiful, the production of a musical genius of the same order as Beethoven or Debussy. Milton Babbitt once said that fifty years after its composition, music was till trying to come up to it. The ensuing decades haven't done anything to resolve that situation. But it is not an easy work to love, being extremely disturbing. Disturbing in a way that so far surpasses a superficially unsettling, lesser experience that it's really inadequate to describe what I mean. It isn't merely in the sound or the words or the interplay of those, it is in the entire context of the work, its two creators and the context of all of them in the very real world of their creation. The rest of this post is an attempt to merely begin at a description of what I mean when I say that. Trying, as well, to give some, small description of the scope of Arnold Schoenberg's intellectual and artistic capacity, his position in intellectual and musical history and what the failure to listen to him tells us about us. There is no recent creative genius I'm aware of who was so engaged in external world and who consciously and, I would guess, unconsciously expressed that world in their art.
The poetry that Schoenberg set is by the very deeply ambiguous and often repulsive Stefan George*. There is no other possible description but that it is decadent. It always seems to be pulled between sublimity and an abyss of destructive self-indulgence. Schoenberg's music more surely is on the side of the sublime, though it openly chooses to involve itself in the amoral pit that the text plays on.
George was enough of a fascist that when the Nazis took over Goebbels offered him the leadership of the Academy of Arts. George refused. Some think his refusal was not based in moral clarity but in his being enough of an effete aristocrat that he disdained the vulgarity of the Nazis. He left Germany for Switzerland, not being able to tolerate the Nazis but not openly resisting them, dying within the year. He had associates and followers who were Jewish (though George was somewhat antisemetic), Nazis, anti-Nazi fascist (some of them were involved in a plot to kill Hitler).... He was also someone who was semi-openly gay even as the Nazis were beginning their oppression of gay people. He was nostalgic for the declining Germanic military aristocracy. I recall reading that he was attended by a Junker at his deathbed but am not sure if that's a myth or the truth.
Schoenberg's choice of poetry in many of his vocal works is extremely troubling or at least strange. His colleague and associate Eduard Stuermann talked about how the extreme decadence of the poetry of
Pierrot Lunaire seemed to inspire him, even as Schoenberg expressed skepticism about using it ("We'll have nothing to do with that!"). In that case the choice of poetry was the choice of Albertine Zehme, who commissioned the piece so she could perform it but, despite his misgivings, Stuermann said that something in the decadent poetry inspired Schoenberg. He also pointed to his settings of George as another example. As anyone can hear, Schoenberg transformed such bizarre material into something that is emblematic of the intellectual climate and the disordered times. The premier of Pierrot was 1912, two years before the First World War demolished the world Schoenberg grew up in. He seems to have read the signs of the time and saw where they led.
I've repeatedly wondered why he would choose to set someone he must have known was as morally tainted as George. The best I've come up with is that he was expressing the intensely troubled moral ambiguity of the period he was living in. The absolute morality of traditional religion was considered passe in his circles and with it an absolute sense of morality. Much of philosophical writing during his life was the full and far from pure flowering of a brutal materialism that outright rejected morality in favor of a bloody interpretation of natural selection with individual, social and national expressions of its assumptions.
And that was only one of the many streams of thought current in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Many of those were anything from morally ambiguous to amoral to reveling in the depravity in the wake of an asserted death of morality. As well there were the intersecting ambiguities of vision promoted by the pseudo-science of psychology as well as the alien, though far less ambiguous, findings of physics.**
Schoenberg lived in that milieu and he was certainly well aware of it. He was a thoroughly modern man of his times, extremely well cultured and yet not of the same world. And in Vienna from the late 19th century, through the first decades of the 20th century, the degenerating Austrian empire with its over-ripe to rotting brilliance, the First World War, the aftermath with the staggering inflation and material deprivation, the turn into fascism with the failure of impractical attempts at democracy and the League of Nations, and into the Nazi period and the Second world war, exile in the United States, the after war years and into the very beginning of the casual decadence of Southern California in the 1950s, Schoenberg's witness was almost incomprehensibly broad. Over all of that was the steady rise of scientific racism, antisemitism, racing to the horrible epoch of the Holocaust, something which endangered and impinged on him, interacting with choices he had made earlier in his life. Beginning as a somewhat secular Jew, Schoenberg converted to Catholicism in time to have history make that choice extremely troubling in far more than just its implications. He reconverted to Judaism in response to the Holocaust and wrote
several of his greatest works as a direct result of facing the meaning of the history of the 1920s through the Second World War and its aftermath. For a composer who was dealing so intensely with life in the last years of the 19th century (
Transfigured Night), experiencing the subsequent decades with a high degree of knowledge, intellectual and moral discernment, it is not any surprise that the musical language he expressed his experience in would become far more emotional as time went on. By the time he reaches clarity in his reconversion compositions, Schoenberg did more to express the first half of the 20th century than any artist in any medium. His music expresses more about the subsequent years, under serious consideration, than anyone else I'm familiar with. By comparison, few others can come away without seeming, in some way, less serious or even trivial. When he arrives at his final compositions there is a sense that he had made his final choice, he had committed to a moral vision if not a path in response to as clear a view of the alternative as aware humanity has ever had. The issues of moral choice that he faced, squarely, in his music, if not in life, are unfashionable, rejected as old fashioned and unscientific. That refusal to choose is a continuation of the same moral failure that led to the disasters of the 20th century.
To ignore Schoenberg's interpretation of his time, the view of an extremely cultured artist, dealing directly with the horrors and moral issues that are made more exigent from our refusal to learn from our recent past is an indictment of our current intellectual life. Refusing to hear an artist dealing directly with the dangers of leaning over and looking into the most profound abyss our species has created for our world in a way that is brave, unsparing and absolutely human, is an act of intellectual and moral cowardice. The failure of the alleged intellectual class to engage with it is a symptom of the failure of our intellectual elite. An intellectual class that remains indifferent to Arnold Schoenberg betrays its shallowness as certainly as any class that rejects the scientific or mathematical accomplishments of his time. Imagine if the intelligentsia of the 19th century had rejected Beethoven and you can see what it means. Considering Schoenberg's macrocosmic address of real life as it deals with issues of life and death, morality and depravity, that indifference is a manifestation of complete cowardice and self indulgence. It is a choice for what lies in the dead abyss, beyond the the garden terrace.
* I'm aware of a form of that charge going back to at least the late 18th century.
** I am writing another post about the intersection between these and moral reform with the far from untroubled results.
