Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg of Vienna is the great troubling presence of modern

music. His vast, sallow skull lowers over it like a sort of North Cape.

For with him, with the famous cruel five orchestral and nine piano

pieces, we seem to be entering the arctic zone of musical art. None of

the old beacons, none of the old stars, can guide us longer in these

frozen wastes. Strange, menacing forms surround us, and the light is

bleak and chill and faint. The characteristic compositions of Strawinsky

and Ornstein, too, have no tonality, lack every vestige of a pure chord,

and exhibit unanalyzable harmonies, and rhythms of a violent novelty, in

the most amazing conjunctions. But they, at least, impart a certain

sense of liberation. They, at least, bear certain witness to the

emotional flight of the composer. An instinct pulses here, an instinct

barbarous and unbridled, if you will, but indubitably exuberant and

vivid. These works have a necessity. These harmonies have color. This

music is patently speech. But the later compositions of Schoenberg

withhold themselves, refuse our contact. They baffle with their

apparently wilful ugliness, and bewilder with their geometric cruelty

and coldness. One gets no intimation that in fashioning them the

composer has liberated himself. On the contrary, they seem icy and

brain-spun. They are like men formed not out of flesh and bone and

blood, but out of glass and wire and concrete. They creak and groan and

grate in their motion. They have all the deathly pallor of abstractions.

And Schoenberg remains a troubling presence as long as one persists in

regarding these particular pieces as the expression of a sensibility, as

long as one persists in seeking in them the lyric flight. For though one

perceives them with the intellect one can scarcely feel them musically.

The conflicting rhythms of the third of the "Three Pieces for

Pianoforte" clash without generating heat, without, after all, really

sounding. No doubt, there is a certain admirable uncompromisingness, a

certain Egyptian severity, in the musical line of the first of the

"Three." But if there is such a thing as form without significance in

music, might not these compositions serve to exemplify it? Indeed, it is

only as experiments, as the incorporation in tone of an abstract and

intellectualized conception of forms, that one can at all comprehend

them. And it is only in regarding him as primarily an experimenter that

the later Schoenberg loses his incomprehensibility, and comes somewhat

nearer to us.

There is much in Schoenberg's career that makes this explanation

something more than an easy way of disposing of a troublesome problem,

makes it, indeed, eminently plausible. Schoenberg was never the most

instinctive and sensible, the least cerebral and intellectualizing of

musicians. For just as Gustav Mahler might stand as an instance of

musicianly temperament fatally outweighing musicianly intellect, so

Arnold Schoenberg might stand as an example of the equally excessive

outbalancing of sensibility by brain-stuff. The friendship of the two

men and their mutual admiration might easily be explained by the fact

that each caught sight in the other of the element he wanted most. No

doubt, the works of Schoenberg's early period, which extends from the

songs, Op. 1, through the "Kammersymphonie," Op. 9, are full of a

fervent lyricism, a romantic effusiveness. "Gurrelieder," indeed, opens

wide the floodgates of romanticism. But these compositions are somewhat

uncharacteristic and derivative. The early songs, for instance, might

have proceeded from the facile pen of Richard Strauss. They have much of

the Straussian sleepy warmth and sweet harmonic color, much of the

Straussian exuberance which at times so readily degenerates into the

windy pride of the young bourgeois deeming himself a superman. It was

only by accident that "Freihold" was not written by the Munich

tone-poet. The orchestral poem after Maeterlinck's "Pelléas" is also

ultra-romantic and post-Wagnerian. The trumpet theme, the "Pelléas"

theme, for instance, is lineally descended from the "Walter von

Stolzing" and "Parisfal" motives. The work reveals Schoenberg striving

to emulate Strauss in the field of the symphonic poem; striving,

however, in vain. For it has none of Strauss's glitter and point, and is

rather dull and soggy. The great, bristling, pathetic climax is of the

sort that has become exasperating and vulgar, rather than exciting,

since Wagner and Tchaikowsky first exploited it. On the whole, the work

is much less "Pelléas et Mélisande" than it is "Pelleas _und_

Melisanda." And the other works of this period, more brilliantly made

and more opulently colored though they are, are still eminently of the

romantic school. The person who declared ecstatically that assisting at

a performance of the string sextet, "Verklärte Nacht," resembled

"hearing a new 'Tristan,'" exhibited, after all, unconscious critical

acumen. The great cantata, "Gurrelieder," the symphonic setting of Jens

Peter Jacobsen's romance in lyrics, might even stand as the grand finale

of the whole post-Wagnerian, ultra-romantic period, and represent the

moment at which the whole style and atmosphere did its last heroic

service. And even the "Kammersymphonie," despite all the signs of

transition to a more personal manner, despite the increased

scholasticism of tone, despite the more acidulous coloration, despite

the distinctly novel scherzo, with its capricious and fawn-like leaping,

is not quite characteristic of the man.

It is in the string quartet, Opus 7, that Schoenberg first speaks his

proper tongue. And in revealing him, the work demonstrates how

theoretical his intelligence is. No doubt, the D-minor Quartet is an

important work, one of the most important of chamber compositions.

Certainly, it is one of the great pieces of modern music. It gives an

unforgettable and vivid sense of the voice, the accent, the timbre, of

the hurtling, neurotic modern world; hints the coming of a free and

subtle, bitter and powerful, modern musical art. As a piece of

construction alone, the D-minor Quartet is immensely significant. The

polyphony is bold and free, the voices exhibiting an independence

perhaps unknown since the days of the madrigalists. The work is unified

not only by the consolidation of the four movements into one, but as

well by a central movement, a "durchführung" which, introduced between

the scherzo and the adagio, reveals the inner coherence of all the

themes. There is no sacrifice of logic to the rules of harmony. Indeed,

the work is characterized by a certain uncompromisingness and sharpness

in its harmonies. The instrumental coloring is prismatic, all the

registers of the strings being utilized with great deftness. Exclusive

of the theme of the scherzo, which recalls a little overmuch the

Teutonic banalities of Mahler's symphonies, the quality of the music is,

on the whole, grave and poignant and uplifted. It has a scholarly

dignity, a magistral richness, a chiaroscuro that at moments recalls

Brahms, though Schoenberg has a sensuous melancholy, a delicacy and an

Hebraic bitterness that the other has not. Like so much of Brahms, this

music comes out of the silence of the study, though the study in this

case is the chamber of a Jewish scholar more than that of a German. Were

the entire work of the fullness and lyricism of the last two movements;

were it throughout as impassioned as is the broad gray clamant germinal

theme that commences the work and sweeps it before it, one might easily

include the composer in the company of the masters of musical art.

Unfortunately, the magnificent passages are interspersed with unmusical

ones. It is not only that the work does not quite "conceal art," that it

smells overmuch of the laboratory. It is that portions of it are

scarcely "felt" at all, are only too obviously carpentered. The work is

full of music that addresses itself primarily to professors of theory.

It is full of writing dictated by an arbitrary and intellectual

conception of form. There is a great deal of counterpoint in it that

exists only for the benefit of those who "read" scores, and that

clutters the work. There are whole passages that exist only in obedience

to some scholastic demand for thematic inversions and deformations.

There is an unnecessary deal of marching and countermarching of

instruments, an obsession with certain rhythms that becomes purely

mechanical, an intensification of the contrapuntal pickings and peckings

that annoy so often in the compositions of Brahms. It is Schoenberg the

intellectualist, Schoenberg the Doctor of Music, not Schoenberg the

artist, who obtains here.

And it is he one encounters almost solely in the music of the third

period, the enigmatical little pieces for orchestra and piano. It is he

who has emerged victorious from the duel revealed by the D-minor

Quartet. Those grotesque and menacing little works are lineally

descended from the intellectualized passages of the great preceding one,

are, indeed, a complete expression of the theoretical processes which

called them into being. For while in the quartet the scholasticism

appears to have been superimposed upon a body of musical ideas, in the

works of the last period it appears well-nigh the generative principle.

These latter have all the airlessness, the want of poetry, the frigidity

of things constructed after a formula, daring and brilliant though that

formula is. They make it seem as though Schoenberg had, through a

process of consideration and thought and study, arrived at the

conclusion that the music of the future would, in the logic of things,

take such and such a turn, that tonality as it is understood was doomed

to disappear, that part-writing would attain a new independence, that

new conceptions of harmony would result, that rhythm would attain a new

freedom through the influence of the new mechanical body of man, and had

proceeded to incorporate his theories in tone. One finds the

experimental and methodical at every turn throughout these compositions.

Behind them one seems invariably to perceive some one sitting before a

sheet of music paper and tampering with the art of music; seeking to

discover what would result were he to accept as harmonic basis not the

major triad but the minor ninth, to set two contradictory rhythms

clashing, or to sharpen everything and maintain a geometric hardness of

line. One always feels in them the intelligence setting forth

deliberately to discover new musical form. For all their apparent

freedom, they are full of the oldest musical procedures, abound in

canonic imitations, in augmentations, and diminutions, in all sorts of

grizzled contrapuntal manoevers. They are head-music of the most

uncompromising sort. The "Five Orchestral Pieces" abound in purely

theoretical combinations of instruments, combinations that do not at all

sound. "Herzgewächse," the setting of the poem of Maeterlinck made

contemporaneously with these pieces, makes fantastic demands upon the

singer, asks the voice to hold high F _pppp_, to leap swiftly across the

widest intervals, and to maintain itself over a filigree accompaniment

of celesta, harmonium and harp. But it is in the piano-music that the

sonorities are most rudely neglected. At moments they impress one as

nothing more than abstractions from the idiosyncrasies and mannerisms of

the works of Schoenberg's second period made in the hope of arriving at

definiteness of style and intensity of speech. They smell of the

synagogue as much as they do of the laboratory. Beside the Doctor of

Music there stands the Talmudic Jew, the man all intellect and no

feeling, who subtilizes over musical art as though it were the Law.

The compositions of this period constitute an artistic retrogression

rather than an advance. They are not "modern music" for all their

apparent stylistic kinship to the music of Strawinsky and Scriabine and

Ornstein. Nor are they "music of the past." They belong rather more to

the sort of music that has no more relation with yesteryear than it has

with this or next. They belong to the sort that never has youth and

vigor, is old the moment it is produced. Their essential

inexpressiveness makes almost virtueless the characteristics which

Schoenberg has carried into them from out his fecund period. The

severity and boldness of contour, so biting in the quartet, becomes

almost without significance in them. If there is such a thing as

rhythmless music, would not the stagnant orchestra of the "Five

Orchestral Pieces" exemplify it? The alternately rich and acidulous

color is faded; an icy green predominates. And, curiously enough,

throughout the group the old romantic allegiance of the earliest

Schoenberg reaffirms itself. Wotan with his spear stalks through the

conclusion of the first of the "Three Pieces for Pianoforte." And the

second of the series, a composition not without its incisiveness, as

well as several of the tiny "Six Piano Pieces," Op. 19, recall at

moments Brahms, at others Chopin, a Chopin of course cadaverous and

turned slightly green.

It may be that by means of these experiments Schoenberg will gird

himself for a new period of creativity just as once indubitably by the

aid of experiments which he did not publish he girded himself for the

period represented by the D-minor Quartet. It may be that after the

cloud of the war has completely lifted from the field of art, and a

normal interchange is re-established it will be seen that the monodrama,

Op. 20, "Die Lieder des 'Pierrot Lunaire,'" which was the latest of his

works to obtain a hearing, was in truth an earnest of a new loosing of

the old lyrical impulse so long incarcerated. But, for the present,

Schoenberg, the composer, is almost completely obscured by Schoenberg,

the experimenter. For the present, he is the great theoretician

combating other theoreticians, the Doctor of Music annihilating

doctor-made laws. As such, his usefulness is by no means small. He

speaks with an authority no less than that of his adversaries, the other

and less radical professors. He, too, has invented a system and a

method; his "Harmonielehre," for instance, is as irrefragable as theirs;

he can quote scripture with the devil. He is at least demolishing the

old constraining superstitions, and in so doing may exercise an

incalculable influence on the course of music. It may be that many a

musician of the future will find himself the better equipped because of

Schoenberg's explorations. He is undoubtedly the most magistral theorist

of the day. The fact that he could write at the head of his treatise on

harmony, "What I have here set down I have learned from my pupils,"

independently proves him a great teacher. It is probable that his later

music, the music of his puzzling "third period," will shortly come to be

considered as simply a part of his unique course of instruction.