Originally, it was certainly to do with the attitude of Western audiences, who were known to be very conservative in their tastes. New composers and contemporary music had always had a hard time gaining acceptance, even if they simply continued to elaborate on tradition.
Schönberg was a complete outsider in this milieu. From a modest background, he had received very little formal musical education in his youth, in the late nineteenth century. He took some violin lessons, taught himself to play the cello and founded an amateur orchestra. The only music Schönberg knew was what he himself could play. He couldn’t afford to go to concerts. He studied composition informally with his friend Alexander von Zemlinsky. Beyond that, Schönberg was an autodidact.
It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that such an unusual path in the Austrian capital was not tolerated. In fact, it is almost a miracle that Schönberg’s earliest compositions, such as his String Quartet No.1 in D minor, was quite well received. Soon, the audiences began to turn against him, however. In 1899, the Vienna Tonkünstlerverein rejected his sextet Verklärte Nacht, and at the première in 1900 of some of his early art songs, the audience protested. Less weighed down by heavy historical baggage, the composer dared to be ever more free and honest in his works. His music began to sound more and more dissonant; the first performance of his Kammersymphonie (Chamber Symphony) in 1907 again led to revolt. ‘From then on, the scandal never stopped’, Schönberg would recall many years later.
Tradition on steroids
1908 marked a new era in his writing. He took a resolute decision that he would forever be associated with: his break with the tonal system. Since then, Arnold has become a synonym of atonality. But where his transition is often depicted as a radical break, Schönberg did not see it this way. Schönberg did not seek to storm heaven – it is truer to say that he was a seeker of heaven – as one can see from his religious titles, like Der biblische Weg (The Biblical Way) and Moses and Aaron. He saw his new way of composing as an inevitable next step in the evolution of music.
That conviction was confirmed in the way he taught. For in his treatise on harmony (Harmonielehre), Schönberg was particularly critical of ‘the meaningless abstractions from the practice of a bygone era’, and as a teacher at various conservatories, he continued rigorously to teach the classic rules of tonal harmony. He made it clear to his students how important the musical grammar was for the meaning of their work, and to this end relied on the world-famous Austrian and German models. Composers like Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms, who had made an indelible mark on Schönberg’s own early music.
However, Schönberg pushed those theories and rules past a breaking point. He went so far in his quest for harmonic meaning that harmony became meaningless. He himself referred the works he composed after 1908 not as atonal but pantonal. He was not abandoning tonality, but combined all forms of tonality at the same time. Only later, after 1923, would he take that concept once again to its zenith and write music in accordance with his twelve-tone technique. In that system, every tone in the chromatic scale is of equal value, and each note therefore has occurred exactly once before it can be repeated. It is mainly this quasi-mathematical approach to writing music that still gives today’s listeners the shivers.
Hearing tonality disappear
So how should we understand the works on the programme during Aimez-vous Schönberg? Verklärte Nacht and the First Chamber Symphony were written in the years before that turning point. When tonality was shifting, but had not yet been burst apart. In the first of these works, Schönberg still openly pays tribute to his model composers: the rapidly evolving harmonies are an elaboration on Wagner, and the way he handles themes in an ever-changing manner align him with Brahms.
Based on a poem by Richard Demel, the work follows to some extent on the repeated tone poems of Richard Strauss. ‘The desire to give expression to the emotions evoked in him by the work of Dehmel influenced the development of my style considerably,’ the composer later admitted to the poet. But Schönberg’s music undeniably went far beyond the literary source. The original story of a woman who admitted to her lover that she was pregnant by another man was completely drowned out by the intrinsic emotional force o the work.
In the First Chamber Symphony, written in 1906, Schönberg further played around with tonality. Once again, he took a theme and, like Brahms, let it evolve quickly. The larger orchestration helped him do so, for with more instruments at his disposal, the composer could develop several ideas simultaneously. The core idea in this work is made up of perfect fourths, however, one of the fundamental intervals in tonal harmony. In this way, it became ever less clear whether the notes are being used melodically or harmonically. Schönberg further blurred the boundary between the two, although this work, with a few clear cadences, is still largely anchored in the key or D major.
That would change with Pierrot Lunaire. This work was written in what the musicologist Oliver Wray Neighbour called Schönberg’s ‘expressionistic period’, making a link with the composer’s brief excursion into painting in 1910, when Schönberg exhibited together with the Blue Rider group of Wassily Kandinsky.
In Pierrot Lunair, tonality has been abandoned. A decision that was highlighted by the use of Sprechgesang (speech song), in which the performer alternates between the spoken sound and sung sound. Schönberg explained his technique in his preface as follows: ‘The melody that in the score is in the singing voice [...] is not intended to be sung. The performer’s task is to transpose this into a spoken melody[Sprechmelodie], in which he carefully takes account of the prescribed intervals. He does this by keeping as precisely as possible to the rhythm as if he were singing […] being fully aware of the difference between sung sound and spoken sound: the sung sound maintains a constant pitch; the spoken sound starts off at a given pitch, but instantly leaves it by rising or falling.’
But even in this groundbreaking work, Schönberg’s respect for tradition remains crucial. He bases himself on standard forms like the canon, fugue or passacaglia. Although you no longer get a tonal framework, Schönberg nevertheless continues to provide the listener with a structure, as did his great classical and Romantic models.
It is thus unfair to depict Arnold Schönberg as a sustained revolutionary who lacks all respect for his predecessors. He was most certainly groundbreaking, but knew very well what the boundaries were that he, time and again, crossed. It is telling in this regard the extent to which his contemporary, Gustav Mahler, regarded his music. Despite the many negative reactions, Mahler spoke very positively about Schönberg. In letters, he indicated that he ‘may not always understand the developments, but he never lost his trust [in Schönberg].’ Perhaps you shouldn’t do so, either.
