Arnold Schoenberg died in Los Angeles on July 13, 1951, almost exactly fifty years ago. As the central proponent of what has been commonly considered a radical rethinking of the fundamental structures of Western art music, he remains what he was for the last forty years of his life: the most controversial figure of twentieth-century music. His detractors have included some of the most serious and thoughtful men of the past ninety years, but he has never lacked for defenders, either. This essay's point is to raise one more small voice in defense of a great composer.
Schoenberg began by writing music strongly influenced by Wagner's scope and chromaticism and Brahms's formal discipline. He saw nineteenth-century music as moving ever further from a tonal center. He decided, early in the twentieth century, to take this movement to what he saw as its logical musical consequence: the abandonment of tonality. In the 1920s, temperamentally and esthetically unhappy with music that lacked an organizing principle, he adopted an extraordinarily elaborate system of his own devising, the "method of composing with twelve tones." This dodecaphonic system became the basis for what has come to be called serialism. Most of the music Schoenberg composed in the last twenty-five years of his life made use of his system.
The above outline is common knowledge and not, I think, controversial. The controversy begins with the posttonal music, which is delighted in by a few and deplored by many. Ultimately, any disagreement that is esthetic in nature cannot be settled. But some detractors have gone further, in my view misreading Schoenberg's words and character, charging him with careerism and with advancing socialist and statist goals. The motives of such critics may or may not be worth examining. But it must be said that whatever Schoenberg may have been, he was no careerist. Or, put otherwise, if he was a careerist, he was a very bad one indeed and hence no proper model for friends or foes of careerism. Though he spent his last years living in southern California, he lived a middle-class existence at best (thanks in no small part to help from friends and admirers), and he was reduced to teaching music to the children of "celebrities," a commodity of which southern California has never had a shortage. I met one of his former students about fifteen years ago, a woman who described him as a warm-hearted and generous man and an inspiring teacher.
What success he enjoyed in his lifetime was succès d'estime, and that, granted, was for a brief enough time remarkable. Though it may be slightly fair to say that he had political sympathies bordering on socialism, any suggestion that his politics and the admiration he so briefly enjoyed were in any way linked is utterly false, as even a cursory glance at the record will show. How many of the numerous mindless adherents of the Frankfurt School, for instance, are interested in seconding Adorno's praise of serialism or pushing his theories about the relationship of socialism and "advanced" music? Don't hold your breath while racking your brain for names.
Far from being the master manipulator of thought, art, and people that he has been asserted to be, Schoenberg was actually no more than a curiously profound man with virtually no insight into the ways other people saw, heard, or understood almost anything. Quite simply, he was a man with a revolutionary understanding of the materia musicae, but he was, as he called himself, a conservative revolutionary. It should be remembered that around 1900, the terms new music and new art were being used entirely wittingly by artists who saw what they were about as a radical departure from what had come before. Such a perspective was not without precedent. In the recent past it happened around the years 1300 and 1600, where the terms employed were ars nova and nuove musiche, respectively. To these movements we owe the development of, respectively, polyphony and opera, fundamental components of the legacy of Western culture.
Schoenberg was proud that he was making the new out of the old, and far from scorning the old, he wished to be judged by its standards. No tyrant or would-be tyrant (another epithet directed against him) ever said anything as witty, self-deprecating, charming, and expressive of legitimate esthetic frustrations as "My music is not modern; it is only badly performed." Alas, it continues to be badly performed by most of the few that still bother to perform it.
Schoenberg never repudiated the past; he believed, rather, that it was important to continue and enrich the heritage one had received. A case in point: he loved the music of Johann Strauss to near distraction. He and his pupils, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, made arrangements of some dozen or so of their favorite waltzes for their private performances of new and neglected music. Schoenberg not only loved Brahms's music even more than he loved Strauss's, he believed deeply that Brahms's music was profoundly "modern" and advanced in concept, even more so than Wagner's. He never abandoned the position that his own music proceeded logically and historically from the music of those two men. In fact, there is no reason not to believe that he genuinely thought that serialism would make music more comprehensible, because he also genuinely could never grasp why conductors who performed Brahms's music didn't perform his, too.
Clearly, either Schoenberg or the rest of the world has the wrong end of the stick on this issue. But whatever position one takes, the fact remains that his influence, real or imagined, legitimate or otherwise, was locally intense but short-lived. In short, it never amounted to a hill of beans. In this country especially, Schoenberg is not and has not ever been a force to be reckoned with. Love him or loathe him, he and his school were never more than a blip on the radar screen, except in the precincts of the Academy and of periodical journalism. (Visitors to this site will agree, I trust, that these are the smallest of small ponds. Few will dispute the wisdom of Henry Kissinger's decades-old wisecrack about the vitriol of academic disputes being in inverse proportion to their significance.)
I do not dispute that most people find his music very hard to listen to, even with the best will in the world. But to argue that his music is worthless because of its difficulty for "inexpert listeners" is to make no argument at all. Difficult art may be great art, minor art, or nonart, but it will by its very nature have precious few admirers. Whether such admirers are an elect or a small cadre of the self-deceived will depend upon your point of view. In the long run, however, these people do not control the advance or decline of culture and its institutions, musical or otherwise; they do not and cannot prevail in what remains of the free market of high culture, much as anyone might wish them to. As the United States rapidly declines into paganism and barbarism, the two crucial components of high culture are becoming ever harder to locate: an attentive and involved audience and money. The likelihood that our mandarins would ever try to shove dodecaphony down the throat of the unwilling lies somewhere between the implausible and the hysterical. It's a struggle nowadays even to establish a Bocelli-free zone!
Schoenberg's critics are fond of making the invidious comparison between the tone row and the diatonic scale. This is another canard. Bach himself, the titan whom everyone reveres, helped undermine the very foundations of music through his advocacy of the system of falsified tuning dubbed equal, or well, temperament. This system alters the natural harmonic relationships of the tones in the scale to enable keyboard instruments to play in a wider variety of keys than would be possible with truly natural, or just, intonation. For the past three centuries, all but a handful have accepted without question this profound compromise with truly natural tuning, a compromise made, as I say, merely to give certain musical performers an easier life! There is much more to the question of tuning, obviously, but the point is that "natural" tonal relations had been subverted almost two centuries before Schoenberg turned his back on diatonicism. His subversion was one of degree, not of kind.
In purely human terms, Arnold Schoenberg could be a tough customer. Robert Craft, who as a young man knew Schoenberg late in his life, noted that "his fathomless humility [was] plated all the way down with a hubris of stainless steel." He was a man that took his work very seriously, and such men are occasionally very dull dogs and frequently difficult ones. And he was a scrapper. Ever since the teens of the last century, critics and colleagues have torn Schoenberg to pieces, with all his pomps and all his works. Schoenberg fought back with occasional articles, pamphlets, and musical compositions, including a group of satirical canons that mock neoclassicism and parody Stravinsky's music and even his name (they are by no means among Schoenberg's best work, but they do suggest how seriously he took the esthetic quarrels of his time).
Schoenberg never succeeded in giving as good as he got, though; his abusers have always been more numerous than his defenders and, on more occasions than is pleasant to see, readier than he to vilify and calumniate. One need only dip into any of the standard biographies and studies to see how intemperate has been the language of some of his critics during the last eight decades. Even those not given to intemperate language tended to speak with uncommon harshness about Schoenberg, his music, and his theory of composition. Bruno Walter, like virtually all the other great conductors among Schoenberg's exact contemporaries, performed many of his tonal works but eschewed the atonal and twelve-tone ones. In his book Of Music and Music-Making, Walter described such music as "divorced from life" and part of the "cultural regress" of twentieth-century art and civilization.
These are strong words. And it may well be true that the number of Western ears capable of hearing Schoenberg's music as beautiful will never reach critical mass. But then again, stranger things have happened. James Joyce, a writer so extraordinarily difficult to read that it is safe to say that more people have read his explicators than his prose, has gained and held a place in the pantheon – though for how long remains uncertain. Many once-lauded abstract painters are now being rightly consigned to the dung heap, but it hardly seems likely that the work of Matisse or Bracque will ever want for an audience. I accept Santayana's doctrine that it is inconceivable that a thing of beauty will find none that can appreciate it. That is to say, in art there is no equivalent of Kant's tree falling unnoticed in the woods. Thus, I am prepared to admit that if Schoenberg's music were to sink without trace in a century or two, his present-day detractors would appear retrospectively to have won their case.
Let us all cross that bridge when we come to it, however. Meanwhile, it is worthwhile noting something that Gary North wrote for this site on May 7, 2001: "The issue of innovation has to do with the profitability of output, not the cost of input. The innovator is an entrepreneur. He may fail. The new technology may come a cropper. Time will tell. So will the market." This is a pretty fair doctrine for understanding artistic longevity, too, and I recommend it for wider consumption. As a contented consumer of the products of the innovator Arnold Schoenberg, I hope that his "technology" will outlive that of my Beta VCRs, but time and the market will indeed tell.
One of the genuinely wicked characteristics of the Left is its insistence upon making everything subservient to politics (in effective terms, the state). I have known of very few on the Right that have been guilty of this crime. Virtually all have understood, with St. Paul, that charisms are variously distributed. It is thus foolish to defend or attack a political system or philosophy because a good or bad composer espoused or failed to espouse it. It is also both wrong and foolish to love or hate music because of the alleged wisdom or wrongheadedness of its composer, just as none worthy of respect choose on ideological grounds whom to make a friend or a wife.
The world is a wicked place, no doubt about it. Among other things, it presents us with virtually unlimited opportunities for reflection, comparison, and lesson-drawing. May I be pardoned, however – as one that loves freedom and, coincidentally, Moses und Aron, Die Jakobsleiter, the string quartets, the piano music, and much else composed by Arnold Schoenberg – for hoping that those who don't share my feelings about this remarkable artist will henceforward seek opportunities for monition and counsel elsewhere? I would suggest that they start with Gladiator and The Sopranos, for example, both of which have received incomprehensible praise and are ripe for a jeremiad. I shall gladly and unreservedly applaud anyone that takes up this task.
May 14, 2001
