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served as the thirty-third grand master of the Prieuré de Sion, which, according
to a fabricated legend, guarded the secret of the Grail itself.
All this was standard-issue post-Wagnerian mumbo-jumbo. But Debussy’s
honest quest for an unblemished, truthful musical language soon led him to
other, distinctly un-Wagnerian sources. Just before his second trip to Bayreuth,
in 1889, he attended the Paris Universal Exposition, which imported exotic
sights and sounds from around the world, courtesy of a network of oppressive
colonial regimes. It was here that Gauguin first became enamored of the
tropical simplicity that eventually led him to take up residence in Tahiti. Debussy
listened transfixed to the music of a Vietnamese theater troupe, with its effects
of resonating gongs, and also to a Javanese gamelan ensemble, with its
minimal scales of five notes, its delicate layering of timbres, its air of suspended
animation. Gamelan music, Debussy wrote, “contained all gradations, even
some that we no longer know how to name, so that tonic and dominant were
nothing more than empty phantoms of use to clever little children.”
Debussy also immersed himself in painting and poetry, working out musical
analogies for his sharpest aesthetic impressions. Although he was later labeled
a musical “impressionist,” Renoir and Monet affected him little; he was
influenced more by Anglo-American painters—by Turner’s way of suffusing a
landscape with light, by Whistler’s way of subsuming a seascape into a single
mood. He read the poetry of Paul Verlaine, whose Fêtes galantes he
discovered on the shelves of his piano pupil and lover Marie-Blanche Vasnier.
And Verlaine’s perfectly simple and elusive images—the color of moonlight, the
music of rustling leaves and falling rain, the unreadable beauty of the sea, the
motion of ancient dances, the souls of marionettes—fired Debussy’s musical
imagination. To evoke the instrument of “Mandoline,” he wrote strumming
chords in which fifths accumulate in dreaming towers. To capture the plain
mystery of the line “singing branches,” he let common chords tumble over one
another in defiance of textbook rules. In the midst of that kaleidoscopic rush of
sounds, the whole-tone scale, one of Debussy’s trademark devices, made an
early appearance. This, in turn, brought the young composer to the threshold of
so-called atonality.
Musicians and listeners had long agreed that certain intervals, or pairs of notes,
were “clear,” and that others were “unclear.” The quoted words can be found on
a cuneiform tablet from the Sumerian city of Ur. The clearest intervals were the
octave, the fifth, the fourth, and the major third, which form the lower end of the
harmonic series (see, again, the opening measures of Thus Spake
Zarathustra). By contrast, the tritone had for centuries been considered a
disturbing entity. The whole-tone scale, which had begun showing up as an
exotic effect in mid-nineteenth-century Russian and Central European music,
consists of six equal steps in succession; if one goes upward starting from any
C on a piano, it is three white keys followed by three black keys. The scale has
the interesting property of being “clear” and “unclear” in equal measure. It
abounds in bright major thirds, which can be obtained by moving two steps from
any note. It also abounds in tritones (three steps). In visual terms, the scale
generates a palette at once luminous and unreal, bright and hazy.
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Debussy also made use of pentatonic scales, which he encountered many
times at the Paris Exposition—those ancient, elementary five-note scales that
crop up in folk traditions all over the world, from Africa to Indonesia. And he
continued using diatonic (major- and minor-key) scales, though often in a spirit
of nostalgia or satirical play.
The composer thought deeply about the physical facts underlying harmony.
Hermann von Helmholtz, in his 1863 treatise, On the Sensations of Tone as a
Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, had explained the physics of the
natural harmonic series and attempted to define human perceptions of
consonance and dissonance in relation to it. As the waveforms of any two
simultaneous tones intersect, they create “beats,” pulsations in the air. The
interval of the octave causes a pleasant sensation, Helmholtz said, because the
oscillations of the upper note align with those of the lower note in a perfect two-
to-one ratio, meaning that no beats are felt. The perfect fifth, which has a three-
to-two ratio, also sounds “clean” to the ear. Debussy may have known
Helmholtz’s work; he certainly knew the eighteenth-century speculations of
Rameau, who had linked standard harmony to the overtone series. Debussy
loved to plant octaves and fifths in the bass and let a rainbow of narrower
intervals shimmer in the upper air.
Debussy’s emblematic early work is Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun,” an
orchestral narrative after a poem by Mallarmé, written and revised between
1892 and 1894. In the poem, a faun wonders how best to treasure the memory,
or perhaps the dream, of two exquisite nymphs; he plays a song upon his flute,
aware that music falls short of the viscerality of experience:
Long shall my discourse from the echoing shore
Depict those goddesses: by masquerades,
I’ll strip the veils that sanctify their shades.
The score begins by summoning the very music that the faun plays—a languid
melody on the flute, descending a tritone and going back up. The harmony,
likewise, swings across the tritone and comes to rest on a richly resonant B-flat
dominant seventh, which, in classical harmony, would resolve to E-flat. Here the
chord becomes a self-sufficient organism, symbolic of unbounded nature. Then
the flute repeats its melody while a new texture forms around it. Debussy thus
resists the Germanic urge to develop his thematic material: the melody remains
static while the accompaniment evolves. Cloudy whole-tone sonorities mark the
horizon of the faun’s vision, where shapes dissolve in mist.
All this suggestion eventually coalesces into a voluptuous, full-orchestral love
song in D-flat major. The strings savor long, flowing unison lines, more akin to
Indian ragas than to Wagner or Strauss. It is music of physical release, even of
sexual orgasm, as Vaslav Nijinsky demonstrated in his undulating dance of the
Faun at the Ballets Russes in 1912. “I hold the queen!” Mallarmé’s faun exults.
Yet the tritone lingers in the bass, a mystery ungrasped.
With the opera Pelléas et Mélisande, sketched in the early 1890s and then
extensively revised before its 1902 premiere, Debussy created a new kind of
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interior music drama, using Wagner as raw material. The text is by the
Symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, and, as Strauss would do in Salome,
Debussy set Maeterlinck’s play word for word, following its riddling prose
wherever it took him. The love triangle of Pelléas, his half brother Golaud, and
the inscrutable wandering princess Mélisande moves toward a grim climax, but
most of the action takes place offstage; the score places the listener in a liquid
medium into which individual psychologies have been submerged. Debussy’s
established resources—whole-tone scales, antique modes, attenuated melodies
that rise from wavering intervals—conjure an atmosphere of wandering, waiting,
yearning, trembling.
Later come glimpses of a beautiful country on the other side. When Pelléas and
Mélisande finally confess their love for each other—“I love you,” “I love you,
too,” without accompaniment—the orchestra responds with a simple textbook
progression moving from a tonic chord to its dominant seventh, except that in
Debussy’s spectral scoring it sounds like the dawn of creation. A similar
transfiguring simplicity overtakes the prelude to Act V, in which we discover that
Mélisande has given birth to a child.
At some point, Debussy’s sense of himself as a sonic adventurer, a Faustian
seeker, dissipated. By 1900 he was no longer calling for a Society of Musical
Esotericism; instead, he prized classic French values of clarity, elegance, and
grace. He was also listening intently to Spanish music—in particular, to the
cante jondo, or deep song, tradition of Andalusian flamenco. His major works
from the first decade of the century—La Mer; the Preludes, Book I, and
Estampes for piano; and the cycles of Images for piano and for orchestra—
intermingle familiar qualities of unearthliness with dancing movement and clean-
cut lyricism. “Voiles” (“Sails”), in the Preludes, confines itself almost entirely to
the whole-tone scale. “Steps in the Snow” revolves around hypnotic repetitions
of a four-note figure. But “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair” has a melody of the sort
that begs to be whistled in the street; many people would be surprised to learn
that it had been “composed” at all. And the “Interrupted Serenade,” a Spanish
scene, intertwines flamenco guitar with Arabic scales suggestive of Moorish
influence. Debussy did not learn to write such music in Faustian isolation;
instead, he picked up clues from desultory nights at the opera, operetta,
cabarets, and cafés.
Paris bohemia promoted an easy back-and-forth between occult esotericism
and cabaret populism, not least because the two worlds were sometimes
literally on top of each other. The Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross met in a
room above the cabaret Auberge du Clou, and as the cabal debated its arcane
philosophy, the insinuating tunes of the café-concert would have floated up from
below.
In such places, Debussy often encountered Erik Satie, another clandestine
revolutionary of the fin de siècle, and, in some ways, the more daring one.
Satie, too, dabbled in Rosicrucianism, serving briefly as the house composer for
the Order of the Rose-Cross of the Temple and Graal, which the novelist
Joséphin Péladan had founded in a Parsifal daze. Satie’s music for Péladan’s
play Le Fils des étoiles (1891) begins with a totally irrational string of dissonant
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six-note chords—the next step beyond late Liszt. Yet a life of experiment was
not to Satie’s liking. The son of a publisher of music-hall and cabaret songs, he
found deeper satisfaction in playing piano at the Auberge du Clou. He achieved
liberation from the past in three piano pieces titled Gymnopédies, which discard
centuries of knotted-brow complexity in favor of a language at once simple and
new. In the first eighteen bars of the first piece, only six pitches are used. There
is no development, no transition, only an instant prolonged.
The conductor Reinbert de Leeuw has written: “Satie was, in a manner of
speaking, starting European musical history all over again.” The same could
have been said of Debussy, who, in 1901, remarked to his colleague Paul
Dukas that too many modern works had become needlessly complex—“They
smell of the lamp, not of the sun.” Debussy was describing the motivation for his
latest work, the Nocturnes for orchestra, and in particular for the movement
“Fêtes,” which depicted a festival in the Bois de Boulogne, replete with the
sounds of soldiers’ trumpets and the cries of the crowd. This was the germ of an
alternative modernism, one that would reach maturity in the stripped-down, folk-
based, jazz-happy, machine-driven music of the twenties. In essence, two
avant-gardes were forming side by side. The Parisians were moving into the
brightly lit world of daily life. The Viennese went in the opposite direction,
illuminating the terrible depths with their holy torches.
Schoenberg
Schoenberg was born in 1874. His father, Samuel Schönberg, came from a
German-speaking Jewish community in Pressburg, which is now Bratislava, in
Slovakia. (Schoenberg dropped the umlaut from his name when he fled
Germany in 1933.) Samuel Schönberg moved to Vienna as a young man to
make a living as a shopkeeper. There he met and married Pauline Nachod, who
came from a family of cantorial singers. The couple lived in modest
circumstances and did not own a piano. Their son learned much of the classical
repertory from a military band that performed in a coffeehouse on the Prater.
Arnold taught himself several instruments and played in a string quartet that
occupied a room set aside for messenger boys. He learned instrumental forms
by subscribing to an encyclopedia, and waited for the S volume to arrive before
composing a sonata.
One way or another, Schoenberg absorbed so much music that he had no need
for formal instruction. He did take some lessons from Alexander Zemlinsky, a
slightly older composer who wrote fine-grained, lyrically potent music in the vein
of Mahler and Strauss. Zemlinsky’s father was Catholic, his mother was the
daughter of a Sephardic Jew and a Bosnian Muslim. In 1901, Schoenberg
married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde, who, a few years later, would set off the
central emotional crisis of his life.
After working for a time as a bank clerk, Schoenberg took on various odd
musical jobs, conducting a workers’ chorus, orchestrating operettas, and writing
sentimental songs. In late 1901, he moved to Berlin to serve as a musical
director for high-minded revues at the Überbrettl cabaret, or, as it was later
called, the Buntes Theater. This organization was the brainchild of Ernst von
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Wolzogen, who hoped to import to Berlin the streetwise sophistication of Paris
cabarets such as the Chat Noir and the Auberge du Clou. In the wake of
financial difficulties, Wolzogen quit his enterprise in 1902, and Schoenberg,
short on work, returned to Vienna the following year. Aspects of the cabaret
reappeared in the 1912 song cycle Pierrot lunaire, where the soloist floats
between speech and song. If Schoenberg later characterized his atonal music
as a gesture of resistance to the popular mainstream, in the early days his
stance was significantly more flexible.
Sharp-witted, widely cultured, easily unimpressed, Schoenberg made himself at
home in the coffeehouses where the leading lights of fin-de-siècle Vienna
gathered—the Café Imperial, the Café Central, the Café Museum. The great
men in Vienna all had their circles of disciples, and Schoenberg quickly
assembled his own. In 1904 he placed a notice in the Neue Musikalische
Presse announcing that he was seeking pupils in composition. Several young
men showed up as a result. One was Anton Webern, a stern young soul who
may have seen the ad because it appeared directly beneath a report on the
desecration of Parsifal in America. (The previous year, Heinrich Conried,
Mahler’s future employer, had staged Parsifal at the Met, breaking the rule that
made Wagner’s sacred opera exclusive to Bayreuth.) Another was Alban Berg,
a gifted but feckless youth who had been working in the civil service.
The early works of Schoenberg always come as a pleasant shock to listeners
expecting a grueling atonal exercise. The music exudes a heady, luxurious
tone, redolent of Klimt’s gilt portraits and other Jugendstil artifacts. Brash
Straussian gestures mix with diaphanous textures that bear a possibly not
coincidental resemblance to Debussy. There are spells of suspended
animation, when the music becomes fixated on a single chord. The chamber
tone poem Transfigured Night, written in 1899, ends with twelve bars of
glistening D major, the fundamental note never budging in the bass. Gurre-
Lieder, a huge Wagnerian cantata for vocal soloists, multiple choruses, and
super-sized orchestra, begins with a great steam bath of E-flat major, probably
in imitation of the opening to Wagner’s Ring. Yet all is not well in Romantic
paradise. Unexplained dissonances rise to the surface; chromatic lines intersect
in a contrapuntal tangle; chords of longing fail to resolve.
The young Schoenberg encountered opposition, but he also received
encouragement from the highest musical circles. The Mahlers regularly invited
him to their apartment near the Schwarzenbergplatz, where, according to Alma,
he would incite heated arguments by offering up “paradox of the most violent
description.” Afterward, Gustav would say to Alma, “Take good care you never
invite that conceited puppy to the house again.” Before long, another invitation
would arrive.
Mahler found Schoenberg’s music mesmerizing and maddening in equal
measure. “Why am I still writing symphonies,” he once exclaimed, “if that is
supposed to be the music of the future!” After a rehearsal of Schoenberg’s First
Chamber Symphony, Mahler asked the musicians to play a C-major triad.
“Thank you,” he said, and walked out. Yet he made a show of applauding
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Schoenberg’s most controversial works, knowing how destructive the critics and
claques of Vienna could be.
Strauss, too, found Schoenberg fascinating—“very talented,” he said, even if
the music was “overloaded.” The two composers met during Schoenberg’s first
stint in Berlin—Wolzogen, the director of the Buntes Theater, had collaborated
with Strauss on his second opera, the anti-philistine comedy Feuersnot—and
Strauss helped his younger colleague locate other sources of income. When
Schoenberg later founded the Society for Creative Musicians in Vienna, Strauss
accepted an honorary membership, and expressed the hope that the new
organization would “blessedly light up many minds darkened by decades of
malice and stupidity.”
Schoenberg withheld from Strauss the impertinence that he showed to Mahler.
“I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, honored master,” the future
revolutionary wrote obsequiously in 1903, “once again for all the help you have
given me at a sacrifice to yourself in the most sincere manner. I will not forget
this for the whole of my life and will always be thankful to you for it.” As late as
1912, Schoenberg still felt nervous and schoolboyish in Strauss’s presence: “He
was very friendly. But I behaved very awkwardly … I stammered and surely left
the impression of a servile devotion on Strauss.” Schoenberg told himself that
he should have been more of a “Selfian”—as proudly self-determined as
Strauss himself.
In May 1906, the Schoenberg contingent had gone to see Salome in Graz.
Beforehand, Schoenberg painstakingly studied the vocal score, which Mahler
had given to him. It stood on his music stand, open to the first page. “Perhaps in
twenty years’ time someone will be able to explain these harmonic progressions
theoretically,” Schoenberg told his students. Aspects of Salome’s fractured
tonality show up in the First Chamber Symphony, which Schoenberg wrote that
summer. Yet this new piece was very different in tone and style from Strauss’s
opera. Its strenuous working out of brief motivic figures recalled Viennese
practice in the Classical period from Haydn to Beethoven. In a deliberate
rejection of fin-de-siècle grandiosity, it was scored for a mini-orchestra of fifteen
instruments, its sonorities rough rather than lush. Schoenberg was throwing off
excess baggage, perhaps in anticipation of lean years to come. The process of
condensation led to Pierrot lunaire, in which the soloist is accompanied by an
agile band of two winds, two strings, and a piano.
Just as Debussy imagined new sounds while perusing images in Verlaine and
Mallarmé, Schoenberg let poetry guide him. He relished the erotic visions of
Richard Dehmel, who furnished the story of Transfigured Night. He also
investigated, at Strauss’s suggestion, the plays of Maeterlinck; and in 1902 and
1903, he fashioned a large-scale orchestral tone poem on the subject of
Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, purportedly unaware that Debussy had just
made a setting of the same text. But Schoenberg’s most crucial literary
encounter was with the poetry of Stefan George, then the leading Symbolist
among German writers.
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George stood apart from his compatriots on account of his ardent Francophilia;
he had gone to Paris in 1889, attended Mallarmé’s “Tuesdays” (the poet
dubbed him “one of us”), and translated the major French poets into German.
He might have met Debussy, though there is no evidence that he did. So
determined was he to honor his French masters that he dropped capital letters
from German nouns. A self-styled artist-prophet in the fin-de-siècle mode,
George surrounded himself with a bevy of acolytes, among whom could always
be found several beautiful adolescent boys. George’s circle inspired Mann’s
satire “At the Prophet’s”; minus the homosexual element, it might also have
served as a model for Schoenberg, who treated his students as disciples and
seldom appeared in public without them. More important, George showed
Schoenberg a way out of the easygoing pleasures of Viennese aesthetics. The
sheer density of the poet’s imagery did not permit easy access, although
sensual secrets resided in the labyrinth.
Schoenberg’s voyage to the other side began on December 17, 1907, when he
set a poem from George’s collection Year of the Soul, much of which is
concerned with an intense scene of farewell. It begins: “I must not in thanks sink
down before you / You are the spiritual plain from which we rose.” The music
hangs by only the thinnest thread to the old harmonic order. It purports to be in
B minor, yet the home chord appears only three times in thirty measures, once
beneath the word “agonizing.” Otherwise, it is made up of a ghostly flow of
unrooted triads, ambiguous transitional chords, stark dissonances, and
crystalline monodic lines, approximating the picture of an “ice-cold, deep-
sleeping stream” with which the poem concludes. The date of composition is
telling: eight days earlier, Schoenberg had bid farewell to Mahler at the
Westbahnhof in Vienna. If, as seems possible, the fact of Mahler’s departure
impelled the choice of text, then it carries a double message: the young
composer has been abandoned by a father figure, yet he is also liberated, free
to pursue a different love.
The next leg of the journey took place in the midst of personal crisis.
Schoenberg had admitted into his circle an unstable character named Richard
Gerstl, a gifted painter of brutal Expressionist tendencies. Under Gerstl’s
direction, Schoenberg had taken up painting and found that he had a knack for
it: his canvas The Red Gaze, in which a gaunt face stares out with bloodshot
eyes, has come to be recognized as a minor masterpiece of its time and place.
In May 1908 Schoenberg discovered that Gerstl was having an affair with his
wife, Mathilde, and that summer he surprised the lovers in a compromising
position. Mathilde ran off with Gerstl, then returned to her husband, whereupon
Gerstl proceeded to stage a suicide that exceeded Weininger’s in flamboyance:
he burned his paintings and hanged himself naked in front of a full-length mirror,
as if he wanted to see his own body rendered in Expressionist style. The suicide
took place on November 4, 1908, on the night of a Schoenberg concert to which
Gerstl had not been invited; evidently, that rejection was the final straw.
Schoenberg himself struggled with thoughts of suicide. “I have only one hope—
that I will not live much longer,” he wrote to his wife at the end of the summer. In
a last will and testament that may have been an unused suicide note, he wrote,
“I have cried, have behaved like someone in despair, have made decisions and
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then rejected them, have had ideas of suicide and almost carried them out,
have plunged from one madness into another—in a word, I am totally broken.”
He warned that he would “soon follow the path, find the resolution, that at long
last might be the highest culmination of all human actions.” But, in an
intriguingly vague turn of phrase, he could not foresee “whether it be my body
that will give way or my soul.”
Suicide was not Schoenberg’s style. Just as Beethoven, in his Heiligenstadt
Testament, resolved to forge ahead into a life of misery, Schoenberg pressed
on. That same summer of 1908 he finished his Second Quartet, in which he
hesitates at a crossroads, contemplating various paths forking in front of him.
The first movement, written the previous year, still uses a fairly conventional
late-Romantic language. The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory
Scherzo, unlike any other music of the time. It contains fragments of the folk
song “Ach, du lieber Augustin”—the same tune that held Freudian significance
for Mahler (or so Freud said). For Schoenberg, the song seems to represent a
bygone world disintegrating; the crucial line is “Alles ist hin” (all is lost). The
movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made
up of fourths separated by a tritone. In them may be discerned traces of the
bifurcated scale that begins Salome. But there is no longer a sense of tonalities
colliding. Instead, the very concept of a chord is dissolving into a matrix of
intervals.
In the final two movements of the Second Quartet a soprano voice joins the
string players to sing two George poems, “Litany” and “Rapture.” The texts
come from a larger cycle that George wrote in memory of a handsome boy
named Maximilian Kronberger, who died of meningitis one day after his
sixteenth birthday, leaving the poet in spasms of grief. Schoenberg seems to
identify not only with the poet’s emotion but also with his urge to manipulate
pain to expressive ends, in the name of self-abnegation and purification.
“Litany” cries out for a quick end to sexual and spiritual agony: “Kill the longing,
close the wound!” “Rapture,” the culmination of George’s “Maximin” cycle,
presents the solution. It begins in a state of profound estrangement, with the
alienation of the individual turning universal:
I feel the wind of another planet.
Growing pale in the darkness are the faces
Of those who lately turned to me as friends.
This Martian breeze is mimicked in soft, sinister streams of notes, recalling the
episode in Salome when Herod hallucinates a chilly wind. Special effects on the
strings (mutes, harmonics, bowing at the bridge) heighten the sense of
otherness, as singing tones become whispers and high cries. Then comes the
transformation:
I dissolve in tones, circling, weaving …
I am but a spark of the holy fire
I am but a roaring of the holy voice.
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The soprano declaims her lines in a cool, stately rhythm. The strings dwell on
sustained chords, most of which can be named according to the old harmonic
system, although they have been torn from the organic connections of tonality
and move like a procession of ghosts. At the climactic moment, under the word
“holy,” the composer’s motto chord, the dissonant combination of a fourth and a
tritone, sounds with unyielding force. Even so, Schoenberg is not ready to go
over the brink. At the close the motto chord gives way to pure F-sharp major,
which, in light of what has gone before, sounds bizarre and surreal. The work is
dedicated to “my wife.”
Schoenberg stayed in his Stefan George trance through the fall of 1908, when
he completed a song cycle on the poet’s Book of Hanging Gardens. The
otherworldly serenity persists, together with vestiges of tonality. Then something
snapped, and Schoenberg let out his pent-up rage. In 1909, as Mahler was
sinking into the long goodbye of his Ninth Symphony and Strauss was floating
away into the eighteenth-century dreamworld of Rosenkavalier, Schoenberg
entered a creative frenzy, writing the Three Pieces for Piano, the Five Pieces for
Orchestra, and Erwartung, or Expectation, a dramatic scene for soprano and
orchestra. In the last of the Three Piano Pieces, the keyboard turns into
something like a percussion instrument, a battlefield of triple and quadruple
forte. In the first of the orchestral pieces, “Premonitions,” instrumental voices
dissolve into gestures, textures, and colors, many of them derived from Salome:
agitated rapid figures joined to trills, hypnotically circling whole-tone figures,
woodwinds screeching in their uppermost registers, two-note patterns dripping
like blood on marble, a spitting, snarling quintet of flutter-tongued trombones
and tuba. Erwartung, the monologue of a woman stumbling through a moonlit
forest in search of her missing lover, is distended by monster chords of eight,
nine, and ten notes, which saturate the senses and shut down the intellect. In
one especially hair-raising passage, the voice plunges nearly two octaves, from
B to C-sharp, on a cry of “Help!” This comes straight from Wagner’s Parsifal;
Kundry crosses the same huge interval when she confesses that she laughed at
the suffering of Christ.
Schoenberg’s early atonal music is not all sound and fury. Periodically, it
discloses worlds that are like hidden valleys between mountains; a hush
descends, the sun glimmers in fog, shapes hover. In the third of the Five Pieces
for Orchestra—the one titled “Farben,” or “Colors”—a five-note chord is
transposed up and down the scale and passed through a beguiling array of
orchestral timbres. The chord itself is not harsh, but it is elusive, poised
between consonance and dissonance. Such utterly original experiments in
shifting tone colors came to be classified as Klangfarbenmelodie, or tone-color
melody.
The same rapt mood descends over the Six Little Pieces for Piano, Opus 19,
which Schoenberg wrote in early 1911, as Mahler lay dying. The second piece
is nine bars long and contains about a hundred notes. It is built on a hypnotic
iteration of the interval G and B, which chimes softly in place, giving off a clean,
warm sound. Tendrils of sound trail around the dyad, touching at one point or
another on the remaining ten notes of the chromatic scale. But the main notes
stay riveted in place. They are like two eyes, staring ahead, never blinking.
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Scandal
“I feel the heat of rebellion rising in even the slightest souls,” Schoenberg wrote
in a program note in January 1910, “and I suspect that even those who have
believed in me until now will not want to accept the necessity of this
development.”
Nothing in the annals of musical scandal—from the first night of Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring to the release of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.”—rivals the
ruckus that greeted Schoenberg early in his career. In February 1907, his
thornily contrapuntal, though not yet atonal, First String Quartet was heard
against a vigorous ostinato of laughter, catcalls, and whistles. Mahler, leaping to
Schoenberg’s defense, nearly got into a fistfight with one of the troublemakers.
Three days later, the First Chamber Symphony caused “seat-rattling, whistle-
blowing, and ostentatious walk-outs,” according to Schoenberg’s student Egon
Wellesz. When the Second Quartet had its premiere, in December 1908, the
critic Ludwig Karpath couldn’t wait until the following morning to make his
feelings known, and shouted, “Stop it! Enough!” A critic friendlier to Schoenberg
shouted back, “Quiet! Continue to play!”
The resistance to Schoenberg was deep-seated. It came not only from
reactionaries and philistines but also from listeners of considerable musical
knowledge. One early scandal, we are told, was fomented by pupils of Heinrich
Schenker, a giant in the new discipline of musicology. Anti-Semitism played no
significant role, despite some latter-day claims. (Two of Schoenberg’s most
vehement critics, Robert Hirschfeld and Julius Korngold, were Jews, and their
colleague Hans Liebstöckl was a Prague-born German of antinationalist and
proDebussy tendencies.) Even Mahler had trouble accepting the “necessity of
this development,” in Schoenberg’s words. “I have your quartet with me and
study it from time to time,” Mahler wrote to Schoenberg in January 1909. “But it
is difficult for me. I’m so terribly sorry that I cannot follow you better; I look
forward to the day when I shall find myself again (and so find you).” When
Mahler saw the Five Pieces for Orchestra, he commented that he could not
translate the notes on the page into sounds in his head. Nevertheless, he
continued to encourage his “conceited puppy” and, in his last days, was heard
to say, “If I go, he will have nothing left.”
Strauss, for his part, thought that Schoenberg had gone off the deep end. That
reaction must have been especially disappointing, for Schoenberg had written
the Five Pieces in answer to Strauss’s request for some short works for his
Berlin concert series. Schoenberg was so eager to show Strauss what he had
done that he mailed off the Pieces before they were complete, and only ten
days after the fourth of the set was finished. “There is no architecture and no
build-up,” Schoenberg explained in an accompanying letter. “Just a vivid,
uninterrupted succession of colors, rhythms, and moods.” Strauss politely wrote
back that such “daring experiments” would be too much for his audience.
Outwardly, he maintained his support, sending his colleague one hundred
marks in 1911. But his true opinion surfaced three years later, when he made
the mistake of writing to Alma Mahler that Schoenberg “would be better off
shoveling snow than scribbling on music paper.” Alma showed the letter to