Love him or loathe him, he transformed music
By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff | February 12, 2006

''[N]ever was anything as incoherent, shrill, chaotic and ear-splitting produced in music. The most piercing dissonances clash in a really atrocious harmony, and a few puny ideas only increase the disagreeable and deafening effect."

This remark aptly characterizes the reaction of some listeners to the music of Arnold Schoenberg, even today, 55 years after the composer's death. But the particular criticism comes from the pen of the dramatist August von Kotzebue, writing in 1806 about the overture to Beethoven's opera''Fidelio."

Both Beethoven and Schoenberg stirred controversy because of the way they altered the language and extended the expressive range of music. One aim of James Levine's 10-program series of Beethoven/Schoenberg concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra this season and next is to create juxtapositions of their music that are mutually illuminating.

Beethoven, of course, has stood as a cultural icon for more than a century, but that didn't happen overnight. His most challenging works -- the late piano sonatas and string quartets -- did not become established on concert programs until well into the 20th century, and, significantly, after the invention of the phonograph, which made repeated listening possible for music lovers. Throughout musical history, the work of innovative composers has often taken decades to achieve acceptance; it was at least 50 years after the deaths of Mahler and Janacek that their work reached the international mainstream.

Like Beethoven, Schoenberg worked in a constantly changing and evolving musical style that acknowledged tradition while simultaneously lighting out for new territory. This is true of the three different musical styles through which Schoenberg's music evolved. He began in the late-Romantic manner -- music charged with shifting chromatic harmonies -- that was pervasive in his youth. People who enjoy the music of Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss ought to love Schoenberg's ''Verklaerte Nacht" (''Transfigured Night") and the opulent oratorio ''Gurrelieder" just as much, and they usually do, once they get past the fear and loathing inspired by Schoenberg's name.

Schoenberg later pushed those unstable harmonies until they no longer had a tonal basis. He did this in part because in his view it was the next inevitable step in the historical development of music, and he felt he was a man of destiny; he also did it because he needed to in order to express what he was compelled to. These non-tonal works were labeled ''atonal," though he hated the term.

Finally, he developed the 12-tone technique as a means of bringing a new system of order to non-tonal music and stabilizing it. In all three styles, Schoenberg operated at an awe-inspiring level of technical mastery. As his career progressed, his music became more condensed, more violent in its contrasts, and therefore more difficult to follow. Yet he also wrote, ''All I wanted was to be a better sort of Tchaikovsky." Even after he developed the 12-tone system, he wrote there was lots of good music still to be written in C major, and late in life he was still occasionally writing tonal works.

This week's all-Schoenberg concert at the BSO includes examples of each of the composer's major styles: the late Romantic ''Pelleas und Melisande," the non-tonal ''Five Pieces for Orchestra," and the ''Variations for Orchestra," written in his 12-tone technique.

The styles differ, but you can tell that they emanate from the same musical personality -- just as with subsequent composers who wrote using traditional tonality in some pieces and the 12-tone technique in others. Stravinsky is always identifiably Stravinsky, whether we are talking about ''The Rite of Spring," the neoclassical works, or such 12-tone works as the ''Requiem Canticles." The same holds for Aaron Copland, whose early ''Variations" for piano and late 12-tone ''Connotations" come from the same voice. More recently, William Bolcom used both techniques in the same comprehensive work, his setting of William Blake's ''Songs of Innocence and Experience."


Behind the clash
Several nonmusical factors, especially musical and racial politics, exerted strong influences in generating fear and loathing of Schoenberg's music while he was alive. Like Beethoven, Schoenberg had to deal with the notorious conservatism of Vienna's musical public; unlike Beethoven, he faced a particularly virulent strain of anti-Semitism.

He came from outside the reigning Viennese musical establishment, and he had a highly contentious personality. Like Beethoven, he knew how to hold a grudge. On the other hand, Schoenberg seems to have been quite sociable in congenial company; it is hard to reconcile the expressionistic, haunted portraits he painted of himself with the figure who appears in photographs with Charlie Chaplin.

Performance issues also contributed to Schoenberg's scary reputation. He once quipped, ''I don't write modern music, it is just badly played." He had no lack of gifted interpreters committed to his cause: such soloists as the pianist Eduard Steuermann and the violinist Louis Krasner, as well as chamber musicians including the Kolisch Quartet. Some of the solo and chamber music consequently found its public before the larger works did.

Schoenberg's operatic and orchestral works posed greater difficulties to organizations less committed to new work, and they therefore encountered greater resistance. Schoenberg didn't have much use for podium giants whom he called ''talentless cowards" because they failed to promote his music. His letters and papers are full of invective directed at Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, and the BSO's Serge Koussevitzky, and they in turn did not have much use for him and his music. Many recordings of Schoenberg's orchestral music up into the 1960s are not compelling because the performances aren't accurate, let alone expressive and beautiful.

Now, however, several musical generations have passed, and new performers dedicated to Schoenberg's music continue to appear. As the music has been played and recorded more often, and at a higher level of assurance, it has become more accessible, although maybe not yet enough to overcome its reputation.


In his steps
Especially after Schoenberg's death, the 12-tone system became a religion for some of his students and followers. It attracted passionate adherents and equally passionate detractors. (Of his newspaper critics, Schoenberg wrote, ''I have found that a sewer does not stink to annoy me.")

Fortunately for many composers, as for Schoenberg himself, the system was not a religion, but a technique that enabled them to express what they wanted to. Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, Schoenberg's two most famous Viennese pupils, used the technique to compose music that sounds totally different from their teacher's, and from each other's. Later 12-tone composers include such diverse figures as Luigi Dallapiccola, Roger Sessions, George Perle, and Gunther Schuller. You can hear the influence of Schoenberg on such jazz musicians as Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus. Even composers working in entirely different styles admired Schoenberg, and he admired them; he enjoyed playing tennis with George Gershwin.

The fault does not therefore lie in the technique, and it is safe to say that there is plenty of good music still to be written in the 12-tone system. The real issue for any piece of music, as Schoenberg repeatedly emphasized, is not how it is made, but what it has to say.

If Schoenberg hadn't existed, it would have been necessary to invent him, and not because of the 12-tone system, the seeds of which appear in Mozart and even in Bach; if he hadn't done it, someone else would have.

Schoenberg was 18 years younger than Freud, who put names on recognizable emotional conditions no one had described openly before. What makes Schoenberg's music essential is that he precisely delineated recognizable and sometimes disquieting emotional states that music had not recorded before. Some of his work remains disturbing not because it is incoherent, shrill, and ear-splitting but because it unflinchingly faces difficult truths.



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