Arnold Schönberg – the Man and the Composer
The Viennese composer Arnold Schönberg was a lifelong non-conformist, both as a person and as an artist. Schönberg exploited tradition but, with his newly coined musical language, he himself was to begin a tradition. His expressive intention was not determined by the attempt to achieve in music 'a greater or lesser degree of beauty' (as it was traditionally defined), but was driven by 'inner necessity'.
Arnold Schönberg was self-taught, and in his youth he was 'exclusively a Brahmsian' until, at the instigation of his friend and mentor Alexander von Zemlinsky, he also began to revere Wagner. 'This is why in my Verklärte Nacht the thematic construction is based on Wagnerian "model and sequence" [...] on the one hand, and on Brahms' technique of developing variation – as I cal] it – on the other.' (Schönberg in My Evolution, 1949) The relationship of Schönberg the 'conservative revolutionary' (his pupil Hanns Eisler's famous remark about his teacher) to 'Brahms, the Progressive' (the title of a lecture that Schönberg gave in 1933) is not, however, confined to the technical aspects of composition. They shared not only a liking for polemicism but also one for the encoding of autobiographical moments in music which, by means of its symbolic language, provided an immediate release valve for individual expression. Until the time of the symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande, completed in 1902, Schönberg was unmistakably a Romantic, whose incipient obduracy could not conceal the pleasure he took in the sound world of his era and who, for instance with his Gurre-Lieder, created a timeless example of late-Romantic composition on the threshold of 'new planets'.
'Every glance can be expanded into a poem, every sign into a novel' – Arnold Schönberg's preface to the Bagatellen, Op. 9, by his pupil Anton Webern, which he paraphrased with concepts of 'gesture' and 'breathing' – also describes the style of his own compositions from the beginning of the stylistic period in which he 'renounced a tonal centre' (My Evolution), starting roughly in 1908 with the Second String Quartet, Op. 10. This new structural conception of music as a counter-proposal to schematicisms and formal repetitions corresponds with the stylistic ideals of expressionism. As Anton Webern said in a lecture in 1932, the intention was 'to pursue a different goal with each work – each piece is something different, something new'. The tendency towards expressive compression in the music can be seen both in the works as complete entities and in the individual elements found within them, ultimately even in individual sequences of notes: Schönberg referred to this as 'composition with tones'. The expressive requirements intensify the individual moments, in consequence of which repetitions and analogies are increasingly avoided. The immediacy of the musical events does not only lead to the dissolution of traditional formal principles, but also calls into question formal unity in the traditional sense. In place of expansive, motivic writing we find a freely associative style that creates a multitude of relationships but keeps them hovering in ambiguity. Even if the musical ideas unfold in extremely condensed form, 'melos' remains a recognizable gesture that is perceptible in Schönberg's music. Alongside the tonal relationships in the score, tone colour and dynamics are treated as equally valid structural parameters.
Schönberg's enduring and – even today – pioneering conceptual processes culminated in the development of a new compositional method, roughly from 1918 – appropriately, in the historical context of a period of revolution and reorganization of the political and social hierarchies in the Vienna of the First Republic. Schönberg himself quite consciously made claims of superiority an behalf of his twelve-tone method (dodecaphony); he had a visionary premonition of the future importance of his creative innovations. In this method there is a reorganization of note relationships and their relationships to each other – vertically as well as horizontally, on the premise of egalitarianism and dehierarchification. The rejection of dependency upon a tonal centre, to which he had already alluded in his free-tonal period ('music-making in colours and forms'), is now placed in a predetermined compositional framework. Within this superficially strictly structured principle of organization, however, the most important musical röle is still assigned to musical ideas of a traditional character. Here, as in earlier musical methods, the first idea of a new composition serves a thematic function. It was not for nothing that Schönberg, in his tables of rows, referred not to 'Originalreihe' (original row) but to the Letter 'T' (as in 'theme'). Schönberg was a man on a mission, and could never adapt himself to the fashionable taste of his era or submit to the demands of the masses. In his essay Composition with Twelve Tones he summarized the inevitability of his musical production as follows: 'Whether one calls oneself conservative or revolutionary, whether one composes in a conventional or progressive manner, whether one tries to imitate old styles or is destined to express new ideas – whether one is a good composer or not – one raust be convinced of the infallibility of one's own fantasy and one must believe in one's own inspiration.'
Therese Muxeneder
© Arnold Schönberg Center
