Arnold Schoenberg: The Hanging Gardens

Composer(s)

Arnold Schoenberg: His father Samuel (1838–89) was born in Szécsény, his mother (née Nachod, 1848–1921) in Prague. They came to Vienna from Pressburg (Bratislava). Schoenberg accordingly inherited Hungarian nationality, which was converted to Czech on the formation of the state of Czechoslovakia in 1918. He became an American citizen in 1941. The family was Jewish, and the three children, Arnold, Ottilie and Heinrich, were brought up in the orthodox faith. Neither parent was particularly musical; Schoenberg remembered his uncle Fritz Nachod, who wrote poetry and taught him French, as the main cultural influence of his childhood. But his sister and brother showed musical talent, and the latter, like their cousin Hans Nachod, became a professional singer. Schoenberg’s musical education began when he was eight with violin lessons, and he very soon began composing by the light of nature, imitating the violin duets by such composers as Pleyel and Viotti that he was given to learn, and arranging anything that came his way – operatic melodies or military band music – for the same combination. Somewhat later, having met a schoolfellow who played the viola, he was able to spread his wings to the point of writing trios for two violins and viola.

The family was not well off. In the year after the death of his father, who had kept a shoe shop, Schoenberg was obliged to leave school and take employment as a clerk in a small private bank, where he remained for about five years. Meanwhile he pursued music, literature and philosophy in the evenings, his interest fired by two friends of his own age, David Josef Bach and Oskar Adler. According to his own account Bach taught him the courage to keep his artistic ideals high. Adler was in effect his first music teacher. He was a good violinist, and Schoenberg taught himself the cello, at first using a large viola adapted with zither strings, and then a proper cello which he began by playing with violin fingering. Together they formed an amateur ensemble which permitted Schoenberg to explore the Classical chamber music repertory from the inside and to compose quartets. Adler helped him to educate his ear through playing, and taught him some elementary harmony. For the musical forms he turned to articles in a popular encyclopedia.

Schoenberg and his friends heard very little music except what they could play themselves. Concerts were beyond their means, though they would sometimes stand outside café enclosures to eavesdrop on the band. While he was still working in the bank Schoenberg joined an amateur orchestra, really no more than a handful of string players, conducted by Alexander von Zemlinsky, and the two soon became firm friends. Zemlinsky, the elder by three years, had attended the Vienna Conservatory, where he had distinguished himself. His compositions had attracted Brahms’s notice. He was therefore in a position to help Schoenberg with the formal instruction that he had so far missed. Although Schoenberg received encouragement from Josef Labor, to whom he submitted a movement from a string quartet in C in about 1894, and from Richard Heuberger, Zemlinsky was the only regular teacher he ever had. The importance of Zemlinsky’s influence is hard to assess. In later life Schoenberg ascribed to him most of his knowledge of the problems and techniques of composing, whereas Zemlinsky merely said that they had shown each other their works. It is difficult to believe that Schoenberg ever needed to be prompted twice about a general principle of composition, but he certainly respected Zemlinsky’s advice, and the pattern of their early relationship persisted. At a time when misunderstanding had taught him to hold himself aloof, he still treated Zemlinsky as an equal both as man and musician.

In the autumn of 1897 Schoenberg wrote a string quartet in D major, making various changes in the course of composition in response to Zemlinsky’s criticisms. When it was done both felt that it marked a new stage in his work, and Zemlinsky, who was on the committee of the Wiener Tonkünstlerverein, proposed it for performance. It was accepted, played at a concert for members only the following March, and well enough received to be repeated in the next season. It was many years before a new work of Schoenberg’s was to meet with comparable success. The Verein turned down his string sextet Verklärte Nacht in 1899, and there were protests when songs from opp.1–3 were sung in public in December 1900. From that time on, in his own words, the scandal never stopped. In these early works he had already taken the first steps in the development of chromaticism that was to lead him to abandon triadic harmony and tonality itself by 1908, and each stage in his progress aroused fresh hostility. For the moment, however, little was heard of him. He kept the wolf from the door by conducting workers’ choral societies associated with the Social Democratic Party and orchestrating operettas, and managed between March 1900 and April 1901 to compose the vast Gurre-Lieder.

In October 1901 Schoenberg married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde (1877–1923). There were two children of the marriage: Gertrud (1902–47), who married Schoenberg’s pupil Felix Greissle in 1921 and emigrated to the USA in 1938, and Georg (1906–74). In December the young couple moved to Berlin, where Schoenberg had got a job on the musical side of Überbrettl, a kind of cabaret that formed part of Ernst von Wolzogen’s Buntes Theater. The idea behind Überbrettl was to use the popular mode to serious ends. Various well-known men of letters, such as Wedekind, Morgenstern and Dehmel, were interested in it. In the summer Schoenberg had tried his hand at setting verses of the Überbrettl type, and at least one song, Nachtwandler, was subsequently performed in Berlin, though only once. Schoenberg’s employment there lasted only until the following summer, after which he was obliged to interrupt the orchestration of the Gurre-Lieder in order to score operettas. He was saved from further drudgery of this kind by Richard Strauss, to whom he had shown parts of the Gurre-Lieder and his new symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande. Strauss was impressed, and used his influence to obtain for him the Liszt Stipendium and a post as composition teacher at the Stern Conservatory. So he stayed on in Berlin for another year and returned to Vienna in July 1903 with the completed score of Pelleas.

That autumn various musical classes were organized in rooms made available at a girls’ school founded by Dr Eugenie Schwarzwald. Schoenberg taught harmony and counterpoint there for a single season, and Zemlinsky, in whose house he was living at the time, taught form and orchestration. When Schoenberg gave up his class some of its members continued to study composition and theory with him privately, among them a number of students of music history under Mahler’s friend Guido Adler at the University of Vienna. In the autumn of 1904 this nucleus was joined by two new recruits, Webern (an Adler pupil) and Berg, who were to fulfil their promise as composers through acceptance and individual reinterpretation of the successive steps in their master’s development, and bring him the support of their lifelong personal and artistic loyalty.

If private teaching was scarcely lucrative for Schoenberg – he taught Berg free for the first year because his family was not in a position to pay fees – composition was still less so. The Viennese public was conservative in its tastes and reluctant to support new work in any of the arts. Special societies attempted to remedy this situation. To one of them, the Ansorge Verein, Schoenberg owed various early performances, starting with some of his songs early in 1904. At this time he and Zemlinsky were already planning a society of their own, which they launched successfully under the title Vereinigung Schaffender Tonkünstler. For their honorary president they managed to secure Mahler, whose brother-in-law Arnold Rosé had invited him to rehearsals of Verklärte Nacht the previous year when Rosé was preparing the quartet that he led for a performance of it. Mahler was deeply impressed and became a staunch supporter of Schoenberg, even though he did not always see eye to eye with him over artistic matters. The new society survived only for the season 1904–5 but succeeded in putting on sizable works by Mahler, Strauss, Zemlinsky and others, and in January the first performance of Pelleas und Melisande, conducted by the composer. The orchestra was ill at ease and the reception cool.

The pattern of Schoenberg’s life for the next few years was now set. A heavy teaching programme did not save him and his family from material hardship; as late as 1910 he was obliged to borrow from Mahler to pay the rent, and the following year Berg launched an appeal on his behalf, though without his knowledge. The style of his music, which he composed largely in the slacker summer months, became increasingly dissonant; each new work raised a storm. The Rosé quartet gave the first performances of the first quartet and Kammersymphonie early in 1907. Mahler stood up for both works in public, and although he privately confessed that he could not fully understand Schoenberg’s development he never lost faith in him. His removal from Vienna that spring deprived Schoenberg of a valuable ally, though in the four years that remained to him his concern for Schoenberg’s well-being and interest in his work never faltered. Uproar predictably greeted Rosé’s first performance of the Second Quartet in December 1908, and when the first freely dissonant works, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten and the op.11 piano pieces, were presented in January 1910 they met with almost universal incomprehension.

These were years of crisis not only for Schoenberg’s musical style but in his domestic life. He had made the acquaintance of the Viennese painters Oskar Kokoschka and Richard Gerstl, and in 1908 took up painting seriously. Gerstl, who had become a family friend, gave lessons to both him and his wife. During that summer he discovered that she was having an affair with Gerstl, with whom she then went to live. Later she was persuaded to return for the sake of the children; in November Gerstl committed suicide.

In October 1910 Schoenberg mounted a one-man exhibition. The following January he received a letter from the expressionist painter Kandinsky, whose sympathy for his work extended beyond his painting to his music and ideas. This initiated a lasting friendship. Schoenberg exhibited with the group Der Blaue Reiter founded by Kandinsky, and contributed an essay and a facsimile of Herzgewächse to the first and only number of the periodical that bore its name. He showed pictures elsewhere, but, although he continued to paint and draw occasionally in later years, visual means of expression quickly lost the importance that they had briefly held for him.

For some years Schoenberg had kept up a fairly steady output of music, culminating in the extraordinary works of 1909: the op.11 piano pieces, the Fünf Orchesterstücke op.16 and Erwartung. But now the pace slackened. His spare time in the years 1910–11 was largely devoted to writing the Harmonielehre and completing the long-delayed orchestration of the Gurre-Lieder. In 1910 he offered his services to the Kaiserliche-Königliche Akademie für Musik und Darstellende Kunst as an external lecturer in theory and composition. His application was successful, but his hopes that this might lead to a professorship were thwarted. A question was asked in parliament, and he was subjected to virulent attacks on racial grounds. By the end of the academic year his circumstances had so far deteriorated that he decided to try his luck once again in Berlin, and moved there with his family in the autumn of 1911.

His arrival was greeted with some extremely unpleasant comment in the press, and his winter lectures at the Stern Conservatory were poorly attended. Nevertheless his fortunes at last began to improve a little. His name at least was now internationally familiar, audiences were beginning to find his earlier music more accessible, and his later work was arousing curiosity. Pierrot lunaire, composed in the summer of 1912, was given with considerable success under the composer’s direction in October, and then went on tour to 11 German and Austrian cities. Sir Henry Wood had given the first performance of the op.16 orchestral pieces in London the previous month, and that of the Gurre-Lieder took place in Vienna the following February under Schreker. This was an overwhelming success, but the composer, smarting under years of very different treatment from the Viennese public, refused to acknowledge its applause. Five weeks later it took its revenge by bringing a concert of music by Schoenberg and his associates to a halt. Meanwhile Schoenberg, relieved of immediate financial worries by the generosity of a rich patron, determined to make a secondary career as a conductor. He lacked experience, but Zemlinsky arranged for him to conduct, early in 1912, a concert including Pelleas und Melisande. This set him on the road. By the outbreak of war he had conducted Pelleas, the Gurre-Lieder and the Fünf Orchesterstücke in a number of European cities.