8 - The Hegemony of German Music: Schoenberg's Vienna as the Musical Center of the German-Speaking World

Summary

THE OEUVRE OF ARNOLD SCHOENBERG — whether as composer, painter, writer, teacher, theoretician, or inventor — represents one of the most outstanding artistic achievements of twentieth-century modernism. The founder of the Second Viennese School was born in Vienna in 1874 and died in Los Angeles in 1951. These two key dates of origin and exile are worlds apart not merely geographically but also historically, artistically, and personally. Schoenberg was an autodidact who, in turn, was also a teacher, and both factors were equally important in his artistic makeup. His development as a composer epitomizes a whole century, marked as it was by the fundamental paradigms of musical modernism: a progression away from hidebound tradition toward freedom of expression and, eventually, classicistic modernism. All his life Schoenberg endeavored to avoid any kind of conformity both in an artistic and personal sense. Nevertheless, he drew on past tradition in order to create another with his new musical idiom. He did not aim to achieve a “greater or lesser degree of beauty” in music in the conventional sense but instead was driven by a will to expression that could be described as “necessity.” In his youth the self-taught composer was exclusively a Brahmsianer (follower or admirer of Brahms) before his mentor and friend Alexander von Zemlinsky introduced him to Richard Wagner, for whom he also conceived an immense admiration: “This is why in my Verklärte Nacht the thematic construction is based on Wagnerian ‘model and sequence' above a roving harmony on the one hand, and on Brahms’ technique of developing variation — as I call it — on the other.”