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Schoenberg's early Wagnerisms: Atonality and the redemption of Ahasuerus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 August 2008

Julie Brown
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Extract

When we young Austrian Jewish artists grew up, our self-esteem suffered very much from the pressure of certain circumstances. It was the time when Richard Wagner's work started its victorious career, and the success of his music and poems was followed by an infiltration of his Weltanschauung, of his philosophy. You were no true Wagnerian if you did not believe in his philosophy, in the ideas of Erlösung durch Liebe, salvation by love; you were not a true Wagnerian if you did not believe in Deutschtum, in Teutonism; and you could not be a true Wagnerian without being a follower of his anti-Semitic essay, Das Judentum in der Musik, ‘Judaism in Music’. … You have to understand the effect of such statements on young artists.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 1994 , pp. 51 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 Lecture given on 29 March 1935 to the Jewish Mailamm group who were helping the Hebrew University to build and maintain a music department. In Schoenberg, , Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Black, Leo (Berkeley, 1975), 502–3.Google Scholar

2 Details on the motivic debt can be found in Schoenberg's, ‘National Music’ (1931)Google Scholar, Style and Idea, 174;Google Scholar see also ‘Brahms the Progressive’ (1933Google Scholar, rev. 1947), ibid., 398–441; Breig, Werner, ‘Schönberg and Wagner: Di Krise um 1910’ in Bericht über den 2. Kongreß der Internationalen Schönberg-G’esellschaft. ‘Die Wiener Schule in der Musikgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts’, ed. Stephan, Rudolf and Wiesmann, Sigrid (Vienna, 1986), 42–8;Google Scholar and Weinland, Helmuth, ‘Wagner zwischen Beethoven and Schönberg’, Musik-Konzept, 59 (Munich, 1988), 73ff.Google Scholar

3 Koppen, Erwin, ‘Wagnerism as Concept and Phenomenon’, in Wagner Handbook, ed. Muller, Ulrich and Wapnewski, Peter (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 343.Google Scholar See also Large, David C. and Weber, William, eds., Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca, 1984).Google Scholar

4 Bloom, Harold, A Map of Misreading (Oxford, 1975).Google Scholar On applications of this theory to twentieth-century composition, see Straus, Joseph N., Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Holloway, , ‘Modernism and After in Music’, The Cambridge Review, 110/2305 (1989), 60Google Scholar; Taruskin, ‘Revising Revision’, review of Korsyn, Kevin, ‘Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence’Google Scholar, and Straus, Joseph N., Remaking the Part: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition, inGoogle ScholarJournal of the American Musicological Society, 46/1 (1993), 138.Google Scholar On Wagner's impact this century, see also Botstein, Leon, ‘Wagner and our Century’, in Music at the Turn of the Century: A 19th-Century Music Reader, ed. Kerman, Joseph (Berkeley, 1990), 167–80;Google ScholarWhittall, Arnold, ‘The Birth of Modernism: Wagner's Impact on the History of Music’, in The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner's Life and Music, ed. Millington, Barry (London, 1992), 393–6Google Scholar; Dahlhaus, Carl, ‘Wagner's Place in the History of Music’, in Wagner Handbook, 99–117;Google Scholar and Kerman's, Joseph still thought-provoking, ‘Wagner: Thoughts in Season’, The Hudson Review, 13/3 (1960), 329–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 See Dümling, Albrecht and Girth, Peter, eds., Entartete Musik- Eine kommentierte Rekonstruktion – brrr DüsseldorferAusstellung von 1938 (Berlin, 1988)Google Scholar; Prieberg, Fred K., Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt, 1982).Google Scholar

7 The last of these has recently been brought polemically into focus by Taruskin; see his ‘Revising Revision’, 124–38.Google Scholar

8 Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven, 1992).Google Scholar For other recent perspectives, see Katz, Jacob, The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner's Anti-Semitism (Hanover, 1986)Google Scholar; Borchmeyer, Dieter, ‘The Question of Anti-Semitism’, in Wagner Handbook, 166–85Google Scholar; Millington, Barry, ‘Nuremberg Trial: Is There Anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger?, this journal, 3 (1991), 247–60;Google Scholar and Millington, , ‘Wagner and the Jews’, in The Wagner Compendium, 161–4.Google Scholar On ideology in this century, see Taruskin, Richard, ‘Revising Revision’Google Scholar, and ‘Back to Whom? Neoclassicism as Ideology’, 19th-Century Music, 16 (1993), 286–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 The period to which Dahlhaus refers is from 1889 to the advent of serialism: ‘Wagner's Musical Influence’, in Wagner Handbook, 554.Google Scholar

10 This article is part of an ongoing project on the intellectual and cultural contexts of the Second Viennese School.

11 The programme note is published in Reich, Willi, Schoenberg. A Critical Biography, trans. Black, Leo (London, 1971), 48–9.Google Scholar

12 See Mäckelmann, Michael, Arnold Schönberg und das Judentum: Der Komponist und sein religiöses, nationales und politisches Selbstverständnis nach 1921 (Hamburg, 1984)Google Scholar and Ringer, Alexander, Schoenberg: Composer as Jew (Oxford, 1990).Google Scholar Ringer ignores the Mailamm speech; Mäckelmann, , 269–72Google Scholar, considers it but underplays the Wagner reference, taking the lecture as a demonstration that Schoenberg not only understood complete assimilation as unattainable and therefore futile, but also that assimilation brought with it the danger of Jewish self-hatred. Hartmut Zelinsky, whose anti-Wagnerian polemics are well known, is the notable exception, although his reading differs from mine; see his ‘Arnold Schönberg – der Wagner Gottes: Anmerkung zum Lebensweg eines deutschen Juden aus Wien’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 4 (1986), 7–19.Google Scholar

13 ‘Art and the Moving Picture’ (1940), Style and Idea, 155.Google Scholar

14 ‘Parsifal und Urheberrecht’, Konzert-Taschenbuch für die Saison 1911/12 (Berlin, 1912), 84–90.Google Scholar Translated as ‘Parsifal and Copyright’, Style and Idea, 491–6.Google Scholar

15 The lectures are published in English as Babel and Bible, ed. Johns, C. H. W. (London and New York, 1903);Google Scholar no record of German publication. For a full account of the incident, see Johanning, Klaus, Der Bibel-Babel-Streit Eine forschungsgeschichtliche Studie (Frankfurt, 1988).Google Scholar I am grateful to Sander Gilman for directing me to this incident.

16 See Stuckenschmidt, Hans H., Arnold Schoenbeg: His Life, World and Work, trans. Searle, Humphrey (London, 1976), 18, 20–1.Google Scholar

17 See Glettler, Monika, ‘Minority Culture in a Capital City: The Czechs in Vienna at the Turn of the Century’, in Decadence and Innovation: Austro-Hungarian Life and Art at the Turn; of the Century, ed. Pynsent, Robert B. (London, 1989), especially 49 and 55.Google Scholar

18 See Gilman, Sander L., Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton, 1993), 15.Google Scholar On Schoenberg's family, see Stuckenschmidt, , Arnold Schoenberg, especially 15–45.Google Scholar

19 Interview with George Perle, 1970–1: transcript in the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, Los Angeles, p. 25(minimally edited). Given the dearth of authentic material on Schoenberg's circumstances before 1910, we might admit his testimony here.

20 Interview with Perle, 25–6.

21 See in particular Gilman, Sander L., Jewish Self-Had. Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, 1986).Google Scholar

22 See Stuckenschmidt, , Arnold Schoenberg, 34.Google Scholar

23 Ringer, , Schoenberg: The Composer as Jew, 26, 36, 7 and 178.Google Scholar

24 Luther emerges as a ‘political hero’ because of his achievement of separation from Rome; see Chamberlain's, Houston StewartThe Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Lees, John (London, 1912), II, 366–77.Google ScholarRinger, (The Composer as Jew, 16)Google Scholar reports that ten thousand individuals – Jews and Catholics – became Protestants within two years. For a consideration of the impact of the Lutheran Church on German Jews, see Gutteridge, Richard, Open Thy Mouth for the Dumb! The Leman Evangelical Church and the Jews 1879–1950 (Oxford, 1976).Google Scholar

25 See ‘Schoenberg and the Poetry of Richard Dehmel’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, 9 (1986), 151–2.Google Scholar

26 I have reinstated the word ‘German’ that appears in Schoenberg's original typescript; it is substituted by ‘human’ in the published version. The text in Style and Idea is heavily edited to disguise the limitations of Schoenberg's English at the time of his emigration.

27 Style and Idea, 503.Google Scholar Schoenberg presumably refers to Chamberlain's, Houston StewartFoundations of the Nineteenth Century.Google Scholar Chamberlain had, of course, published several books on Wagner's works, and was later to become the composer's son-in-law.

27 Wagner, Richard, ‘Judaism in Music’, translated in Wagner, 9 (1988), 23.Google Scholar Additional references to this work will appear in the text.

28 Translation based on ‘Appendix to “Judaism in Music”’, Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. Ellis, William Ashton (London, 1894), III, 120–2.Google Scholar

29 Manuscript, Arnold Schoenberg Institute, Los Angeles: this and subsequent quotations are taken from a transcript available at the Institute. I should like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Irene Auerbach with translations of this and many other German documents.

31 Ibid.: ‘Wie jedes andere, kann es mit einer abstrakten Theologie nichts anfangen, sondern braucht fühlbares. Nur die Genies, die Köpfe, die Propheten können diesen Gedanken erfassen der ihnen (wahrscheinlich trotz seines Mangels) noch immer höher scheint, als der polytheistische. Zudem aber ist die Bibel die Geschichte des jüdischen Glaubens und infolgedessen ist in ihr nicht enthalten, wer gegen diesen gekämpft hat und unterlegen ist. Das erste solche Ereignis in diesem Glauben, das gesiegt hat, das christliche, hat seine eigene Geschichte. Die besiegten sind untergegangen. Nochmals also: im Volk fehlte das Bedürfnis nach einem Weiterleben nach dem Tode keinesfalls; nur in seiner Theologie.’

32 Weinfinger, , Sex and Character, authorised translation from the German (London, 1906);Google Scholar see in particular p. 327. In the Introduction to his Harmonielehre, Schoenberg wrote that Weinfinger, along with Maeterlinck and Strindberg, had ‘thought earnestly’ about life's problems: Theory of Harmony, trans. Black, Leo (London, 1978), 2.Google Scholar

33 A majority of Schoenberg's visual works are undated, including this and the next caricature; however, since the bearded one and a ‘Vision’ (satire) – extremely similar to, and apparently contemporary with, the profile – are reproduced in a 1912 Festschrift to Schoenberg, edited by Berg, they clearly date from 1911 at the latest.

34 Gilman, (Jewish Self-Hatred, 29–31)Google Scholar traces this distinction between ‘blindness’ and ‘seeing’ from as early as the twelfth century. Concerning Luther and Lutheranism's appropriation of this myth, see 63–7. For the pathological perspective, see Gilman, , The Jew's Body (London, 1991), 68–72.Google Scholar My observations on Jewish identity and stereotyping owe much to Gilman's work.

35 ‘Affirmations’, statements by Schoenberg, selected from various unspecified interviews, in Schoenberg, ed. Armitage, Merle (Freeport, N.Y., 1937; rpt. 1971), 248.Google Scholar There is no doubt an additional mystical element to this Christian concept of ‘seeing’.

36 ‘Gustav Mahler’, Style and Idea, 471.Google Scholar Schoenberg reworked this essay in 1948, but this statement dates from 1912.

37 Style and Idea, 185–9.Google Scholar

38 See Timms, Edward, Karl Kraus, Apocatic Satirist Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, 1986), 130–5;Google Scholar Timms, 133, also reports that Theodor Herzl reacted to the anti-Semitic sentiment of the 1880s by defiantly growing his beard to accentuate his Jewish solidarity.

39 Vision (Satire), Zaunschirm number 172, p. 276.

40 Sex and Character, 303.Google Scholar

41 Arnold Schoenberg Letters, ed. Stein, Erwin (London, 1964), 90.Google Scholar In a brief, unpublished essay, ‘The Art of the Caricaturist’, Schoenberg focuses on the nose, taking a caricature of himself as the starting point. Eventually he makes comparisons between the art of caricature and the technique of variation. Manuscript, Arnold Schoenberg Institute, Los Angeles.

42 See Timms, , Karl Kraus, 140–6.Google Scholar

43 Theory of Harmony, 408.Google Scholar

44 Gilman discusses a musical representation of this stereotype in Strauss's Salome: see ‘Strauss and the Pervert’, in Reading Opera, ed. Groos, Arthur and Parker, Roger (Princeton, 1988), 306–27.Google Scholar In ‘Nuremberg Trial’ (see n. 8), Barry Millington argues that similar stereotypes inform Wagner's representation of Beckmesser.

45 Schoenberg, , Harmonielehre (Vienna and Leipzig, 1912), 4Google Scholar (my translations). Further references are given in the text, citing Black's translation and then the 1911 page number.

46 On this exchange, see Bailey, Walter B., ‘Composer versus Critic: The Schoenberg-Schmidt Polemic’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, 4 (1980), 118–37, especially 126.Google Scholar In the end the journal, alerted to the author's identity, convinced Schoenberg to publish under his own name. Schoenberg's two essays appear in Bailey's article (in both German and English) along with Schmidt's original article and response. Schoenberg's essays also appear in Style and Idea.

47 Style and Idea, 199.Google Scholar

48 Ibid., 191.

49 Letter to Emil Henzka (managing director of Universal Edition, Vienna), 19 August 1912; quoted in Stuckenschmidt, Arnold Schoenberg, 135.Google Scholar

49 It is significant that a certain inconsistency emerges in his discussion of the whole-tone scale and the augmented triad: on the one hand, he is keen to distance himself from the idea that German usage of the augmented triad derives from ‘exotic scales’, suggesting rather that it originated in the New German School (Liszt); on the other, he seems to accept the ‘exotic’ source's evil influence, as witnessed by the comments above. It may simply be that the ideological threads woven through the subtext occasionally become entangled. For a brief reading of Schoenberg's discourse according to gender tropes, see McClary, Susan, Feminine Endings. Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991), 11–12, 105–9.Google Scholar

51 Schoenberg, , Structural Functions of Harmony, ed. Stein, Leonard (London, 1954), 35.Google Scholar In the Harmonielehre, Schoenberg speaks instead of ‘schwebende’ and ‘aufgehobene Tonalität’: Theory of Harmony, 383–4.Google Scholar

52 129/146: Leo Black translates ‘unendliche Harmonie’ as ‘unending harmony’.

53 Rufer, Josef claims that Schoenberg made this statement in July 1921: The Works of Arnold Schoenberg, trans. Newlin, Dika (London, 1962), 45.Google Scholar JanMaegaard suggests that the correct date is July 1922. See Haimo, Ethan, Schoenberg's Serial Odyssey: The Evolution of his Twelve-Tone Method, 1914–1928 (Oxford, 1990), 1.Google Scholar

54 Schoenberg's rhetoric shifted on revolution vs. evolution. Robert Falck outlines this in a brief history of the expression ‘emancipation of the dissonance’, from Rudolph Louis's Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart (1909)Google Scholar to Schoenberg's first use of it in ‘Opinion or Insight?’ (1926: Style and Idea, 258–64):Google Scholar from seeing this step as a result – what Falck calls a ‘neutral factor’ – to a ‘leap’ (1930); also a ‘basic assumption’ (1930), a ‘theory’ (1946), and even a ‘law’ (1949); see Falck's, ‘Emancipation of the Dissonance’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, 6/1 (1982), 106–11.Google Scholar

55 ‘The Relationship to the Text’, Style and Idea, 141–5;Google Scholar this essay was first published in 1912 in the single issue Blaue Reiter Almanac, edited by Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky.

56 For more on the history of the prose concept, see Dahlhaus, Carl, ‘Musical Prose’ (1964), in Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Puffett, Derrick and Clayton, Alfred (Cambridge, 1987), 105–19Google Scholar; Danuser, Hermann, Musikalische Prosa, Studien zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, 46 (Regensburg, 1975);Google Scholar and Danuser, , ‘Musikalische Prosa’, Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, vol. 2, ed. Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich (Wiesbaden, 1978).Google Scholar

57 ‘Brahms the Progressive’, Style and Idea, 415.Google Scholar For more on this essay, see Dümling, Albrecht, ed., Verteidigung des musikalischen Fortschrittso. Brahms und Schönberg (Hamburg, 1990).Google Scholar

58 Reich, , Schoenberg, 56.Google Scholar This translation is different from that in the published score, an attempt to be more faithful to what Leo Black (Reich's translator) describes as one of Schoenberg's ‘tersest and most poetic pieces’.

59 Adorno, Theodor, ’Zu den Georgeliedern’Google Scholar, afterword to Schoenberg, Arnold, Fünfzehn Gedichte von Stefan George für Singstimme and Klavier (Wiesbaden, 1959), 82.Google Scholar

60 ‘Bach’ (1950), Style and Idea, 396.Google Scholar

61 For a detailed analysis and critique of both songs, see Brown, Julie, ‘Schoenberg's Das Buch der hängenden Gän’en: Analytical, Cultural and Ideological Perspectives’, Ph.D. diss. (University of London, 1993).Google Scholar

62 Manuscript, dated 10 January 1924, Mödling. Arnold Schoenberg Institute, Los Angeles. For an example of similar word-play, see ‘Wechseldominante’ in Theory of Hammy, 429.Google Scholar

63 In a draft lecture on ‘The Jewish Situation’ dating from 1934 Schoenberg refers to: ‘the tragicomedy of the democracy in our people: our aim to [maintain] freedom in spiritual things has caused a new Babylonian captivity’; quoted in Ringer, , The Composer as Jew, 156n.Google Scholar

64 ‘New Music: My Music’, Style and Idea, 104.Google Scholar

65 Ibid., 215.

66 ‘Judaism in Music’, 33.Google Scholar

67 On the composition of Gurrelieder, see Maegaard, Jan, Studien zur Entwicklung des dodekaphonen Satzes bei Arnold Schönberg (Copenhagen, 1972), 31–2;Google Scholar on the various piano arrangements, see Türcke, Berthold, ‘Gurrelieder and Orchestra Pieces, Op. 16, for Two Pianos: A Rediscovery of Reductions by Schoenberg/Webern and Erwin Stein’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, 7 (1983), 239–54.Google Scholar

68 Gilman has argued that such acts of rejection, followed by the creation of new discourses uncontaminated by their exclusion from the predominant one, have often put Jews in the forefront of the avant garde; see Jewish Self-Hatred, 9–10.Google Scholar

69 ‘Mahler’ (1912/1948), Style and Idea, 452.Google Scholar

70 For another perspective on the relationship between Heine and Schoenberg, see Bluma, Goldstein, Reinscribing Moses: Heine, Kafka, Freud, and Schoenberg in a European Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).Google Scholar

71 See, for example, Botstein, , ‘Wagner and Our Century’, 179.Google Scholar

72 ‘National Music (I)’, Style and Idea, 172.Google Scholar