SMALL GREATNESSES or ME AND ARNOLD
I reached adulthood at the same time the invention of the long playing record was opening 20th century music to a wider public. Twelve-tone music and its Inventor and CEO Arnold Schoenberg were on every cultured lip - said lips either puckering for embrace or else curling in dIsdain. With both exhilaration and sense of obligation I began to listen. Tonally-unfriendly music came as a shock to long-anchored major-minor sensibilitIes. “Brahms with wrong notes” excited me and a lot of others to youthful rebellion (Take that, D-Major!).
For the man-in-the street Mozart lover assimilation has been slow. The prospect of “posterity” has been dangled before the unconvinced. (You don’t like this stuff now but wait and listen and you will understand.) For myself I couldn’t and didn’t. This was despite spartan mornings spent with Schoenberg records: the piano pieces of Opus 11 or the Five Orchestra pieces. Cold water on the face, a clear head, a rested sensibility. “Pierrot Lunaire” leaped out at me. I loved It — macabre, funny, wholly original. Otherwise, no soap.
I was not alone, and dissenters have not gone away. Aside from the youthful “old-fashioned” pieces that have rightly entered the repertory I suspect a frightenIng percentage of symphony subscribers would be happy never to hear a note of Schoenberg’s music again. This is a shame because he was an extraordinary musical figure. His maturer pieces are still programmed but almost always accompanied by pleas for understanding, analyses or cheerleading —all of which seem like apologies. I remember a performance of the Five Pieces for Orchestra preceded by a conductor’s explanation that lasted longer than the piece itself. This music is well over 100 years old.
I hid my shame for years as colleagues wiggled with delight at “Moses und Aron,” sang along with “The Book of the Hanging Gardens.” Was I deficient at learning new languages?’ Had I a Luddite’s ear? Was I incapable of responding to anything beyond the pulls and pushes of traditional harmony? I suffered in my emptiness but then I finally figured it out. I didn’t misunderstand Schoenberg’s music I just didn’t like it. Being in the business I was in I received a lot of flack.
Sitting one evening in a friend’s Beverly Hills kitchen I met Leonard Stein.
Stein had been a household name in Los Angeles music circles for decades. He was Schoenberg’s right hand man after the latter had emigrated to Southern California in 1934. Stein was celebrated as a pianist, composer. scholar, teacher, promoter and point man for the avant garden. I was pontificating on the stunted growth of Schoenberg’s post mortem reputation. The reception of great composers was supposed in time to blossom into universality. His had not.
Stein quietly pointed out that the worth of music is not determined by how many people like it, that the handful of listeners who love “Moses und Aron” deserve equal voting rights with the armies of Mozart fans, and that the use of “universal” as the touchstone for immortal music is a fallacy. Suddenly that made sense. The products of electricity have made Schoenberg the ideal “modern composer.“ His reputation is sustained not necessarily by thousands of concert goers shoulder to shoulder in concert after concert but by solitary listeners who prefer their musical affairs intimate.
I listened to the Violin Concerto a few days ago. (Bless you, Hilary Hahn). Powerful stuff. It makes you listen — winding phrases that never lose their balance, feverish surges, sinuous, slippery harmonies. Maybe tough love is what I need but this music makes me queasy, claustrophobic. I have come to revel in the so-called dissonance of others. I love Messiaen’s great tangled blasts of sunlight, or the hollow sonorities of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles. Schoenberg’s world depresses me. I feel the same about the Shostakovich quartets, great music of unbearable sadness.
Maybe I lived too long in Vienna — festive, jovial, tastefully nostalgic Vienna, ground zero for the tradition that still dominates classical music. It is also a place where deviousness is next to godliness. and the faint smell of corruption is inescapable, where relentless and elaborate politeness works to conceal a xenophobia and racism honed to exquisite detail, where evil thoughts find comfortable homes down dark alleys not marked on city street maps. From the mouths of Phd’s you will hear that Roosevelt and Eisenhower were Jews and World War II was a Zionist plot. The Viennese who today call themselves Kriegsopfer — victims of war— greeted Hitler and the Anschluss with semi-hysterical joy.
Music in Vienna is different from other places. Its orchestras and opera houses — even its instruments — retain a style and sound that is gloriously if unmovably other. Vienna makes the term “provincial” look like a compliment. Illustrious guest conductors are allowed to stand in front of the Vienna Philharmonic and wave their arms while it does what it wants, which by the way is quite wonderful. A professor once said to me that the Viennese see as far as Wienerneustadt but that beyond its rooftops lies China. George Szell called Vienna a Scheissgefühltes BonBon. You translate.
Let me end with the Schoenberg Center which was formed in California and later outbid as a home base by the city of Vienna. I received their regular news letter. One decision the Viennese made was that the composer’s name should revert to its original spelling “Schönberg,” acknowledging that he was one of their own. Strangely overlooked was that if Arnold Schoenberg had kept to his real name and home, he and his family would have been gassed and cremated..
Thus I read of the Schoenberg family’s trip from California to visit to the Center’s new headquarters. The family members had long ago embraced their new land and had happily anglicized their name. How strange and wonderful it was to read about the Schoenbergs at the Schönberg Center.
BERNARD HOLLAND