Arnold Schoenberg

“ Arnold Schönberg (born 1874) has gained a place for himself in Vienna as the foremost spokesman of the ultra-radical school of German music. At the present time he is gradually coming to similar recognition in other countries. His musical manner is so utterly foreign [Pg 343] to anything else we are familiar with that men believed for a long time (and quite excusably) that he was a mere charlatan, one who, failing to gain recognition by legitimate means, had resorted to the methods of the sideshow. ”

“ Schoenberg is an autodidact, the lessons in composition from Alexander von Zemlinsky not affecting his future path-breaking propensities. His mission is to free harmony from all rules. A man doesn't hit on such combinations, especially in his acrid instrumentation, without heroic labour. His knowledge must be enormous, for his scores are as logical as a highly wrought mosaic; that is, logical, if you grant him his premises. He is perverse and he wills his music, but he is a master in delineating certain moods, though the means he employs revolt our ears. ”

“ An unsuspected stream of loquacity had broken its dam somewhere deep within the man, had diluted his fiery blood and softened his pitiless fibre. Schomberg experienced mingled relief and apprehension, as if suddenly an enormous savage cat had begun to wind itself about his legs in inexplicable friendliness. No prudent man under such circumstances would dare to stir. Schomberg didn't stir. Ricardo assumed an easy attitude, with an elbow on the table. Schomberg squared his shoulders afresh. ”

“ They are not "modern music" for all their apparent stylistic kinship to the music of Strawinsky and Scriabine and Ornstein. Nor are they "music of the past." They belong rather more to the sort of music that has no more relation with yesteryear than it has with this or next. They belong to the sort that never has youth and vigor, is old the moment it is produced. Their essential inexpressiveness makes almost virtueless the characteristics which Schoenberg has carried into them from out his fecund period. ”

“ What the morals of a spectre could be, Schomberg had no idea. Something dreadful, no doubt. Compassion certainly had no place in them. As to the ape--well, everybody knew what an ape was. It had no morals. Nothing could be more hopeless.
Outwardly, however, having picked up the cigar which he had laid aside to get the drink, with his thick fingers, one of them ornamented by a gold ring, Schomberg smoked with moody composure. Facing him, Ricardo blinked slowly for a time, then closed his eyes altogether, with the placidity of the domestic cat dozing on the hearth-rug. ”

“ A complete disassociation of ideas, harmonies, rhythmic life, architectonic is demanded. To quote an admirer of the Vienna revolutionist: [Pg 119] "The entire man in you must be made over before you can divine Schoenberg's art." ”

“ But it is in the piano-music that the sonorities are most rudely neglected. At moments they impress one as nothing more than abstractions from the idiosyncrasies and mannerisms of the works of Schoenberg's second period [Pg 241] made in the hope of arriving at definiteness of style and intensity of speech. They smell of the synagogue as much as they do of the laboratory. Beside the Doctor of Music there stands the Talmudic Jew, the man all intellect and no feeling, who subtilizes over musical art as though it were the Law. ”

“ So in the clean-shaven, extremely thin face hanging over the mail-boat's rail Schomberg saw only the face of a possible “account.” The steam-launches of other hotels were also alongside, but he obtained the preference.
“You are Mr. Schomberg, aren't you?” the face asked quite unexpectedly.
“I am at your service,” he answered from below; for business is business, and its forms and formulas must be observed, even if one's manly bosom is tortured by that dull rage which succeeds the fury of baffled passion, like the glow of embers after a fierce blaze. ”

“ The inner ear tells you that the D-minor quartet is really thought, though not altogether played, in that key. As for form, you must not expect it from a man who declares: "I decide my form during composition only through feeling." Every chord is the outcome of an emotion, the emotion aroused by the poem or idea which gives birth to the composition. Such antique things as the cyclic form or community of themes are not to be expected in Schoenberg's bright lexicon of anarchy. ”

“ Yes, Schoenberg, no less than Henri Matisse, is a torch-bearer in the art race. He is a stone in the architecture of music—and not an accidental decoration.
[12] May I quote a few passages from the “Handbuch”?
“The artist does not do what others find beautiful, but what he finds himself bound to do.”
“If anyone feels dissatisfied with his time, let it not be because that time is no longer the good old time, but because it is not yet the new and better time, the future.”
“Though I refrain from overprizing originality, I cannot help valuing novelty at its full worth. ”

“ In a place that's full of women you needn't look at them unless you like; but if you go into a room where there is only one woman, young or old, pretty or ugly, you have got to face her. And, unless you are after her, then--the governor is right enough--she's in the way."
"Why notice them?" muttered Schomberg. "What can they do?"
"Make a noise, if nothing else," opined Mr. Ricardo curtly, with the distaste of a man whose path is a path of silence; for indeed, nothing is more odious than a noise when one is engaged in a weighty and absorbing card game. ”

“ When Schomberg had been made to understand that Mr. Jones's henchman was ready to discuss, in his own words, "this boat of yours, with courses and distances," and such concrete matters of no good augury to that villainous Swede, he recovered his soldierly bearing, squared his shoulders, and asked in his military manner:
"You wish, then, to proceed with the business?"
Ricardo nodded. He had a great mind to, he said. A gentleman had to be humoured as much as possible; but he must be managed, too, on occasions, for his own good. ”

“ Now the Boston Symphony Orchestra has only recently deemed it fitting to play the five orchestral pieces, and I believe the piano pieces received their first public performance in New York at one of the concerts given by Leo Ornstein, although several pianists, notably Charles Henry Cooper and Mrs. Arensberg, had played them in private.
In 1911 Schoenberg issued his quite extraordinary “Handbuch der Harmonielehre,” which is one of the best evidences that, even though the composer dies in the war, others will follow to carry on the torch from the point where he dropped it. ”

“ Since then Strawinsky, who, to my [37] mind, is the most brilliant of the new composers, has written three ballets, The Firebird, Petrouchka, and The Sacrifice to the Spring, and an opera, The Nightingale. Not a note, so far as I am aware, of these most interesting scores has been heard in New York, although Paris and London are thoroughly familiar with them. Schoenberg is as yet barely a ghoulish name in this country, to be whispered shudderingly until some daring soul makes the Austrian composer a conventional thing of the past. ”

“ Wandering about his premises in profound solitude, Schomberg recoiled at the door of the billiard-room, as if he had seen a snake in his path. All alone with the billiards, the bare little tables, and a lot of untenanted chairs, Mr. Secretary Ricardo sat near the wall, performing with lightning rapidity something that looked like tricks with his own personal pack of cards, which he always carried about in his pocket. Schomberg would have backed out quietly if Ricardo had not turned his head. Having been seen, the hotel-keeper elected to walk in as the lesser risk of the two. ”

“ The blight on the entire new generation of composers would seem to point to some such common cause. There is, no doubt, a curious coincidence in the fact that in each of the four chief German musicians of the recent period there should be manifest in some degree a failure of artistic instinct. The coarsening of the craftsmanship, the spiritual bankruptcy, of the later Strauss, the grotesque pedantry of Reger, the intellectualism with which the art of Schoenberg has always been tainted, and by which it has been corrupted of late, the banality of Mahler, dovetail suspiciously. ”

“ Schomberg looked down at him dumbly. For a few seconds neither of them stirred; then Ricardo lowered his glance, and, opening his fingers, let the whole pack fall on the table. Schomberg sat down. He sat down because of the faintness in his legs, and for no other reason. His mouth was dry. Having sat down, he felt that he must speak. He squared his shoulders in parade style.
"You are pretty good at that sort of thing," he said.
"Practice makes perfect," replied the secretary.
His precarious amiability made it impossible for Schomberg to get away. ”

“ The musical ideas of those of the compositions that are finely realized recall the ruggedness [Pg 247] and hardiness and starkness of things that persist in the Finnish winter. The rhythms seem to approach the wild, unnumbered rhythms of the forest and the wind and the nickering sunlight. Music has forever been a movement "up to nature," and Schoenberg's motto is but the precision of a motive that has governed all composers. But Sibelius has written music that seems to come as the very answer to the call, and to be the North indeed. ”

“ If Schönberg succeeds in gaining a permanent place in music with his 'third manner,' it is certain that all our musical æsthetics hitherto must be reconstructed.
In closing our cursory review, we may admit that German music can afford to shed—may, indeed, be compelled in its own interest to shed—many of the mental characteristics and the technical processes that have made it what it is. There is an end to all things; and there comes a time in the history of an art when it is the part of wisdom to recognize that, as Nietzsche says, only where there are graves are there resurrections. ”

“ The drive had commenced. Count Schönstein began to tremble; his heart went faster and faster, as his excited brain peopled all the dim vistas of the trees with living forms. He could scarcely breathe with absolute fear. Again and again he looked at his triggers, and the hammers, and the little spikes of brass which he hoped would strike death into the ribs of some splendid buck. He began to assure himself that he could not tell a buck from a doe if the animal ran quickly; that he must shoot at once, and trust to Providence keeping the tender feminine members of the herd out of the way. ”

“ This evening, as we were sitting in my father's house, Christopher brought us, damp from the press, a copy of Dr. Luther's Appeal to His Imperial Majesty, and to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, on the Reformation of Christendom. Presenting it to our grandmother, he said,—
"Here, madam, is a weapon worthy of the bravest days of the Schönbergs, mighty to the pulling down of strongholds."
"Ah," sighed our mother, "always wars and fightings! It is a pity the good work cannot be done more quietly." ”

“ Besides, any man who did not resemble Schomberg appeared for that very reason attractive. She was afraid of the hotel-keeper, who, in the daytime, taking advantage of the fact that she lived in the hotel itself, and not in the Pavilion with the other "artists" prowled round her, mute, hungry, portentous behind his great beard, or else assailed her in quiet corners and empty passages with deep, mysterious murmurs from behind, which, not withstanding their clear import, sounded horribly insane somehow. ”

“ I'll lose life rather than win him as my friend." Incensed at her bitter words, Ludwig seizes the princess by the hair and hurls her into the foaming sea. But loving Hartmut springs after her, rescues her and places her with tender care in his boat. At the landing Queen Gerlinde and her daughter Ortrun with their attendants hasten to welcome the Norman heroes and fair Gudrun, who accepts Ortrun's kiss, but refuses that of the old queen, knowing well that the latter is the source of all her misfortunes, and having a presentiment of the greater evils that threatened her. ”

“ He flashed a grin at Schomberg in passing, and a snarling:
“Ah! H'm!”
“Well, what more dangerous do you want?” argued Schomberg. “He's in no way a fighting man, I believe,” he added negligently.
“And you say he has been living alone there?”
“Like the man in the moon,” answered Schomberg readily. “There's no one that cares a rap what becomes of him. He has been lying low, you understand, after bagging all that plunder.”
“Plunder, eh? Why didn't he go home with it?” inquired Ricardo.
The henchman of plain Mr. Jones was beginning to think that this was something worth looking into. ”

“ And amid all this light and sound, amid the music and the sizzling, and the clatter of plates and glass, and the reverberation of the mirrors, and the whirring of the ventilators, and the sheen of gold, and the harsh glitter of white, and the dull hum of hundreds of strenuous conversations, and the hoarse cries of the pale demons at the fire, and the haste, and the crowdedness, and the people waiting for your table—you eat. You practise the fine art of dining. ”

“ The despised Swede became for Schomberg the deepest, the most dangerous, the most hateful of scoundrels. He could not believe that the creature he had coveted with so much force and with so little effect, was in reality tender, docile to her impulse, and had almost offered herself to Heyst without a sense of guilt, in a desire of safety, and from a profound need of placing her trust where her woman's instinct guided her ignorance. Nothing would serve Schomberg but that she must have been circumvented by some occult exercise of force or craft, by the laying of some subtle trap. ”