ARNOLD SCHOENBERG, 1874-1951

Though I'd heard his name and only rarely his music, the first time that I'd heard anything detailed about Schoenberg was years ago on KPFK in a segment that highlighted his immigration to the United States, out to Santa Monica and the Pacific Palisades.  He was praised to the high heavens.  His music certainly does alert you to new contrasts, eruptive maybe even disruptive harmonies, cacophonic chords that cause you to back and cower from them.  I do prefer his string quartets.  His operas are downright fingernails on a chalkboard.  

The piece below in German is titled, Verklarte Nacht, [or "Transfigured Night"] Op. 4, Boulez.  I wonder what is meant by the "Transfigured Night," transfigured from what to what?  From beauty and wonder to trauma?  I wonder.  From imagining a better world to eeking out a living from a bleak landscape?

As to its meaning, we could do no less than to rely on Wikipedia. 

Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4, is a string sextet in one movement composed by Arnold Schoenberg in 1899. Composed in just three weeks, it is considered his earliest important work.[1] It was inspired by Richard Dehmel's poem of the same name, combined with the influence of Schoenberg's strong feelings upon meeting Mathilde von Zemlinsky (the sister of his teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky), whom he would later marry.[2] The movement can be divided into five distinct sections which refer to the five stanzas of Dehmel's poem;[3] however, there are no unified criteria regarding movement separation.[4][5][6]  

I was looking for someone who might help me understand Schoenberg or the mystery surrounding him, given that I am no classic pianist.  But after listening to his music, the one thing that struck me about the harmonies is how contemplative they are.  Then I listened to this interview, where the gentleman noted that John Cage was influenced by Schoenberg, in fact, studied with him.  So I went to YouTube and found John Cage.  Again, not knowing who these guys are, I could only rely on my untrained ear, and what I heard again were the contemplative tones in Schoenberg.  Were they the same?  Were they constructed from the same idea?  I don't know but the tones are there, the same tones in Schoenberg.  What was Schoenberg trying to say about the world, about 20th Century Western Civilization, if he was trying to say anthing about it at all? 

For an answer to that question, I'd have to read or listen to a lecture that compares the two.  

Next, I wanted to listen to another John Cage piece, so I found this analysis of his 4' 33".  It is three movements of silence.  Yep, silence.  The three movements are "tacet" or instructions not to play instruments.  Cage is saying that silence is music.  Or that sparsism is that elegant part of music, performance, or art.  Okay.  He is also saying that non-performance is music.  Okay.  And the music that he's referring to is the ambient sound, that sound on the periphery of the stage or arena, which includes the sound of expectations, the sound of babies crying, sneezes, coughs, yawns, etc.  This is all music.  In its purest sense what Cage is saying is that sound is music.  As a some kind of fundamental statement about sound or music, perhaps all sound is music, but not all sound or all music, in a theoretical sense, for that matter is valuable or of equal value, nor is it performance.  People pay to see a performance.  But isn't 4'33" a performance?  It is.  Someone has to sit at a piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds and play three movements of silence.  I cannot imagine the extensive training and study for that.

Back to Schoenberg, he gets a bad rap perhaps for his harmonics and chromatic melodies.  But I think that criticism against a musician must also have its origins in politics.  

One of the genuinely wicked characteristics of the Left is its insistence upon making everything subservient to politics (in effective terms, the state).

He criticized some sacred cow.  As of yet, I don't know what it is, but this article here makes me think that he may have criticized communism or the Frankfurt School, the hotbed of communism that fused Marxist class struggle to Freudian-based vision of erotic pleasure.  It looks like after writing the opera Moses and Aron that he came to a realization.  Wikipedia explains  

 Moses und Aron has its roots in Schoenberg's earlier agitprop play, Der biblische Weg (The Biblical Way, 1926–27), a response in dramatic form to the growing anti-Jewish movements in the German-speaking world after 1848 and a deeply personal expression of his own "Jewish identity" crisis. The latter began with a face-to-face encounter with anti-Semitic agitation at Mattsee, near Salzburg, during the summer of 1921, when he was forced to leave the resort because he was a Jew, although he had converted to Protestantism in 1898. It was a traumatic experience to which Schoenberg would frequently refer, and of which a first mention appears in a letter addressed to Wassily Kandinsky (April 1923): "I have at last learnt the lesson that has been forced upon me this year, and I shall never forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely even a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but that I am a Jew."[2]

Is there a greater anti-Jewish movement than communism?  My guess is that Schoenberg was critical of communism and fascism and socialism.  It's a case of Schoenberg being critical of anti-semitism which seemed to come from all corners of the world.  America at the time was the least offender, at least in the eyes of Europeans.  And America did have a favorable bias toward Europeans, all one needs to do is look at its post-war immigration policy to see who in it favored.  See this trailer to a recent (2015) rendition of the opera.

Thomas McCarthy explains that  . . . .   In an effort to find some context for Schoenberg, I thought I would post this from Thomas Schmidt.

This came in great contrast to the century that preceded it. The achievements of the Western world in the nineteenth century, which we will date starting with Beethoven's Eroica symphony in 1804 and end in 1908 with Mahler's Eighth Symphony and the rise of Schoenberg's atonal music present a record of achievement and growth that it is stunning today to contemplate. In motion, we have the steamboat in 1807, the railroad in 1825 or 1830, the automobile in 1885, electric traction and independent multiple control in 1887, and the airplane at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Electricity, telephones, fax machines, telegraph wiring and wires, and international connectivity under the ocean all saw first light in this timeframe. Scientific discoveries abounded, with X-rays, the germ theory of disease, and the periodic table of the elements being only three small examples from physics, biology and chemistry. In art music, the Romantic era launched by Beethoven swept Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler and others in its wake; Verdi and Puccini created timeless compositions for the dramatic stage. Politically, regimes infringed on fewer human rights, especially in the area of economics, and slavery, an ancient and worldwide practice, was reduced to an insignificant institution by mostly nonviolent means, excepting Haiti and the United States. For information systems purposes, George Boole created a radically simplified logic that could be decided by simple machines, Charles Babbage designed a machine that could calculate, and Ada Lovelace demonstrated the skill of programming logic machines.