Читать книгу The New Music - Theodor W. Adorno - Страница 11

Ladies and gentlemen,

As this is the final session of the course, I feel it is appropriate for me to begin with a few rather fundamental matters. And this also relates to a specific occasion. My text ‘The Aging of the New Music’, which I have presented a number of times as a lecture,¹ has now been published, and I think that some of you have already seen it. And I have the feeling that this text has been subject to certain misunderstandings. I have heard that a number of young readers saw this essay as a form of apostasy, or a sort of disavowal of the things I have stood for and which I consider fundamental to music as such. First of all, let me just ask you in all modesty, especially the younger ones among you, to read this essay, which is very closely connected to the lectures I have given. I consider it one of the great ills of the current situation in Germany that people are getting out of the habit of grasping ideas of a somewhat complex and nuanced nature as ideas, and that they are all, as I put it, viewed as slogans of the kind found in training camps. [Applause] One has to be in favour of something or against something. And I think that, as long as this mentality persists, something of the totalitarian element survives, even if none of its outward forms have remained. It is absolutely not the case, of course, that I have turned against modern music, tried in this essay to cut off its development or anything similar, and I think that, if you take a close look at the text, you will find that I have even tried to identify those elements precisely in Schoenberg and Webern that virtually necessitated some of the developments in so-called pointillist music,² which is the primary focus. But I do think that an autonomous person should not seek cover in trends or movements but, rather, aim autonomously for an understanding of the matter. And if this leads one to oppose a prevailing trend, I see no great misfortunate in that – one has to admit that such possibilities exist, especially if one knows with certainty that history does not proceed in a straight line. And just as I was unable to see, shall we say, the neoclassical fashion that emerged in the thirties as a form of progress, I am equally doubtful that a music written in the belief that its true raison d’être lies in the creation of relationships based to varying degrees on mathematics or physics, that this can provide its justification. Because I genuinely think that our view of things should be as complex as they themselves are. This means, on the one hand, acting on what I have been trying to convey to you the whole time, namely that the works are force fields, and that there are indeed countless problems in Schoenberg, in Berg, in Webern, that demand to be thought further and pushed further – but that, on the other hand, one should not blind oneself to certain human and intellectual-musical regressions that are apparent to a certain extent in this current musical trend. And I think one can do these things properly only if one goes into the complexity of the phenomenon – but not in the sense of, shall we say, espousing progress at all costs; just as, conversely, one cannot retreat to the supposedly eternal values and use those eternal values to devalue what is created now. I simply mean – and this is the purpose of my critique, as well as the purpose of the lectures I am giving to you now – that the category that is constitutive for all music is that of musical sense, of that which is ‘composed’. I will admit to you that I hinted almost ten years ago, in Philosophy of New Music, at the possibility that even this category of so-called musical sense is not the last thing, and that there is a growing rebellion against it. But I would say that such a rebellion, even as a negation of musical sense, would still need some portion of musical sense; that is, it would have to remain within the artistic realm and not drift into the pre-artistic state of mere cogency, into the pseudo-scientific. It would be pseudo-scientific because, firstly, one can show at every turn that an integral logical design, if it draws very different media into itself, is an illusion; that is, it is not derived from a single principle at all. And, secondly, because what I call the ‘composed’ is given too little attention. And I think our task is rather to speak to the young composers – I am happy to see two of the foremost exponents of these things here today³ – I consider it better and more important that we work through these problems together, and that we genuinely attempt to put our heads together and make progress in these matters rather than tying our selves down according to some rigid slogans and adopting inflexible positions. And that finally takes me to the purpose of this lecture, namely to use the details of Schoenberg’s works to show you the musical sense of those phenomena that hold the danger of drifting towards something purely mechanical, something that can no longer be explained through its living context of meaning.⁴ So that is what I want to tell you myself. To formulate it precisely, the point is not that I am discarding or rejecting some new compositional methods that have crystallized in favour of some ‘absolute’ standard. There is no such thing, and naturally any compositional method that arises from the sense, the musical sense, and is employed for its sake, is legitimate. Rather, what I am arguing against and consider a danger is really just for work on certain, to an extent, even non-artistic methods to replace the representation of the artistic idea or that which is composed. That is, I think that the methods must be a function of the artistic sense, not the other way around. And, most of all, I do not think it is an artistic, a genuinely artistic approach first to come up with methods and then wait to see if the sense will perhaps come along from somewhere. [Applause] This is something that is particularly hard to imagine occurring on a grand scale today. Here too, please do not misunderstand, I wish to be cautious. It is fair to say that, with the methods of the figured bass period, as introduced around 1600, the first works really showed more of a joy in the material than any great sense. So one should not rule out this possibility a priori. If you play through operas by Caccini or Peri⁵ today, you will find a very modest amount of musical sense, to put it mildly. On the other hand, I would say that a few things have happened in the world since then, and that we cannot simply cast aside all notions of a meaningfully constituted work of art organized by means of its own sense and now think that when we turn towards new materials we are doing the work of pioneers, and that these materials will gain sense later; rather, in these three hundred and fifty years of music history, the relationship between the musical sense and the material has become so infinitely close that reverting to the cult of the mere material, in my view, truly involves the danger of regression. This means that the element of a somewhat infantile tinkering is actually replacing mature, self-aware composition. And this, this danger of a regression in music, which had truly reached maturity in a particular sense with Schoenberg, to something that seeks refuge in a system that is alien to it, external to it, that no longer has the courage to obey its own sense absolutely and instead plays with the ability to employ some methods imposed from without – that is really what I am warning of. And if I may be completely honest, I have the feeling that the position I am taking is really not the most backward one, but that I am attempting to caution a little and to put a check on a process of regression, of a loss of spiritual [geistig]⁶ meaning in general, that I think is by no means restricted to music today; I constantly observe it, most of all in the realm of philosophy, but also that of sociology, where there is a current tendency to absolutize so-called fact finding – that is, the enumeration and statistical processing of mere facts – and to denigrate any question about the meaning of these phenomena as mere metaphysics. But there is truly a form of enlightenment that, as we once wrote in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, is in danger of reverting to the language of amphibians.⁷ [Laughter in the auditorium] In other words, if history does not progress in a straight line, then exactly the same applies to these matters. It is certainly possible that methods seem advanced in the sense of rationalization but are actually something narrower, more limited and regressive in their function. I simply wanted to point that out once more, to clarify the positions and, above all, to prevent any of you from thinking that, because I am not following this trend and do not consider it the business of the theoretical thinker to receive everything that is out there in a sympathetic manner but, rather, to advance things through thought – that my attempt to retain this form of independence constitutes a solidarity with some or other restorative tendencies in music. Ladies and gentlemen, I am well aware that everything that is said today to criticize whatever modern music can immediately be misused by greybeards of all varieties to say, ‘Well, Adorno too is saying that modern music is no good any more.’ Now, an independent thought can never be safe from such misuse in any case, but I would say it is also a feature of our times that there is no truth that cannot, within the context we inhabit today, take on a function that perverts it and turns it into its own opposite. And if one is at all serious about the truth – and I presume that all of us who have come together here, or at least most of us, are very serious about the truth – then we cannot let ourselves be terrorized by the fact that some old Bayreuthian or similar fossil [laughter in the auditorium] is rubbing his hands with glee every time I am unimpressed by an integral serialist composition. I am happy to run that risk, and if the Bayreuthian insists on invoking my name then he is free to do so, just as Mr Sedlmayr has occasionally cited me despite my protests;⁸ but that is an occupational hazard, and I would simply ask that I can trust you, as I feel I can expect in the light of our work together, to see things as they are really meant, to be entirely independent from the idea of a training course and, rather, to share some of the concerns that I have, and to genuinely take on something of the interest that I am representing. [Applause]

Well, now I would like to return directly to Schoenberg. I will choose a piece from Gurrelieder that could be considered a ‘hit’ – that is, it is extremely popular and many people are inclined to say how beautiful it is, and I also think it is especially beautiful. But I will show you a few things in this piece that perhaps contradict its outwardly enchanting character somewhat; and, indeed, there is an extremely strong tension in Schoenberg’s youthful works – he would speak later of the ‘subcutaneous’ element⁹ – between the musical surface and the subcutaneous events, that is, what is happening underneath. So I will take the famous song of Waldemar from Gurrelieder, which is on page 37 of the piano reduction: ‘So tanzen die Engel vor Gottes Thron nicht’ [Thus the angels dance not before the throne of God] [plays]. So, this is an eight-bar song, and is completely in D major. And it is a very beautiful melodic idea, as they say. I must say, the more closely I have looked at these eight bars, the more alien they have become to me. As you know, one of the most fundamental elements in Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, and consequently in the entire development of Schoenberg’s music until the twelve-note technique, is the awareness of scale degrees – that is, the awareness of a stepwise motion with strong root progressions. Now, there is essentially none of that here; instead, it always stays, it always hovers around this D. And the tonic has an extremely strange weight here. The tonic seems as if it were seizing this entire phrase – not in the manner of a pedal tone, as things do progress harmonically, but in such a way that the music keeps reverting to the tonic. Take note of it, this peculiar dominance of the tonic, which really goes against everything we would have learnt in Schoenberg’s school. Schoenberg’s freedom from his own doctrine is something I would like to point out to you quite emphatically [plays]. Now the D major returns, and this is very odd, because he could have continued like this [plays] or with something similar. But he eschews that; one might say that he follows this gravity and stays there [plays]. Yet again the tonic [plays]. Now, that leads to something I have already touched on, but which I wanted to tell you more about, namely the fact that the development that drove Schoenberg beyond tonality is connected precisely to an extremely heightened awareness of tonality. And this is an awareness in which the tonic is taken much more seriously, much more emphatically than in all the other neo-German music from the same period. For example, you can find something very similar in a song whose material is actually far more advanced, such as ‘Traumleben’ [Dream life], which I will discuss later,¹⁰ from op. 6 [plays], where the music also locks into the tonic, and in the second period it ends in exactly the same way on the tonic rather than moving away from it. Now, I want to examine this aspect because I think that, precisely in this, in this very strong awareness of the autonomous value of the scale degree beyond its mere functional purpose in Riemann’s sense, the function of dominance – that, paradoxically, it is precisely here that we find the element that subsequently broke through the boundaries of tonality. For if you listen properly to something like the passage from Gurrelieder that I played for you, then the individual chord seems to take on a life of its own in relation to the context in a way that it never really does with the other neo-German composers of the Wagnerian school, with Hugo Wolf, with Reger, with Richard Strauss, not with any of these important composers. The chord, the first degree, becomes a form of absolute here. It becomes an existent [Daseiendes], not merely an element in a state of becoming. And precisely this reinforcement of the individual constitutive degrees in the harmonic writing, this is really the precondition for the emancipation of harmony in later Schoenberg and the way the individual sound takes on this peculiar meaning of its own, which then enables it to step out of the tonal context. So I would say that here too, in this harmonic dimension of Schoenberg, we are dealing with a force field, with two tendencies that cannot simply be brought together. On the one hand, you are dealing with the dynamic, with this highly developed awareness of degrees, which is extremely closely connected to the principle of variative development, of thematic work – that is, with the whole sonata spirit in Schoenberg. On the other hand, you have a certain stubbornness of the individual element, which has its own weight in a way one does not find among the other neo-Germans. And precisely this polarity, the fact that Schoenberg is on the one hand far more dynamic than the other composers – here I mean ‘dynamic’ in the sense of progression, of movement, not ‘dynamic’ in the narrower musical sense of piano and forte, I am sure you will understand me – but, on the other hand, he has a stronger sense of the individual musical element, for the – how shall I put it? – for the disconnected, I would almost say, through this tension towards the extremes. This was really a major factor in the collapse of tonality. You can find this element that I just described to you – and which is by no means easy to pin down but lies only in this strange tendency towards persistence – you can also find this in the mature Schoenberg in a certain sense, in the things I once referred to as ‘blotches’¹¹ – that is, in certain irrationalities, shall we say, in certain individual aspects that set themselves apart from the context, that cannot be entirely absorbed by the overall dynamics, and which stand there as a slightly foreign counterweight to those dynamics. Those of you who truly know Schoenberg’s work know exactly what I mean by these blotches. For example, the tremolo passage in the first of the op. 19 piano pieces, which I am sure you all know, this is an example of that exact phenomenon. And by identifying this, by highlighting this peculiar irrationality of insistence at the individual level, I come to an aspect that strikes me as not insignificant for the fundamental controversy in which we find ourselves here.

Perhaps I can share an experience of my own with you, for I generally want to attempt to reconstruct experiences and somehow give you access to the experiential core of these things. In 1924, at a time when I was already quite familiar with Schoenberg’s work, I had my first encounter with a work by Webern: the op. 5 quartet pieces,¹² which I now love dearly and consider a great masterpiece. At the time, however, I measured these pieces against the op. 19 piano pieces. And I remember exactly that I was reviewing them, and I wrote at the time that these op. 5 quartet pieces by Webern constituted a step backwards from Schoenberg because this particular form of irrationality, of complete freedom, of being irreducible to thematic connections, had already given way to a form of rationalizing process.¹³ Those of you – and I assume that is almost everyone – who know Webern’s op. 5 very well will know that the thematic work there has already been taken extremely far, and that constant variations are brought about by devices such as shifting entries by a quaver, accordingly shifting the accents. He is really composing with basic cells. Perhaps we will have an opportunity to analyse these pieces very closely. They are very interesting, and unmistakably progressive. But I still remember exactly my feeling that, compared to Schoenberg’s op. 19 – which, if I am correctly informed, was actually written slightly after the quartet pieces by Webern – compared to that op. 19, its systematic nature was a step backwards to an extent, as this sphere of the blotch, this sphere of the true freedom of an organically necessary approach based on the gravity of the music, without seeking refuge in thematic cogency, because that was lost in the process. And I would certainly say that this element in Schoenberg strikes me as one of the most important. Mr Boulez spoke in his lecture of the later Schoenberg, of certain academic tendencies in later Schoenberg,¹⁴ and I would say that these elements I am referring to are precisely the non-academic elements in Schoenberg – that is, those whereby he eludes any formula or rigidity – and really the elements, I would say, that count most today. So this means that one must realize the sense of precisely those phenomena that are not driven and justified by the motivic machine, must understand what they are therefore, and try from that point to take up such impulses, this gravity, the ‘sexual life of sounds’, as he called it,¹⁵ even at the cost of one’s own principles. Measured against what Schoenberg taught, with the importance of scale degrees, measured against this, the passage I played to you is undoubtedly a deviation. It is un-Schoenbergian in this sense but infinitely consistent in a higher sense, because here – and this is the artistically decisive aspect – the reversion to the tonic is the idea. I think one can pinpoint the difference between the technically pre-artistic and the technically artistic very concisely, namely as the difference between false and true: whether a composer cannot get beyond the first degree because they have not yet learnt their harmony properly, or whether a theme is conceived in such a way that its character, its particularity, lies in the fact that it specifically tends towards the tonic, as is the case here – and that is really what we find in such a theme in Schoenberg.

But now, ladies and gentlemen, I am known for my dialectical excesses and must therefore do justice to my bad reputation here too [laughter in the auditorium] by pointing out that this static aspect I just showed you cannot, of course, have the last word in such a song. Rather, Schoenberg’s sense of form is so refined that precisely this somewhat overemphasized tonic has implications for the construction, as the music subsequently moves far away from the tonic – not simply in the sense of using fresh degrees or suchlike, for it is necessary to touch on a somewhat distant tonal region in order to compensate for the damage to the overall construction caused by this overbearing dominant. He therefore follows it with a modulation that goes first to B major, then – after touching on D major again – to F sharp major and from there to E flat, and only then back to the initial D major. So you must understand the harmonic development correctly: although the song clings firmly to its D major character, what is required for this character to emerge is the creation of a certain equilibrium through very marked modulations, through deviations. So already here, in this music, there are what one might call harmonic expanses, harmonic complexes, whose totality creates a kind of balance, and tonality here consists not in the starting point or the goal but rather in this balance, which is brought about entirely through these overarching harmonic complexes. You can already see from this how modern, in a deeper, subcutaneous sense, is the treatment of harmony via this principle of balance, however harmless the musical surface might seem. So now, please note – I will play you a little more – how this D major is set up through the equilibrium between the individual harmonically very distant complexes, and how the music also moves rather far away from the static opening, and nothing static returns [plays Gurrelieder] […] strong emphasis on the tonic [plays]. And now on page 40 we have this famous theme,¹⁶ which is then developed over the whole of Gurrelieder somewhat in the manner of a second subject in a symphony, and which I will only touch on now because of the large intervals that are used freely for the first time. It is very interesting that Schoenberg’s large intervals, which have a very complex history, were initially derived purely from the individual melodic idea and only a little later, in the op. 6 songs, justified after the fact, as it were, as an adumbration of complicated harmonic relationships to which they refer in the manner of arabesques, such as the famous minor ninths in ‘Traumleben’ from op. 6. But here they are initially introduced as a purely melodic idea, and Schoenberg, who often said that innovations in one area are usually accompanied by a certain conservatism in other areas, did not make an exception here: he evidently found the compulsion to use these large intervals so foreign and unusual that here, precisely in this most melodically exposed of passages, he chose an especially simple harmonic skeleton for it. Incidentally, I would like to add that Webern told me on various occasions that both he and Schoenberg – and they did, after all, somehow carry out the great innovations together – that they kept fluctuating between doing it and not doing it, that they only did it with fear and trembling, as it were, and were always worried and tried to go back on it, but then took the chance after all because there was no other way; and I would almost say that some of this fear and trembling, of this worry and this fear, entered the music itself, and that, the fact that there was no other way, that is what gives these things their true force. So, the passage I mean is on page 40 [plays]; now he quite simply repeats the phrase [plays], and then it even appears a third time [plays]. Now, in later years he would surely not have written that for a third time. But you can sense something in it of the tension in which these intervals, which grew purely from the melody, appeared there. I also think – and we will return to this – that all of us really grew up with the idea, at least I thought it for a long time, that the explanation for Schoenberg’s development lies substantially in his string quartet writing, and that he was really a string quartet composer first and foremost. I noticed some time ago – and this is seemingly very paradoxical – that, in fact, Schoenberg’s instrumental themes almost all have a particular songlike quality; not songlike in the sense of striking melodies one can sing, but in the sense that they breathe in a way that normally only vocal melodies do. And actually, the more intensively I occupy myself with these things, the stronger my feeling grows that one of the emancipatory impulses one finds in Schoenberg is – how shall I put it? – that of a singing out freely. The singing voice was always subject to a form of constraint through its adaptation to the tonal system in general. And, within the framework of these tonal limits and these circumscribed metric limits, one always experiences singing as if – one can reconstruct this experience, at any rate – as if it were bound, as if it actually wanted to become much freer. And, if I am not mistaken – I am really saying this with a degree of caution, but I feel it very strongly – one of the deepest impulses in Schoenberg, and thus in the emancipation of music as such, is that of unleashing the singing voice, to allow the voice to sing out. And this impulse to sing out, perhaps this was subsequently transferred from there to instrumental music. There seems to be a certain confirmation of this in the fact that the real origins of Schoenberg’s polyphony, which is after all the most decisive element in Schoenberg, lie in vocal rather than instrumental music; that is, Schoenberg’s first great canonic structures, which determined the later integral counterpoint in a certain sense, that they are locating precisely in Gurrelieder, and that Gurrelieder even goes much further in its canonic and imitative elements than the subsequent purely instrumental works, and that he then returned to these canonic arts, which are taken incredibly far here, to almost Franco-Flemish levels, that he only returned to these in the transition to twelve-note composition during the time of Pierrot lunaire. And I feel that such an impulse to sing out was a very substantial factor in this passage.

So, I would now like to draw your attention to another phenomenon in Schoenberg. I think we have spoken a number of times about Valéry’s statement that the quality of a work of art can be measured by its refus – that is, by the things it eschews.¹⁷ One can very easily gain the impression that this power of this refus, this refus is greater in Western European than Central European music – as if Schoenberg’s school had always wanted to have everything and consequently, through this lack of renunciation, this lack of things one denies oneself, took on a somewhat academic character, shall we say. I think that this assumption is not entirely correct, and that, if one were to put together all the possibilities for other music that are contained in Schoenberg and which he simply cast by the wayside, that this would produce a catalogue of impressive proportions. For now I will show you – and this is connected once again to the topic of art nouveau – I will show you only how the possibilities that were elevated to exclusivity by Schreker, that these possibilities and many others are immanent in Schoenberg too, and that he simply chose not to pursue them. In other words, the formal language of impressionism is very much present in Schoenberg too. And I think I can say that with reference to the lecture by Mr Boulez, who asserted a certain opposition between the Schoenberg school and impressionism¹⁸ – whereas Gurrelieder in particular is extremely rich in such very loose elements. I will play you just this one highly characteristic Schrekerlike passage, this is on page 50 [plays], and so forth. That is from King Waldemar’s ‘Midnight Song’.

Now I would like to show you a little something, a very small detail that is connected to the aspect of consistency. That, after all – and I would like to highlight this most emphatically – is the most fundamental principle in Schoenberg, that everything that happens leaves its trace in time, as it were, that it is a music in which nothing is forgotten. And that is the foundation of the peculiar awareness of time at the heart of Schoenberg’s music, something that should really be analysed in detail. If you take other composers who were using variation techniques around 1900, they used, as you all know, what Richard Wagner called ‘psychological variation’.¹⁹ That is, the motifs are reshaped according to their characteristics. But despite this reshaping, which is sometimes very extensive in Strauss – just recall the characteristic notes of Salome’s motif, everything that happens to them, that is really a very far-reaching variation, starting from this [plays Strauss, Salome], he does an incredible amount with this – but despite this variation, the motifs are always strung together, I would say. There is really always something strip-like in all this neo-German music, like a film strip, where small shots, small, minimal pictures of motifs are placed next to each other and then connected; whereas the essential thing in Schoenberg is that the variation intervenes, that the theme, every thematic event, has consequences in the sense that it leaves traces in what follows, but also that what follows must never be the same or simply correspond to what has already been; for in music, as a temporal art, there is really no such thing as mathematical equality, because what comes later, simply by virtue of coming later, has a different function from what precedes it, and one must actually elaborate this other function compositionally. And through this technique of intervening variation, the fact that things are not simply strung together, but that everything that follows is both identical to what precedes it and also not identical to it, which results in the far denser thematic fabric that you know from Schoenberg.

Now, let me just give you one example of the idea of the large interval, which, quite aside from the fact that the motif I played you is one of the main motifs, also has a certain bearing on the construction of the other themes. You will recall that the themes from Gurrelieder I demonstrated to you earlier, that they all moved within a relatively narrow intervallic range, that they had a stepwise, diatonic character or even a chromatic character. But after this major event takes place, this wide-interval theme, the idea of the large interval continues to have an effect, one might say. So there is this exceedingly beautiful song on page 58: ‘Du wunderliche Tove’ [How strange you are, Tove]. This song corresponds to the first song, in a sense, because it is also homophonic, also in a flat key, also in 3/4, and it also shares something of its tone. But now the intervals are much wider. So, in other words, after this emancipation of the melodic line in ‘Nun sag ich dir’s zum ersten Mal’ [Now I shall tell you for the first time] that I played to you earlier, from there on the themes learnt to stand on their own feet, so to speak, so that they can now allow themselves to indulge in far greater intervallic freedom. So please listen to the line here [plays Gurrelieder]. But that is not the only interesting thing about it. Rather, you have something here that is very characteristic of Schoenberg’s approach to metric structures. With its exclamation ‘Du wunderliche Tove’, the first phrase is very short, almost a little abrupt [plays]. Now, the second entry is somewhat similar, and likewise has three bars. But already – and here you have all of this Schoenbergian sensibilité, this incredible sensitivity to anything rigid, mechanical, motionless – after the first phrase he has a long ending [plays], then in the second phrase [plays] he goes on immediately [plays]. In other words, because the space between the second phrase and the beginning of the third is shortened to a crotchet rest, the monotony that might otherwise have ensued because of the two three-bar phrases is already paralysed because the second one immediately shifts to a different metric form, and this is the first instance of a four-bar unit, which one might say fulfils the form. Now listen – please try to listen very closely, these are really the compositional details that matter. So he starts with a three-bar unit. This is followed by a transition, likewise three bars long, and then a second three-bar group in the voice whose note values, with one exception, correspond to the first so that one almost worries, one expects fearfully, that a symmetrical transition will now follow. But instead the music moves on immediately, and the rapidity of this continuation undoes the symmetry after the event, as it were, and the second three-bar unit now becomes the antecedent of another irregular period, shortened to seven bars, whose consequent has four bars. This is of such consequence that the next period follows in very close succession but is now expanded to nine full bars, if I am not mistaken, thus creating a large formal arc, and then there is another instrumental transition. In keeping with the extension of these arcs, however, this is also expanded to five bars. So you see how the proportions here all depend on one another. That is, this tendency to extend the arc, which really comes only from the quicker succession of the third entry after the second, this first brings about a seven-bar unit, but then this impulse to lengthen the phrases continues until we reach nine bars; and, on the other hand, this must also have consequences for the idea of the brief instrumental transition,and accordingly the next transition is likewise extended. Now, take a look at the whole thing; I will play it for you once more so that you understand not only its rhythmic variety – on its own, this variety would not be at all interesting – but so that you understand the sense in the succession of these different proportions in the piece’s periodic structure. And the whole results only from the problem that arises, namely how to develop a rather call-like, appellative phrase into a song whose parts are joined into long lines. The first introduction, incidentally, the first instrumental introduction that begins the song is only two bars long, that is, one bar shorter than the others, so that the metric units grow longer very organically and gradually [plays].

Now, I would like to show you something else in order to demonstrate how Schoenberg actually composes. Look, this theme with the marking ‘very calmly’ on page 59, this is introduced here only as a consequent to the instrumental transition [plays], and so forth. Now, it is a fundamental part of composition to assess the relative weight of the melodic ideas in comparison to one another. This theme, this individual idea, has a very large weight. It is so vivid, so characteristic, that it cannot simply remain intermittent but must emerge as a form of main theme. It is very difficult, or we just have no time, to put these things in very exact musical terms – we could do it if we addressed the question of why this theme has this individual weight. One of the reasons, of course, is that the tonic is reached definitively here and then remains above the dominant, which already gives it a very striking character in harmonic terms. But it is also partly due to the use of intervals. It is this theme [plays]. And this theme now has a very clear character of a consequent, an Abgesang. Schoenberg feels this so strongly that, once the song has developed much further, he closes with a general pause and then brings this theme back as a pure, very clear Abgesang – I am leaving aside the requirements of the text and am speaking purely musically – only because this character of a consequent or closing group to the theme demands that it is introduced at the end, as an ending theme. The theme has the weight of an ending, the weight of something that is coming to an end, and Schoenberg feels this weight. In composition, then, it is generally vital to feel the specific weight of the individual themes, to feel which theme has an ending character, which has a positing, thematic one, which has a continuing one, which has a transitional or contrasting one, and so on. And I want to say time and again that Schoenberg’s true greatness as a composer, it seems to me, lies in the fact that he had an instinct for these elements of musical language as elements of musical sense shared by hardly any other composer. So I will play you the end of the song so that you can see how that appears now, as an Abgesang or a coda, if you like [plays]. As an aside, one might say the following about the formal approach: he simultaneously weaves the reprise of the theme’s first entrance into the Abgesang, but now as a retrograde, in such a way that he presents what was the continuation theme [plays] first, and then, with his unerring sense of form, he uses this seal-like invocation of the very beginning, which eludes all variation, which cannot be varied, as a renewed invocation – but now an ending one, so that it closes with the words ‘Du wunderliche Tove’. So he has this character of a closing group, then moves to the continuation theme, which is in the middle again, logically enough, and then the opening theme forms the end, which creates this incredibly compelling and convincing closing effect. Perhaps you can have another look at it now to see – it’s on page 61 – to understand this formal shaping [plays].

So, that is what I wanted to show you in this song.

Now I will give you a few more details about ‘Lied der Waldtaube’, which is probably very familiar to all of you, and rather than conducting any microscopic examination I will draw your attention to a few technical achievements. First of all, regarding the evolution of new compositional methods in Schoenberg, there is a constant interplay, one might say, between the harmonic and contrapuntal aspects. This means that, on the one hand, the harmonic effects result from contrapuntal collusions and, on the other hand, that the contrapuntal complexity stems from the complex construction of the chords, of which I gave you several examples in the previous sessions. Now, the example I will give you this time is an opposing one, for it shows how the voice leading actually brings about new chords, how the logic of the parts simply has consequences for the formation of new chords. The passage I would like to mention is on page 74. – Yes, that’s very regrettable […].²⁰ So I’ll play it to you in context [plays Gurrelieder, ‘Lied der Waldtaube’]. So you see here how these two groups are approaching each other chromatically […].

[…] Now, this formation of chords in passing, this proves especially in Gurrelieder to be one of the most revolutionary means of harmonic formal crafting, and I think it was fundamental to the emergence of the new harmony. Incidentally, let me also point out one matter in which this forms a good starting point. In the so-called heroic days of new music – and the book on linear counterpoint by Ernst Kurth²¹ is partly to blame for this – people always said that harmony did not really matter in new music, it was merely a result of the counterpoint. I just gave you an example from which you could see – well, one cannot speak of ‘counterpoint’ here, because it is not really a contrapuntal passage – but how the movement of the inner parts leads to certain new and, by the standards of traditional harmonic theory, unusual events. But it would really be entirely wrong to assume, and it was only the superficiality of the cretins who were spouting their nonsense about these things back then, that these matters of counterpoint or voice leading always have a harmonic sense too. Schoenberg never simply ‘went for it’ like many other later composers, especially in the period of free tonality, who really no longer listened to the harmonic aspect; rather, he was always extremely finely attuned to points of harmonic emphasis, as I just showed you. Listen to this progression [plays]. It is like that with all these things. That is to say, this ear for harmonic detail, for the individual harmonic event, which I already mentioned when we looked at the song ‘Erwartung’, this is always so alert in Schoenberg that every product of Schoenberg’s counterpoint simultaneously has a harmonic sense. In other words, and I would like to say this about the problem of counterpoint in general – I hope I can give a course here some time purely on Schoenberg’s counterpoint, I think that would really be very worthwhile [applause] – the most important thing in counterpoint is actually the harmony – that is, the problem of counterpoint is the creation of a harmonic sense, just as everyone knows from learning harmony that the problem of harmonic writing is good voice leading, leading the voices in such a way that they make harmonic sense. And if we think that one of the decisive aspects of Schoenberg’s counterpoint is a certain binding character, a feeling of necessity, then this quality, which I will discuss further in a moment, is largely due to the fact that he establishes a balance between contrapuntal and harmonic forces, that the results of the counterpoint make harmonic sense, and conversely that the harmonic movements make contrapuntal sense. In other words, if the difference between the two dimensions, the vertical and the horizontal, was eliminated by the twelve-note technique, then this principle that everything harmonic must be contrapuntal and everything contrapuntal must be harmonic is already implicit in the procedure. And that is why I showed you this passage here, and will show you another too, especially from these male choruses in the third part of Gurrelieder, and any fool can hear the parallel with the male choruses from the second act of Götterdämmerung. But this has no bearing, none whatsoever, on understanding what is actually happening there. Although one can even discover Hagen’s motif [plays] hinted at, if one enjoys such things, the musical character is utterly and radically changed.

I would like to show you a few passages now, namely the ending and part of a very bold – no, I will play you the choral excerpt. Unfortunately it is quite impossible to demonstrate the extremely polyphonic parts of these choruses on the piano, even to stammer them, and playing the gramophone record until we reached the corresponding point would be a very time-consuming process. So we will have to dispense with that. I will play you the relatively homophonic ending of these male choruses to show you the harmonic events. I will play from 171 [plays]. And then, pay particular attention to the following passage [plays]. And now, pay attention to what happens here too [plays], and so forth. So you can see here how these highly dissonant chords result from the voice leading, paralleling these preceding, far more harmless endings. Here they follow one another, and then [plays] these two elements are folded together. So here you already have the principle of twelve-note composition, where things that are introduced successively at first, in this case the change from the G major chord to the chord that I will incorrectly term a D flat minor chord, although it is in reality something far more complex – that this change ultimately leads to the chords being both thrown together at once.

Now, I had spoken to you just now of the harmonic origin of polyphony, that is, the root of modern harmony, of Schoenberg’s new harmony, in voice leading. But Schoenberg’s harmony has another root. The question of where this Schoenbergian polyphony actually comes from is an extremely peculiar one. Such elements as those I have just shown you are one dimension of that; there are also entirely different ones. And for that you have to go back to Wagner for a moment. As you all know, there is relatively little in the way of truly polyphonic passages, of true polyphony, in Wagner. And it is very strange that, as late as around 1910, if you read a book like Strauss’s treatise on orchestration, Wagner was considered a great exponent of polyphony²² simply because the inner parts in his music are – in the interests of a meaningful rendition, I would almost say – very prominent, but in Wagner things almost always stay within the framework of the four-part chorale. It is really always four-part chorales, with some of the voices partly elaborated, and true polyphony exists only in a small number of passages where he works with thematic combination, superimposing different leitmotifs. There are a few well-known, very interesting passages of this kind in Die Walküre, and naturally the most famous example of all is the threefold thematic combination from the Meistersinger prelude. Now, this aspect of thematic combination plays an oddly significant part as the origin of both Schoenberg’s polyphony and the new Schoenbergian harmony. And I would like to show you how such thematic combinations already appear in Gurrelieder, but also how these thematic combinations are clearly different from the later, mature polyphony. One finds such a combination in ‘Lied der Waldtaube’, where he combines this theme you will recall [plays], which is the same as this [plays] but with a different ending, with the theme that has those large intervals, which has a different rhythm here [plays]. And now there is also a third that is interwoven with these, namely the theme in the voice, but it runs partly – and this is no longer the case in late Schoenberg – in unison with the wide-interval theme, though it does not maintain the unison entirely strictly. So, I will play you this passage [plays]. And here you have the ‘wood pigeon’ harmony again [plays], and so forth. Now, I wanted to tell you something about the problem of the binding and the non-binding. Look here: the counterpoint in this passage has something non-binding, in the sense that none of the combined voices are really set apart from the others [plays], and now they go together [plays]. This would be quite unthinkable in late Schoenberg, of course. That is, in late Schoenberg, either the voices would be identical or move in parallel, or they would be highly contrasting. So this is one of those non-binding aspects connected to this tonal style. How one is supposed to envisage the concept of the contrapuntally binding, what it actually is, that is indeed one of the most difficult questions. Schoenberg himself once said that he only really learnt what counterpoint is when he wrote the Woodwind Quintet.²³ And I am convinced that he was quite serious about that, in a certain sense. For true counterpoint as found in mature Schoenberg does not mean putting several voices together, superimposing them and combining them as seamlessly as possible; true counterpoint means that the relationship between several simultaneous voices is organized in such a way that the one is conditioned by the other, and vice versa, and that there is no arbitrary relationship, no arbitrariness in the relationships between simultaneous voices. And I would say that this aspect, the fact that there can no longer be any chance connections between simultaneous voices, that these simultaneous voices must rather be utterly co-dependent, that this is really the central rule of musical development in late Schoenberg. The greatest area of interest in late Schoenberg is this absolute necessity of counterpoint, but necessity in the sense that the mutually complementary voices together form a unity of sense, and not simply that they are superficially adapted to one another in keeping with some rules or other. I think that we still lack a truly exact concept of new counterpoint to this day, and that the didactic notion of combined simultaneous voices and the genuinely artistic idea of this necessity of interrelated voices, that no distinction is made between the two, and it would be vital to articulate these aspects. And I can only touch on this problem, as indeed, in this course, in such a short course, I can only really touch on problems and direct your attention towards a number of questions; but the real work is for you to do, namely to absorb what I have said and, if it means something to you, to develop it further yourselves. I can only try to give you an idea of how to look at such things in order to understand what is going on within them. But I can by no means claim to give you a complete explanation of these works and all they have to offer, for I can really provide you only with those elements that I believe are necessary to understand them. I think this qualification of the purpose of my undertaking here is a necessary one.

Now, I was asked yesterday – and this follows on from the few references I made to ‘Lied der Waldtaube’ – about the oft-cited connection, I mean compositionally speaking, between Schoenberg and Mahler. ‘Lied der Waldtaube’ is one of the few compositions by Schoenberg that genuinely shows certain Mahlerian influences, if you will, such as some march-like interpolations that are reminiscent of Mahler, or recall this [plays]. Though I should add that, even in such passages in Schoenberg, the connection is not so unambiguous because here, at the end of the seemingly Mahler-like first part of Gurrelieder, one clearly sees the emergence of something that was a model for both Mahler and Schoenberg, namely Titurel’s great funeral music from the third act of Parsifal,²⁴ which, of all Wagner’s music, was probably one of the most consequential pieces for modern music. So if you look at the last two pages of Tove’s song, with the big bell climax, that idea truly came from this late work by Wagner. But I think that connections to Mahler such as those found in these passages are not what matters. If people are intent on hunting down Mahlerian elements in Schoenberg, they will generally have a very hard time of it. There are sometimes turns of musical phrase whose Austrian idiom perhaps has a slight hint of Mahler to them, such as the middle section of the incomparably magnificent song ‘Lockung’ [Enticement] from op. 6. But that is actually uninteresting. I think that the influence of Mahler is rather connected very closely to the factor I was just describing to you, namely the problem of binding counterpoint and a binding compositional approach in general. The element in Mahler that I have in mind is not so much a specific compositional element, more a kind of criterion that applies to much of Mahler’s way of composing: the criterion of clarity. All of Mahler’s orchestration – and this is why it is right to include Mahler in the category of new music, and why he does not really belong to the neo-Germans – the most fundamental principle of Mahler’s orchestration is never that of colouristic intoxication or creating the richest and most opulent sound. Such things certainly appear in Mahler, but only really as by-products. Rather, the principle that guides Mahler’s approach to composition, and especially to orchestration, is to give every musical event the utmost clarity, to ensure through the disposition of tone colours that it emerges unambiguously as the thing it is intended to be. This principle is the complete opposite of Wagner’s, which I have termed the ‘occultation of production’,²⁵ and points very clearly to chamber music, and this approach became more and more pronounced in the course of Mahler’s life. You can find a veritable prototype of this, developed with the utmost mastery, in the Fourth Symphony, where he achieves an indescribable clarity through the orchestration – one could almost call it a clarity of musical drawing in colours at the expense of the sonic totality. And this, the fact that the colour serves to make the construction absolutely clear, where the idea of a lush, rounded overall sound is not the prime concern, the true subordination of colour to the compositional principle: this is what Schoenberg adopted, and not only for his own art of orchestration, which is not always […]

[…] only in a form where clarity has become problematic. This means that, for someone like Bach, this problem of compositional clarity or clarity of instrumental sound did not arise at all in this way, because everything was already clear, so to speak. But now, with these composers, with all the traditional composers including Wagner, clarity was achieved largely through the relatively fixed types of medium, where one could always know and imagine more or less what would happen now and what would follow. And it is only when that is no longer the case, when this crutch is completely absent, that the question of how to clarify musical events poses itself. So, if I may put it like this, the more chaotic the forces that are unleashed in the music, the greater the simultaneous need to organize them through clarity and to present them in such a way that the whole can take on musical sense. And I think that this, ladies and gentlemen, brings me to a very crucial and decisive point for probably understanding Schoenberg. For the constructivism of Schoenberg, and hence the constructivism of all our music, results not from a joy in construction as such but from the necessity of wresting this now infinitely complex musical material, and with it this infinitely complex and rich musical imagination, from the chaos that threatens it at every moment. What makes this new music great, for heaven’s sake, is that it stepped out of its safe, predetermined civilizatory boundaries and took up this chaotic element once more, this element that can smash through convention. Precisely because of this, however, it constantly faces the problem of not regressing to the pre-artistic, to the barbaric, but rather to clarify itself; and clarity is really the same thing as construction. When we speak of the principle of construction in music today, then what this means is that the principle of clarity, that is, the precise determinacy of every musical event, has become total and places itself in front of every other event, and this – as I think I showed you especially in my deliberations just now – is really an exact function of musical richness but also of the chaotic, surging and yet unformed quality behind it. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if what I just told you is right, then it indeed follows that the principles of construction in music must always have a determinate connection to what is composed. This means it is only worthwhile to construct where these explosive forces are actually present. If this is not the case, if this dialectic, this tension, the thing I have very clumsily and crudely termed the ‘chaotic’, but where I think you can probably all follow what I mean somehow – if these forces, these diffuse, divergent forces are no longer felt, and there is instead a guarantee of calm and safety from the start, then the principle of construction really has no purpose in music. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to return to what I said to you at the beginning of today’s session, namely that, in criticizing certain current forms of constructivism, I am serving the cause of freedom rather than that of reaction. I think the danger is that the principles of construction, once they are no longer experienced in this state of tension with what is being constructed, lose their purpose and consequently decline. And that is what I wanted to show you specifically in the young Schoenberg: that this is not the case with him, that whenever principles of construction appear in his music, they purely serve this purpose of organizing masses of material that would otherwise be unmanageable.

Now, that is essentially what I wanted to say to you about Gurrelieder. I would just like to remind you, for the sake of precision, that the principle of thematic precision I showed you in that slightly clumsy passage from Gurrelieder, that this would subsequently play a far greater part in Schoenberg’s music than you think. Most of all, I would like to draw your attention in this context to the later parts of the First String Quartet, where almost all the themes previously presented are set in counterpoint with one another. But I would also like to point you – and this is an especially overt example of thematic combination – to the First Chamber Symphony, not only to the famous canonic passages in the development but also to the scherzo, where Schoenberg first contrasts the scherzo and the trio, but then he naturally cannot respect the convention A–B–A form in its usual guise. However, the scherzo character and the contrast with the trio are so clear that something resembling the A–B–A form must ultimately ensue, and he managed this by the very overt measure of simply placing the scherzo and the trio in counterpoint when he repeats the scherzo, that is, by simply superimposing them simultaneously. This is another principle that would have very significant consequences later on. You know that Berg used this approach most extensively, for example, that the final movement of Berg’s Chamber Concerto actually rests on this Schoenbergian principle. And then, finally, the most advanced consequence of this principle of thematic combination, if you like, is twelve-note counterpoint, in which – in sophisticated twelve-note works – the different forms of the row are constantly appearing together and being superimposed, meaning that the aspect of thematic combination is really a precursor to the later integral counterpoint. I would just like to augment what I told you yesterday about the connection between Schoenberg’s principles of construction and the eruptive or explosive element: that the later Schoenberg – whom we cannot discuss this time, unfortunately, but who should always be in our field of view when examining these early works – that Schoenberg also had an extremely sophisticated awareness of these things. So one might say that Schoenberg’s dodecaphony is always in proportion to the degree of complexity in the purely compositional events. If the compositional events are relatively simple, he operates with the row equally simply and does not engage in any great twelve-tone arts, as one can observe in his Accompanying Music for a Film Scene,²⁶ which you recently heard performed so well by Mr Rosbaud.²⁷ But if there is much going on in the music, if it is extremely complex in its own substance and its own sense, then naturally the full ‘amenities of the modern age’,²⁸ as he put it, will be deployed, and then the most incredible dodecaphonic skills will be used to present this correspondingly rich and nuanced musical content. Examples of this are the Third String Quartet and the Variations for Orchestra, which you have heard, the latter most especially. In their use of twelve-note technique, these two pieces probably represent the pinnacle of subtlety and artifice, and both works are extremely complex, incredibly polyphonic and authentically felt. In a certain sense, then, this is also a part of early Schoenberg: one must learn to recognize and realize, at every moment, the proportion between the degree of construction and the demands of what is constructed.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have not covered remotely as much ground as I had intended in this course, but I did at least have the feeling, even though I unfortunately spoke alone for the entire time, of being in a kind of dialogue with you about these things, and that is why I felt that my actual intention of discussing the young Schoenberg should be placed in the service of understanding the current problems, even at the price of being unable to show you the beautiful elaborated Neapolitan sixth in the song ‘Traumleben’, or the even more magnificent treatment of form in the song ‘Lockung’,²⁹ and suchlike. Regarding the op. 6 songs, however, I would like to add that the climate is an entirely different one here, that quantity truly turns into quality. All these titbits that I picked out of the early works for you to show how all these things are already latent in them, they now stop being titbits – if I may use so barbaric an expression – and become constitutive. So, from op. 6 onwards, the elements prescribed by the musical language really disappear altogether, and the elements that are used to construct the music’s tonality, which I could only touch on for now, these elements now become the only valid ones. In every one of these songs, tonality has already become a problem, a problem – please do not misunderstand me – not in the crude sense of being ‘problematic’, with the consequence that one cannot write tonal music any more. That would have been the easy way out. It was a problem in the sense that Schoenberg asked himself, I would almost say, just as Kant asked himself how synthetic judgements a priori are possible, that is, whether synthetic judgements are possible, Schoenberg similarly asked himself how tonality is possible, which meant: how is tonality still possible? And the answer he gave was really that, in the face of this abundance of surging events, it was possible only through construction, possible only if this same tonality that was once a given and constituted the framework for all compositions, if this became thematic, one might almost say, if all music set itself the task of re-creating this tonality on its own terms, instead of presupposing it merely as an external system of reference, as something finished. And, in the great evolutionary works from op. 6 onwards, this attempt to recuperate tonality for a musical content that is already conflicting with it at every moment brings about these incredible inner tensions that finally cause everything to fall apart. If you listen to the first introductory bars of the song ‘Lockung’, for example, you will immediately notice that, although one still essentially has a cadence and a tonal melody, its whole air of directness and the complexity of its elements really belong to a work by the mature Schoenberg. And you will truly feel here that this music only had to give a shake for the tonality to fall off it. To conclude, let me just touch on these few bars [plays no. 7 of Eight Songs, op. 6]. Essentially that is already the spirit of this [plays no. 4 of Six Little Piano Pieces, op. 19], and with such an abundance of musical shapes it is quite immaterial whether the chords are a little more or a little less tonal. This proves a superficial aspect by comparison, and it is generally the case in music that the surface elements always become worn out and disappear very quickly over time, and that what remains as the essence are only the inner workings of the musical fabric. Unfortunately there is no time left for me to analyse these few bars – I think it is ten bars – I cannot analyse them now as I had originally intended. One could spend hours discussing only these few bars, to say nothing of the entire song. These few bars consist of three little sections, the second of which, the middle section, also shortens the rhythm. This abbreviation of the rhythm is in turn a consequence of the rhythm in the accompaniment, which anticipates such a two-beat rhythm. And this anticipated two-beat rhythm also has consequences for the melody, but at the end it leads into a resolving passage that forms the cadence, although this middle section is a radical variation on the antecedent, in that the characteristic intervals [plays] are repeated faithfully but are no longer comprehensible as such because of the altered rhythm and the insistent tempo; and then the consequent, the cadential consequent seems entirely fresh, even though the three elements that form this mini-movement actually all hang together. But once again – let me say this again in closing – once again it is the case that Schoenberg does not take a rationalized thematic approach, deriving one motif directly from another, for here too the motivic connections lie beneath the surface. From the start, one is dealing with such wide-ranging variations that one can no longer say in a rationalist manner that this or that motif returns somewhere, for the same intervals have their own innate tension and their effects continue, but they are not simply repeated stubbornly and mechanically; and that is precisely what creates this impression of extraordinary tension and vehemence.

So, ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end – regrettably, I must say, for I have the feeling that we had only now got into the matter properly, and that this was actually just the beginning. But all I can do is to hope that a little of what I have told you, especially the composers among you, will give you food for thought, and that you have perhaps seen from what I have told you that I presented the young Schoenberg not so that you would return to the young Schoenberg but to rejuvenate our aging new music a little with the help of the young Schoenberg. That was my intention, at any rate. Many thanks.