Читать книгу The New Music - Theodor W. Adorno - Страница 7

[…]¹ that I was not guided by any music-historical interests. Nor do I wish to discuss these matters in order to round out or correct the image of a great composer, though I hope that both aspects will be touched on as a side effect – namely, that I can both show you some music-historically remarkable things and contribute to an overall picture of Schoenberg. But we know, after all, that the idea of this music festival in Kranichstein² is really for us to attempt, in very serious and concentrated work, to advance the musical consciousness of the present day and, if I might put it thus, to bring it to a form of self-consciousness, a consciousness of itself. And the reason I have decided to speak about the early Schoenberg – with the explicit approval of Mrs Schoenberg,³ as it happens – is that the works in question are quite especially relevant to our present situation.

You may know that I have, on various occasions, developed the argument that all of Schoenberg’s decisive innovations can already be found in his early works, extending roughly until op. 10; and that, if one understands those works correctly, the later works will almost be self-explanatory, they will no longer present any difficulties. Now, in our present context it is not a matter of promoting an understanding, for I think I can assume that almost all of you know and understand the later works of Schoenberg quite well. Rather, the problem is a different one. This claim that the decisive innovations by Schoenberg are already evident in the early works – what does it actually mean? It means that the experiences, the basic experiences that later found their own, very pure style, that were later developed with the utmost rigour, these basic experiences were already garnered here, where they were formulated in varying degrees with the traditional material of music. Now, I see the current relevance of those youthful works precisely in those basic experiences. For it seems to me that New Music, in its current phase and in the way people operate today with the twelve-note technique in particular, like a recipe, something ready-made and given, has forgotten those basic experiences – or, as I put it in my essay ‘The Aging of the New Music’, referring to a passage from Kierkegaard, that in the place where the Wolf’s Glen once yawned terribly there is now a railway bridge from which travellers can look down into the abyss safely and comfortably.⁴ In other words, the material developed by Schoenberg has now to a large extent become common property and, crudely put, is now available too cheaply, at least among those younger composers who can be taken seriously, but this comes at the price of losing the experiences for which it was once made; these methods, then, have mostly lost the significance they had when they originated.

At this point, let me avert a misunderstanding. Unfortunately, especially in recent times, I have discovered that anyone who tries to go beyond a mere factual survey and to develop artistic matters further, to approach them in a thinking way, exposes themselves to such manifold misunderstandings that one really cannot be careful enough, so I have genuinely found myself somewhat in the situation of the burnt child who dreads the fire. So please do not misunderstand me as taking any restorative approach or presenting a laudatio temporis acti, as if I were saying, ‘Yes, those were the good old days fifty years ago, when the likes of us were booed and there was really something happening, whereas now no one gets worked up anymore and everything has become so non-committal.’ I do indeed believe that even this very external aspect, the fact that it was a scandal at the time and no longer is today,⁵ that it reveals something quite central. But I will not develop that any further here. And let me also avoid a further misunderstanding and pre-empt an objection that I would normally expect particularly from the young composers among you. Because you could say to me, ‘Why are you getting so worked up? That’s really all terribly sentimental. It is the fate of all new achievements in art that the new discoveries find expression in the material and the treatment of the material, and that the original inner tensions that once spawned this material will pass, that the material will then stand on its own; and now that the twelve-note technique has been established, it would be a nonsense to expect every chord and every counterpoint to have the same tension that such a chord would have had in the early works of Schoenberg or Anton von Webern before the invention of dodecaphony.’ Well, there is certainly something in that. And far be it from me to say that the same shudder [Schauer] once caused by certain sounds, like the one I will demonstrate to you in a moment, that this same shudder should be conserved or sought anew. The concept of a ‘conserved shudder’ is comical in itself, and I hope you will not think me so foolish as to advocate such a conserved shudder. But I nonetheless think that one should not make things too easy for oneself with this idea of conservation. For as true as it may be – and I am going somewhat against traditional logic here in favour of dialectic logic, as I simply happen to be an adherent of the latter – as true as it may be that these chords, these musical constructs, fundamentally change in their form, it is equally true that something of this element must be preserved; and that, if musical elements once filled with inner tension genuinely change into mere material, then this material itself loses the sense it formerly had. So I do not wish to use these things in order to encourage you to create similar configurations, to turn the music towards the representation of a similar expressive or constructive sense as the young Schoenberg did. That is out of the question, and I would once again ask you emphatically not to understand my words in this way. But I do think that the question of the sense of every musical event, which arises in an extraordinarily powerful way in Schoenberg’s early music, must equally be posed in New Music. So this means that mere consistency, in the sense that every note is determined by some mathematical or other principles, is not enough, that every note must rather have meaning within the purely musical functional context in which it appears. And I think that one can direct this question as to the sense of each individual musical element at the young Schoenberg, and that one can better understand this demand through his music; but it goes without saying that the relevant characters today, and generally the question of the musical sense that must be organized and created, is something entirely changed, something entirely different from what Schoenberg, the young Schoenberg, was dealing with. By examining the early works, or touching on a few aspects of early Schoenberg in a highly fragmentary fashion, I hope simply to help you rediscover this dimension, the idea that all musical elements must have a musical sense and not simply fit, much as Kolisch⁶ and I, in our joint lecture last year, tried to elaborate the representation of musical sense in traditional music from the perspective of modern music, or roughly in the same way that Křenek set up his composition course last year.⁷ But you must not take that literally; you should simply learn these things in a comprehensible and concrete way that has been so widely forgotten today; for the situation in which we now find ourselves is really that composition has, in a sense, become too easy, and this becoming-too-easy of composition holds an indescribable danger precisely because the demands placed by this material in order to identify itself at all are those of musical sense, whereas, if one applies this newly won material to compositions – if they are senseless or primitive – the application of this material is not at all justified. So I will certainly try to make the young composers in particular, the twelve-note composers, be more self-critical in their own methods by measuring what they do against the indescribable wealth and indescribable substance that can be found precisely in the young Schoenberg, and which is the template or the precondition for the asceticism, for all the refusals Schoenberg later undertook.

Now, let me begin by saying something about the concept of the young Schoenberg: unlike in many other cases of youthful composers, one cannot claim that he had not yet found his style, that these are imperfect juvenilia or the like. Rather, I think that, from an extremely early point – I am inclined to date it to Gurrelieder at the latest – not only was Schoenberg in possession of complete technical mastery but his style too was already absolutely explicit as a personal style. And let me add that, in my view, some of the most important works that Schoenberg wrote in his entire life come from this time in his young years. I am thinking especially of the Second String Quartet, which we would scarcely be analysing here, but which you surely all know. One would equally have to mention the Chamber Symphony, which was of indescribable consequence for the history of music, or also the first movement of the Second Chamber Symphony, as well as the First String Quartet and the op. 6 songs. So, I think that comprehending what an incredible amount of the later Schoenberg’s finds are already present in the early works, it also means comprehending the maturity and immense quality of Schoenberg’s youthful works, because only if one has sacrificed what is found here, or has already been given this foundation, only then can the carriage that begins its journey hold the weight that justifies this whole journey in the first place.

I cannot help adding another thought to this. And here, if you will allow it, I would also like to modify certain views for whose genesis I am not entirely without responsibility. What I am referring to is the entire complex of the innate movement of the musical material. I scarcely need to tell you what I mean by this, or how important this question is, and how much the musical material pushes of its own accord towards certain consequences – that is, how it is really the case in music that, if one has said A, one must also say B, and how much the whole development of music in each individual work and in historical terms follows precisely this innate movement. But art is, after all, always a relationship between subject and object. And, once and for all, one should not think that one can enter the realm of objectivity by simply crossing out the subject. The objectivity of art is not a remainder, not a residual concept; it is not something that is left over when the subject withdraws and instead surrenders to a demand that supposedly lies purely in the material, or in the so-called primal elements of art; rather, this demand is naturally mediated time and again by the artistic spirit and the artistic consciousness, and thus always assumes the work and effort of the concept, which means the work and effort of subjectivity. And if I am not mistaken, then music history has reached a stage today in which the concept of the material’s innate movement threatens to be fetishized somewhat – that is, to be separated from this relationship with the subject that intervenes in and transforms the material, and without which there can really be no such movement of the musical material. But if that is the case, it is probably true that, from the most central perspective, the musical material is not actually so decisive on its own. You all know that Schoenberg, in his later days, repeatedly fell back especially on the material from the period around the Second String Quartet and the Chamber Symphony, that he completed a major conception such as the Second Chamber Symphony as a mature or old man, and he operated with this earlier material in a number of such excellent works as the Kol nidre.⁸ Moreover, he kept saying – and I think he was very serious when he did so – that he felt as close to the works of his youth as to those of his mature years, and that he by no means disavowed something like Gurrelieder. He was not as modern as those of his critics who, when they heard a bar from Gurrelieder, automatically reacted with the gesture of ‘Aha, Wagner’ and considered the matter closed. And if I could help you to leave behind some of these clichés, for example that of ‘exaggerated late Romanticism’, which really only conceal what was actually going on in the music, then I would expressly welcome that as a by-product, as a further by-product. At any rate, I wanted to say that, if Schoenberg kept returning to this material, then this means that he was actually more interested – and I mean that not in a psychological and private sense but in the objective sense that it is more objectively interesting – in the procedures, the forms of control, the kind of possibility for shaping a musical sense that played out in the engagement with the material, and not so much the material as such. This means that the older Schoenberg, in such works as the Second Chamber Symphony, in the second movement, worked with this material from the younger Schoenberg from the perspective of all his experiences with dodecaphony. And we could show you in detail – the specialists among us who are here, such as Kolisch and Leibowitz⁹ and myself, as well as a few others – that this tonal piece did indeed profit from all the achievements of the twelve-note technique. And, by the same token, one might say that the real principles of construction, which are far more important for dodecaphonic music than the objectified and reified rules, that these can really all be found in the early works. In a moment I will give you an example, one that I hope will be slightly surprising for you, to illustrate this. So, in other words, I think that, if we examine these works, we should concern ourselves more with what was composed and with the manner of composition than with the mere question of what was used to compose. For if one can compose properly and has something that must be composed, then the modernity, that is, the right material, will come of its own accord, as it were; there is no need to worry a great deal about that. But one should, for heaven’s sake, no longer consider it an achievement today, or a matter of great boldness or sophistication, to operate with a certain material that means nothing in itself before something genuinely convincing has emerged from this material, and thus has a very primitive sense.

Now, I already hinted that the notion of the young Schoenberg, that this is not, as the cliché would have it, a pre-Schoenbergian Schoenberg but actually already the whole Schoenberg, just under a seed leaf of sorts; it is the Schoenberg in whom all the substantial elements of mature composition are already present but still wrapped in a husk of traditional material, which is at last burst open by the forces already active within it, so that it simply falls off like a seed leaf, as Hegel describes in his Phenomenology,¹⁰ allowing the new to emerge in a pure form. Now, in this understanding of the young Schoenberg, we can say that this part of his output, which encompasses no more than ten or eleven works, is already divided very clearly into a number of periods, and that the young Schoenberg himself already exhibits a very clear arc of development. For purposes of orientation – I hope you will forgive my pedantry – I would speak of three basic periods and first describe these to you in brief. I am not familiar with the works that predate the publication of op. 1.¹¹ I once had the opportunity to take a glance at a string quartet and a piano work at Mrs Schoenberg’s home, but I was certainly not able to examine these closely enough to venture an assessment of any kind. At any rate, the Schoenberg we know – from op. 2 onwards, at least – is already not only an absolutely distinctive composer but also very much the real Schoenberg. Now, this ‘first period’ would include the first three books of songs and Verklärte Nacht, and these are works in which one can truly see him stretching himself and expanding and gradually attaining full control of the material; and precisely because everything is very much in flux here, very much in statu nascendi, these first works, especially the op. 2 and op. 3 songs and Verklärte Nacht, are eminently instructive. These are followed by a period that one might consider a period of fully-fledged mastery and is characterized by Gurrelieder and the symphonic poem Pelléas et Mélisande. If I am not mistaken, these two works are among the greatest and most significant masterpieces within the framework of the style generally known as the ‘New German School’. They are absolute equals of the most mature works by Strauss and Mahler, both in their technical sophistication and in their originality, and one really has to see everything that is contained in these works to understand, to understand fully what he then left behind. And the third period of the young Schoenberg, that would be the period that begins with the First String Quartet and the op. 6 songs. I think that the production of these works actually overlapped, or that maybe the quartet is even earlier than the songs. Some of the op. 8 songs also seem to be earlier, so the chronology is not accurately reflected by the opus numbers. This is the period in which Schoenberg’s principles of construction first emerge in their pure form, in which he takes up the problem of sonata form, in which he addresses the problem of thematic work in the sense of an extreme compression and motivic economy and in which, finally, Schoenberg’s polyphony is also taken to an advanced level. So they are the works in which his peculiar way of working with chromatic scale degrees, and treating them as degrees in their own right, is consistently employed, though today I will give you an example of this that already appears in one of the early songs. So that would be the approximate chronology. And you know that the op. 10 quartet, the second quartet, in a sense summarizes this entire process of development by having a first movement with the highest degree of tonal construction and a second whose expression goes to the utmost extremes in a certain visionary manner, then the third relates the preceding movements to each other through variative development before the last movement truly breaks with tonality and truly enters the realm of freedom.

Now, let me say a few things about op. 1, though I only have the song ‘Abschied’; I do not know the other song, ‘Dank’, so I cannot say anything about it. First of all, I noticed something which I feel a little proud to have detected. I have, on various occasions, developed the idea that Schoenberg’s approach can largely be understood as a synthesis – forgive the rudimentary term – as a synthesis of Brahms and Wagner. I mean this in the sense that the chromatic, expressive and highly sophisticated material of Wagner’s harmonic language has merged with Brahmsian compositional principles, namely his completely seamless and consistent thematic work. This is not a synthesis in the sense of simply adding together these two elements, of course; one has to imagine a consummate interpenetration of these two principles in the inner constitution of this music. Now, the op. 1 songs are certainly very little known. But the amazing thing I discovered is that these songs – that is, the one song I know – could genuinely be said to contain the Brahmsian and Wagnerian elements alongside each other, meaning that this aspect of a confrontation between these two separate and opposing schools that Schoenberg discovered in his youth, this confrontation can be traced back to very concrete things, namely stylistic elements that were found in his own work. First I will play you the beginning, where you will immediately see the connection to the Serious Songs by Brahms.¹² I will then play you a further extremely Brahmsian passage, and after that one in which the Wagnerian influence – almost like a piano reduction from the Ring – displays itself in an almost touching manner. So it begins like this, and is incidentally in the same D minor as the first of the Four Serious Songs by Brahms [plays ‘Abschied’ [Farewell], Two Songs, op. 1, no. 2], and so on. And then the entire Brahmsian passage […] [plays], and so forth. […] And the Wagnerian passage that follows it goes like this [plays], and so on. So, you can see from this how these elements truly stand alongside each other in an exceedingly honest way. I would like to point out how little Schoenberg – and I think this is very characteristic – how little Schoenberg concealed this. After all, any normal New German composer would have been clever enough, shall we say, to hide such things. But this peculiar Schoenbergian sincerity or naïveté, whatever you wish to call it – and Schoenberg was essentially a very naïve composer; the concept of naïveté is a crucial part of him – simply registered these things the way they initially appeared in his own musical conception. Incidentally, Schoenberg always held the view that a younger composer could certainly refer to models if he were truly original, which went completely against the mindset of those who want to throw Wozzeck on the scrap heap as soon as they discover that the long interlude in the third act¹³ is similar in its overall idea to Siegfried’s funeral music from Götterdämmerung,¹⁴ yet have no trouble whatsoever if some so-called modern composer imitates composers of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries in a laughable and paltry fashion. I have never been able to understand why there should be such oversensitivity on the one side and this indescribably low standard on the other, but perhaps that is because I am one of these evil intellectuals.

But I would like to draw your attention to another matter concerning these very first songs by Schoenberg. These songs are unusually long – the one I have, at least, and I assume the other is similarly long – much like the Proses lyriques by Claude Debussy,¹⁵ and indeed their whole fabric, including the somewhat luxuriant piano reduction-like treatment of the accompaniment, is highly reminiscent of Debussy’s Proses lyriques, even if they are not yet as specific in their character, not yet as original as this work by Debussy. Evidently both masters made, around the same time, an attempt of sorts for music to move from a more narrowly lyrical character to prose, for lyricism itself to gain a greater breadth, both inwardly and outwardly, than it had previously possessed, and it is very interesting for Schoenberg’s sense of form that he somehow notices that this kind of breadth, of almost oratorical breadth, that this cannot really be reconciled with the piano Lied genre. These things are very difficult to explain, but I think that you will immediately have a sense of what I mean. Very long, elaborated songs cannot really be written as songs with a piano, only as songs with an orchestra. An overlong piano Lied is of a similarly impossible nature as an excessively long piece for a single string instrument, for example. And Debussy, much like Schoenberg, sensed that in those early 1890s, with the result that both crafted these works in, I would almost say, in the character of opera fragments. But I wanted to touch on that only in order to point out a problem that I think it would be highly productive to consider systematically, namely the connection that actually exists between musical dimensions, between musical scale and the respective sonic material used in the music. It would be misguided to believe that these aspects – that, crudely speaking, the form is independent from the disposition of sonorities, the disposition of colours and the entire volume of the sound; rather, these elements, like everything in a work of art, all relate to one another, and one should really examine this interrelatedness in a very precise manner. But that is just an aside.

Now, the first work by Schoenberg that truly shows its claws openly is the op. 2 songs. And, to explain these songs to you, I think I should take a moment to mention something extra-musical: the concept of art nouveau. In their choice of texts, but also the way they themselves are crafted, these songs are very much products of art nouveau, and one can see elements of art nouveau running through Schoenberg’s entire oeuvre, both in his selection of texts and in other aspects, just as one can find similar elements among the great revolutionary painters of his generation, which in a certain sense is, after all, the pre-Picasso generation. Think of van Gogh, where this is very strong, and think also of Munch. So, in this sense, Schoenberg unquestionably has his roots in art nouveau. Now, I cannot embark on a genuine philosophical theory of art nouveau, although it would be extremely important. I will only say that art nouveau rests – and this is one of its formal characteristics – on the attempt to break out of the realm of conventionalized bourgeois forms but still stay within the circle of forms predetermined by the bourgeois world. And that element in art nouveau which is viewed today as so complacently laughable by the gaze that finds anything strange if it contains a contradiction – this is precisely the element of contradiction between breaking out and respecting the conventions after all, this decision to stay within the established world of the nineteenth century. Now, if you will permit this somewhat formal definition, which barely gives you any actual taste of art nouveau, you will see that the works from this phase, which could very much be termed Schoenberg’s art nouveau phase, have exactly this character of wanting to break out and at the same time stay inside. That, incidentally – and I would just like to touch on it in advance – is exceedingly characteristic of Schoenberg in general, namely the fact that his way of breaking out is not like that of Richard Strauss, namely a somewhat non-committal step into new territory; rather, he takes the traditional elements extremely seriously, but so seriously that the very seriousness with which he handles them transforms them into something else. Or, conversely: the breaking out itself occurs with a kind of fear and trembling; it occurs in such a way that he continually tries to keep whatever he feels compelled to include somehow within the framework of the traditional means. And the tension between these two elements, this is really what gave Schoenberg a revolutionary force that goes far beyond what was possessed by the impressionist musicians, who did not have this force of resistance in themselves at all, who did not have these two conflicting elements working away at each other, and whose solutions consequently remained far less radical and much more comfortable. That applies to Debussy in France and to Ravel, in exactly the same way it applied to Richard Strauss in Germany, or indeed Max Reger.

But first, regarding this whole problem of art nouveau, I must read you a poem to give you an idea of what it really means. Let me say at once that if you take this poem in a naïve literary way – it is a poem by Dehmel¹⁶ – then you will all chuckle about it. In order to avoid a false idea of how fruitful it is, just try not to chuckle, and try to feel what lies in the complementary colours juxtaposed in the poem, for example, and then you will immediately understand how Schoenberg arrived at certain harmonic colours that would later become incredibly significant. So, the poem is called ‘Erwartung’ [Expectation], the composition is op. 2, no. 1. It reads as follows:

From the sea-green pond

near the red villa

beneath the dead oak

the moon is shining.

Where her dark image

gleams through the water,

a man stands, and draws

a ring from his hand.

Three opals glimmer;

among the pale stones

float red and green sparks

and sink.

And he kisses her,

and his eyes gleam

like the sea-green depths:

a window opens.

From the red villa

near the dead oak,

a woman’s pale hand

waves to him.¹⁷

Now, this contrasting of unrelated complementary colours – ‘sea-green’, ‘red villa’, ‘moon’ – first of all demands of Schoenberg an entirely new harmonic colour, and this harmonic colour is a particular chord. It is this chord that will now concern us, and not only the chord itself but also its relationship to the whole. I will give you an idea of the song; you must excuse my squawking, but we are among musicians, and musicians generally – thank God – tend not to place great value on the beauty of the voice [plays ‘Erwartung’ [Expectation], Four Songs, op. 2, no. 1]. So, let me first show you the chord that appears here. It is this passing chord [plays]. The strange thing is that it is not this one [plays], but rather that it gains a much harder edge because the D, this dissonance [plays], appears instead of the expected E flat. And this chord runs through the song at every critical point – later in a lower register, like this [plays]. Now, you would all say that this chord comes primarily from Wagner. And Wagner very often uses similar passing chords as a form of harmonic seal, for example in the Ring. And I think this is probably the immediate model: the warning cry of the Rhinemaidens to Siegfried – which goes like this [plays] – which is just as sharply dissonant. Nonetheless, I would say that the character of this chord [plays] is quite different from this chord [plays]. This is for the following reason – and this brings us into contact with a purely harmonic and an expressive element: the Wagnerian chord is a ninth chord, a special kind of ninth chord that, if you want to express it harmonically, not simply as a suspension – but Schoenberg himself avoided the concept of non-harmonic notes as far as possible, and rightfully so, and instead tried to derive the notes of chords from the harmonic structure, which I think is the only correct principle for a composition that does not work with substitutes, where harmonic events stand for themselves; so, the Wagnerian chord, crudely speaking, consists of stacked thirds. Like this: [plays]. Here there are five notes: four at first, stacked in intervals of a minor third, and then the last one a major third above. That is not the case in Schoenberg’s chord, which already makes its connection to triadic harmony much more difficult. Of course, you can always hear it as an alteration [plays], that is, an alteration of the six-five chord. But first you have to keep to the phenomenon when you listen, to what is actually there, which is this [plays], and there you will find that a single third appears in this entire chord [plays], while elsewhere the chord has either an augmented fourth [plays] or a perfect fourth [plays] or then […] here likewise a perfect fourth. In other words, the chord is in reality already a quartal chord, and is most simply explained [plays a chord consisting of perfect fourths] as an upward alteration of this quartal chord. So it does not, in the form that appears here, tend towards a triad in the same way. And that is why it has something far more foreign, why it breaks out of the tonal schema far more than these Wagnerian seventh chords with added ninths.

Now, I told you about this peculiar art nouveau phenomenon in Schoenberg, which consists in constantly trying to draw everything into the music’s formal immanence. He still did this in a relatively simple way here by always resolving the chord in the same way, following the same principle, and it runs through the entire song – but then, at a very conspicuous point, appears in a lower register and takes on a certain kind of independence in this low register. I will play the entire song once for you. But I would like to draw your attention to a further aspect; there is no sense in playing it to you so often, otherwise we will lose time, and so I would like you to keep in mind a few things I will tell you, and then realize them when I play you the whole song. There is one part here [plays op. 2, no. 1]. This is a very important element in the entire history of Schoenberg’s music. This is the element of – well, one might almost say, an irregular, an irrational gesture. There is a sudden flaring up, an urgent motion in which a sudden tension is announced and smashes through the whole musical fabric for a moment. This element of a sudden interruptive gesture remained incredibly important for the sense in Schoenberg’s later music. When you have this passage in op. 19, for example [plays the first of Six Little Piano Pieces, op. 19], then this [plays] is essentially the same as this [plays ‘Erwartung’]. And only if you feel that here – I would almost say that the shock is held in the collision of these two unrelated colours – will you feel how much is contained in such twists in Schoenberg’s music. But one must ask oneself whether, if a musical event does not justify itself in the way I hope I have now shown you, where the event is justified by this ‘Ha!’, this sudden, abrupt action, whether musical elements have any validity if they do not fulfil such a function. So that is the question I would like to raise here. And now I will show you how Schoenberg follows on from this chord [plays]. Second verse [plays]. Now this is taken up as a remainder [plays]. […] I told you that – and I truly want to help you understand something with this song – I told you that, from the start, Schoenberg felt the need to create a sort of homogeneity between the formal structure and the individual event. In other words, he does not leave it at this one chord – as Richard Strauss would, incorporating countless sounds of this kind ten years later in Salome and Elektra, but using them only for colouristic effect without any bearing on the overall construction – but rather forms a middle section from this chord and its resolution. Yet there is still something mechanical about this element here. That is, the chord is simply transposed by one third after another and resolved in exactly the same way each time. And now you can see how the forces in such a work act against one another. I was once attacked most viciously when, with reference to Wagner, I dared to say that a work of art is not a being but a force field. I think that when one looks closely at such a song, one can recognize quite precisely how it should be understood. That is, on the one hand, Schoenberg has the justified need not to leave the chord as an isolated colour but, rather, to develop the form from it, to embed it. On the other hand, it is not adequate as a means of creating form because such a chord draws its power precisely from its uniqueness; because such a chord itself, I would almost say, has something unrepeatable, and because the excitement, this sudden flash that I just showed you in that shock gesture, cannot really be repeated. I said to you at the start, in an entirely different context, that shudders cannot be conserved. Well, that also applies to this composition: one cannot conserve the shudder that was really the purpose of this chord by constantly repeating it, and, at the same time, it must have consequences for the composition. This means that, within the composition, one really finds a collision between two forces that are not yet truly resolved within the composition, and the work – I mean the inner work of the composer – is now to resolve these forces.

We have now, I think, arrived at an extremely important element in Schoenberg’s development, namely the inner necessity of the principle of variation. For if one can characterize the later compositional technique of Schoenberg as a technique of developing variation, as he himself called it,¹⁸ then this means one thing: that these two aspects I just pointed out to you are united. On the one hand, then, the need for the new is taken into account, and there is really something different all the time; the unrepeatable is never repeated. On the other hand, one finds something identical undergoing change, which creates a certain unity between the divergent events, between the events – while here, in this song, the two aspects, which are the gestural and unique nature of the chord and then its continuation in the form of repetition, in a sense stand unconnected beside each other. So one could almost say that what one might call the compositional flaws of this very early song – this is a song by someone aged twenty-three or twenty-four – what one might call the weaknesses of this song, that these are at once the forces that bring movement into such art. And you can see from this how a concept such as that of compositional flaws applies only in isolation, only in a limited sense, and when it acts with such driving force, and these two elements point beyond each other, then it can become something eminently fruitful that actually enables the work to become. As an aside, let me remind you that a particular manner, a particular character that subsequently appears in Verklärte Nacht and, if you like, also in Gurrelieder, that this is present here too. There is that theme in Verklärte Nacht, one you all know [plays Verklärte Nacht, op. 4]. […] And this was already the same manner that you have here [plays ‘Erwartung’]. And now – and here you can recognize the full brilliance of Schoenberg’s sense of form in his feeling that such a chord is really an absolute chord, that it should not be completely resolved within this compositional context but, rather, has a force of its own. He achieves this in a relatively simple way, as he often does in his earlier works, namely by octave displacement: it simply appears in a low register, where it takes on this peculiar character [plays]. If you take a look at Berg’s op. 2 songs, incidentally, especially the third, you will see how such chords have lasting effects. Later on, in Erwartung, the opera Erwartung, the monodrama Erwartung, by Schoenberg, one can find such gestures and such things all the time, but now they have truly become absolute – that is, in Erwartung, in the opera Erwartung, the mediating elements, the repetitions and all that, are completely eliminated, and all that remains are events like this chord or this shock gesture that I tried to explain to you. So that is what I really wanted to tell you here about this song.

I would also like to draw your attention to one thing in particular, namely the fact that the middle section at ‘Three opals glimmer’ – and this is also very indicative of late Schoenberg – that this is not simply a contrasting B section but, rather, is derived from the material of this chord; it follows on from the rest of the exposition and only really continues it, without leaving the context of this original situation; it has this quality of continuation, of further development, as Schoenberg’s middle sections often do, and not the element of mere contrast. I hold the view that the most important thing in composition is to learn how to consciously control possibilities like those I have mentioned, but I have the feeling that, today, countless composers are no longer even aware of such problems, that all this is being forgotten, resulting in a terrible impoverishment of composition. And what I really want, what I mean to encourage you to do, is truly to prevent this impoverishment of composition by becoming aware of all the possibilities that are manifest in these early works by Schoenberg. I will just look at this again so that you can see exactly what I mean. So, this appears once more in the song [plays]. Now this, like an Abgesang¹⁹ [plays], and so on. Also, note Schoenberg’s sense of form in giving this middle section the marking ‘A little more animated’. So he feels – and this relates again to the way such a composition is a force field – he feels the exhaustion that results from the sustaining of the chord but simultaneously feels the need to expand the chord, in a sense acting like his own conductor by, like a good conductor, giving an imperceptible nudge at certain points by raising the tempo slightly; so he raises the tempo slightly with his marking in order to smooth over the contradiction I was telling you about. So, that is what I wanted to say about this song.

The next song, ‘Schenk mir deinen goldenen Kamm’ [Give me your golden comb], also belongs very much to the sphere of art nouveau. An extremely important element of this art nouveau sphere is a certain kind of erotic shock, shall we say, but it is always connected to concepts such as ‘transfiguration’. So, on the one hand, it is constantly thumbing its nose at bourgeois morality; it is always about free love, yet sexuality is never really accepted as sexuality but instead is associated in a sort of pantheistic manner with the cosmos, with infinity and God knows what else. So if you look at the text of Gurrelieder – and Jacobsen was a great art nouveau poet – if you look at the text of Gurrelieder, you will also find a great deal of this strange configuration of pantheistic cosmic feeling and anti-bourgeois elements, criticism of marriage, and this sphere, which is implied with such phrases as ‘free love’ or ‘suicide’,²⁰ this whole conceptual sphere thus plays a very major part in Schoenberg’s early work. Now, the song in question is entitled ‘Give Me Your Golden Comb’. Its actual title is ‘Jesus Begs’, but Schoenberg evidently relegated it to a subtitle because of its shocking nature. This too is a poem by Dehmel, an erotic poem that is placed in the mouth of Jesus and should be imagined as being directed at Mary Magdalene. I think that, if you want to understand fully the core of reality behind these shocking chords from the young Schoenberg, you must feel that, you must try to reconstruct for yourselves what it would have meant in the bourgeois world of 1895 to represent Mary Magdalene as Christ’s lover. Only if you can truly feel this configuration, I think, can you gain a sense of the genuine risk that once lay within this music, perhaps comparable to what happens when one uses such chords nowadays in a totalitarian state, where one will get in similar trouble to when the Austro-Hungarian police would come knocking about such poems. So, the poem reads as follows:

Give me your golden comb;

every morning shall remind you

that you kissed my hair.

Give me your silken sponge;

every evening I want to sense

for whom you prepare yourself in the bath –

oh, Mary!

Give me everything you have;

my soul is not vain,

proudly I receive your blessing.

Give me your heaviest burden:

Will you not lay on my head

your heart too, your heart –

Magdalene?²¹

Now, what makes this song very strange is that here, in very early Schoenberg, you already find the highly peculiar relationship with tonality that is crucial for Schoenberg’s work in general.

On the one hand, he is not at all satisfied with using an ordinary cadence, and instead of the usual cadential chords, as well as the typical Brahmsian secondary degrees, he introduces chords from other keys – he later spoke of them as ‘secondary dominants’²² – as very striking root progressions. On the other hand – and here is another extreme contrast to Richard Strauss; I would generally advise you, if you wish to grasp the full weight of the things I am trying to lay out for you here, you should look at the contrast precisely with songs by Richard Strauss, which in some ways emerged from this art nouveau sphere quite similarly – on the other hand, he takes tonality, as I said earlier, far more seriously than someone like Richard Strauss, who was not at all interested in ending up in God knows what key, and what happens with keys in general has no significance. I would assume that Schoenberg examined Wagner much better and more closely than Strauss did, because in Wagner it is almost always the case – Lorenz has shown this in great detail – that the unity of key has a formal function.²³ This means that precisely when the usual preconceived forms such as sonata form or operatic forms are no longer valid, then the music must first of all dictate what means of formal construction are actually left – and the answer is tonality. At the same time, it wants to move away from these conventional chords through its expressive power, and here one again finds this tension: on the one hand, tonality is significantly extended through the chords that are employed, but, on the other hand, these extensions only serve to reinforce the awareness of tonality. And this approach remained essential for the whole harmonic language of the young Schoenberg. In the great masterpieces too, such as the F sharp minor quartet and the first movement of the Second Chamber Symphony, one always finds precisely these foreign chords supporting the key. In one of the next lectures I will use one of the greatest masterpieces among all of Schoenberg’s songs, namely op. 6, no. 1, to show how this extension leads to an entire key becoming a kind of elaborated Neapolitan sixth, and what indescribable skill Schoenberg shows in the construction of harmonic perspective as early as op. 6. But first I will only show you this song.

Incidentally, I would also like to address another matter. Now, one can say that every composer really has a limited number of basic characters. When my friend René Leibowitz said earlier that one can judge the quality of a composer by the number, by the abundance of characters, this is certainly true in one sense, for the composer’s breadth is determined by how little the characters are repeated. At the same time, all of them have a form of – how shall I put it? – basic thematic experiences or basic thematic situations that keep returning. So, just as this shock gesture I showed you and this chord form such basic situations, this song I will play you now also displays a type that keeps returning in Schoenberg, for example in op. 6, but also in the song about the beautiful flowerbed from the George songs.²⁴ It starts and continues as this slow alla breve song, but its fabric becomes ever freer and ever more uncompromising. And it is also the case that the question of characters must be considered not only extensively but also intensively. That is, the quality of a composer also has something to do with their ability to present these characters increasingly vividly and, most importantly, more precisely throughout their personal development. So this character that you will now hear, this is also one of Schoenberg’s basic characters; it is part of the bedrock that he then modified to an extreme degree. You will not find that immediately, you will not find the song returning in the same form; but you will notice that this idea does return in a sense, and that he varies it.

It would be very interesting – and this is a task I have entirely neglected until now, and that should really be undertaken by someone else, a very urgent task in my view – to compile a form of, well, inventory, in the correct sense of the word, an inventory of these genuinely Schoenbergian basic characters, and thus to gain a form of blueprint for these basic musical experiences of which this landscape consists. I hope to introduce you to several of these basic characters in the course of the lectures.

[Plays ‘Schenk mir deinen goldenen Kamm’ [Give me your golden comb], Four Songs, op. 2, no. 2]. So, you can see that it has a six-bar structure and is very clearly in F sharp minor, at times F sharp major, but the second chord already goes to B minor, then we move entirely outside the key; I won’t analyse it in detail [plays]. […] You will, I assume, have a very strong sense of F sharp major, even though he constantly employs this relationship of a third between C minor [plays] and the parallel major of F sharp minor [plays], namely A major, even though there is always a tendency towards the subdominant. But this whole inclination towards the subdominant is really a means of harmonic perspective; that is, I think it is extremely important for an understanding of Schoenbergian harmony: the subdominant and the substitute for the subdominant that he develops always have the purpose of counteracting the key and the dominant, and thus creating a certain dimension of depth in the cadence, and the key becomes so strong as a result that it must, in a sense, have the strength to subsume this opposing tendency of the subdominant within itself. I think that, just as people used to pour molten lead into the keels of ships, here this weight of the subdominant is attached to the key – ‘subdominant’ being understood in a very broad sense, as it is often the fourth, fifth, sixth subdominant – so it is only now, by lifting this weight, that the key establishes itself as a real force and truly proves itself. So you see that if the young Schoenberg, as I said before, takes the concept of tonality far more seriously than someone like Strauss, then one should understand this very much in a dynamic sense. That is, he is thinking of the key not as a mere given, as the framework within which one can indulge oneself; rather, the key, if you will, is really something problematic from the start. The key is respected as a means of formal construction, but it is not something that is simply there. It is something that must first be produced through the disposition of harmonic events, through the distribution of harmonic forces. And this production of the key, this is now connected – if you will allow me to return to the problematics of art nouveau I was discussing at the start – this is once again connected extremely closely to those art nouveau elements, because a resource such as tonality, which was already very conventional by the time of Schoenberg but was also the only means of formal construction he had left, had to be internally justified, so to speak, not simply by being applied, but by being produced through the arrangement of elements. That, I would say, is really the early Schoenberg’s theory of harmony, and one also finds some of this awareness of scale degrees in later free atonality, and one could show that something like the desire in dodecaphony for constantly fresh degrees is essentially already contained here, as this need for fresh contrasting degrees, which actually fulfil the condition for tonality, is really very much like this aversion to repetition, to mere stubbornness. So have a listen to the whole thing, listen to how the key is produced, perhaps best of all by listening to the epilogue, where the very same chord sequence appears, but now separated […]. […] Many of you will find the very chromatic nature of the passage reminiscent of Tristan. But here we can observe something that will be very characteristic of the later Schoenberg. I showed you in the previous song how he incorporates this strange, foreign suspended chord into the form by sequencing it. In this song here, op. 2, he is already no longer satisfied with the form of sequencing. This means that he no longer simply produces harmonic cohesion by repeating the same harmonic events on different degrees, as Wagner does, but rather uses constant variation. He does this chromatically, but I would say it is far more old-fashioned in a certain sense, namely in the sense of a chorale. He harmonizes as one harmonizes a chorale, whereas Wagner’s sequences really have little to do with harmonization any more, as they keep repeating harmonies on different degrees instead of creating harmonic progression and are thus ultimately static – because there is nothing new in them, whereas here there is truly something new. Let me just show you how that sounds, because I think it is one of the most important things for understanding Schoenberg. If the later Schoenberg, the mature Schoenberg, wishes for each musical event to stand entirely for itself and to be taken in its own right, not to be judged by some general schema, then this is already implicit in the early works in the fact that he does rely on something like repetition as a crutch but that, even within as small a space as these six bars, things are constantly changing [plays]. Now, this is how Wagner would continue [paraphrases in the style of Wagner], and so on. Now, I don’t mean to parody it at all, I simply want to show you how, even in so ostensibly basic a matter, something that outwardly seems as Wagnerian as this initial chromatic descent in the vocal line [plays] is, in its internal cohesion, something completely different from Wagner. Now, think of Richard Strauss, who likewise uses such non-diatonic degrees and similar things. In Strauss, they always have the character of a surprise, like the famous omelette surprise – they are always something of a surprise, but they have no power of formal construction; that is, what is entirely missing is this power of the subdominant. Strauss is essentially always a composer of the dominant, and you all know that, when the famous second-inversion chord appears in Strauss, one just thinks, ‘Well, a second-inversion chord’ – that is simply what Strauss does. Essentially, things always move upwards in Strauss. Strauss completely lacks this sense of a balance between harmonic forces, this awareness that there can only be a true harmonic progression if the upwards motion is carried by a weight, by a counterweight; instead, he always has this harmonic gesture of ascending to some heights, and this constant dominant-like action gives it a certain shallowness, harmonically speaking, that is completely absent here. And then, in Reger, everything is connected so entirely via semitones, so chromaticized, that no sense of scale degrees can come about at all. Reger really has only leading notes, and in that sense there is no tonality in Reger but, rather, countless tonalities that are pushed endlessly back and forth through these chords that glide into one another, connected by leading notes. But this approach of using chromaticism while keeping the degrees strong enough for a tonality to ensue – that is really the specifically Schoenbergian quality that matters here. And, you will see, he works chromatically at the start [plays]. […] And this is already the fully matured Schoenberg [plays], the cadence [plays]. Note – and this once again shows his incredibly sophisticated sense of form – that these constant inserted chords from the flat keys all have the meaning of a through-composed subdominant region. Now, in terms of compositional technique and other aspects, one might say that Schoenberg profits from this because he now no longer needs the conventional subdominant. That is, he can replace the standard subdominant with the dominant of VI and there can still be a convincing cadence to F sharp minor, because the subdominant was reached far more robustly via the preceding chords, but in this way he sidesteps the banality of the usual IV–V–I cadence. So I would like to show you that now [plays]. Here it already goes to the subdominant – still subdominant. And everything you had here, from here [plays], actually stands for this [plays a different cadence instead of bar 5]. But precisely this [plays only the cadence] is no longer needed, because this [plays another cadence] is much stronger – or this [plays a third example of a cadence] – it brings about the cadential function much more strongly, in the sense of an elaborated Neapolitan sixth, than could be achieved with the normal IV chord, which causes the typical cadential elements to disappear.

Now, the next song I would like to show you is interesting, I think, because – as a composition, I do not think it is one of the young Schoenberg’s most brilliant songs, but it has a [interruption] – we can continue, can’t we? I don’t know, I think we have until one o’clock, as far as I know. So, this next song I will show you²⁵ is of very great interest, because I think one can already find a principle very much related to the principle of note rows, which is really quite astounding for op. 2. It is another poem by Dehmel. But I will just show you these two parts [plays no 3 of Four Songs, op. 2], and so on. Now, the theme with which it begins is a four-note theme; it goes like this [plays]. And the voice now answers like this [plays]. What happens here is exactly what one would refer to in a dodecaphonic context as the retrograde inversion. Because here you have – so these are the four notes [plays]. If you now play these backwards – no, it’s not a retrograde inversion, I was talking nonsense; it’s a simple retrograde [plays]. And if you transpose it, you have this [plays]. So you can see here – and I would like to emphasize that very strongly: it is clear how little the invention of the twelve-note technique is a mathematical matter, much less a substitute for tonality, from the fact that the consequences of organic motivic work led Schoenberg, still in the midst of tonality, to operate with exactly the same methods that were later made absolute in twelve-tone music. Now, the form of note row technique in question here really consists – if one leaves aside the somewhat schematic disposition, as this is really a faithful retrograde – only in taking a small selection from the available intervals and forming an entire thematic complex from it, very often using a procedure I would call ‘axial rotation’. By this I mean starting from the second note of such a four-note group, for example, and then appending the missing first note or an interval corresponding to it at the end. So this character – a somewhat broader ‘serial’ character, if you like – defines the course of this whole section, which I deliberately played slowly for you so that you can appreciate it. Now I will show you in detail. So the whole thing is based on two, really only two intervals: seconds and thirds. Nothing else really appears in the entire melody during the first eight bars [plays]. Third, third, second, third, second, third, second, second, third, second, second, third, second, third, second, third, third, third, second, second, third, third, second. So there is nothing else at all, and this creates a great sense of unity. Let me play it to you again [plays]. […] Counterpoint to that. So you see how, even here, and in a very simple melody where there is not actually any constructivist necessity, I would almost say that the note-row principle extends to the musical invention, because the entire theme is already invented in such a way that it always [plays] – so you can truly see how organic this aspect actually is.

Well, I don’t know, I had wanted to show you today, for a very different reason, the last song from op. 2, which became very famous.²⁶ But this is really for, well, an aesthetic reason, in order truly to show you what possibilities for musical happiness and musical abundance this composer sacrificed because of an urge that was stronger than anything else. And I cannot shake off the feeling – I mean, I do not intend to bore you with some pathos-drenched theories now – but I cannot shake off the feeling that the incredible cogency of Schoenberg’s later works that they – forgive the mythological turn of phrase – that they benefited from everything that was once there, from this whole abundance. So that whole past had to have been there once and then been forgotten, in order to lead to the mature Schoenberg without this rigour taking on any sense of aridity or meagreness. And I think you should all bear this in mind and be aware of this whole side of the phenomenon, without simply covering it up by saying, ‘Well, that was Romantic, and one can’t carry on like that any more.’ Indeed, we all know that, and so did Schoenberg. But if this so-called Romantic element had not been there, then the rest would probably never have come into existence. That is, if this overflowing feeling of happiness had not been there in the young Schoenberg, I would say, then the particular kind of tragedy and the necessary darkening of the later Schoenberg would not have been possible, for even there one finds an indescribable possibility of love, of hope, of self-surrender – all these things are infinitely strong in this young Schoenberg, and the later darkness always rests on the foundation of, how shall I put it, suffering from the world, precisely because the world does not return these feelings, as it were, because the world is cold and foreign. And I think that only when one grasps this element of exuberance, which is a precondition for the alienation in later Schoenberg, only then can one truly understand the profundity, the real intellectual and human profundity, that this whole phenomenon actually possesses, which is the real reason for my speaking to you so extensively about the young Schoenberg. Though I do want to go into a few technical matters as well. Firstly, that this wonderful middle section is introduced from the remainder of a consequent, a middle section that is among the most flowering, rich music there is. Then, that there is a second at the end when it seems as if the lion were showing its claws, and as if there were a quiet rumble going through this world, as if it were saying, ‘Well, we’re not quite so safe after all.’ So this rumble, which lies only in the epilogue, at the very end, in the very last bars, I would like to draw your attention to this in particular [plays ‘Waldsonne’ [Forest sun], Four Songs, op. 2, no. 4]. Now, let me just point out the following, namely how, even in so ostensibly unproblematic a song, how consistent and – I would almost say – how little concerned with effect Schoenberg is in his approach. You will have noticed that, at the end of the middle section, the whole thing dissolves somewhat and is reduced to a repetition of this small motif from here onwards [plays]. Now, any other composer would simply have ended the song with a reprise of the first verse. Schoenberg does not; this feeling of a quiet dissolution of the musical line, a form of atomization, it has consequences. So he hints at the differences here [plays]. It is still all a reprise – ‘with restraint’. And now once again this dissolution of the motif [plays]. […]

So, I think we should end there for today, and in the next session we will perhaps look more closely at Verklärte Nacht and Gurrelieder, then perhaps at the end also the op. 6 songs, and after that I will also tell you a few things about the major chamber music works, though I assume that most of you are very familiar with them. – Thank you.