Gerhard on Music

Selected Writings

Roberto Gerhard, Meirion Bowen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138710528
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351779494
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This title was first published in 2000: Catalan-born composer Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970) left significant legacies - both musical and documentary. Exiled in Cambridge with the onset of the Spanish Civil War, he gradually achieved wide recognition by performers and conductors, in both Britain and America, as a composer whose music was essential to the modern repertoire. In this work, the author collects many of the composer's articles, reviews, lectures and broadcasts to demonstrate the full extent and continuity of Gerhard's artistic and creative thinking. The writings have been arranged thematically to emphasize the evolution of Gerhard's musical interests. His attachment to Spanish and Catalonian traditions broadened into a fascination with folk music of all kinds. His studies with Schoenberg in the mid 1920s gave him the key to his own creative individuality; thereafter, his imaginative vitality led him eventually to experiment with electronic and concrete music and he continued breaking new ground, even in his final years.

V New Horizons

18 Schoenberg, twelve-note music and serialism

Schoenberg in Barcelona (1932)⁹⁰

Arnold Schoenberg is one of those rare personalities that appear from time to time in the course of history, who both announce and develop in their work a radical change, a profound mutation in the thought and sensibility of a whole era. This transformation had already been begun in Schoenberg’s first pieces, more than a quarter of a century ago. It has been since completed with disconcerting speed. The works of his maturity already speak a totally new language. They embody with absolute purity a concept of music that emanates from a spirit and sensitivity radically different from that encountered in the past. However, for us, Schoenberg’s contemporaries amongst the public of 1932, the transformation is still dormant or has only just begun: hence the discrepancy between Schoenberg and his age. It isn’t new in history that genius should be prodigiously ahead of its time. Nor is it surprising, therefore, that he has been long misunderstood. It is relevant to remember Cocteau’s dictum: “When a work seems to go ahead of its time, it is simply the time that stays behind.” One might say that the delay has been marked in our geographical region: for Schoenberg’s music has been late to reach Barcelona; and it has been preceded by a lot against, about the fame of his “difficulty”.

We cannot avoid the fact that there are in truth “difficult” writers, and that Schoenberg is one of them. The difficulty of this difficult writer comes, probably, from the nature of the ideas expressed; and maybe also from the way of dealing with them. Even though in the case of a musician like Schoenberg, the latter is clearly a consequence of the former; that is to say, that the nature of the ideas implies the way of exposing them.

It would be naive to try to “explain” Schoenberg’s music. The technical side, in the first place, is of no interest to the audience. Words also cannot explain the music. Music would not be music if it could be explained through words. One can’t reach Schoenberg’s music from the outside – to try and arrive through technical analysis. There is just one way: to listen, to listen and to listen; simply that. Until the veils drop from people’s eyes; until the deafness of the internal ear ceases and starts to feel, despite its unprecedented novelty, Schoenberg’s music; the beauty of its melody, the prodigious art of its structure, the superb clarity and soberness of its forms, the genius of its constructions, the greatness of its conception, its spirituality, its ineffable emotionality.

However, much of or more than the technical revolution which Schoenberg has produced, so Protean is the diversity of his work, its content, its expression, that it has always disconcerted the critics. To pigeon-hole Schoenberg is impossible. He has eluded all labels or formulae.

From the ultra-romanticism of Gurrelieder, a vocal-instrumental symphony of massive dimensions, to the “constructivism” of the Chamber Symphony Op.9, the “impressionist” refinement of the Five Orchestral Pieces Op.16 and Pierrot Lunaire; from there still to the expressionism of the dramas Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand; or the objectivity of the Wind Quintet Op.26, the classical serenity of the Serenade Op.24 and the Suite Op.29, the pure spirituality of the String Quartet No.3, or of the Variations Op.31 for orchestra … what a fabulous richness, what a variety of styles, what a diversity of forms of expression! And what a profound originality of spirit, always true to itself throughout all that diversity! An originality already evident, clearly, in the first works of his youth, like Verklärte Nacht, Pelleas und Melisande and the Lieder Op.8 (which we shall shortly hear in Barcelona), in which the composer still uses traditional vocabulary and technical procedures. Always uncompromising originality: hence the opposition of the masses, yesterday as well as today; although today it seems to us almost inconceivable that those youthful works could irritate the audiences of 25 years ago. But today we merely appreciate to what extent with the novelty of their melodic, rhythmic and harmonic conception, Schoenberg was contradicting already the listening habits of pre-war audiences. We can’t understand it any more, simply because so much contemporary music, assimilating and disseminating Schoenbergian innovations, has familiarized our ear with a whole range of new sonorous relationships, dissonances that must have shocked the ears of earlier listeners, incapable of understanding their meaning through lack of experience.

The ear is the most conservative of the senses!

Never, on the other hand, has a “revolutionary” been more profoundly linked and in mutual sympathy with the past. There’s a notable story about Schoenberg in this regard. Called up during the war, it bothered him greatly when his soldier colleagues talked to him about music. He wanted to be a soldier. Nothing more. One of the questions that most used to irritate him was: “Are you that much discussed composer that has caused a musical revolution?” One day when an officer asked him in front of the whole company, Schoenberg replied, “Now I cannot deny it. But I must explain how it happened: someone or other had to do it; and as nobody else had the courage, in the end I volunteered.” An innovator in the opposite direction, really, and endowed with an enormous sense of responsibility. But also, genial intuition and powerful intelligence in the service of an artist of incorruptible conscience.

A conversation with Schoenberg (1931)⁹¹

About a month ago, Schoenberg settled for a while in Barcelona. He loves the country, the weather, the people, everything of ours that he has encountered up till now: to the extent that he aims to return every year to spend some time with us. We need hardly conceal our pleasure if this came about: above all, if his stay in our country benefited his health, as seems likely.

I do not pretend here to have interviewed him. Given that it is Schoenberg, I do not dare! I owe him too much gratitude and know how to admire and worship him too profoundly as a disciple to be able to betray him as a reporter. I can’t see himself in the absurd situation of that actual interviewer whom Schoenberg one day welcomed with the words, “Please start by telling me what I should say, and then I will try to tell you myself.” But I can give you some glimpses of the conversations I had with him in his small villa at La Salut, Barcelona, where there is a large window with a splendid view overlooking the urban landscape. Sometimes slightly veiled by fog and a bit chilly, sometimes, at noon, in the sunny tennis court, between sets, our talks on those autumnal days brought back memories of my periods of study with Schoenberg in Mödling, Vienna and Berlin.

Schoenberg disappoints and completely bewilders the journalist, for his opinions are not “sensational”. This should be particularly understood, maybe, in a man who, because of his work, is the most “sensational” figure in contemporary music; work which has not only said the last word to our generation, but seems likely to save its full revelatory power, its genuine and definitive “sensation” for future generations; especially when present generations, wary of how unpopularity digs its heels in around the greatest musician of our time, have decided to move away from him, to follow paths that lead more directly towards success.

Having dealt incidentally with this matter of young people’s tendencies today, Schoenberg said to me: “I found it very odd that, after the War, a lot of young people, showing a surprising lack of ‘practical sense’, started following me. Nowadays, however, I find less strange the fact most of them have at last acquired enough practical sense to know the time is ripe to put me right. I congratulate myself, because I like to walk alone. And, being my pupil, you know already how I have always insisted in warning those that approach near to my ‘danger zone’.”

In fact, Schoenberg has managed to discourage some young people. Maybe this is a good thing. The majority, for whom discouragement is more astutely appropriate, in enabling them to find an easier path, has already found a way of escaping from a difficult situation; and today, in opposition to Schoenberg, they preach the restoration of old historical styles and practice an ingenuous game called “neo-classicism”.

‘Back to Bach and Handel’, I hear them say! ‘If only those musicians could notice the great difference there is between Bach and Handel!’ If there has to be a return, I wish that at least they would make up their mind for Bach or for Handel. If this return would be to Bach, at bottom I would agree with it, and I would even promote it myself. But I’m afraid that if I taught these ‘returning’ musicians everything they need to know in order to compose like Bach, then composition would flow for them. That is what I hope, at least!

Regarding this old style which young people want to utilize nowadays, and the return to tonality and even to strict diatonicism which they preach, there seems to me a strong objection. Although in Europe, in the art-music of these last centuries, there were no such antecedents so that one could easily imagine a rigorously diatonic music, that is, based exclusively on the seven notes of the scale. But one could, strictly speaking, also abolish modulation. Because with the smallest modulating deviation the chromaticism we want to condemn would burst back in. For what reason do diatonic composers of today close their eyes to this question?

For my part, I can say that the compositions thus made which I have had the chance to listen to, do not agree at all with supposed diatonicism. On the contrary, to my ears, the dissonances in this music sound horrible, because they have no relationship with the rest. They have the effect of grease stains on a white waistcoat.

What significance do you give to your technique of twelve semitones?

I ought really to be surprised that you of all people should should ask me this question. For you must recall from our composition lessons that I am able to clarify more important problems than that one and like doing so. If you are after an answer for the public, I should say that, regarding twelve-tone technique, understanding is only possible for people who have enough knowledge about the general technique of our art, and not, simply, the usual dilettante notions of the Conservatoire. For the latter what I have to say now will continue to be an enigma for a long time.

What I mean when I say that, in composition with twelve tones it is the same way as in tonal music. In music with seven notes, the harmony is just an ‘inversion’ of the melody and vice-versa, the melody an ‘inversion’ of the harmony; with the only difference that instead of seven notes being used there are twelve. But, be it seven or twelve, everything, harmony or melody, proceeds from the same series. Now, the question of whether it is appropriate to underline and emphasize a tonic centre is not a question of aesthetics or taste, but merely one of capacity of understanding.

I’m sure of one thing, that no ‘brain owner’, like Beethoven, could doubt that another ‘brain owner’ could move whoever it affects. Regarding this, I, who know the effect my music provokes in me when I compose it, don’t feel the smallest anxiety faced with the future.

Reminiscences of Schoenberg (1955)⁹²

The man who revolutionized contemporary music was nothing of a revolutionary himself. In a special number of the magazine Musikblatter des Ansbruch, produced in Vienna in 1924 for Schoenberg’s 50th birthday, Hanns Eisler, a former pupil, went so far as to call him a “reactionary”. This is a surprising criticism, coming, as it does, from a communist, but it is nonsense too, apart from its doubtful orthodoxy.

The dig at the master was no doubt provoked by the fact that in his then most recent works – Serenade Op.24, Suite Op.25 and the Wind Quintet Op.26. Schoenberg had returned, at least nominally, to the use of sonata and other traditional forms. But how far his treatment of these forms corresponds in fact to traditional notions of form organization (Op.25 and 26 are pure twelve-tone compositions, by the way) that is quite another matter. The plain truth is that to that typical segment of the middle- and upper-middle-class of the days before and after 1914 who sported the intellectual hardening of the arteries with stupendous pride of prejudice, Schoenberg had been the bête noir almost from the beginning of his career, and shared alike with his friends and contemporaries, the “rebels” Kokoschka, Karl Kraus and the architect Adolf Loos, a full measure of neglect and contempt.

Schoenberg felt a deep reverence for the masters of the past. Their works were his constant terms of reference, both in his own creative work and in his teaching. Seldom can an innovator have scrutinized more heart-searchingly every prompting that bid him to defy accepted convention and venture into the unexplored. I remember that analysing his Three Piano Pieces Op.11 – one of his first “revolutionary” works – he once pointed out how often he had had to pause in the very act of writing down some of the more unusual sound-combinations, startled at the radicalism of his own spontaneous thought: and, rubbing out, he tried to take off the edge and tone the thing down, only to find, on re-reading his work the next day, that there was something palpably “wrong” in the passages thus emended and they would only sound “right” when he was able to restore the first notation.

Yet, as Schoenberg wrote in 1949, “very few critics have been able to discern to what extent the permanent laws of music are being observed in those works, or disregarded, or simply adapted to new circumstances; and all that has been happening is a process of growth and evolution in no way more exorbitant than such processes have always been in the history of music.” On the other hand, it is only too plain that without some degree of “exorbitance” there would be no evolution at all.

It was an important event in Schoenberg’s career when, in 1925, he was offered the succession to Busoni’s chair at the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. The Academy was the loftiest cultural institution in Germany at the time. Its members held the rank of Senator: and with the dignity of the office went a truly munificent stipend as well. To Schoenberg this meant complete security at last, the end of the long, lean years. It was an appointment for life, too – which didn’t of course prevent the Nazis from sacking him as soon as they came to power. The Chair, moreover, was a potential sinecure in the sense that, according to his contract, Schoenberg need not have taken any pupils at all in case the candidates for the so-called Meisterklasse did not seem to him promising enough. The choice of pupils was entirely up to him. He was supposed to reside in Berlin for periods of six months at a time, chosen at his pleasure, and teach such pupils ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of plates
• Chronology of Gerhard’s Life and Work
• Introduction
• I Composer and Public
• II Tradition and Innovation
• III Contemporary Composers 1929–1939
• IV Music and Drama
• V New Horizons
• VI Music in a Post-war Context
• Notes
• Appendix I: Chronological list of Gerhard’s writings
• Appendix II: List of musical compositions by Gerhard and selected discography
• Selected bibliography
• Index