Political and Religious Ideas in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg

Charlotte M. Cross, Russell A. Berman, Charlotte M. Cross, Russell A. Berman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135654016
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The original essays in this collection chronicle the transformation of Arnold Schoenberg's works from music as pure art to music as a vehicle of religious and political ideas, during the first half of the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary volume includes contributions from musicologists, music theorists, and scholars of German literature and of Jewish studies.

Chapter 1
Abstract Polyphonies

The Music of Schoenberg’s Nietzschean Moment

WILLIAM E. BENJAMIN

The development of Arnold Schoenberg’s religious thought, in the direction of an uncompromising ethical monotheism, is paralleled by gradual changes in his approach to composition, in the direction of conscious, rational control of the creative process.¹ This parallelism seems straightforward in one sense: as he moved towards an explicit and consciously articulated religious position, one deeply felt and self-generated but philosophically in accord with liberal Judaism, he also adopted a more formal, more deliberately intellectual, and thus more describable way of composing.² Both moves, in other words, involved a shift from the emotional and necessarily private to the deliberate and communal, the relevant community having been actual in the case of religion and potential where composition was concerned. Looked at more carefully, however, what looks like the transposition of a process of transformation from one sphere into another conceals a relationship of inversion. For as his music became, in a sense, more knowable and intersubjectively describable, Schoenberg came to understand God as absolutely unknowable and indescribable, as the God of Moses as interpreted by Jewish philosophers since Maimonides.³

Schoenberg made his radical break with musical tradition in 1908, full of confidence in his intuitive powers—his ear for unorthodox pitch combinations and his instinct for rhythm and form—and with the conviction that he was genuinely inspired, that he was composing as if under the compulsion of some mysterious (inner) force. In his writings from the years 1908–11, he insists repeatedly, and with the greatest vehemence, that inspiration is the beginning and end of authentic artistry. He writes, for example, that

the artist’s creativity is instinctive. Consciousness has little influence on it. He feels as if what he does were dictated to him. As if he did it only according to the will of some power or other within him, whose laws he does not know.⁴

Moreover, one has only to examine the compositional sources from those years to see that these are not empty proclamations, that the music he penned at that time flowed directly from his musical unconscious. I will justify this statement in what follows, but taking it at face value leads one to conclude that the unprecedented leaps Schoenberg made—in the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11 (1909), the song cycle, Fifteen Poems from the “Book of the Hanging Gardens,” op. 15 (1908–9), the Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16 (1909), and the dramatic work for soprano and orchestra, Erwartung [Expectancy], op. 17 (1909)—arose from and were probably made possible by an essentially antirational view of art. In these pages I will try to explain why this attitude, which was compatible with Schoenberg’s broader philosophical stance at the time, was unable to survive the ideological tum that he executed between 1912 and the early 1920s. In this way, I hope to show that there is no incongruity between the spiritual and compositional paths that he took as he moved from free atonality to twelve-tone composition, despite their apparent divergence.

The antirational view is clearly expressed in Schoenberg’s 1911 treatise, the Harmonielehre [Theory of Harmony], in which he inveighs against the possibility of defining the beautiful by way of rules.⁵ He declares that which most people find beautiful in art to be, instead, a nonessential by-product of the artist’s exploration of nature, a process that draws only on the artist’s integrity as its guide. In his view, true beauty (or true worth) resides in faithfulness to life, in capturing aspects of life’s complexity and fullness. And this relationship of art to life can in no ways be expressed as an equation, life form=artistic representation. “Life is not symbolized that way,” he writes, “for life is: activity.”⁶ This conception of musical worth can be linked to that of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose idea that “the composer reveals the inmost essence of the world and utters the most profound wisdom in a language which his reason does not understand” is quoted approvingly in Schoenberg’s 1912 essay, “The Relationship to the Text.”⁷ But Schoenberg’s understanding of this “inmost essence” in the period under consideration, bespeaks the influence of the young Nietzsche, who tropes it as a primal unity that is also a site of “pain and contradiction.”⁸ Nietzsche gives this unity the name of Dionysus and sees its experience as the object of ancient Dionysian ritual. In such ritual and symbolically in Dionysian art, as he sees them, individuals merge in a paroxysm of annihilation, in which the pain of being destroyed recedes before the joy of becoming part of a higher creativity, that of the unitary life force. Moreover, the ugly has its rights in his conception of art, because it is part of the truth of life, perhaps more authentically so than the beautiful. As he puts it,

… the ugly and the disharmonic are part of an artistic game that the will in the amplitude of its pleasure plays with itself. But this primordial phenomenon of Dionysian art is difficult to grasp, and there is only one direct way to make it intelligible and grasp it immediately; through the wonderful significance of musical dissonance …. The joy aroused by the tragic myth has the same origin as the joyous sensation of dissonance in music.⁹

One may dispute my association of Schoenberg’s conception of music (in 1908–11) with Dionysian art as characterized by Nietzsche,¹⁰ because the two are not entirely congruent. Schoenberg, after all, spends many pages of his Harmonielehre arguing that there is no such thing as a nonharmonic tone (a tone that is foreign to the prevailing chord). “Disharmony,” then, might seem to be foreign to him as a musical concept. Yet it is hard not to see in Schoenberg’s views a reflection of the Nietzschean dictum that “nothing is more conditional—or, let us say, narrower—than our feeling for beauty.”¹¹ Moreover, Nietzsche’s striking image in the quoted passage, of musical dissonance as standing for Dionysian joy, seems to cry out for appropriation by the composer who was, after all, dissonance’s emancipator.

Other important aspects of Schoenberg’s overall artistic outlook in 1908–11 are specifically Nietzschean. One is the idea that artistic activity is a striving toward the future, the basic theme of Also sprach Zarathustra [Thus Spake Zarathustra].¹² A second is the condemnation of traditional aesthetics as a means by which the artistically weak attempt to subdue the artistically strong, which parallels Nietzsche’s view of traditional morality.¹³ And a third manifests itself in a correspondence between Schoenberg’s description, in the summer of 1909, of what he was trying to accomplish with his new music (to be discussed below), and Nietzsche’s discussion of “frenzy”—a physiological state in which the excitability of the artist’s nervous system has been maximally enhanced—as an indispensable condition for the creation of significant art in the era he was heralding.¹⁴

I shall assume that these relationships speak for themselves in the first and second cases. Of the third I shall have more to say in what follows. And the idea behind all of these, that Schoenberg’s early atonal music instantiates Nietzsche’s conception of Dionysian art—by reflecting a vision of life (nature) as essentially multiplex and conflicted—will be taken up as the basis of the musical analysis that is the principal contribution of this paper.

If there is anything categorically true of Nietzsche’s philosophy, despite his rabid opposition to final truths, it is his rejection of the traditional dichotomies of mind and body, of spirit and matter, and of the world beyond and this world. One may summarize this rejection as deicide, and Nietzsche would have been happy to have it so regarded. It is clear that, in his aesthetic vision of reality, there is no place for God. Indeed, there is no place for ideal, unchanging entities of any sort. Although Schoenberg left us little indication of his metaphysical commitments in the years 1908–11, it seems to me significant that the idealist dichotomy between idea (the essence of a work, which has an ideal, ahistorical existence) and style (the work’s historical garb or manner) has no important place in the Harmonielehre. This opposition, in which “idea” is of course the platonically privileged term, is basic to Schoenberg’s later thought. Whereas it is doubtless an overstatement to equate Schoenberg’s religious views at the time he broke with normal tonality with Nietzsche’s, it is not wrong to say that, in the former’s world view at this time, God has no existence apart from human creativity, and manifests himself only in works of genius.

The libretto for the short stage work, Die glückliche Hand [The Fortunate Hand], op.18 (1910–13), which Schoenberg wrote in 1910, shows some change in this regard. It identifies humans as formed in God’s image, and bemoans their degradation by materialism. It cannot be described, however, as a religious text, one concerned with articulating the nature of divinity or of our relationship to it. But it may be significant that Schoenberg could not advance very far with the composition of the music for this text in 1910, and was able to complete it only in 1912–13. It is as if he felt that his purely intuitive approach to composition was unsuited to the expression of openly spiritual concerns and needed to wait until he was ready to work in a more intellectual and systematic manner. This manner evolved in 1912–13, during which he became openly preoccupied with mystical concepts, and especially with the radical affirmation of the reality of spirit in such literary sources as Balzac’s short novel, Seraphita. This strange, fable-like story, based on the writings of the eighteenth-century mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, discourses on such matters as reincarnation, the relationship between humans and angels, and the geography of heaven. It is inconceivable that Schoenberg would have contemplated basing a work on a text such as this in 1909, but in 1912 he began to conceive a large choral symphony that would use the final scene of Seraphita, in which a seventeen-year-old hermaphrodite, who is half human, half angel, is assumed into heaven. In the end, this project came to naught, but it turned into Die Jakobsleiter [Jacob‘s Ladder], for which a libretto was completed in 1915. Here, elements of Balzac’s novella are grafted on to the story from the Hebrew Bible, marking a further stage in Schoenberg’s religious odyssey back to Judaism, or rather towards a full engagement with it. Although he never completed the music for this work—he began it in 1917 and resumed it many years later, after World War II—by 1916 he had completed four songs on texts of an explicitly spiritual nature, published as op. 22.¹⁵ Precisely in these years (1912–17) we see a gradual change in his attitude as an artist. In the first place he writes much less, and more uncertainly, finishing few of the projects he contemplates. In terms of approach and technique, there is a progressive return to sketching and other kinds of planning, a partial reversion to more traditional formal and textural procedures, and, with his incomplete setting of his own text to Die Jakobsleiter, the beginnings of the twelve-tone system.¹⁶

Of course, Swedenborgian theosophy is a long way from ethical monotheism. The latter posits God as radically other, as pure idea, while the former sees God and man as a unity, obscured for man by the error of materialism, by the impediment of his body.¹⁷ Theosophy, therefore, could allow the artist to see his or her art as a manifestation of godliness, which in no wise would imply abandonment of an instinctual approach. For Schoenberg, though, engagement with God implied new modes of acting, a sense of service, even learning how to pray.¹⁸ It involved taking a step back from total faith in oneself, or, in Schoenberg’s case, in the power of his musical ear.

The dynamic seems clear. As the visionary who can see through to the heart of nature, the expressionist artist (Schoenberg in 1908–11), through untrammeled reliance upon instinct, produces works that spring forth as godlike acts, that look to the future and defy explanation in terms of accepted disciplinary theorizing. But as soon as this artist begins to think about what the divine might actually be, he or she begins to sense a distance from this entity, and thus to doubt the infallibility of instinct. With the arrival at monotheism, the artist recognizes God as totally other, and reevaluates the Nietzschean conception of creativity as a form of idolatry. No longer an “Overman,” or a materially encumbered emanation of divine spirit, the artist becomes a simple person, and the artist’s works take on a dimension of ethical responsibility, a requirement of a kind of truthfulness. In Schoenberg’s case, the identification with God is replaced by one with Moses, the lawgiver.¹⁹ No longer is the act of composition beyond reason, because ultimately at one with the world. Now only the law is truth, and its pursuit demands the partial renunciation of instinctual attunement and the compensatory embrace of intellect.

If the account I have given of the music of 1908–11 is valid, it should be expected to pose intractable problems for those who attempt to read the music ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Editors’ Introduction
• Chapter 1: Abstract Polyphonies: The Music of Schoenberg’s Nietzschean Moment
• Chapter 2: Arnold Schoenberg as Poet and Librettist: Dualism, Epiphany, and Die Jakobsleiter
• Chapter 3: Androgyny and the Eternal Feminine in Schoenberg’s Oratorio Die Jakobsleiter
• Chapter 4: Von heute auf morgen: Schoenberg as Social Critic
• Chapter 5: Schoenberg in Shirtsleeves: The Male Choruses, Op. 35
• Chapter 6: The Prophet and the Pitchman: Dramatic Structure and Its Musical Elucidation in Moses und Aron, Act I, Scene 2
• Chapter 7: Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron: A Vanishing Biblical Nation
• Chapter 8: Schoenberg Rewrites His Will: A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46
• Chapter 9: Texts and Contexts of A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46
• Chapter 10: Returning to a Homeland: Religion and Political Context in Schoenberg’s Dreimal tausend Jahre
• Chapter 11: Schoenberg’s Modern Psalm, Op. 50c and the Unattainable Ending
• Contributors