Genius & Anxiety by Norman Lebrecht

Author:Norman Lebrecht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2019-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

Being Arnold Schoenberg is never easy, least of all for the man behind the name. Edgy, provocative, hotheaded, stubborn, insensitive, antisocial, and downright rude are just a few of the adjectives he attracts in the 1890s as a half-trained cellist with ideas miles above his station. No less forceful, on the other hand, is his innate charisma, a magnetic power to enthrall outstanding musicians and infuse them with his heretical thoughts. His first captive is Alexander Zemlinsky, the confused son of a former Catholic who works as a Sephardi synagogue beadle and his half-Muslim wife. The early works of Zemlinsky catch the ear of the dying Brahms, who predicts great things for the young man. Schoenberg, who joins his amateur orchestra, lifts him off the Brahms track into a modern mind-set. Zemlinsky is persuaded to give the younger man lessons in composition—he is the only teacher Schoenberg ever acknowledges—and introduce his sister Mathilde, whom the jobless Schoenberg promptly marries. Schoenberg completes a string sextet, Verklärte Nacht, which one critic astutely likens to Wagner’s Tristan prelude taken with the ink still wet and smeared down the page. Schoenberg, by the turn of the century, is going way off what audiences expect to hear.

He has a stroke of luck, a chance meeting with the loveliest girl in Vienna. Zemlinsky has been giving lessons to Alma Schindler, a nubile late teenager with a taste for talent. She makes out with Alex on the piano stool, stopping just short of consummation, and then dumps him for a man twice her age, the director of the Vienna Opera, Gustav Mahler. Zemlinsky turns rejection into opportunity. When Mahler asks to meet Alma’s young friends, he turns up, with Schoenberg, for coffee. Mahler likes Zemlinsky on sight and promises him a job at the opera. Schoenberg, on the other hand, is shabbily dressed and full of unsound opinions. Voices are raised, and Schoenberg storms out. “Don’t come back!” yells Mahler. Two weeks later, he says to Alma, “Why don’t those young guys come round anymore?”

Mahler gets his brother-in-law Arnold Rosé, concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic, to perform Verklärte Nacht. Schoenberg’s next work, a string quartet, leaps neurotically all over the page. He writes a chamber symphony, “filled with joy at the expectation of success,” only to be frosted by the audience. His next string quartet has a soprano singing Stefan George’s poem “I feel the air from another planet.” As the singer draws breath for her second solo, the musical line runs right off the tonal rails. “Kill the longing, close the wound,” sings the soprano with a naked Freudian subtext. A riot erupts. Arrests are made. Vienna has a “scandal” on its hands. Schoenberg is the bogeyman of music, the lunatic who loathes Brahms, the enemy of the bourgeoisie.

In atonality, any note can be used without relation to what comes before or after. Schoenberg is an anarchist in the musical treasury. Before now, a work of music is governed by a signature key: A, or B-flat, or any other letter up to G.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.