The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Alex Ross
poem Transfigured Night, written in 1899, ends with twelve bars of glistening D major, the fundamental note never budging in the bass. Gurre-Lieder, a huge Wagnerian cantata for vocal soloists, multiple choruses, and super-sized orchestra, begins with a great steam bath of E-flat major, probably in imitation of the opening to Wagner’s Ring. Yet all is not well in Romantic paradise. Unexplained dissonances rise to the surface; chromatic lines intersect in a contrapuntal tangle; chords of longing fail to resolve.
The young Schoenberg encountered opposition, but he also received encouragement from the highest musical circles. The Mahlers regularly invited him to their apartment near the Schwarzenbergplatz, where, according to Alma, he would incite heated arguments by offering up “paradox of the most violent description.” Afterward, Gustav would say to Alma, “Take good care you never invite that conceited puppy to the house again.” Before long, another invitation would arrive.
Mahler found Schoenberg’s music mesmerizing and maddening in equal measure. “Why am I still writing symphonies,” he once exclaimed, “if that is supposed to be the music of the future!” After a rehearsal of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, Mahler asked the musicians to play a C-major triad. “Thank you,” he said, and walked out. Yet he made a show of applauding Schoenberg’s most controversial works, knowing how destructive the critics and claques of Vienna could be.
Strauss, too, found Schoenberg fascinating—“very talented,” he said, even if the music was “overloaded.” The two composers met during Schoenberg’s first stint in Berlin—Wolzogen, the director of the Buntes Theater, had collaborated with Strauss on his second opera, the anti-philistine comedy Feuersnot—and Strauss helped his younger colleague locate other sources of income. When Schoenberg later founded the Society for Creative Musicians in Vienna, Strauss accepted an honorary membership, and expressed the hope that the new organization would “blessedly light up many minds darkened by decades of malice and stupidity.”
Schoenberg withheld from Strauss the impertinence that he showed to Mahler. “I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, honored master,” the future revolutionary wrote obsequiously in 1903, “once again for all the help you have given me at a sacrifice to yourself in the most sincere manner. I will not forget this for the whole of my life and will always be thankful to you for it.” As late as 1912, Schoenberg still felt nervous and schoolboyish in Strauss’s presence: “He was very friendly. But I behaved very awkwardly … I stammered and surely left the impression of a servile devotion on Strauss.” Schoenberg told himself that he should have been more of a “Selfian”—as proudly self-determined as Strauss himself.
In May 1906, the Schoenberg contingent had gone to see Salome in Graz. Beforehand, Schoenberg painstakingly studied the vocal score, which Mahler had given to him. It stood on his music stand, open to the first page. “Perhaps in twenty years’ time someone will be able to explain these harmonic progressions theoretically,” Schoenberg told his students. Aspects of Salome’s fractured tonality show up in the First Chamber Symphony, which Schoenberg wrote that summer. Yet this new piece was very different in tone and style from Strauss’s opera. Its strenuous working out of brief motivic figures recalled Viennese practice in the Classical period from Haydn to Beethoven. In a deliberate rejection of fin-de-siècle grandiosity, it was scored for a mini-orchestra of fifteen instruments, its sonorities rough rather than lush. Schoenberg was throwing off excess baggage, perhaps in anticipation of lean years to come. The process of condensation led to Pierrot lunaire, in which the soloist is accompanied by an agile band of two winds, two strings, and a piano.
Just as Debussy imagined new sounds while perusing images in Verlaine and Mallarmé, Schoenberg let poetry guide him. He relished the erotic visions of Richard Dehmel, who furnished the story of Transfigured Night. He also investigated, at Strauss’s suggestion, the plays of Maeterlinck; and in 1902 and 1903, he fashioned a large-scale orchestral tone poem on the subject of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, purportedly unaware that Debussy had just made a setting of the same text. But Schoenberg’s most crucial literary encounter was with the poetry of Stefan George, then the leading Symbolist among German writers.
George stood apart from his compatriots on account of his ardent Francophilia; he had gone to Paris in 1889, attended Mallarmé’s “Tuesdays” (the poet dubbed him “one of us”), and translated the major French poets into German. He might have met Debussy, though there is no evidence that he did. So determined was he to honor his French masters that he dropped capital letters from German nouns. A self-styled artist-prophet in the fin-de-siècle mode, George surrounded himself with a bevy of acolytes, among whom could always be found several beautiful adolescent boys. George’s circle inspired Mann’s satire “At the Prophet’s”; minus the homosexual element, it might also have served as a model for Schoenberg, who treated his students as disciples and seldom appeared in public without them. More important, George showed Schoenberg a way out of the easygoing pleasures of Viennese aesthetics. The sheer density of the poet’s imagery did not permit easy access, although sensual secrets resided in the labyrinth.
Schoenberg’s voyage to the other side began on December 17, 1907, when he set a poem from George’s collection Year of the Soul, much of which is concerned with an intense scene of farewell. It begins: “I must not in thanks sink down before you / You are the spiritual plain from which we rose.” The music hangs by only the thinnest thread to the old harmonic order. It purports to be in B minor, yet the home chord appears only three times in thirty measures, once beneath the word “agonizing.” Otherwise, it is made up of a ghostly flow of unrooted triads, ambiguous transitional chords, stark dissonances, and crystalline monodic lines, approximating the picture of an “ice-cold, deep-sleeping stream” with which the poem concludes. The date of composition is telling: eight days earlier, Schoenberg had bid farewell to Mahler at the Westbahnhof in Vienna. If, as seems possible, the fact of Mahler’s departure impelled the choice of text, then it carries a double message: the young composer has been abandoned by a father figure, yet he is also liberated, free to pursue a different love.
The next leg of the journey took place in the midst of personal crisis. Schoenberg had admitted into his circle an unstable character named Richard Gerstl, a gifted painter of brutal Expressionist tendencies. Under Gerstl’s direction, Schoenberg had taken up painting and found that he had a knack for it: his canvas The Red Gaze, in which a gaunt face stares out with bloodshot eyes, has come to be recognized as a minor masterpiece of its time and place. In May 1908 Schoenberg discovered that Gerstl was having an affair with his wife, Mathilde, and that summer he surprised the lovers in a compromising position. Mathilde ran off with Gerstl, then returned to her husband, whereupon Gerstl proceeded to stage a suicide that exceeded Weininger’s in flamboyance: he burned his paintings and hanged himself naked in front of a full-length mirror, as if he wanted to see his own body rendered in Expressionist style. The suicide took place on November 4, 1908, on the night of a Schoenberg concert to which Gerstl had not been invited; evidently, that rejection was the final straw.
Schoenberg himself struggled with thoughts of suicide. “I have only one hope—that I will not live much longer,” he wrote to his wife at the end of the summer. In a last will and testament that may have been an unused suicide note, he wrote, “I have cried, have behaved like someone in despair, have made decisions and then rejected them, have had ideas of suicide and almost carried them out, have plunged from one madness into another—in a word, I am totally broken.” He warned that he would “soon follow the path, find the resolution, that at long last might be the highest culmination of all human actions.” But, in an intriguingly vague turn of phrase, he could not foresee “whether it be my body that will give way or my soul.”
Suicide was not Schoenberg’s style. Just as Beethoven, in his Heiligenstadt Testament, resolved to forge ahead into a life of misery, Schoenberg pressed on. That same summer of 1908 he finished his Second Quartet, in which he hesitates at a crossroads, contemplating various paths forking in front of him. The first movement, written the previous year, still uses a fairly conventional late-Romantic language. The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo, unlike any other music of the time. It contains fragments of the folk song “Ach, du lieber Augustin”—the same tune that held Freudian significance for Mahler (or so Freud said). For Schoenberg, the song seems to represent a bygone world disintegrating; the crucial