The Rest is Noise. Alex Ross
he will have nothing left.”
Strauss, for his part, thought that Schoenberg had gone off the deep end. That reaction must have been especially disappointing, for Schoenberg had written the Five Pieces in answer to Strauss’s request for some short works for his Berlin concert series. Schoenberg was so eager to show Strauss what he had done that he mailed off the Pieces before they were complete, and only ten days after the fourth of the set was finished. “There is no architecture and no build-up,” Schoenberg explained in an accompanying letter. “Just a vivid, uninterrupted succession of colors, rhythms, and moods.” Strauss politely wrote back that such “daring experiments” would be too much for his audience. Outwardly, he maintained his support, sending his colleague one hundred marks in 1911. But his true opinion surfaced three years later, when he made the mistake of writing to Alma Mahler that Schoenberg “would be better off shoveling snow than scribbling on music paper.” Alma showed the letter to Schoenberg’s student Erwin Stein, who decided that his teacher should be apprised of its contents. Schoenberg snapped that whatever he had learned from the composer of Salome he had misunderstood.
In the middle of these setbacks came a massive success, which, in the end, only magnified the composer’s anger. This was the 1913 world premiere of Gurre-Lieder, which had been sketched ten years earlier and exhibited a late-Romantic style that Schoenberg had since abandoned. The setting was Vienna’s Musikverein—the legendary hall where symphonies of Brahms and Bruckner had first been heard. The conductor was Franz Schreker, another Austrian composer who was moving through liminal realms of post-Wagnerian harmony. Signs of a triumph were already evident at intermission, as admirers crowded around the composer. But he was in a foul mood, and declined to receive new converts. When the performance was over, even the anti-Schoenbergians, some of whom had brought along whistles and other noisemakers in anticipation of a scandal, rose to their feet along with the rest of the crowd, chanting, “Schoenberg! Schoenberg!” The brawlers were weeping, one witness said, and their cheers sounded like an apology.
The hero of the hour failed to appear, even as the applause swelled. He was found, according to the violinist Francis Aranyi, “huddled in the most distant and darkest corner of the auditorium, his hands folded and a quiet, quizzical sort of smile on his face.”
This should have been Schoenberg’s hour of glory. But, as he recalled many years later, he felt “rather indifferent, if not even a little angry … I stood alone against a world of enemies.” When he finally walked to the podium, he bowed to the musicians but turned his back on the crowd. It was, Aranyi said, “the strangest thing that a man in front of that kind of a hysterical, worshipping mob has ever done.” Schoenberg had rehearsed this gesture; in 1911 he had made a painting titled Self-Portrait, Walking, in which the artist’s back is turned to the viewer.
The scandal to end all scandals erupted on March 31, 1913, again in the storied Musikverein. The program mapped Schoenberg’s world, past, present, and future. There were songs by Alexander Zemlinsky, Schoenberg’s only teacher; if the police had not intervened, the audience would also have heard Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Schoenberg was represented by his First Chamber Symphony. And new works by Berg and Webern offered up sonic phenomena that not even Schoenberg had yet imagined. The breaking point came during Berg’s song “Über die Grenzen des All,” or “Beyond the Limits of the Universe,” a setting of a brief, tantalizing poem by Peter Altenberg, at the beginning of which the winds and brass play a chord of twelve separate pitches—as if all the keys between two Cs on a piano were being made to sound at once.
“Loud laughter rang throughout the hall in response to that squawking, grinding chord,” one witness recalled. (It must have been a poor performance, because the chord is supposed to be very soft.) There were physical scuffles, and the police were called. A Dr. Viktor Albert complained that Erhard Buschbeck, the youthful organizer of the concert, had boxed him on the ears. Buschbeck responded that Dr. Albert had called him a “rascal,” making physical retaliation necessary. A lawsuit followed. “The public was laughing,” the operetta composer Oscar Straus testified in court. “And I openly confess, sir, that I laughed, too, for why shouldn’t one laugh at something genuinely comical?” The sound of the scuffle, Straus quipped, was the most harmonious music of the evening. The report of the trial took up almost an entire page of the Neue Freie Presse, pushing aside the murder trial of one Johann Skvarzil.
Atonality
The source of the scandal is not hard to divine; it has to do with the physics of sound. Sound is a trembling of the air, and it affects the body as well as the mind. This is the import of Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone, which tries to explain why certain intervals attack the nerve endings while others have a calming effect. At the head of Helmholtz’s rogues’ gallery of intervals was the semitone, which is the space between any two adjacent keys on a piano. Struck together, they create rapid “beats” that distress the ear—like an irritating flash of light, Helmholtz says, or a scraping of the skin. Fred Lerdahl, a modern theorist, puts it this way: “When a periodic signal reaches the inner ear, an area of the basilar membrane is stimulated, the peak of which fires rapidly to the auditory cortex, causing the perception of a single pitch. If two periodic signals simultaneously stimulate overlapping areas, the perturbation causes a sensation of ‘roughness.’” Similar roughnesses are created by the major seventh, slightly narrower than an octave, and by the minor ninth, slightly wider. These are precisely the intervals that Schoenberg emphasizes in his atonal music.
Psychological factors also come into play when the music is set in front of a crowd. Looking at a painting in a gallery is fundamentally different from listening to a new work in a concert hall. Picture yourself in a room with, say, Kandinsky’s Impression III (Concert), painted in 1911. Kandinsky and Schoenberg knew each other, and shared common aims; Impression III was inspired by one of Schoenberg’s concerts. If visual abstraction and musical dissonance were precisely equivalent, Impression III and the third of the Five Pieces for Orchestra would present the same degree of difficulty. But the Kandinsky is a different experience for the uninitiated. If at first you have trouble understanding it, you can walk on and return to it later, or step back to give it another glance, or lean in for a close look (is that a piano in the foreground?). At a performance, listeners experience a new work collectively, at the same rate and approximately from the same distance. They cannot stop to consider the implications of a half-lovely chord or concealed waltz rhythm. They are a crowd, and crowds tend to align themselves as one mind.
Atonality was destined to raise hackles. Nothing could have been more perfectly calculated to cause consternation among the art-loving middle classes. But Schoenberg did not improve his situation when he set about answering his critics. He was a gifted writer, with a knack for turning out sharp-edged barbs: not for nothing was the acidulous Karl Kraus his literary hero. Starting in 1909, he issued a stream of commentaries, polemics, theoretical musings, and aphorisms. At times, he argued his case with charm and wit. More often, though, the fighter in him came out, and he summoned up what he called “the will to annihilate.”
In a way, Schoenberg was most persuasive in justifying his early atonal works when he emphasized their illogical, irrational dimension.
As far as we can tell, he composed them in something like an automatic state, sketching the hyperdense Erwartung in only seventeen days. All the while, the composer was in the grip of convulsive emotion—feelings of sexual betrayal, personal abandonment, professional humiliation. That turbulence may be sensed in some of the explanations that Schoenberg provided to friends in the period from 1908 to 1913. To Kandinsky he wrote: “Art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill.” To the composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni he wrote: “I strive for: complete liberation from all forms, from all symbols of cohesion and of logic.” And he instructed Alma Mahler to listen for “colors, noises, lights, sounds, movements, glances, gestures.”
In public, however, Schoenberg tended to explain his latest works as the logical, rational outcome of a historical process. Perhaps because he was suspected of having gone mad, he insisted that he had no choice but to act as he did. To quote again his 1910 program note: the music was the product of “necessity.” Instead of separating himself from the titans of the past,