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Updated: June 22, 2025
Schoenberg is, I said to myself, the crudest of all composers, for he mingles with his music sharp daggers at white heat, with which he pares away tiny slices of his victim's flesh. Anon he twists the knife in the fresh wound and you receive another horrible thrill, all the time wondering over the fate of the Lunar Pierrot and hold on! Here's the first clew.
The old order has changed, changed very much, yet I dimly feel that if this art is to endure it contains, perhaps in precipitation, the elements without which no music is permanent. But his elliptical patterns are interesting, above all bold. There is no such thing as absolute originality. Even the individual Schoenberg, the fabricator of nervous noises, leans heavily on Wagner.
Something more of humanity, sympathy for man and his experiences, inner freedom, might have saved him. But it was just the poetic gift that the man was lamentably without. And so, freighted with too much erudition and too little wisdom, Reger went aground. Schoenberg Arnold Schoenberg of Vienna is the great troubling presence of modern music.
His black-and-white reproductions look pretty bad, and not nearly as original as his music. He also paints grey-green landscapes and visions, the latter dug up from the abysmal depths of his subconsciousness. Schoenberg is, at least, the object of considerable curiosity. What he will do next no man may say; but at least it won't be like the work of any one else. Schoenberg is always atmospheric.
Schoenberg is new; is he therefor to be considered better than Beethoven? Stravinsky is new; is he therefor to be considered worse than Liszt? Is an opera better than a song? Compare Pagliacci and Strauss's Ständchen. Is a string quartet better than a piece for the piano?
There is an unnecessary deal of marching and countermarching of instruments, an obsession with certain rhythms that becomes purely mechanical, an intensification of the contrapuntal pickings and peckings that annoy so often in the compositions of Brahms. It is Schoenberg the intellectualist, Schoenberg the Doctor of Music, not Schoenberg the artist, who obtains here.
Their disparate tendencies bring to the lips the old query, Under which king? Some think that Arnold Schoenberg may be a possible antagonist in the future, but for the present it is Reger and Strauss, and no third in opposition. The Strauss problem is a serious one. In America much criticism of his performances has contrived to evade the real issue.
More shocking still would be the suspicion that in time I might be persuaded to like this music, to embrace, after abhorring it. As for Schoenberg, the painter he paints, too! I won't take even the guarded praise of such an accomplished artist as Kandinsky as sufficient evidence. I've not seen any of the composer's "purple cows," and hope I never shall see them.
Joseph Speckbacher commanded the right wing, whose line extended from the heights of Passberg to the bridges of Hall and Volders; Hofer was with the centre, and had his headquarters at the inn of Spade, on the Schoenberg; Haspinger directed the left, and advanced by Mutters.
The cause of the unsatisfactoriness of much of the music of Strauss and Schoenberg, Reger and Mahler, is doubtless to be found in the innate weakness of the men themselves rather more than in the unhealthiness of the atmosphere in which they passed their lives. Still, the case of Mahler makes one hesitate a while before passing judgment.
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