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Updated: July 22, 2025
There is much in Schoenberg's career that makes this explanation something more than an easy way of disposing of a troublesome problem, makes it, indeed, eminently plausible. Schoenberg was never the most instinctive and sensible, the least cerebral and intellectualizing of musicians.
The coarsening of the craftsmanship, the spiritual bankruptcy, of the later Strauss, the grotesque pedantry of Reger, the intellectualism with which the art of Schoenberg has always been tainted, and by which it has been corrupted of late, the banality of Mahler, dovetail suspiciously.
And so it went on to the end, and I noted as we progressed that Schoenberg, despite his ugly sounds, was master of more than one mood; witness the shocking cynicism of the gallows song Die dürre Dirne mit langen Halse. Such music is shameful "and that's the precise effect I was after" could the composer triumphantly answer, and he would be right.
She was all in a flutter at having thus unexpectedly come upon appreciation of the beauties and merits her mirror told her she possessed. When Mrs. Schoenberg, her aunt, rose to go, she gave Feuerstein a chance to say in a low aside: "My queen! To-morrow at eleven at Bloomingdale's." Her blush and smile told him she would be there.
If we may take him at his word Arnold Schoenberg has a system of modulation. At least it is his very own. Are long compositions better than short ones? This may seem a silly question but I have read criticisms based on a theory that they were.
Exclusive of the theme of the scherzo, which recalls a little overmuch the Teutonic banalities of Mahler's symphonies, the quality of the music is, on the whole, grave and poignant and uplifted. It has a scholarly dignity, a magistral richness, a chiaroscuro that at moments recalls Brahms, though Schoenberg has a sensuous melancholy, a delicacy and an Hebraic bitterness that the other has not.
How does Schoenberg do it? How does he pull off the trick? It is not a question to be lightly answered. In the first place the personality of the listener is bound to obtrude itself; dissociation from one's ego if such a thing were possible would be intellectual death; only by the clear, persistent image of ourselves do we exist banal psychology as old as the hills.
His admirers and pupils think so, however, and several of them have recorded their opinion in a little book, published at Munich, 1912, by R. Piper & Co. The life of Arnold Schoenberg, its outer side, has thus far been uneventful, though doubtless rich in the psychical sense. He is still young, born in Vienna, September 13, 1874.
Now, the field being cleared, let us see what the music of the new man is like. Certainly, he is the hardest musical nut to crack of his generation, and the shell is very bitter in the mouth. Early in December, 1912, the fourth performance of a curious composition by Schoenberg was given at the Choralionsaal in the Bellevuestrasse, Berlin.
If this new music is so distractingly atrocious what right has a listener to bother about Pierrot? What's Pierrot to him or he to Pierrot? Perhaps Schoenberg had caught his fish in the musical net he used, and what more did he want, or what more could his listeners expect? for to be hooked or netted by the stronger volition of an artist is the object of all the seven arts.
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