Ed Zubrow asks: > Having been listening to a lot of Richard Strauss lately, I am a bit > perplexed by [this quote from Arnold Schoenberg]: > > "I was never *revolutionary*. The *only revolutionary* in our time was > Strauss." > > I know that Schoenberg admired Strauss and that the latter supported > Schoenberg, though he was befuddled by the development (pun intended) > of his music. I don't really know, but I can always guess. What seems revolutionary to us, to Schoenberg was merely a tiny evolutionary step. Schoenberg always saw his dodecaphony as a way to discipline post-Wagnerian chromaticism. More and more dissonance was coming into music anyway (look at Strauss's Elektra or Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy). What bothered Schoenberg was the lack of an organizing principal. Music often modulated for no reason at all. The old function of modulation delineating the parts of form meant less and less, because the music was modulating practically from bar to bar. Schoenberg wanted to reassert the primacy of form, almost always classical or classically-derived form. After his tone poems, Strauss was the great formal revolutionary, especially in his operas. Rosenkavalier is in that sense even wilder than Elektra. The "atonality" that hangs up so many listeners meant very little to Schoenberg. Indeed, he saw little difference between something like his Pierrot lunaire and Verklaerte Nacht. However, I would also say that Schoenberg mistook himself. His view of form really was a revolutionary step. We see form differently than Brahms did, largely due to Schoenberg. The "method of composing with twelve tones" took a fundamentally different mind set than the classic Viennese tradition, no matter how much Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern tried to bridge the gap. Steve Schwartz *********************************************** The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html