Arnold Schoenberg

* Chamber Symphony No. 1
* Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
* Chamber Symphony No. 2

Alfred Brendel (piano), SWF Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden/Michael Gielen
Total time: 60:59
Philips 446 683-2

Summary for the Busy Executive: Splendid. Sensitively played.

Close to fifty years after his death, Schoenberg still makes many
listeners go "eewwwww." They look at his name on the rare concert program
as a child looks at brussels sprouts on the dinner plate - with at least
a sense of affront and perhaps a little despair.  For many, Schoenberg is
the Man Who Ruined Music, even though most haven't heard his output or, if
they have, get little coherence from what they've encountered.  It becomes
"intellectual" music (in a bad sense).  To be sure, most of Schoenberg's
fans and acolytes haven't helped.  Schoenberg's own writings contain much
off-putting stuff.  The fight over Schoenberg has become, on both sides,
largely a religious, rather than aesthetic war - a fight over a style
rather than over a body of work.  During its course, several dubious
propositions have arisen on both sides.

Schoenberg formulated a system - known variously as "serialism,"
"dodecaphony," "twelve-tone," and "atonal" - for which much has been
claimed, on both sides of the battle line.  However, the terms don't
come all that close to describing the music.  "Atonal" describes music
not written according to Schoenberg's basic rules, and there are tonal
serial pieces, arguably dating back to the Renaissance.  Furthermore, many
composers before and after Schoenberg wrote themes which used all twelve
notes of the chromatic scale, usually in a tonal context and certainly not
adopting Schoenberg's procedures.  However, since Schoenberg referred to
his discovery as the "method of composing with twelve tones," I will use
the term "dodecaphony" or "twelve-tone" to refer to it.  Depending on whom
you talk to, it's either the greatest thing since shampoo and conditioner
in one or single-handedly responsible for the estrangement of composer and
audience.  As far as I'm concerned, it's neither.  A technique in itself is
aesthetically neutral.  Mozart and Salieri used the same techniques.  We
have to talk about individual works.  A particular style guarantees neither
treasure nor trash.  The very term "art" implies how well something is
done.  The odds run against any composer - twelve-tone or not - turning
out a Certifiable Masterpiece.  Schoenberg himself said, "Of course, a soul
you have to have." If it were easy, anyone could do it.  Moreover, much of
the current audience is estranged from all sorts of composers.  I've seen
concert-goers walk out on Nielsen, early Stravinsky, Mahler, Vaughan
Williams, Bernstein, Shostakovich, and Beethoven.  I've seen concert-goers
walk out in droves before the music was even played, simply because they
didn't recognize the name on the program.  I doubt that dodecaphony alone
or even mostly has much to do with this.  This sad state of affairs seems
far more complex.

As I've said, dodecaphony is one more technique in a composer's toolkit.
It doesn't make, as some Schoenbergians have claimed, everything else
obsolete.  A power router doesn't always supplant a dovetail plane.
Furthermore, the influence of the system has been overstated by adherents
and foes alike.  If twelve-tonalists really had the power they claimed,
they'd get more recordings and performances.  A brief check of CD releases
and concert programs in any given year should disabuse anybody of this
notion.  Commissions of new work - usually a sign of prestige - show a real
variety of style.  The Argo compilation Dance Mix (Argo 444454-2) lists not
one twelve-tone composer amid the current prestigious smorgasbord.  It has
turned out that the "tonal-atonal" fight was irrelevant to the way music
actually moved, just like the "Brahms-Wagner" knockdown extravaganza of the
Nineteenth Century.  In each case, composers went their own way.  We have
now neither the tonal Earthly Paradise nor the atonal Olympus, but a wide
array of musical styles, only one of which is dodecaphonic.  I would also
point out that Schoenberg wrote, throughout his career, in different
idioms, even after he formulated his system.  Listen to the Concerto for
String Quartet, the Cello Concerto, the Suite in C for Strings, the
Weihnachtsmusik 1921, the 3 Folksongs, as well as to the early,
super-Mahlerian Gurrelieder.

I hate having to bring this sort of thing up - something I feel the need
to do with no other composer - but Schoenberg really has become the musical
Antichrist whom well-meaning people believe has fundamentally changed
Western European music.  In other words, he has become a figure rather
than a composer, rather like Beethoven throughout much of the Nineteenth
Century.  In fact, one thing has popped up pretty consistently in my
experience with Schoenberg.  If you meet up with those who want to talk
about the system (for and against), rather than pieces of music Schoenberg
actually wrote, you can pretty much tune them out.  They've already missed
the point.  Does the purposeful lack of key center mean that one hears the
music differently? Yes and no.  One isn't aware of themes as such (unless
you've really studied or you listen better than I do).  Intervals and
gestures tend to be emphasized, rather than themes.  I suspect that most
people are bothered by this less than they are by the lack often of
definite phrases - in other words, the Wagnerian unending flow of one
phrase into the next.  I know even very few professionals, after all,
who can tell a dodecaphonic score from a highly chromatic one simply by
listening.  But this applies only to certain pieces, and it's truer of
Schoenberg's earlier practice than of his later.  In fact, it's the
main reason why I dislike his most popular work, the moony, overwrought
Verklaerte Nacht.  In my experience, people most want to know where they
are in a piece or at least to watch for and confirm signposts.  What most
listeners really need, I believe, is a listener's guide to Schoenberg, a
roadmap of the larger sections and the occasional side trip to the
exceptional scenic view - a guide in which the word "atonal" or "serial"
is never mentioned and in which the music is discussed as one talks about,
say, Dvorak's "New World."

For years, I almost never listened to Schoenberg, at least as a kid,
because people kept telling me how awful he was and because I have yet
to like Verklaerte Nacht, the piece they said they at least tolerated.
I never actually had to listen, since he was never on concert programs
I attended and most of his music went unrecorded.  The lush choral
masterpiece Friede auf Erden was the exception.  This all changed my
freshman year of college.  By chance, I walked in on two pianist friends of
mine practicing for concerto competitions (one of them took the orchestra's
music).  I sat in the back of the hall and listened to something that
excited me - I remember the sharp, nervous rhythms and the odd harmonic
world.  What was it, I asked after they had finished.  You've probably
guessed that it was the Schoenberg piano concerto.  I learned two lessons:
always listen for yourself and pay no attention to the signature at the
bottom of the score.

I rushed out to get the only available recording at the time:  Glenn
Gould with an L.A.  pickup group conducted by Robert Craft.  What a
disappointment!  Compared to what my friends had played, this was stodgy,
muddy - an aural swamp.  Gould was fine, but I've never considered Craft -
despite his love for and advocacy of the music - all that convincing a
Schoenberg interpreter (or Webern or Berg interpreter, for that matter).
It rudely introduced me to an important hindrance to Schoenberg's
reception - lack of good performances.  Even professionals seldom knew
what to make of the music, and Schoenberg often complained (privately;
he was pathetically grateful for any performance) of the lack of musical
comprehension among many of his interpreters, including big names like
Stokowski.  Still, I felt it important to record the work in any
performance, since it may have convinced other conductors and pianists
to take it up.  Vaughan Williams said that it took a thousand composers
to make a good one.  Unless luck rides with you, you can say the same for
performances.  There really is no Schoenberg performance tradition as
extensive as the ones for Beethoven, Brahms, and, recently, Mahler.  But
the years have passed and have brought outstanding recordings, including
those by Rosbaud, Boulez, Mehta (oddly enough), Huber, and Michael Gielen.

The two chamber symphonies appear decades apart, the first in 1906 during
Schoenberg's period of post-Wagnerian tonal chromaticism.  The opening
movement to the second chamber symphony comes from the same period,
although it was not completed until 1939.  Schoenberg often had problems
finishing pieces.  Sometimes he simply lost interest.  Other times he
couldn't see his way to his typically ambitious goals.  Still other times
he had waited so long that he felt he could no longer reconcile his younger
and current compositional self.  Schoenberg, with characteristic idealism,
began the Chamber Symphony No.  1 to write a popular hit full of tunes
everyone could hum.  It didn't work out quite that way.  About as many
people hum this symphony as hum the second movement of Mahler's eighth.
The Schoenberg work strikes me as a "concerto for orchestra," long before
Bartok's, especially since it so often features solo instruments against
the ensemble mass.  The orchestration - particularly considering the number
of contrapuntal lines - sounds out lean and clear almost to the point of
transparency.  The ideas, if not exactly hummable, are incisive, vigorous,
and memorable.  Schoenberg gives you a lot of them as well, and they tumble
in one after the other, fast and furious.  Schoenberg cast the work in one
long movement, but like many one-movement symphonies, it subdivides into
four large sections:  allegro moderato, scherzo and trio, adagio, and
recap.  After the briefest of introductions - brief but beautiful - the
allegro moderato alternates between a Straussian athletic striving and
tender, song-like reflection.  The scherzo's a contrapuntal showpiece,
a real test of players' ensemble "chops." It demands of each player that
he knows when to come to the center (often for just a couple of seconds)
and when to get out of the way.  The scherzo gives way - in a lovely
transitional passage based on superimposed fourths - to a marvelous slow
"movement," which meditates in a mood of calm and maturity.  In mood, it
reminds me of parts of Wagner's Siegfried-Idyl.  The recap takes us through
a radically foreshortened trip of the symphony - like looking at where
you've been through the wrong end of the telescope - so far and ends with
the bustling vigor of the opening.  Gielen makes all things clear,
including the larger architecture of the work.  I would have wanted
slightly more indulgence and singing in the quieter passages, but that's a
quibble.  The impulse Gielen and his players give to the movement more than
makes up for this.  The movement seems to go by in four huge spans.

The second chamber symphony, in two movements (Adagio and Con fuoco),
opens somewhat like Brahms's second serenade.  The work as a whole strikes
me as less self-consciously innovative, as if Schoenberg feels he has
nothing at this point to prove to anyone, beyond the beauty of the work
itself.  It's more comfortable with its Nineteenth-Century roots.  The
extensive opposition of solo instruments against mass, seen in the first
chamber symphony, gives way to more ensemble work.  The sound is mellower
here, less bright and aggressive.  Schoenberg has over thirty years of
experience as a composer behind him.  The whole movement sings a purely
Romantic song, filled with yearning.  I hear Bruckner in the background -
not the religious Bruckner, but the poet of resignation.  The con fuoco
movement follows with a light-hearted dance, gracious and gemutlich, for
the most part, giving the lie to the picture of Schoenberg as dour ascetic.
Little storms burst and clear, but I find large good humor uppermost in the
movement.  A recap of sorts occurs toward the end, when the regrets of the
adagio return.  Given the previous high spirits, the regrets no longer seem
so distant.  Schoenberg achieves a completely convincing turnaround in
mood.  The humor gives way to a painful great sadness, and the symphony
ends with this.  It immediately put me in mind of 1938-39, the Anschluss
and the invasion of Poland.  This is music that expresses the devastation
of one's home.  Gielen is faultless.  This is the finest recording of this
symphony I know, and I haven't the imagination to conceive of a better.

The Piano Concerto comes from the Forties, during Schoenberg's years in
southern California, as one of the most remarkable members of a remarkable
circle of European exiles, who included Stravinsky, Piatigorsky, Toch,
Thomas Mann, Kurt Weill (briefly), Brecht, Eisler, and Werfel.  Schoenberg
had attracted a few private composition pupils, including pianist, wit, and
show-biz personality Oscar Levant.  Even so, the Schoenbergs struggled to
make ends meet.  Levant resolved to do a good deed and commissioned for
$1000 a small piece he could play in his recitals.  Schoenberg agreed and
became excited.  His secretary informed Levant that the little piece was
becoming a piano concerto (with the name OSCAR, woven into the basic
material).  For so many thousands more, Levant could receive immortality.
Levant panicked.  It was much more money than he felt he could part with,
and he dropped out.  Luckily, another patron was found, and the work
received its public premiere in 1942 with the pianist Eduard Steuermann and
Stokowski conducting.  Levant, interestingly, later paid Schoenberg the
original amount for the piece he never received.  This is Brendel's second
recording of the piano concerto (on the first, Gielen also conducted).
I've not heard the first.  In a wonderfully-written essay, Brendel comments
"Rerecording the work ...  felt like an act of re-generation - as though I
were contributing some continuity and progress to a world which, relapsing
into nationalism, fascism and madness, appears to have lost interest in
both." Brendel also talks about how much more "modern" and less "Brahmsian"
the work seems now.  Apparently, that was the view most people had in the
Forties, even so sophisticated and perceptive a critic as Virgil Thomson.
This might have been the effect Gould and Craft aimed for.  However, if
you examine any late Schoenberg score, the markings indicating which voice
should sound through the texture at a particular moment are meticulously
inserted.  If you hear a "wash of sound," you're probably not hearing
Schoenberg's intentions.  The concerto is in four movements, played without
pause.  Brendel and Gielen, despite the rhythmic urgency of the music,
always keep the texture lean and light.  It is the rhythm and "character"
of each movement that shine through above all:  in the first movement, a
graceful, yet nervous waltz; in the second, a dark, almost Bartokian
scherzo.  The third movement, which takes the concerto's emotional weight,
strikes me as unusual in Schoenberg's output - the least dependent on
19th-century melodic practice.  Schoenberg sings a lament, alternately
lyrical and angular.  According to Brendel's liner notes, Schoenberg had
sketched the movement with the annotation "A difficult situation was
created" - all annotations, incidentally, suppressed in the final score.
It's difficult to hear this music and not think of the agonies of wartime
Europe.  Brendel himself gets reminded of Picasso's Guernica.  The piano
takes extended solos, bearing the expressive burden.  Brendel plays
magnificently.  With him, the movement has become not 12-tone music, but
music.  It challenges the listener's emotions, far more than the intellect.
The rondo finale is marked "giocoso" (joyfully), but it doesn't fall out
that way.  The music moves rapidly and, for the most part, lightly, but the
gloom of the previous adagio persists.  The rondo subject tries to keep
things light, but the episodes seem mostly grim.  However, about a minute
near the end, Schoenberg appends a "stretto," in which the various voices
seem to interrupt each other with statements of the theme - a new statement
before the old ones finish.  The effect is comically grotesque - as if a
litter of imps were swept out over the doorstep by a brisk, sturdy broom.
If the music doesn't achieve Beethoven's joy, it's not mired in Wagnerian
gloom either.  One does what one can.

If your curiosity ever impels you to sample the "difficult" Schoenberg, try
this disc.  As I say, it treats Schoenberg's music as music, rather than
as some weird sort of tract.  Gielen and Brendel have rendered to this
composer a tremendous service.

Steve Schwartz