Arnold Schoenberg

"Schoenberg was a key figure in 20th-century music. He was perhaps not as key as Charles Rosen thought, but at the time he wrote this book, in 1976, he was certainly regarded as vital. Schoenberg had been dead for only 25 years, and he had left his mark on most composers. Whether they followed him or rejected him, they had to make a choice about where they stood. It’s a big life. Schoenberg was born in Vienna in 1874 and died in Hollywood in 1951. He was Jewish and when Hitler came to power in 1933, he left Europe almost immediately and went to the United States. What is still misunderstood about Schoenberg is that he was very much a traditionalist—because he was a radical too. He came out of the Austro-German tradition, following on from Brahms and Wagner and going back to Bach. When he taught, those were his exemplars. One way of looking at that tradition is that music is about progress, it goes forward and one thing leads to another. In particular in Wagner , music harmonically had reached a crisis where it had become more and more chromatic (one of those technical terms I mentioned). Chromaticism is a harmonic complexity, and it involves dissonance. Most music involves dissonance. Even Hildegard’s music involves dissonance, though it’s generally resolved. It goes from a dissonance to a consonance—that’s where you get the emotion in music. That’s true of an Indian raga every bit as much as a Western symphony. But in the hands of Wagner, that resolution was increasingly delayed, so that for great stretches of Wagner you don’t know what key you’re in and when the music does resolve…well, you could argue that in Tristan and Isolde , it doesn’t resolve until the end, after four and a half hours. Based on that experience of the music of the past, Schoenberg thought, ‘Right. The next step is to do away with keys.’ It was like Neil Armstrong: one small step for Schoenberg, but a giant leap for audiences. I think that’s why Schoenberg is regarded as radical—but it’s important to know where he came from. Charles Rosen is very good at spelling this out in his little book. It’s a tiny book. It’s even shorter than mine, just 116 pages of text. It’s one of those books I remember where I was when I read it. I was on a train going from Lancaster, where I was at university, to Nottingham, where my girlfriend was at university. I read it during the course of that train journey, and it really did change the way I thought about Schoenberg and music in general. I remember thinking, ‘This explains not only Schoenberg but all of modern music.’ And perhaps, at the time, it almost did. But it certainly doesn’t anymore because music moves on. One of the things that we’ve seen is that the idea of progress, which is central to Rosen’s book, is viewed with great suspicion in all areas of life, pretty much—with the possible exception of plumbing. So it’s a bit out of date, but it’s still a very good book. One of the reasons it’s so good is that Rosen, in addition to being a great scholar of not just music but the arts in general, was also a very fine pianist. He had played and recorded all of Schoenberg’s piano pieces, the piano concerto and the songs. He knew the music inside out, and he writes about it very, very well. The music examples in the book are very few and far between. Again, he was writing for the general reader. The book was part of a series called Fontana Modern Masters , which included Al Alvarez on Beckett and Conor Cruise O’Brien on Camus. I don’t think there’s a single woman among the ‘modern masters’ and not among the writers either, now that I come to look at it. So it’s not just our attitudes to Schoenberg that have changed in the last 50 years. But this is still a book that I would heartily recommend because, like the book about Hildegard, it says so much about the music as well as the life, and it puts the life firmly in the context of the times."