150 years of Arnold Schönberg, the composer who didn’t write for fools | Culture

“A sort of improved Tchaikovsky. I ask for nothing more, for God’s sake! That they see in me a composer who has been able to improve music, that’s all. And then, if possible, that my melodies become known and that people whistle them.” These were the aspirations of Arnold Schönberg (Vienna, 1874-Los Angeles, 1951) confessed in a letter from 1947. The Austrian composer, who had lived in exile in the United States since 1933, ended up fed up with the label of being modern, dissonant and experimental.

This letter is recalled by his disciple Josef Rufer (1893-1985), in the essay entitled Tribute to Schoenbergthat Acantilado has just published together with the Berlin Diary by the composer to commemorate his 150th birthday, which we celebrate today. And he adds a tasty note, from the same period, that he had found among his papers: “I don’t write for fools. A composer who composes for the public doesn’t think about the music.”

In 1957, Rufer had been commissioned by the Berlin Academy of Arts to travel for three months to the late composer’s home in Los Angeles and sort out his legacy. There he found more than twenty thousand manuscripts, including compositions, sketches and various texts, along with dozens of drawings and paintings, which he catalogued in Arnold Schoenberg’s workshop (1959). But in 1974, he published another book, which Acantilado now recovers in Spanish, with the aforementioned tribute together with one of the most curious unpublished writings he discovered: a diary of the composer written in Berlin mainly in 1912; he also adds a radio script, preserved in the State Library of the German capital, where the composer introduces a broadcast of his opera. From today to tomorrowin 1930.

In Tribute to Schoenberg Here we can read one of the most complete and interesting portraits of the composer. Not so much because he speaks with passion and knowledge of his music, but because of his ability to connect it with his intellectual power and the multifaceted character of his personality. Rufer deals with the musical theorist, the scholar against anti-Semitism fascinated by religion, but also the poet, the painter and even the inventor. He begins by recalling his work room in Brentwood Park, full of similarities with the one he knew in 1919, as his student, in Mödling, southwest of Vienna (Today converted into a museum).

A simple musical craft workshop full of drawers and cups made from cigar boxes. But also of notebooks that he used to bind himself. The complete works of Bach, Mozart scores and editions of the sonatas and symphonies of Beethoven, whose he considered himself to be his heir, preside. He adds numerous curiosities that he discovered, such as the plan of a binding press or a machine for writing scores, together with the pioneering sketch, before 1933, of a modern highway with different intersections. And he allows himself to recall other earlier inventions of his, such as a model of a tram ticket that facilitated the transfer of passengers or their transfer. coalition chess for four players that allows them to build alliances between them.

But Rufer devoted much attention to the invention for which Schoenberg will always be remembered: twelve-tone music. The composer confessed his discovery to him in the summer of 1921, while they were walking together on the shores of Lake Traunsee: “What I have achieved today assures me a place of honour in German music for the next hundred years.” He was referring to a compositional method based on the serial use of the twelve chromatic notes of the scale that followed his break with the tonal system. Among his papers he also discovered its first vestige: a scherzo within the draft of a choral symphony, dated May 1914, which he later used in his oratorio Jacob’s LadderHere the initial theme is formed by the twelve sounds of the scale, which repeats and varies as a series, anticipating future dodecaphonic procedures.

It is not difficult to relate the Berlin Diary with Schoenberg’s inclination as a painter towards self-portraiture. He also developed, around 1910, a similar impulse to narrate his experiences. “I have finally begun. I have been meaning to do it for a long time,” were his opening words, on January 20, 1912. The composer was going through a creative crisis, after composing, at Kandinsky’s suggestion, the song for soprano, celesta, harmonium and harp Leaves of the heartwhere he experimented with sound color by setting Maeterlink’s verses to music. He will suddenly surpass her on March 20: “I had thought I would never write music again,” he confesses while acknowledging the pressure from his students (“they keep stepping on my heels, trying to surpass what I offer them”) and the effort dedicated to his work. Treaty of harmony (“There is no doubt that theoretical speculation dries up the source of creativity”).

But Schönberg interrupted his diary while he devoted himself to the composition of his brilliant cycle Pierrot Lunairewhich he refers to as a melodrama. And he will only add two more entries, in October 1912 and May 1915, where he deals with his problems with the interpreters of that work and with Gustav Mahler’s widow. The composer was not very consistent either during the three months that this diary lasted (not by chance he titled it An attempt at a diary) and the dates are increasingly distant from what he tells. In fact, in his entry of March 11, in which he intends to write about what has happened since February 19, he writes: “I run the risk of not being able to continue with this diary. In the end, it hardly exists anymore.”

However, in its few pages there are many interesting circumstances and opinions. He devotes a lot of space to his concern for the correct interpretation of his complex scores (“my music needs time, it is not for people who have other things to do”); he comments on his ambivalent relationship with Ferruccio Busoni (“he is the most interesting man I have ever met”); his defence of the music of the recently deceased Gustav Mahler (“his time has not yet come. Something must be done before it is too late”); the stammer that prevented him from speaking normally to Richard Strauss (“I lost my temper because I was determined not to be seen as egocentric”); his human and personal closeness to his brother-in-law Alexander von Zemlinsky and his predilection for his disciple Anton Webern; and there is also no lack of his quarrels with the publishing houses Peters and Universal or his disagreements with critics (“I have to teach the Berlin critics, those arrogant cretins, how to speak to artists”).

But the Acantilado edition, which retains Rufer’s notes and has been well translated from German by the philologist Roberto Bravo de la Varga, lacks a prologue. This would have allowed the reader to update what Rufer wrote fifty years ago. For example, to inform him of the omissions in his edition of the Berlin Diary of those fragments more related to family matters or of the existence of two other diaries by Schönberg, both extremely brief and particular: War clouds. A diary, where he collected fascinating descriptions of the sky during 1914 and 1915, convinced that he could read in them the events of the First World War, and another untitled one, from 1923, where he confesses in detail two apparitions he had of his first wife Mathilde Zemlinsky shortly after her death. The three diaries were studied and published, in June 1986, in a special issue of the Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute.

And all this vast collection initially catalogued by Rufer has been available since 1998 at the Arnold Schönberg Centre, located in the Palais Fanto, next to Vienna’s Schwarzenbergplatz. A legacy that forms part of UNESCO’s World Documentary Heritage and can be consulted in its entirety online at: https://www.schoenberg.at/. The city of Vienna, which had caused so many difficulties for Schoenberg during his lifetime, gave his support after his death, naming a square in the 14th district after him and giving his name to the city’s most prestigious choir. Since 1974, his remains have rested in Vienna’s Central Cemetery, in a simple tomb adorned with a white cube, designed by the sculptor Fritz Wotruba, and inaugurated by the Arnold Schoenberg Choir singing his late psalm. From Profundis.