Arnold Schoenberg: Do not approach with caution
Why is it that music historians and musicologists love to talk about Schoenberg, but his music is still relatively rarely performed, seemingly feared by both the public and promoters? The occasional revival aside (he featured as Radio 3’s composer of the week in January, and the Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise festival in 2013 programmed his music), he’s rarely heard in the UK. The BBC Proms archive reveals that the festival has programmed Schoenberg’s music only 73 times in its 122-year history, compared with, say, Brahms’ 823. Just this week I was invited to speak about Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto on Radio 3, but they preferred that I perform only one of his pieces, alongside two by Brahms.
It was my piano professor, Bruno Mezzena, who first encouraged me to play Schoenberg’s music. Mezzena was a composition student of Sangiorgi, who was a student of Schoenberg’s. I knew very little of Schoenberg’s compositions at that time. Several years before, I had chanced upon his Piano Concerto – it was paired on a disc with another Romantic concerto that I’d wanted to buy. I didn’t entirely understand it, but it struck me and I became curious. This was my principal impulse: curiosity. I felt a trust in the musical text, and a conviction that there must be something in this as yet unknown music that would serve as a guide for me; that there was a beauty to it that I had to discover. What followed were years of happy Schoenbergian studies.
His music is often accused of being cerebral, cold and wilfully difficult. But I find in it an invincible combination of intellect and passion, discipline and expressivity. The sentiments it conveys are the eternal sentiments of the human condition – the same as expressed in Romantic music – but the language is different. The revolution at the beginning of the 20th century that overtook all artistic and scientific fields arrived in music through the figure of Schoenberg, who shattered the already stretched tonal system that had dominated the previous three centuries. From all the shards were born different musical languages, the first of which was the serial music of the Second Viennese School.
The sentiments his music conveys are the eternal sentiments of the human condition– the same expressed in Romantic music
Despite the revolutionary novelty, though, Schoenberg’s music has a very tight bond with previous traditions, and especially with the music of the late 19th century, from which it keeps the dance rhythms, phrasing, meters and forms. Probably my favourite work by Schoenberg for solo piano is his Five Piano Pieces, Op 23. These works are serial, and have an experimental character. It is as if he were creating his musical language, channelled through classical forms such as fugues, sonata forms, and waltzes, while at the same time intensely expressing the passions and sentiments of his era, the 1920s: a sense of instability and fear, together with an enthusiasm for the new, for innovation. This was a world poised between elation and ruin, between the end of an epoch and the birth of the modern era – the 20th century, with all its torments and discoveries, of which we are still the children.
‘Curiosity was my primary impulse’ … pianist Pina Napolitano. Photograph: Tommaso Tuzj
Brahms anticipated this tension acutely and perspicaciously. His Fourth Symphony heralds the end of the Romantic musical tradition. His biographer Jan Swafford describes the work as “a funeral song for [Brahms’s] heritage, for a world at peace, for an Austro-German middle class that honoured and understood music like no other culture”. Brahms was the last heir of an unbroken tradition, the last representative of yesterday’s world, of the Romantic era, with its unitarian musical language dominated by tonality. But the older composer recognised Schoenberg’s genius and, having heard the latter’s 1897 String Quartet in D major, offered him a stipend (which Schoenberg, with typical pride, refused).
To return to our initial question: why is Schoenberg so little played today? To a great extent, I believe it is due to prejudice: the prejudice of those who have a musical education and identify classical music with tonal music; and the opposite prejudice, among those who believe they lack sufficient musical education, and that in order to enjoy Schoenberg’s music it is necessary to know musical analysis and recognise the 12-tone series, and so on. Neither of these things is true. Tonality is only an episode in the story of western music, and someone who goes to a concert of dodecaphonic music can and should do so with the same expectations with which one would go to any other concert: to be moved, to be told a story.
As with any other art, music is often also considered a form of entertainment: if something does not immediately gratify, if it surprises or shocks, or if it fails to entertain with acrobatics (which Schoenberg’s music generally eschews, unlike much music which followed, such as Ligeti’s Etudes), we are upset. In a gallery, we can walk past a painting that we dislike or that we do not “understand”, just as we can skip a portion of a book or close it altogether. But music puts us in a position of passivity, it owns and shapes our time. We may buy a ticket to a concert, but the music then buys our time and we have to listen. We are in the same passive situation even when listening to recordings: the music invades our hearing, that most vulnerable of senses, over which we have the least control. Anything disturbing or necessitating more effort or concentration invariably gets rejected.
Essentially, Schoenberg’s music requires faith. It needs the listener to be free of prejudices against its meaningfulness or beauty. And it asks for more time than other music, and repeated listenings. After all, who is able to enjoy a painting by Picasso as quickly as one by Renoir, or Ulysses as rapidly as Great Expectations?
Pina Napolitano gives the UK premiere of a new transcription of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto arranged for 14 musicians as part of a tour of Second Viennese School gems with the Façade Ensemble at Cadogan Hall, London, on 22 February, and West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge, on 26 February.