Schoenberg as More Than Music Theory

In plain language, Leon Botstein can't give a beat.

Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

The Bard Music Festival devoted itself this year to Arnold Schoenberg. Oddly, it also reminded me of Bob Dylan, who since 1970 has recorded a new album almost every year. Sometimes, when one was released, a critic would say "Dylan is back!" as if he’d regained the force he had in the ‘60s. But that was never plausible, because if Dylan really had gotten his old power back, everyone would know it, as in fact we did when he found a new kind of strength in "Time Out of Mind" two years ago. At Bard we were asked to believe that Arnold Schoenberg, the godfather of atonal music, was an unequivocally great composer. If that’s true, I wondered, why doesn’t everyone agree? The reputations of Schoenberg’s two atonal disciples, Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, are much less in dispute. Berg’s "Wozzeck" is acknowledged as a searing opera, and even if Webern’s tiny abstract masterworks find only a small audience, his power isn’t challenged. But at Bard, during a panel on Schoenberg’s influence today, two well-known composers, Betsy Jolas and David Del Tredici, said they’d had problems with some of his works.
In June, at the national convention of the American Symphony Orchestra League, another leading composer, Christopher Rouse, asked (carefully posing the question as a quotation from someone else) whether Schoenberg was any good at all. In the ‘40s and ‘50s, respectively, two of the finest minds ever to write about music, Virgil Thomson and Pierre Boulez, both complained about the rhythms in Schoenberg’s works. Schoenberg’s pieces, Thomson also said, "do not lead independent lives," but instead are most convincing as embodiments of his compositional theories.

The program notes and other commentary at Bard, I’m sad to say, unwittingly supported Thomson’s view. Schoenberg, as nearly everybody knows, invented a compositional technique, the so-called 12-tone system. And ever since, his supporters have felt compelled to talk about it, and about anticipations of it in his pre-12-tone works. What gets forgotten is the heart of Schoenberg’s music, its sound and meaning. As a result, one brave Bard listener, after a performance of Schoenberg’s "Serenade," asked, in just these words, if he was crazy to have found the music amusing. Plainly, it is; why, I desperately ask, must arcane scholarship be forced on classical music audiences, leading them to doubt their ears?
But apart from one key musical difficulty, of which more later, this was my only doubt about the way Bard planned its Schoenberg presentations. The festival— co-directed by Robert Martin (cellist and associate dean of Bard College) and by the formidable Leon Botstein (president of Bard, public-television commentator and music director of the American Symphony Orchestra) -- has dedicated itself, in each of its 10 years, to a single composer. It stretched over two weekends, and gave its eager fans all the Schoenberg they could want, from sweet, unfocused early scribblings to the grown-up 12-tone works, which, even if they make some people itch, are constructed with the finest detailed workmanship of any music since Bach.
Bard also showed us Schoenberg’s larger musical world. If you wondered what things were like at Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances— which he organized in Vienna in 1918 to perform advanced music by himself and others—there was a concert recreating that. Other events featured work by his less well-known students, his songs, which we don’t often hear, and, intriguingly, a 1925 string quartet by his conservative nemesis, Hans Pfitzner. These invaluable afternoons and evenings showed why the Bard Festival—along with Mr. Botstein’s programming at the American Symphony (which bristles with intellectual ambition)—has drawn so much praise.

What I myself heard was, first, that Schoenberg’s workmanship got much finer when he wrote atonal scores. His brushwork got more detailed; his canvases had fewer vague or empty spots. His melodies got better, too, and reached their peak in his 12-tone works, where they’re freshest, liveliest and most wistful. His rhythms, though, can really get annoying. In some places—the bangy finish of the first movement of the Fourth String Quartet, for instance, or places in the second movement where the main theme is stretched out awkwardly in longer notes—they’re so clumsy that I almost felt embarrassed.
And the "Serenade" shows a deeper problem. At the start, I thought, no music could be more delightful, dancing with a Viennese lilt while teasing my attention with perfectly poised complexity (quirky instrumental blends, overlays of tasty contrapuntal lines, phrases that never go where you think they will). But later on, as movement followed movement, I realized with a shock that Schoenberg wouldn’t stop. Having seized my ear he wouldn’t let it go, like someone who first seems like a sparkling conversationalist but after 20 minutes can fluster you because he’s so obsessive. This fed my theory, which I offered here a year ago, that Schoenberg, working early in our troubled century, hoped to restore the collapsing Western musical tradition, and, knowing in his heart that this was impossible, in effect retreated into a private, world, where it’s sometimes hard to follow him.

As for the Bard performances, the chamber music was strikingly more human than those at a Schoenberg retrospective at New York’s Merkin Hall a year ago, which were note-perfect but generally empty. At Bard the performers could be tentative, or, like the Wihan Quartet from Czechoslovakia, not fully in command of the notes. The group wasn’t quite in tune and rendered the Fourth Quartet with too much extraneous chuffing of the bow, making the piece more atonal, so to speak, than it really was. But the musical line was almost always there. And the reading of the "Serenade" by members of the festival’s orchestra, conducted by Eckart Preu, was just about ideal, one of those rare performances in which precision and sheer musical joy unite as inseparable allies.
The orchestral concerts were another story. There were three of them, offering so much difficult music that, taken as a whole, they’d challenge even the world’s top musicians. And in fact the artistic administrator of one of this country’s "big five" orchestras told me confidentially that, even for his superb instrumentalists, these programs would be "just too much to handle in only two weeks."
Worse, Mr. Botstein, who was on the podium, is, at best, a gentleman amateur (despite the ideas, connections, and sheer force of character that get him conducting jobs). Reviews often note that his musicians sound ragged; in plain language. he can’t give a beat. Two big Schoenberg 12-tone works, the Piano Concerto and the Variations for Orchestra, emerged with a kind of rough vigor, though in places they got sloppy, and, because orchestral balance might not have been attended to, instrumental lines that Schoenberg wanted to be prominent were often buried.
The real disaster, though, came with Schoenberg’s early "Gurrelieder" (a massive cycle of songs for soloists, chorus and orchestra), which was shapeless. The instrumentalists, barely coordinated with each other, were rhythmically miles away from the singers, and sometimes the music dissolved into an incoherent blare. Two Schoenberg arrangements of Bach were a mess -- limp, confused, inchoate. Mr. Botstein dazzled me, I’ll happily say, by programming these pieces, since their zany orchestration might have shed light on the equally wild scoring of the Variations. But then he ruined his imaginative lesson with his conducting. He’d earn the gratitude of musical professionals if he’d just plan the festival, and put down his baton.

[I'm sure this review will seem harsh to many people, especially those who haven't heard musicians talk about Leon Botstein. But what I've written is the simple truth. I can't say why other critics haven't written it; I've had drinks after a Botstein concert with a critic who agreed with everything I said here, and then pulled his punches in the review, giving readers no idea he thinks that Botstein is incompetent.

This also is a truth that every music professional I know agrees with. Writing about Botstein proved, in fact, to be much like writing about Seiji Ozawa. When I wrote about Ozawa, all I had to do was mention his name, and people -- sometimes very important people in the music business -- would go off on him, with no prompting at all on me. The same thing happened when I mentioned  Leon Botstein. Though the funniest confirmation of my view came at a music-business party two days before this review appeared. I was telling a friend my summary of Botstein as a conductor, "a gentleman amateur who can't give a beat." A complete stranger passed by, heard only those words, and stopped to ask, "Leon Botstein?" She was a pianist, it turned out, who knew musicians in Botstein's orchestra, the American Symphony.]

Wall Street Journal, August 25, 1999

More on Schoenberg: The Merkin Hall Retrospective