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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 hed 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 thats true, I wondered, why
doesnt everyone agree? The reputations of Schoenbergs two atonal disciples,
Alban Berg and Anton von Webern, are much less in dispute. Bergs "Wozzeck"
is acknowledged as a searing opera, and even if Weberns tiny abstract masterworks
find only a small audience, his power isnt challenged. But at Bard, during a panel
on Schoenbergs influence today, two well-known composers, Betsy Jolas and David Del
Tredici, said theyd 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 Schoenbergs works. Schoenbergs 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, Im
sad to say, unwittingly supported Thomsons 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 Schoenbergs music, its sound
and meaning. As a result, one brave Bard listener, after a performance of
Schoenbergs "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
Schoenbergs larger musical world. If you wondered what things were like at
Schoenbergs Society for Private Musical Performances which he organized in
Vienna in 1918 to perform advanced music by himself and othersthere was a concert
recreating that. Other events featured work by his less well-known students, his songs,
which we dont often hear, and, intriguingly, a 1925 string quartet by his
conservative nemesis, Hans Pfitzner. These invaluable afternoons and evenings showed why
the Bard Festivalalong with Mr. Botsteins programming at the American Symphony
(which bristles with intellectual ambition)has drawn so much praise.
What I myself heard was, first, that Schoenbergs
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 theyre freshest, liveliest and most wistful.
His rhythms, though, can really get annoying. In some placesthe 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 notestheyre
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 wouldnt stop. Having seized my ear he wouldnt let it go,
like someone who first seems like a sparkling conversationalist but after 20 minutes can
fluster you because hes 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 its 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 Yorks 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 wasnt 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 festivals 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, theyd challenge even the worlds top musicians. And in fact the artistic
administrator of one of this countrys "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 cant 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 Schoenbergs 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, Ill 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. Hed earn the gratitude of musical professionals if hed 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
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