- Person
- Arnold Schoenberg
- Lived
- 1874–1951
- Field
- Composition
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
Before the First World War, new music in Vienna was often played after too few rehearsals, under unsympathetic conductors, to audiences who came to jeer and critics who came to attack. At one concert of works by Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils on 31 March 1913, fights broke out in the hall and the police intervened. Listeners at such events were known to whistle on their house keys to mock modern works.
After the war Schoenberg tried a different approach. In the autumn of 1918 he founded the Society for Private Musical Performances, the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen, to give carefully rehearsed, comprehensible performances of new music to genuinely interested listeners. Only members were admitted. A notice on the door declared that critics were forbidden entry, programmes were not announced in advance, and applause or any sign of disapproval was not allowed.
Every work was rehearsed intensively, either by Schoenberg himself or by a performance director he appointed, among them Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Rudolf Kolisch, Erwin Stein and Eduard Steuermann. Members could sometimes attend open rehearsals, and difficult pieces were occasionally played twice in the same concert. Schoenberg kept his own music off the programmes for the first two years. Instead the Society presented Bartók, Busoni, Debussy, Korngold, Mahler, Ravel, Reger, Satie, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky and many others, often in chamber arrangements made by his circle.
Between February 1919 and 5 December 1921, when Austria's hyperinflation forced it to stop, the Society gave 353 performances of 154 works in 117 concerts. In a last effort to raise money, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern arranged Johann Strauss waltzes for a fundraising concert in May 1921 and auctioned the manuscripts. A successor society led by Alexander Zemlinsky, with Schoenberg as honorary president, ran in Prague from 1922 to 1924 and grew to more than 400 members.
The Society's ideals of serious preparation and attentive listening influenced the new-music groups that followed, and its chamber arrangements are still performed. Ensembles such as the Linos Ensemble and Munich's Taschenphilharmonie continue its tradition today.
Why it matters
The Society gave modern composers fair hearings and became a model for the dedicated contemporary music series found in cities today.
About Arnold Schoenberg
Viennese composer who broke with traditional harmony, invented the twelve-tone method, and returned to Judaism in defiance of the Nazis, writing Moses und Aron and A Survivor from Warsaw.
More about Arnold Schoenberg
- Schoenberg's harmony textbook is still studiedArnold Schoenberg wrote his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony) in 1910, a teaching book that musicians still study more than a century later.
- Arnold Schoenberg created the twelve-tone methodIn 1923 Arnold Schoenberg announced his method of composing with twelve tones, a new way of organising music that shaped composition for half a century.
- Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire created a lasting ensembleSchoenberg's 1912 Pierrot lunaire, 21 poems for a half-sung reciter and five players, created the 'Pierrot ensemble' that composers still write for today.
- In America Schoenberg taught John Cage and Lou HarrisonAfter fleeing Nazi Germany, Arnold Schoenberg taught in Los Angeles, becoming a UCLA professor in 1936; his students included John Cage and Lou Harrison.
- Schoenberg taught Alban Berg and Anton WebernArnold Schoenberg's Vienna pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern became major composers in their own right, forming with him the Second Viennese School.
- Schoenberg's Transfigured Night became a beloved classicArnold Schoenberg's string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), written in 1899 when he was 25, remains one of the most performed works of its era.
- Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw honoured the murderedArnold Schoenberg's 1947 A Survivor from Warsaw, for narrator, men's chorus and orchestra, ends with prisoners singing the Shema as they face death.
- Schoenberg's Moses und Aron wrestled with an unseen GodArnold Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron, composed 1930–32, dramatises the Jewish idea of a God who cannot be pictured, through the clash of two brothers.
Sources
- Arnold Schoenberg Wikipedia
- Society for Private Musical Performances Wikipedia
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