Schoenberg and Words: The Modernist Years (review)

Schoenberg and Words: The Modernist Years. Edited by Charlotte M. Cross and Russell A. Berman. (Border Crossings, 11.) New York: Garland, 2000. [xxv, 370 p. ISBN 0-8153-2830-3. $70.]

This volume might have been titled Schoenberg and Ideas, since only secondarily do its eleven essays address Schoenberg's involvement with musical texts. The emphasis is instead on a broad range of aesthetic issues, interpretations, critical readings, and interdisciplinary connections, with no apparent single methodology at work. The volume will be accessible and of interest to the specialist far more than to the general reader.

Although the articles in the collection do not have a unifying theme, they are nonetheless individually lively and thought provoking. Several topics that are characteristic of the general literature on Schoenberg recur here in new contexts. One such is the notion of the artist as prophet and visionary, an outlook that coincided with Schoenberg's own self-image. The theme is taken up by Murray Dineen in "Modernism and Words" with reference to a bittersweet appraisal of the composer written by Theodor Adorno shortly after Schoenberg's death in 1951 ("Arnold Schoenberg, 1874-1951," in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982], 147-72). Dineen traces Schoenberg's empathy with the biblical figure Moses--the inarticulate seer, unappreciated by his contemporaries--but he finds that this prophetic model was often in conflict with Schoenberg as a workaday musician who wished for nothing more than acceptance and the creation of a music that would have little value outside of itself. Adorno also perceived this split in Schoenberg's artistic personality, and although he was a lifelong believer in Schoenberg's prophetic voice, he could not accept the more mundane dimension of Schoenberg's artistic personality. In "The Artist as Modern Prophet," Steven J. Cahn goes even further in casting doubt on Schoenberg's self-image as prophet. Cahn focuses on Schoenberg's song "Vorgefühl," in which the speaker of Rilke's poem--like Schoenberg's Moses--is a visionary who bears the brunt of a great storm to which the world is oblivious. Schoenberg's selection of the poem for musical treatment again points to his self-consciousness as the misunderstood prophet. But the true visionary, Cahn concludes, utters a prophecy that is fixed for all time, while Schoenberg --like all great artists--was an explorer whose artistic persona experienced constant change.

Several articles address Schoenberg's theory of the musical idea and its presentation. This was a topic with which the composer began to wrestle as the twelve-tone principle came to him during the period of World War I, although he never succeeded in formulating it other than in outline. In "Schoenberg's 'Poetics of Music,' the Twelve-Tone Method, and the Musical Idea," John Covach finds ideas in Schoenberg's music to be revealed through a multidimensional variational process that concerns not only themes, but more important, the unfolding of any structural premise in a dynamic and logical discourse that proceeds from simple to complex. For Richard Kurth in his article "Pierrot's Cave: Representation, Reverberation, Radiance," the essence of Schoenberg's musical idea is sound per se--the tone that Schoenberg told Richard Dehmel he could hear in poetry and which he imitates in music by means of "cratylism," a term derived from Plato's dialog Cratylus. This imitation begins a mimetic chain that can also involve acting, mime, and poetic representation--all active ingredients in Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire.

A feminist interpretation of a Schoenberg work is undertaken by Elizabeth L. Keathley in her " 'Die Frauenfrage' in Erwartung: Schoenberg's Collaboration with Marie Pappenheim." Pappenheim's poem for the monodrama, says Keathley, reflects an original and positive image of its protagonist, the Woman, inasmuch as it avoids the limiting clichés in which female figures were often portrayed in literature of the time. The Woman's lack of conformity arises in her relentless questioning, overt sexuality and displays of anger...