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128 BOOK REVIEWS SHOFAR Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Jew, by Alexander L. Ringer. New York: Oxford University Press, The Clarendon Press, 1990. 260 pp. $55.00. The influence of Arnold Schoenberg on twentieth-century music is now acknowledged by musicians everywhere, and even by many audiences that still resist listening to his music. If Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky, who both enjoyed widespread public success in their own time, did much to define the essential directions of musical language in the first half of our century, then more than anyone else it is Schoenberg, who lived only one year into the second half of it, who has been the dominant influence ever since. It is thanks to Schoenberg, the Supreme Lawgiver in twentieth-century music-to his teaching and writing, to his pupils' examples, above all to his own uncompromising works like Pierrot lunaire. E1Wartung, the Five Pieces for orchestra, and Moses und Aron-that the expressive language of atonality and the intellectual rigor of the twelve-tone technique have been recognized by virtually every serious composer of the past forty years, and even adopted by most of them. This new book by Alexander Ringer is a thorough exploration of another and equally important side of Schoenberg's intellect, his religious identity , which was, as we learn in great detail, throughout his career as important to Schoenberg as his musical identity. Schoenberg wrestled with his patriarchal faith in the context of his own music as perhaps did no other composer before him or since; though only a part of his very large compositional output , the works incorporating religious themes go far towards summarizing Schoenberg's entire career, all the way up to the last works, the Modem Psalms of 1950. Born in 1874 into a middle-class Viennese family that was falling away from traditional Jewish observance, Schoenberg was baptized into the Austrian Lutheran Church at the age of twenty. Thereafter he wrote only one significant work, the chorus Friede aufErden of 1907, that in any way reflects a Christian outlook, and it was an uphill struggle from there for many years. It is hardly accidental that the major departure in his life as a composer, his struggle between 1909 and 1914 to find a coherent justification for atonality, coincided with his effort to define his own religious personality. By the time the war forced Schoenberg to temporarily shelve his career in 1915, he had already been occupied for three years writing an enormous choral symphony, culminating in a final cantata called Die lakobsleiter (Jacob's Ladder) in which a variety of syncretizing literary sources are appar- Volume 10. No.1 Fall1991 129 ent; including Balzac, Strindberg, Richard Dehmel, and Rabindranath Tagore, and quotations from Isaiah and Jeremiah. The symphony was never completed, but after the war Schoenberg took up the same musical problems all over again, reaching a culmination about 1923 with the invention of the twelve-tone technique. This launched the second most productive period of his life, when he was a professor at the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin and had much time for composing a series of landmark works incorporating the new technique. By the middle of 1932 he had completed Act II of the opera Moses undAron, based on the Exodus story, his longest,work and undeniably one of his greatest accomplishments. And partially in response to the darkening times in Germany, but chiefly as a climax to his own religious odyssey, Schoenberg re-embraced his ancestral faith. Driven out of Germany in 1933, Schoenberg went to America, with a brief pause in Paris, where he appeared before the Chief Rabbi of the Union Liberale Israelite to affirm his intention to reconvert to Judaism. Once more putting his career on hold, Schoenberg declared, in a series of passionate letters, his willingness to put all his time and strength into a campaign to mobilize public opinion to rescue the doomed Jews of eastern Europe. But this hope was frustrated when he arrived in America and found only a widespread apathy toward the plight of those threatened by Nazi domination. Eventually securing a permanent teaching position at UCLA, he continued to compose and to...

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