Noise and Arnold Schoenberg’s 1913 Scandal Concert

On March 31, 1913, Arnold Schoenberg conducted a concert in the Great Hall of Vienna’s Musikverein that would become known as that city’s most notorious musical scandal. The event was broken up by physical violence, charges were filed, and the subsequent court proceedings were reported in the press. The composer then gave an interview in which he accused the audience of committing two crimes: making illegal noise in a concert hall and destroying property. This article analyzes the ways in which both the scandal and Schoenberg’s response to it sit at the nexus of fin-de-siècle anxieties about Central European concert life, the anti noise movement, and emerging copyright law.