Political and Religious Ideas in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg (review)

Political and Religious Ideas in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg. Edited by Charlotte M. Cross and Russell A. Berman. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000. Pp. xxii + 310. $75.00.

This collection of essays makes a well-intentioned case for rescuing Arnold Schoenberg's music from the myopic gaze of note-counting music theorists. Leaving aside the fact that the political and religious aspects of Schoenberg's music have hardly been neglected lately, the book succumbs to the lack of a clear thematic focus, although there are some excellent individual essays. The book adds to the sizable literature on Schoenberg's two best-known pieces on political or religious themes, the cantata A Survivor from Warsaw and the opera torso Moses und Aron, each treated in two articles and mentioned in practically every one. Detailed studies of works less frequently analyzed, such as the oratorio fragment Die Jakobsleiter, the opera Von Heute auf Morgen, and the late choral music complete the volume. The editors rightly regret the omission of the Ode to Napoleon as well as Kol Nidre, the play Der biblische Weg and other works dealing with Schoenberg's attitudes towards Judaism and the newly-founded state of Israel. Instead of clearly focusing on politics and religion, the editors rather fuzzily expand the inquiry to include other "extramusical" factors such as gender, cultural life, philosophy, and Schoenberg's biography. While it is all well and good to want to reemphasize these important dimensions of his music in scholarly discourse about the composer, there are two basic problems with the approach taken here.

The first is the assumption, expressed in various ways in the editors' introduction, that "aesthetic autonomy as the core modernist project" was the basis of Schoenberg's so-called free atonal music, that is, the music he composed after he broke with tonality in 1907-8 and before he adopted the twelve-tone method after 1921 (xvii). A "move from aesthetic autonomy to engaged art" is then postulated, leading from "Schoenberg's specifically modernist pursuit of a pure music, a music stripped of romantic sentimentalism or structural conventionalism" to an increased involvement with political, religious, and other nonmusical issues (xviii, xvi). Given the expressionist nature of Schoenberg's free atonal music and the abundance of texts, programs, and biographical connections in this repertoire, this trajectory is purely fictional. However, rather than reflecting Schoenberg's own musical development, it describes the American academic scholarship that addresses his work, in which an awareness of the cultural, political, and religious contexts for his music came long after the development of sophisticated methods for understanding how its pitches are organized. Fortunately, most of the authors do not toe this implausible line; the first essay, in which William Benjamin hypothesizes a shift in Schoenberg's thinking from a Nietzschean irrationality tinged with theosophy (in the atonal works) to an increasingly rational, intellectual approach to his materials (in the twelve-tone works) turns the editors' model on its head.

The second problem is reflected in the title: the notion that "specific political and religious material" is somehow contained in and expressed by the works (xviii). This seemingly innocuous position had the unfortunate effect of steering the authors' attention away from those areas in which political or religious ideas have their most substantial ramifications and can be most easily identified: the broader cultural and political environments of Vienna, Berlin, or Los Angeles (the main stations of Schoenberg's peripatetic life) or the relationship of Schoenberg's own thought to prevailing ideas at the time. Focusing on individual pieces of music discourages historical (and intellectual-historical) approaches; the authors were thereby thrown back into their scores, resulting in many cases in the same narrow music-theoretical analysis that the book aimed to avoid in the first place. All too often, the result is an introduction presenting the religious or political background to a work--often without precisely defining the author's...