Schoenberg and Redemption by Julie Brown

Julie Brown’s Schoenberg and Redemption newly testifies to the power of a composer’s self-expressive prose. Two documents from 1934 to 1935 unlock the door to Brown’s original intervention in the populous arena of Schoenberg scholarship: an understanding of the motivation behind Schoenberg’s turn to atonality, or as he called it, the emancipation of dissonance. Schoenberg’s confessional private essay “Every young Jew” (1934) and his Mailamm (American– Palestine Institute of Jewish Musical Sciences) address of 29 March 1935 are fundamental to Brown’s evaluation of Schoen berg’s early acceptance of Richard Wagner’s Deutschtum and his anti-Semitic tract, “Judaism in Music” (1850). As she argues, the two works provide key evidence for Schoenberg’s motivation to strike out on a new path in composition as a means to redemption for himself as a Jew, and of German music.

Reinhold Brinkmann has observed: “Schoenberg’s foundation of the Viennese atonality as a new paradigm for contemporary music, besides being embedded in a music-historical process, was indeed the reflection of a very specific and problematic historical, social, cultural and psychical situation in Vienna around 1900” (Reinhold Brinkmann, “Schoenberg the Contemporary: A View from Behind” in Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997], 197). To this understanding of the relationship between Schoenberg’s cultural circumstances and his compositional practice, Brown’s book adds a new perspective on his turn to atonality, rooted in his statements of 1934 and 1935. Instead of a study predominantly driven by music-theoretical analysis of Schoenberg’s works (such as Jack Forrest Boss, Schoenberg’s Twelve-Tone Music [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014]), Brown presents “Schoenbergian modernism as cultural discourse” (p. 2).

Schoenberg’s Mailamm address reveals his youthful devotion to Wagner’s Deutschtum—that “nobody could be a true Wagnerian if they did not believe in Wagner’s philosophy, his Deutschtum (Germanness)”—and to Wagner’s “anti-Semitic views about Judaism in music” (p. 25). Brown adds, “The implications of this claim have been little explored in the literature.” And even less explored is “Every young Jew,” which was “unpublished at the time,” and, Brown observes, “only touched upon by previous commentators” and “never translated into English”(p. 25). Although Moshe Lazar, Steven J. Cahn (in his Ph.D. dissertation), and Sabine Feisst have translated short segments of “Every young Jew” into English, Brown includes her own full English translation.

Schoenberg’s Nachlass, the collection of his manuscripts, notes, and correspondence, record his life’s journey: his conversion to Lutheranism in 1898; his immersion in the cultural and political atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Vienna; his moves between Vienna and Berlin during the rise of National Socialism; his return to the Jewish faith, beginning in 1921 with the anti-Semitic incident in which he was denied access to the Mattsee spa and then formalized in 1933; and his exile to North America after Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933. For Brown, the Nachlass, including documents like the Harmonielehre, provides insight into the foundation of his two major developments in composition: atonality and the twelve-tone method.

In “Every young Jew,” Schoenberg mentions six times his early longing to be redeemed from disgrace and shame for being Jewish. Brown views “Every young Jew” and Mailamm as expressions of Jewish “self-hatred.” I would look beyond the surface of the words “self-hatred” to see the documents as a “cry of despair uttered by those who experience at first hand the fate of mankind,” to paraphrase Schoenberg’s 1910 aphorism in which he characterizes the creative act that is art (Arnold Schoenberg, “Aphorismen,” Die Musik 9 [1909– 1910], 159; trans. Reinhold Brinkmann, 197).

Integral to Brown’s book is the connection between Schoenberg’s early commitment to Wagnerian Deutschtum and the ideas of Jewish-born...