His ashes are returned for reburial in his native Vienna. By RICHARD FREED .
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Richard Freed reports on the return of his ashes to Vienna.
ONE of the picture postcards tourists buy in Vienna is labeled "Statues of Composers Active in Vienna, Famous the World Over," and it shows the monuments in various Viennese parks to Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Johann Strauss, Brahms, and Bruckner. Of that group, only Schubert and Strauss were native sons.
The most important native Viennese composer since the Waltz King was Arnold Schoenberg, whose centenary is being observed everywhere this year (September '13 was the actual anniversary date). There is no statue of him in any of Vienna's parks, and no discussion of erecting one, but the idea is by no means as unlikely as it might have seemed as recently as ten or fifteen years ago.
There is probably no other great city on earth in which music is so central to the daily life and thought of virtually all its people as it is in Vienna, where, I was assured, "any cab driver can tell you who the next three directors of the State Opera will be, even though he may not be able to tell you who the candidates are in this year's presidential election." Cab drivers are always and everywhere tout ed as being arbiters of public opinion: those in Vienna, I was told, either had nothing good to say about Schoenberg or had not heard of him at all.
It is true that Schoenberg has never loomed very large in the consciousness of the Viennese public, but then he has never been a "popular" composer anywhere else either. He once remarked that he would like to be able to write music like Tchaikovsky's, filled with tunes everyone could whistle, but what he did write was, especially to the Romantically attuned Viennese ear, anything but ingratiating.
Some of his concerts in Vienna just before and after World War 1 had turned into near-riots. He did at tract pupils and disciples, of course, but he left Vienna for good in 1925, spending the next eight years in Berlin and the rest of his life in California.
The so-called " Second Viennese School," which he founded, has probably had less far-reaching influence in Vienna itself than in several other music centers. (If he enjoyed any "popularity," it was not for the works that made him Schoenberg: as late as 1945, he was introduced to a lecture audience at the University of Chicago as "the beloved composer of Transfigured Night.") A year after the composer's death, a Schintbergplatz (the Viennese insist on the original spelling, with the umlaut instead of oe) was dedicated near a middle-class housing project out past Schtinbrunn, and that about took care of any official recognition until this year, when Schoenberg's ashes were flown from California for reburial in Vienna's Central Cemetery. One of my associates, on hearing of this gesture and noting how little of Schoenberg's music was being played in Vienna, remarked that it seemed to be a case of "We come to bury Schoenberg, not to praise him." A Viennese acquaintance in New York, though, assured me:
"No, we will even praise him-as a world-famous musician from Vienna-but we really don't want to hear his music." One has heard this sort of thing for years. Last spring I developed a good deal of curiosity about the Viennese attitude toward Schoenberg at a time when so much respectful attention was being focused on him elsewhere. The first congress of the International Schoenberg Society was scheduled for Vienna on dates I was free, and I seized upon it as an excuse to enjoy a sumptuous Air France flight out of Washington and spend the time in Vienna seeing for myself just what the feeling was. If I found an attitude more reverent than enthusiastic, it was, at least, an advance over the open hostility of the past.
Cab drivers, it turned out, were not issuing statements on the composer last June, but hotel-keepers, city officials, travel agents, and journalists were happy to comment. None of them (or the cabbies) had ever heard of a street named for Schoenberg in their city- I had to check on that at a city office, where the discovery of the Schonbergplatz astonished the researchers. There was, however, a good deal more Schoenberg activity going on than was indicated in the preliminary brochure on the Wiener Festwochen, the city's big annual festival, tradition ally very conservative in its makeup.
THE dates of the Schoenberg Congress (June 4-9) fell smack in the middle of the Festwochen (May 25-June 23), which in turn took place within the period of the elaborate and impressive Schoenberg exhibition at the Secession Museum (May 10-June 30). These three events had no direct connection with each other, but they did converge at times.
One might think that if the Viennese were going to do anything about Schoenberg in his centenary year they would launch their celebration during the Festwochen, but this year's festival- rather pointedly, I thought-was dedicated to Bruckner, whose sesquicentenary preceded Schoenberg's hundredth birthday by nine days. Eight orchestras, under ten conductors, performed all the Bruckner symphonies and many of his other works. Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner, and Franz Schmidt were also heavily represented, since they too have anniversaries this year-the centenary of Schmidt's birth, the 110th anniversary of Strauss', the twenty-fifth anniversary of the deaths of both Strauss and Pfitzner. The Schoenberg representation in the events at the Musikvereinsale was minimal--a single program of choral works and performances of the Woodwind Quintet and a string quartet in mixed chamber-music concerts.
There were, however, Schoenberg programs else where in the city during the festival period, including several at the Secession itself as part of the exhibition there. The opening session of the Schoenberg Congress was held at the Secession, where a performance of the Suite for Seven Instruments, Op. 29, by Friedrich Cerha's ensemble Die Reihe augmented the speeches by Hans Sittner, the Schoen berg Society's president, Rudolf Stephan, director of the congress, Walter Szmolyan, the Society's secretary-general, and Hertha Firnberg, the Austri an Minister of Science and Research, under whose patronage the congress was held. The next evening Cerha conducted both of the chamber symphonies, and two days later he and his associates, as part of the lecture sequence, illustrated problems of interpretation in Pierrot Lunaire (a work they have re corded for Candide). Another interesting program, performed by the Cappella Classica under Alois Hochstrasser, was made up of chamber-orchestra arrangements of Strauss waltzes by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern.
Another site of Schoenberg concerts was the Beethoven-Musikhochschule in Modling, the suburb in which a more significant event also took place. The Schoenberg Society was able to buy Schoenberg's old house in Modling two years ago, and on June 6 (the day after the cemetery ceremony), with appropriate speeches by municipal and federal officials, the renovated building was dedicated as a museum and research center, with a plaque in the front of the building reading:
IN DIESEM HAUSE WOHNTE DER KOMPONIST ARNOLD SCHONBERG IN DEN JAHREN 1918-1924 HIER FORMTE ER SEINE METHODE DER KOMPOSITION MIT ZWOLFTONEN.
It was in that same house that Schoenberg held his composition seminars, and now it is to be used again for similar purposes. The dedication ceremonies, at which attendance was so heavy that I was rather frighteningly reminded of the old college boys' mania for seeing how many people could crowd into a single telephone booth, concluded with Maurizio Pollini's incredibly affecting performances of several of Schoenberg's works on the master's own piano (his other instruments are there, too, including the harmonium, much in need of re pair). From August 24 to September 13 (the birth-date itself) the Society used the house to present a course in the Schoenberg string quartets, under the direction of Rudolf Kolisch (interpretation) and Rudolf Stephan (analysis), both of whom had taken part in the congress in June.
The congress packed a lot of activity into its six days, with some three dozen very active participants from various countries-there would have been more if East Germany and Czechoslovakia had not refused exit visas to the scholars in those countries who planned to attend. Richard Hoffmann, Alexander Ringer, Boris Schwarz, and Leonard Stein represented the United States, and among the other thirty-odd names were such familiar ones as H.H. Stuckenschmidt, Hans Swarowsky, Peter Gradenwitz, and the aforementioned Cerha, Ste fan, and Kolisch. There were many nonparticipants in attendance too, and, most significantly, there were sizable audiences for the musical events.
Though more of a gesture should have been made in the big Festwochen concerts, perhaps this was better left for the "Styrian Autumn" festival at Graz (which included music by Zemlinsky, Schoenberg's only teacher, as well as that of Schoenberg himself).
In any event, now that a new season is under way, works of Schoenberg are being performed in major Viennese concert series.
One old friend who had just realized a lifelong dream of becoming a subscriber to the Philharmonic concerts (subscriptions to that august series are usually obtained only by inheritance) told me excitedly of the deep impression made by last season's Vienna performances of A Survivor from Warsaw and Moses and Aron. "There was a real hostility toward Schoenberg's music here," she said, "but many of us just took it for granted that it was 'unlikable' without ever actually listening to it. Abbado in particular has taught us so much about this mu sic, and now that we open our ears there is so much to admire, so much even to love." The speaker was a retired travel official who may not be quoted as readily as "any cab driver in Vienna," but who is surely not alone in her response. If the Viennese can talk about loving Schoenberg, perhaps that stat ue in the park isn't so far off after all.
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Schoenberg Without Tears
By Eric Salzman
OUR topic today is How to Listen to Schoen berg, Not as Musical Analysis, Not as Music History, but as Music. To back up just a bit, Arnold Schoenberg started his musical life as a post-Wagnerian and then became a German Expressionist (which is odd, because he was Jewish and Viennese). Finally, to the joy of the few and the despair of the millions (critic B. H. Haggin has called his work "a major disaster in the history of music"), he invented twelve-tone music. Now he is one hundred years old (the music itself is not quite that old, but it is certainly getting on), and it is time for articles like this one.
Schoenberg and his music are part of history (as even Haggin admits), and the polemics of yester year are now chapters in books. The music itself, although not played very often, is, so to speak, in disputable. Nearly all of it is available in our vast recorded museum-without-walls, some of it, surprisingly, in several respectable versions.
Schoenberg once said, "My music is not avant-garde, only badly played." Well, it is not always brilliantly performed nowadays, but it is rarely butchered any more, and sometimes it is very well played indeed. Schoenberg has become so much a part of our musical heritage that even musicians who don't like his music very much can't help but understand it better than their predecessors did.
Schoenberg was right: his music is not avant-garde.
It is, in fact, right to the end, squarely in the Great Tradition of
Western classical music Any course in Schoenberg Without Tears should
rightly begin with the post-Wagnerian music Verkl iirte Nacht, Gurrelieder,
the First String Quartet-but all this is so relatively familiar and easy
to accept that we will skip right over it. The "difficult" Schoenberg
begins with the atonal Expressionist music of the period just before
World War I. This was the music that, along with Stravinsky's Rite of
Spring, set the world of music on its ear: the Three Piano Pieces (Op.
11), Pierrot Lun aire, the Five Orchestral Pieces, Erwartung. And yet,
far from being "difficult," this is some of the most directly
expressive and sensual music ever written, and it is, in spite of many
attempts to prove the contrary, extraordinarily intuitive and non-intellectual.
The closest parallel can be found in the music of Debussy, which is also
intensely sensual. 
----- On June 5, 1974, the ashes of Arnold Schoenberg were interred in Vienna's Central Cemetery. The composer's sons, Ronald and Lawrence, and his daughter Nitric', the wife of(4 the composer Luigi Nono, are shown facing the monument. Also in attendance (but not visible here) was his brother-in-law, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch.
But Schoenberg, unlike his French contemporary, is always expressing inner states. Schoenberg's Expressionist music reminds us of the Vienna of Freud: indeed, at times it comes as close to "free association" as is musically possible. In spite (or perhaps because) of the psychological twists and turns, the surface expression is always incredibly rich and variegated. Indeed, Schoenberg's earliest critics were right: this music is a bundle of intense sensations, and it can be listened to and enjoyed (or hated) on just that basis.
After World War I, things are a little different.
Schoenberg got religion: Classicism. Indeed, he set himself the task of reordering the purely sensual effects of his earlier music in terms of the great tradition. He made fun of Stravinsky's "neo Classicism" because he considered himself; not some Russian upstart, the real Classicist.
It seems impossible to escape music history entirely when talking about Schoenberg, for he lived and breathed history and theories of history all his life. So a momentary historical digression is here inevitable. If Schoenberg's earlier music was out of the Wagnerian tradition, his later works harked back to a different Romantic model: Brahms.
Schoenberg was a great admirer of Brahms all his life, and, just as Brahms kept the Classical tradition alive in the Romantic period, so Schoenberg wanted to extend the Classic/Romantic tradition down into our own day.
Now we have the essential point. Schoenberg's later music, his last quartets, his violin and piano concertos, the Orchestral Variations, the String Trio and the Violin Fantasy, were written to be part of the latter-day part of the Great Symphonic Tradition, and that is exactly how they must be listened to--whether, in the end, they are accepted or reject ed. Listen to twelve-tone Schoenberg as if it were Brahms, and you will be doing nothing more nor less than what Schoenberg himself intended. Listen for the themes, the large-scale, Romantic-size phrases with the big (a)tonal sweep, for their developments and their resolutions. If it doesn't work for you, then so much the worse for the two of you- you, that is, and Schoenberg. There are no other terms on which to meet him, even halfway.
There are a few of the later works which, in one way or another, harken back to the intensity of the early music. The most striking of these is the Begleitungsmusik (Accompaniment to a Film Scene)---a scene, by the way, that never actually existed.
The very dramatic Survivor from Warsaw and much of the opera Moses and Aron are other examples. The dramatic impulse helps create a resolution between Schoenbergian Classicism and the intense, inner expression characteristic of his earlier style.
For most listeners, I suspect, it is this music, early or late, and not the Brahmsian twelve-tone works, which will make the strongest and most lasting impact. It is as an Expressionist rather than as a Classicist that Schoenberg will leave his mark on most listeners, and, in the long run, probably on music history as well.
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