After the concert, he began to paint. Vasily Kandinsky returned from a recital of Arnold Schoenberg’s music on January 2, 1911, dashed off two charcoal sketches, and the next day finished the full-color oil canvas Impressions III (Concert). Two weeks later he wrote to the composer, starting one of the most remarkable exchanges in the whole of 20th-century cultural history:
Please excuse me for simply writing to you without having the pleasure of knowing you personally. I have just heard your concert here [in Munich] and it has given me real pleasure … What we are striving for in our whole manner of thought and feeling have so much in common that I feel completely justified in expressing my empathy. In your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.
Among the works Kandinsky heard that evening were the Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11, which Peter Serkin performs in December. The music eschews the organizing hierarchies of the Western tonal system, and Kandinsky heard this abandonment of convention as the credo of a kindred spirit who liberated sound in the same way that he freed color, shape, and line from representation in his painting. For Schoenberg, the free-floating harmonies of atonality were but the means to an end—a way to tap in to a primal creativity:
Art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge, or skill. Not all these acquired characteristics, but that which is inborn, instinctive … This is my belief!
Instead of planning out the pieces, Schoenberg composed in the moment during a spontaneous burst of inspiration in 1909, a year that saw him complete another intuitively composed masterpiece, the Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, which the Vienna Philharmonic brings to Carnegie Hall in January.
The correspondence between Kandinsky and Schoenberg provides a way into this music that, a century after it was written, still challenges listeners. On a program with other classical pieces, Schoenberg’s musical language sounds shockingly different. His works make more sense compared with those of painters, playwrights, and intellectuals Schoenberg rubbed shoulders with in Europe.
Take Schoenberg’s sensationalistic, lurid 30-minute monodrama for soprano and orchestra, Erwartung (Expectation), which the composer also wrote in 1909, using the fractured musical language of atonality to depict the frantic breakdown of a troubled woman. Carnegie Hall audiences get two chances to hear it this season: this month with the Berliner Philharmoniker and in the spring with the MET Orchestra.
In Erwartung, a woman, haunted and deranged, wanders through a forest and stumbles across the body of her dead, faithless lover. Did she kill him? Is she hallucinating? Is the entire nightmarish scenario a representation of the female psyche? To contemporary eyes and ears, the psycho-sexual tension seems unnecessarily morbid, but in fin-de-siécle Vienna, where Schoenberg lived and worked, the psychological impact of sexual desire was positively de rigeur.
Erwartung’s libretto is by a young medical student, Marie Pappenheim, who may have found inspiration in Anna O., subject of a case study in Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s 1895 Studien über Hysterie (Studies on Hysteria). Descending into madness, Anna O. “lost her command of grammar and syntax,” Freud and Breuer record. Likewise, Schoenberg’s atonal, athematic music exudes a sensibility without sense. It is rumored that Ms. Pappenheim was a relation of Anna O. (whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim).
In 1909, Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka tried his hand at playwriting with Mörder, der Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, the Hope of Women), which received its premiere at the Vienna Kunstschau. It was a bizarre, violent, misogynist allegory for the battle of the sexes that resonates with Otto Weininger’s scandalous 1903 book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). Both Kokoschka and Schoenberg had tortured personal relationships with women, and while art should never be reduced to biography, their sexual anxieties surely inflamed their passions. The world itself seemed to go mad in 1914 as war engulfed Europe, and the unthinking expression of visceral emotion no longer promised liberation but guaranteed destruction. In the wake of World War I, Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and other artists tamed the impulsive abstraction in their works and pursued more systematic, rigorous means. Kandinsky developed a geometric style that nevertheless maintained a spiritual core, while Schoenberg developed his 12-tone compositional technique in works such as the Piano Suite, Op. 25 (1921–1923), and the Piano Concerto, Op. 42 (1942). In his final letter to Schoenberg, Kandinsky recalled their early correspondence in the “vanished epoch” at the turn of the century. “How wonderfully life pulsated then, what quick spiritual triumphs we expected.” He concluded with an ambivalent conviction: “Even today I expect them, and with the most complete certainty. But I know that a long, long time will still be necessary.” Schoenberg penned no reply.
—Elizabeth Bergman
Reprinted in edited form courtesy of Playbill®
Playbill® is a registered trademark of Playbill Incorporated.
Elizabeth Bergman earned her PhD in musicology from Yale University, and has authored numerous award-winning books and articles.
Related events: November 12, 2009 Berliner Philharmoniker; December 10, 2009 Peter Serkin; January 16, 2010 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra; January 17, 2010 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra; May 16, 2010 the MET Orchestra
