The Schoenberg school?

Hans Keller

The Second Vienna School: Expressionism and Dodecaphony Luigi Rognoni translated by Robert W. Mann (John Calder 212.50)

The publisher has a distinguished history so far as this particular part of our musical world is concerned: not only did he recently bring out H.H. Stuckenschmidt's Schoenberg biography, but more than twenty years

ago, he gave us H.F. Redlich's Alban Berg: The Man and His Music, itself 'a transcription and condensation' of a book Redlich had written in German. Now, the first chapter oi the English version is entitled 'The Second Viennese School' and this was the first time the pseudo-historical concept was introduced into English: it covers Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, of course, and sundry serial and pre-serial odds and starts into the bargain.

The name stuck, and the more I fought it, the more it clung. I am still fighting it with ineffective zest on two counts. In the first place, Schoenberg's school, though so called by his pupil Rene Leibowitz, was never a school. The one thing its members had in common was twelve-tone technique and twelve-tone technique was the one thing which Schoenberg never taught, except by way of example, as Bach taught Mozart trans-academic counterpoint.

In the second place, may one ask which was the first Viennese school? Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert? Why? Only one of them taught one other personally and unsuccessfully. For the rest, in the whole history of Western music, there is no greater contrast in creative outlook and method than that between Mozart and Beethoven. True, the so-miscalled Vie

nnese classics only one of them was Viennese, and he was a romantic all wrote sonata forms; so did, fortunately, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Britten, and, unfortunately, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and my uncle. The concept of the AustroGerman tradition is, in itself, an over simplification, but at least it leaves the schooling part out of itthe idea of disciples or imitators or followers.

If John Calder was responsible fot allowing 'the Second Viennese School' to pene trate the English-babbling part of musicol ogy, he is now responsible for admitting the inelegant variation, the 'Second Vienna School': the author himself is only half

guilty, for his book, first published in 1966, was originally called La Scuola Musicale di Vienna: at least, he hadn't joined in the

invention of a first Viennese school in order to justify a second; no doubt it was the (otherwise clear-minded) translator who thought up the conformist improvement.

I am not quibbling about words, but com plaining about the intellectual compulsion that makes us misuse them the need for classification and categorisation which, if pursued consistently, abolishes art and replaces it with its history. It would be

unfair to the author, of course, to suggest that he is not alive to the differences (some of them, anyway) between his three subjects Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. But his very sub-titles one on the flap, another on the title-page! show the mortal danger of musicological de-individualisation: 'The rise of expressionism in the music of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton von Webern' it says on the cover (why, incidentally, put in Webern's 'von', to which he strongly objected?); 'Expressionism and Dodecaphony' it says within.

Who cares, anyway? Only he who doesn't understand the music without reference to that which it isn't, i.e. somebody else's music and who therefore can't understand the music's raison d'être, which is its inconv parability. Even the twelve-tone techniques of the three composers are utterly unrelated. The last music I think of when I listen to, or read, or coach, any of the important works of one of the three chief 'Second Viennese is the music of one or both of the others though it is true that weaker Bert and weaker Webern forces your thoughts back to the Schoenbergian model; but Rognoni has never plunged such shallow waters anyway.

Faithful to its title, his is an academic exercise, and a respectable, textbook-like study in all conscience; if it lacks original insight, it has assembled the results of other people's investigations with admirable clarity though there is one gaping hole: the English as opposed to the American literature is almost totally neglected. Names like Matyas Seiber, Walter and Alexander Goehr, Humphrey Searle, and 0.W. Neighbour simply do not occur, and as for my own, I wish it didn't in the circumstances: my one Schoenberg piece which Rognoni lists is the least important I ever wrote in my life, but it happens to be in German.

However, while the author throws chunks of German texts and terms at the reader (which the translator has left piouslY untouched), his own knowledge of German is not altogether masterly: persistent IMP' spellings and misprints apart, he will use, for instance, what he thinks are the German terms for 'antecedent' and 'consequent': but what they come out as is 'antecedent and (if anything) 'second subject'! He even commits the time-honoured mistake of confusing Schoenberg's Sprechstimme (speaking voice) with Sprechgesang (recitative).

Perhaps the book's most serious drawback is that it hasn't been brought up to date and it wasn't all that alive to the contemporary world when it was first published twelve years ago. It isn't only that the dead Mrs Schoenberg is granting the author 'kind permission', nor even that the existence of Deryck Cooke's performing ver' sion of Mahler's Tenth is disastrouslY ignored; but composing trends like neo,Webernism are treated as last night s developments.

A paradoxical recommendation seems inescapable: for those who don't need it, the

book will prove of considerable interest, if Only as a well-conceived and well-ordered reference work, thoroughly musical even Where it is mistake-ridden. But then, readers who don't need the book will readily diagnose its mistakes — most of them: Perhaps it requires exceptional knowledge to realise, for instance, that there is no such thing as an 'episode' in the first movement of Schoenberg's Fourth Quartet — an unepisodic, strictly thematic sonata structure if ever there was one.