Queues have been snaking around Tate Modern in London to view its annual summer blockbuster. ‘Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider’ has transplanted from Munich a good chunk of the Lenbachhaus museum, dedicated to the members of the art collective formed in 1911 who named themselves after Wassily Kandinsky’s painting Der blaue Reiter (1903).

Observant visitors may even find some Schoenberg tucked away. The exhibition barely hints at his central place in the group, though the almanac Der blaue Reiter, published in 1912, printed the manuscript of his exquisite song Herzgewächse (‘Foliage of the Heart’), as well as an article in which the composer (then in his late thirties) discusses the relationship of text to sound and image.

Would the crowds of visitors to the Tate go and hear Herzgewächse for themselves? Would they enjoy it? Such questions remain purely theoretical when the score stays on the printed page, unheard. It was Stephen Walsh, biographer of Stravinsky and Debussy, who made the point, around 40 years ago, that Schoenberg was the first composer to be accorded a place in the canon of European art music even while his music goes largely unperformed.

In a year when we mark a century and a half since Schoenberg’s birth, it would be a shame to waste too many words speculating on this gulf between reputation and reception – why one of the most influential figures in the history of music is more often written about than listened to. ‘It’s no use arguing with the public about what it wants,’ remarked chairman of Decca Sir Edward Lewis.

All the same, the conductor John Mauceri succinctly distils the pervasive resistance to Schoenberg’s revolutionary ‘method of composition with 12 tones’, which he was developing at the same time that Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Pablo Picasso were overturning all the conventions of naturalism in art. ‘We can’t get rid of an octave,’ he tells me. ‘We can’t get rid of the fifth, we can’t get rid of a third. The language of music that develops in Europe out of the Greeks and Romans is something we have either learnt, or it’s actually how we perceive sound. It might have frustrated him. In that sense, he might have been wrong. There are people who love the most complex music. Most people do not. You can blame the people, or you don’t blame anyone. You say, “This is the music. Do you like it? Do you want to hear it again?”’

The pianist Pina Napolitano made a bold debut on record in 2011 with an album of Schoenberg’s piano music. ‘I think it has to do with musical culture in general,’ she says, ‘which is always behind other cultures – the most conservative, in terms of press, musicians and public. The ear is the most intimate sense, and the most ineffable, and the one that leaves us in least control. We are more in control when we read a book or look at art. Schoenberg is still perceived as avant-garde, whereas for me it’s a piece of history, a beautiful piece of history. And this is especially true of the musically educated; because our education system is still completely tonality centred, and music, more than other arts, is still conceived primarily in terms of entertainment.’

It’s a nonsense to attempt a straight-line chronology of Schoenberg’s output; here he is in 1935, by which time he was in the US (photo: Arnold Schoenberg Centre)

Both positions can be true. And both musicians believe that context is key to a fuller understanding of Schoenberg and his music. Mauceri has a vision of a concert series which would draw direct lines between Schoenberg’s expressionist and Californian music, and film scores by composers from Miklós Rózsa to John Williams. ‘Where is the concert in which the Schoenberg Suite for strings is paired with Stravinsky’s Apollo?’

Napolitano had been immersed in German and Russian literature when her conservatoire piano professor placed the Op 11 pieces in front of her. ‘And this immediately fitted in. We never talked about the 12-note system or even about the culture of the period. He just helped me to read the score carefully, and bring out all the colours – to make the music dance. Just as we would with Brahms. And I started learning this music from that position. My ears don’t distinguish any more between tonal or atonal music. Schoenberg just sounds classical, and beautiful to me, like Beethoven or Brahms.’

In this context, I think of Gustav von Aschenbach stepping out for an afternoon stroll at the beginning of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In a Munich cemetery, a couple of miles away from the real-life Lenbachhaus, Aschenbach is assailed by the vision of ‘a tropical marshland beneath a reeking sky … Among the knotted joints of a bamboo thicket the eyes of a crouching tiger gleamed – and he felt his heart throb with terror, yet with a longing inexplicable.’ Mann was writing in 1912, and it took Max Ernst until after the war to imagine such visions for himself and project them on canvas. Meanwhile, back in 1909, Schoenberg had already composed his monodrama Erwartung (‘Expectation’), for which Aschenbach’s daymare could serve as a set design.

The genie in the bottle

What still disconcerts many listeners is the length and breadth of Schoenberg’s journey; their musical intelligence feels challenged. How can a composer capable of the lush and sensuous beauty in Gurrelieder go on to write the Fourth String Quartet? Perhaps they believe that he lost his way. Or they simply decline to travel where he went. But we hear music in the wake of Schoenberg much as we understand ourselves with recourse (consciously or unconsciously) to tropes inherited from Freud. When Schoenberg emancipated dissonance, he uncorked a bottle that could not be resealed, the contents of which were already fizzing with explosive force.

Still more disconcerting is the awareness, however vague or unformed, that Schoenberg’s harmonic experimentation takes place within a language of dialectic, and a small collection of forms inherited from his predecessors, paradoxically making him a traditionalist as well as a modernist. The Op 24 Serenade (1920-23) starts out with a march that cannot be ironised into alienation from its origins; its rhythm is too sturdy, its melodies are too upbeat, its sonata form too regular. There follows a minuet as relaxed and charming as any example by Haydn or Brahms, and a little set of variations on a chirpy theme led by the clarinet.

Schoenberg has gone to all possible lengths to defuse associations of serial composition with loss and angst, just as he had composed the impossibility of retaining a stable key signature through the progress of the Second String Quartet (1908). There, movement by movement, the ear is led to grasp that ‘the centre cannot hold’, until the finale gently takes off like a hot-air balloon, with the soprano breathing ‘the air of other planets’ in a setting of Stefan George’s Entrückung (‘Rapture’): ‘I am dissolved in swirling sound.’ And when the quartet ends in a radiant major key, we are invited to glimpse a new harmony of the spheres, where consonance and dissonance may co-exist in a new relationship.

In Berlin – until the Nazis compelled his exile – and then in California, Schoenberg always continued to teach tonal harmony to his students. And once in America, even if compelled by circumstance, he fused tonal and serial methods in his own music; one never seeks to conquer the other. He cannot be reduced to a bundle of contradictions; his art thrives in a state of productive tension. ‘My music is solely the representation of myself,’ he said to Egon Wellesz in 1912, while confiding to Alma Mahler in 1910, in terms that her husband would have recognised, ‘I want to express myself, but I hope to be misunderstood. It would be terrible if someone could see through me.’

The Second Quartet is an almost embarrassingly direct response from Schoenberg to his wife’s affair with the painter Richard Gerstl, and his insistence that she break it off. At the other end of his career, the String Trio (1946) maps out in graphic detail his recovery from illness in hospital. We are surely past the stage of regarding such biographical detail as a threat to the integrity of the notes. Life and music belong together in Schoenberg as much as they do in Schumann and Liszt, and the more we know of one, the better we understand the other.

Mauceri’s ‘watershed moment’ with Schoenberg arrived in 1988, when he conducted the Second Chamber Symphony as part of an Edinburgh International Festival concert with Scottish Opera. ‘The audience had bought tickets to see Patricia Hodge and Richard Griffiths do the dream sequences in Weill’s Lady in the Dark. We put the Second Chamber Symphony in the middle of the concert, after Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen, and the audience called me back for a second bow, because they got it.’

Along with Moses und Aron and Die Jakobsleiter, the Second Chamber Symphony is one of several works that make a nonsense of a straight-line chronology to Schoenberg’s career. As Mauceri points out, the first movement was completed around 1906, soon after the better-known First Chamber Symphony. Life and then war compelled Schoenberg to file it in the bottom drawer, from which he retrieved it 33 years later, as an exile living in Los Angeles. ‘When I turn the page from the end of the first movement to the beginning of the second, the silence in between is what most people think of as Schoenberg, the 12-tone composer,’ says Mauceri. ‘He picks up the melody that he wrote in 1906 and brings it back on the trumpet, and another war is looming. It’s the most embracing moment. Here is a man who looks in the mirror, and sees and accepts the reality of life. It is so beautiful and so haunting.’

Mauceri believes that Pierre Boulez had a good deal to answer for when he wrote his notorious polemic ‘Schoenberg est mort’ after the composer’s death in 1951. The post-war serialists took what they wanted (or needed) from Schoenberg’s method while cutting his music off from its roots: the influential theorist Theodor Adorno made the peculiar claim that Schoenberg was ‘like a man without origins, fallen from heaven’, when nothing could be further from the truth. But Schoenberg the emancipator of dissonance was the composer they were interested in, not Schoenberg the Jew, Schoenberg the teacher of harmony and counterpoint to film-music composers in Hollywood or, for that matter, Schoenberg the family man whose children called him ‘Daddy’.

Beethoven’s Fifth – the sequel

Something of this tension inflects performances of the First Chamber Symphony. As a conductor who had known Schoenberg since his student years in Vienna, Jascha Horenstein in 1957 draws out its Brahmsian, push-me-pull-you hemiola rhythms. He paints its teeming melodic life with the broadest of brushes over 26 minutes, whereas Boulez in 1964 cuts out all the sugar and fat with the Domaine Musical ensemble, nine minutes shorter, still none too well tuned.

It took a younger generation of performers to find the centre of the piece as a manifestation of the composer’s own identity, not bound to a Romantic past or a total-serialist future. In the UK, at any rate, as David Atherton recently recalled to me, his music ‘was always performed by groups that were just scraping things together, under-rehearsed and never really sorted out’. This state of affairs only improved in the late 1960s when Atherton and the late Nicholas Snowman formed the London Sinfonietta. The First Chamber Symphony was ‘our Beethoven Five’, says Atherton. ‘It was the genesis of the make-up of the Sinfonietta, with solo strings and solo winds: a phenomenally difficult piece, usually underprepared, but also a fully symphonic piece.’

By extension, the First Chamber Symphony made an impact on post-war music far beyond the notes, as other new-music ensembles modelled their make-up on the London Sinfonietta, and composers found that Schoenberg’s instrumentation permitted them a soloistic agility of both thought and execution. Younger musicians do not feel the burden of history pressing so heavily upon them: Napolitano, addressing the piano music, and Ilya Gringolts and his colleagues in the string quartets on BIS bring out relaxed and playful qualities foreign to (for example) Maurizio Pollini and the Juilliard Quartet, who were playing Schoenberg’s music in an era when the first priority was to get the notes right, and then to underline their bracing, perpetual modernity.

Gallery tour

One of the few imaginative responses to the Schoenberg anniversary this year has taken place in Vienna. In the city that treated him alternately as hero and as madman during his lifetime, the MusikTheater an der Wien and Klangforum Wien staged a show covering his whole career across several rooms of the Reaktor (once a set of banqueting halls).

Appointed as curator of my own Schoenberg exhibition in sound (call it a playlist, if you must), I would leave out Gurrelieder, which long ago acquired a status and a momentum of its own. The first room would have to include Verklärte Nacht, saturated in the Wagnerian harmony that Schoenberg had embraced as a teenager, but I would encourage my visitors not to dwell too fondly there. They would move on briskly to the First Chamber Symphony: everything Schoenberg had inherited in large-scale form and harmony from the Austro-German tradition he seems to squeeze into a ball, like a whole bag of spinach steamed and reduced to an iron-rich pulp. At the other end of the room, Patricia Kopatchinskaja and friends would tease all the sexy, wide-eyed, moonstruck humour from Pierrot lunaire and the Brettl-Lieder (cabaret songs); Schoenberg was no Saint-Saëns, but he knew how to have fun.

The central room of my imaginary show would be dedicated to the Schoenberg of the 1920s, and the Opp 20s, placing the suites for piano and for ensemble opposite each other. Pride of place in this room would defiantly be given to the Wind Quintet of 1923-24. ‘If you’ve ever tried it and found its exhaustive “workings” overwhelming in the wrong sense, you have my sympathy,’ wrote Stephen Plaistow in 1977 (Gramophone Critics’ Choice); ‘but try it now in a performance by the Vienna Wind Soloists so warm and clear and scrupulous that what may once have passed as complexity becomes variety, and density richness.’ Interviewing the clarinettist Peter Schmidl, I was struck when he said that of all his recordings, he was most proud of making this one. There is an irreducible kernel of dialectic to the Wind Quintet, a fusion of serial harmony with old forms, which stands for Schoenberg’s output as a whole. Atherton recalls that the making of the London Sinfonietta recording of the piece on Decca (1973-74) took around 195 takes. Perhaps the satisfaction for the listener, as much as the performer, arises from finding your way through its ‘labyrinth of interconnecting parts’.

Schoenberg could have had the Wind Quintet in mind when he remarked that he did not expect listeners to love his music on first acquaintance; he only hoped they would not come to dislike it after 14 listenings. Is that naive, or even arrogant? I remember deciding to come to grips as a listener with Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony (completed in 1923, the year before the Wind Quintet) at a time before it occurred to me that reading a score would help; it took at least 14 attempts to feel for myself a logic as to what would happen next. At any rate, the Wind Quintet now unfolds for me with the rough and tumble of everyday life, full of birdsong and good company. I am as certain as I can be that the teenaged Shostakovich somehow heard or read this piece, and liked it enough to steal some comic moments from Schoenberg’s scherzo for his own First Symphony, completed in 1925.

Since we often fail to leave sufficient time and energy for the last rooms of an art show, I would omit Moses und Aron, the knotty and almost unstageable ‘opera of ideas’. In Mauceri’s festival of Schoenberg, his contemporaries and successors, however, I would love to hear the Dance around the Golden Calf from Moses alongside The Rite of Spring. A curtained annex would be dedicated to Die Jakobsleiter as his other tantalisingly incomplete ‘everything piece’, his would-be answer to Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis in its musical and dramatic journey up to heaven. At the door, a steward would hand out boxes of Michael Gielen conducting music from the Second Viennese School, an SWR Music set that gathers up lovingly dedicated performances of almost every piece discussed here.

Before that, though, the final room would pay tribute to Schoenberg’s extraordinary late harvest, including the pieces recorded by Mauceri on his ‘Schoenberg in Hollywood’ album for Decca (recently reissued by Eloquence within a set dedicated to the conductor’s Hollywood Bowl recordings). Another concert in Mauceri’s series would express Schoenberg’s new-found admiration for Gershwin and Ives. There would be space for his singular, variation-form excursions into the world of the wind band, and the organ, and for the freely rhapsodic Phantasy for violin and piano – another piece which has taken on a newly persuasive, less strident character with a younger generation of performers.

Still more striking as summations of his life’s work and thought are the settings of Jewish prayers for narrator, chorus and orchestra, Kol nidre (1938) and its better-known sequel, A Survivor from Warsaw (1947). Tonality, expressionism and 12-note method have become labels of limited use by this stage, to account for the strength of faith and personal feeling expressed in these works, even in the face of horror.

Schoenberg has never been short of eloquent advocates for his cause, but the most persuasive recent writing comes from the historian Jeremy Eichler. In his book Time’s Echo (2023), A Survivor from Warsaw takes its place alongside Britten’s War Requiem, Shostakovich’s Babi Yar, the writings of Stefan Zweig and Primo Levi and much else besides, as a necessary rebuke to the idea that it was an affront to create art about the Holocaust. The mix of English, German and Hebrew texts in A Survivor from Warsaw stands for Schoenberg’s own life story. It does not find an easy home in concert programmes. On his German and Jewish identities, Schoenberg once remarked: ‘I cannot feel by halves. With me it is one thing or the other!’

YouTube hosts a 1984 film of A Survivor, uploaded by Vienna’s Arnold Schönberg Center. It is given in a German church, by Bamberg forces under the baton of Horst Stein. He and the narrator Hermann Prey had lived through Nazi rule as boys; so, too, probably, had many of the musicians. The pain and the expiation of that memory is etched on their faces, and in Prey’s declamation. It is surely impossible to watch this and then think of the work’s creator as the cold inventor of abstract systems that had lost touch with the world around him. Those sharp thorns have lost none of their power to draw blood.

This feature originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue of the world's leading classical music magazine – subscribe to Gramophone today