Chamber music was as central to Schoenberg's life's work as it had been for the great Viennese composers before him: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and the central model of Schoenberg's youth – Brahms. While a significant proportion of Schoenberg's chamber works was composed for idiosyncratic ensembles (including Herzgewächse, Op. 20; Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21; Serenade, Op. 24; Suite, Op. 29; and Ode to Napoleon, Op. 41), it is through the chamber music for strings that Schoenberg most directly engages, continues, and transforms a tradition that was at the very core of his self-identity as a composer. Moreover, the genre of the string quartet in particular continued to develop in extraordinary ways throughout the second half of the twentieth century on into our own time. The string quartets of the Second Viennese School – Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern – along with those of Bela Bartók were the chief inspiration for these remarkable developments.

Schoenberg's chamber music for strings consists of seven works, the String Quartet in D major (1897), the string sextet Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4, the four string quartets with opus numbers (Opp. 7, 10, 30, 37), and the String Trio, Op. 45. In addition to the sextet, quartets, and trio, there is the Phantasy for violin and piano, Op. 47. (Schoenberg also composed a Scherzo for String Quartet, originally the second movement for the 1897 String Quartet in D major). The chamber music for strings spans nearly fifty years, including all of Schoenberg’s compositional periods: the early tonal music inspired principally by Brahms; the highly chromatic tonality of his first maturity; the contextual “atonality” of his second period; the twelve-tone music from the Weimar years; and the late twelve-tone music composed after his emigration to the United States.

Schoenberg's impact as a composer is rivaled by his remarkable legacy as a teacher. Among the hundreds of students he taught in Europe and the United States, many went on to distinguished careers as composers, performers, and teachers in their own right; many more were left with an indelible impression of the encounter. The deep devotion Schoenberg inspired in his pupils is evident in their accounts which reveal a brilliant, generous, and indefatigable teacher who could also be an authoritarian, capable of sarcasm and even intimidation. Something of the intensity of his relationship with his students can be gleaned from Heinrich Jalowetz's comments in a testimonial volume from 1912:

The end of World War I was an especially difficult time for Schoenberg, as indeed it was for most of his compatriots. It was not only the scarcity of basic necessities such as food and coal that made for uncomfortable living. The total defeat of Austria-Hungary, the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, the rise of new political movements inspired by the Russian Revolution in November 1917, and the creation of an Austrian Republic in November 1918 were described by the composer as “the overturning of everything one had believed in” and the beginning of a “war against all that is low and beastly.” While his introduction of radical atonality was itself commonly thought to be a violent break with tradition, Schoenberg nevertheless maintained that it was precisely a respect for tradition that ultimately justified his compositional advances. Now, however, the very idea of deferring to the past seemed in question. The third edition of his Theory of Harmony (1921) warns the reader of the dangers of using the spirit of the postwar age as an excuse for an equally iconoclastic approach to composition. “The sad part,” he wrote “is just that the idea, ‘one may write anything today,’ keeps so many young people from first learning something accepted and respectable, from first understanding the classics, from first acquiring Kultur.” It was now necessary, he believed, to distinguish between a composer (such as himself) who was a “prophet of the future,” preserving and extending an intrinsically valuable musical tradition, and the “modern” composer, who was merely concerned with being “up-to-date.”

In a famous letter from early August 1909, Arnold Schoenberg wrote to Ferruccio Busoni, describing his credo of composition. For our purposes, the key passage is:

Schoenberg's rapturous and poetic description of his compositional philosophy is a remarkably precise portrayal of his compositions, beginning with the third movement of the Three Pieces for Piano, Op. 11 (completed August 7, 1909). Beginning in August 1909, there is indeed “liberation from all forms” and from “symbols of cohesion and logic.” There is no “motivic working out,” no “harmony as cement or bricks of a building,” no “ten-ton scores,” no “erected or constructed towers,” and Schoenberg's works have become significantly shorter than before (and in the Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra of 1910 would become shorter still).

At the same time, essential aspects of the compositional philosophy described in this letter are completely incompatible with the compositions that Schoenberg had written only days earlier. If one were pressed to name the single most prominent compositional feature of the compositions that immediately preceded the letter to Busoni (the first two movements of Op. 11 and Nos. 1–4 of the Five Orchestral Pieces,Op. 16), it would have to be “motivic working out,” arguably some of the most careful, pervasive, and thorough motivic working out there ever was.

Metaphysics

Herzgewächse, Op. 20 (Heart's Foliage) has to be one of the most extraordinary works in Schoenberg's extraordinary output. Only thirty measures long and lasting little over three minutes in performance, it is the most diminutive of all the works to which Schoenberg gave an individual opus number. Composed in just a few days in 1911 (December 5–9), the score was reproduced in facsimile in the 1912 almanac of Der Blaue Reiter, though there is no record of a performance before 1923. Scored for an ensemble of soprano, celesta, harmonium, and harp, its setting of a short poem by Maurice Maeterlinck (translated by Stefan George), requires a voice of extreme agility which is frequently taken above a high c’' and which, four bars before the end, climaxes (pppp) on a high f’'.

The poem constructs a melancholic and languorous world through the imagery of tangled plant forms. Only the pale and fragile lily reaches upwards with its “mystical white prayer.” Sensuous, erotic, and spiritual at the same time, Maeterlinck's poem recalls Wagner's “Im Treibhaus,” the third of the Wesendonck-lieder and thus part of the sketching process for Tristan und Isolde. Both songs use the claustrophobic imagery of winding foliage as a metaphor for spiritual malaise, but also to express an intense longing for release – a metaphor the matized in Schoenberg's Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, Op. 15 (The Book of the Hanging Gardens), to texts by Stefan George, completed in March 1909.

This Cambridge Companion provides an introduction to the central works, writings, and ideas of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). Few would challenge the contention that Schoenberg is one of the most important figures in twentieth-century music, though whether his ultimate achievement or influence is for good or ill is still hotly debated. There are those champions who regard as essential his works, theories, and signature ideas such as “the emancipation of the dissonance,” and “composition with twelve tones related only to one another,” just as there are numerous critics who would cite precisely the same evidence to argue that Schoenberg is responsible for having led music astray.

No doubt many readers will take up this volume with some measure of trepidation; for concertgoers, students, and musicians, the name Schoenberg can still carry a certain negative charge. And while the music of other early modernist twentieth-century composers who have preceded Schoenberg into the ranks of the Cambridge Companions – including Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky, and even Schoenberg's pupil Alban Berg – could be regarded as having achieved something of a state of artistic normalcy, Schoenberg's music for many remains beyond the pale. It is not our purpose here to bring Schoenberg in from the cold or to make him more accessible by showing that the alleged difficulty, obscurity, fractiousness, and even unlovability of his music are mistaken. On the contrary, much of his music – indeed almost all of his creative output, be it theoretical, literary, or in the visual arts – could be characterized to some degree as oppositional, critical, and unafraid of provoking discomfort.

In 1939 Arnold Schoenberg resumed work on his Second Chamber Symphony, a composition he had first started thirty-three years earlier. Thus Schoenberg, that quintessential Modernist, was confronted directly with a prototypical issue of contemporary composition: what is the underlying sense of writing tonal music after the atonal and twelve-tone revolutions that he himself initiated and brought to fulfillment? Was the Second Chamber Symphony, far from being a retrogressive exercise in nostalgia as suggested by many Modernist scholars and composers, a step forward for him instead? In what follows, I will discuss ways in which Schoenberg indeed employed hitherto unexplored tonal structures and even alluded to serial procedures. These features are evident in particular in the codas and cadences of each movement, which he composed in 1939, notably the same passages he failed to complete in 1906–08 when he first worked on the piece, or when he returned to it in 1911 and 1916.

Yet, paradoxically, the work's final triad is presented in a virtually identical fashion to that of “Litanei” (Litany), the third movement of the Second String Quartet, Op. 10, composed in 1908. Both works end with an extremely low E flat minor triad swelling in crescendo, only to break off into abrupt silence. Stefan George's poem “Litanei” is a prayer for an end to earthly misery. In 1908 Schoenberg followed his setting of “Litanei” with his first major atonal work – the renowned interpretation of George's “Entrückung” (Transport), which describes the transport of the soul from earthly suffering to transcendent ecstasy.

This chapter considers what made Arnold Schoenberg's participation in the culture of the Austro-German world possible, from the perspectives of a German-Jewish historical context and a theory of Viennese-Jewish identity. Taking a broad perspective requires a focus on matters larger than the individual. A simple reduction of Schoenberg's hyphenated Jewish identity to matters of personal belief, individual choice, or a facet of artistic expression would forgo too many questions that encompass the concerns of a people: a family history, a sacred text and law, a drive to be granted rights and recognized as fully human, an attempt to thrive in the majority culture, a desperation not to suffer annihilation, an opportunity to raise a family in a new country, a hope to help build a new nation. By virtue of their magnitude and urgency, these questions, vital to Schoenberg, help to place his work in a fitting context.

In a recent history of the German people, there is no mention of Schoenberg's name. The names that do appear, Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner, embody the narrative of a people who from a foundation resting on 200 years of German tradition (J. S. Bach), turned toward Enlightenment (Haydn and Mozart), a circumspect embrace of Utopianism (Beethoven), and an uneasy pairing of iconoclasm and German purity (Wagner). Though Schoenberg could have occupied a loosely defined space within the world of culture, as do Freud and Einstein, the fictional Adrian Leverkühn, the tragic protagonist of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, displaces Schoenberg in this narrative.

In 1909 Arnold Schoenberg completed his first work for the stage, the monodrama Erwartung (Expectation), Op. 17, on a text by Dr. Marie Pappenheim (1882–1966), a recent graduate of the University of Vienna medical school. Composed immediately following his Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, Erwartung figures among Schoenberg's early atonal works and stands as one of the most notable achievements of musical modernism. It was here, it is widely held, that Schoenberg attained his goal of unmediated emotional expression through music, attested by his rapid composition and the apparent lack of thematic repetition over the half-hour course of the work. In spite of the vicissitudes of its performance history, Erwartung's spike in popularity in the 1990s demonstrates the emotional appeal and contemporary relevance of both its music and text.

The plot of the monodrama concerns a nameless Woman who has waited for her lover to visit and now seeks him. She traverses a dark, frightening forest, eventually finding his dead body near the house of another woman. The Woman experiences a wide range of emotions, including horror, jealousy, rage, forgiveness, and despair, finally leaving open the question of whether or how she can continue without her lover. The verbal and visual details of Pappenheim's libretto and Schoenberg's sensitive musical rendering of the text invest this simple plot with psychological depth and emotional salience.

Since its 1912 composition and premiere, Schoenberg's Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds Pierrot lunaire (Three Times Seven Poems from Albert Giraud's Pierrot lunaire), Op. 21 has aroused strong responses and extensive commentary, especially regarding its enigmatic approach to Sprechstimme (speaking voice or recitation) and its “atonal” idiom. This chapter, in three parts, synthesizes and extends some themes in the recent critical reception of the work. The first part sketches a history of the Pierrot character in comedy and pantomime, including a description of the genesis and overall shape of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire. The second section explores how traditional vocal representations of subjectivity and lyric expression are renatured by Schoenberg's striking approach to Sprechstimme in the work. The final part demonstrates, through selected examples, how the music invokes a rich network of musical allusions, in tandem with tonal latencies that permeate its kaleidoscopic surface.

Pierrots old and new – en blanc et noir

Over the centuries, the Pierrot character has been portrayed by countless actors, pantomimes, and puppets. Originating among Italian commedia dell'arte troupes active in seventeenth-century France, Pierrot first appears in 1660s comedies as a rustic and dumbfounded bumpkin, but in the eighteenth century he became the paragon of pastoral innocence, a pure (and often silent) fool. The nineteenth century gradually transformed him, radically, into a decadent fin-de-siècle dandy, obsessed with the moon. A resemblance with the moon was already suggested by his eighteenth century commedia costume: a powdered white face, soft white hat and large ruffled collar, and loose jacket and trousers of flowing white silk.

Schoenberg's interest in chords and melodies using all twelve tones emerged as early as 1910 during the composition of his opera Die glückliche Hand, Op. 18 (1910–13) and as he was writing the final chapters of his Theory of Harmony (1910–11). The sketches for his unfinished choral symphony, which he started in 1914, include a twelve-tone row and its transformations. During the years of World War I, and then more systematically in 1920–23, he experimented with ordered and unordered collections of various lengths, using a technique he described as “working with tones of the motif,” in works and fragments including Die Jakobsleiter, the Five Pieces for Piano, Op. 23, and the Serenade, Op. 24. The Suite for Piano, Op. 25 (completed in 1923 and published in 1925) is the first piece to use twelve-tone techniques throughout, while the Wind Quintet, Op. 26 (1924) was the first to use a single row for all the movements. And though he never stopped writing tonal music, the project of exploring the manifold ramifications and possibilities of the “method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another” remained at the center of his creative life for the next twenty-seven years.

In contrast to his extensive writings on tonal theory, however, Schoenberg wrote very little concerning the details of twelve-tone composition. The essay “Composition with Twelve Tones,” published a year before his death in the first edition of Style and Idea (1950), was his most substantial public statement. As a result, we primarily owe our understanding of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method to the work of three generations of composers, historians, and theorists who have produced an extraordinary body of scholarship and new compositions formalizing and extending Schoenberg’s ideas. These developments have necessarily brought with them considerable standardization in the pedagogy of twelve-tone theory and analysis. While some differences still persist, the adoption of a shared terminology, conceptual framework, and conventions of representation, have led to an ease of communication between scholars and composers and thus to the flourishing of what has become an important discipline in the field.

The distinction between poetry and rhetoric is as old as Western culture itself, yet attempts to define these two forms of discourse in opposition to each other rarely offer a coherent connection between theory and practice. In theory, poetry is understood in terms of its ability to connect us to an abstract human condition, and is evaluated on the basis of aesthetic quality. Rhetoric, on the other hand, is theorized as the ability to discover the means of persuasion in the context of concrete social situations, and its quality is revealed most powerfully in its ability to produce an observable effect on such situations. Poetry relies upon stylistic devices to move us toward transcendence and being, while rhetoric invokes elements of style to move us toward action and becoming. In theory these distinctions make sense, yet in practice they often break down. One tradition of discourse in which this is especially true is in the communicative forms and practices of African American culture. Within the realm of black rhetoric and aesthetics, form and function are rarely understood in opposition to one another. Indeed, African American communication offers an integrative vision of style that disrupts the age-old separation of poetry as an art of being and rhetoric as an art of becoming. That vision of style is expressed perhaps most powerfully in the rhetoric of Malcolm X. He was an orator whose use of language reconciled the tensions between poetics and rhetoric, between being and becoming, that lay at the heart of Richard Lanham's “rhetorical ideal of life.”

Mention Malcolm X, and you are almost certain to receive a reaction. Many admire him, many loathe him, but even now, more than four decades after his death, few lack an opinion about him. A polarizing figure, in death as in life, Malcolm X continues to haunt American national consciousness like few other figures. His name is known around the world, his autobiography is on American high school and college reading lists around the country, his life was the subject of a blockbuster Hollywood film, hundreds of websites are dedicated to his legacy, and he has even appeared on a United States postage stamp. And yet he resists now, as he did then, being fully accepted - or coopted, depending on your point of view - by the culture that he spent his life critiquing. Malcolm X will forever speak to all of us from the margins, pointing out our collective failure to live according to the ideals we proclaim, taking us to task for the inconsistencies and hypocrisies that riddle our politics, revealing our complicity and reviling our complacency. He will always speak in the voice of the marginalized, a voice that cannot be placated or patronized, a voice both self-righteous and self-educated, passionate and cerebral, angry and eloquent.

Malcolm X exerted a profound and complex influence on the Black Arts Movement, the network of politically engaged African American artists and arts institutions during the 1960s and 1970s that poet, playwright, critic and activist Larry Neal termed the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.” Malcolm X served as inspiration, icon, model, polemicist, theorist, and adviser to the movement, especially in its formative years in the early and middle 1960s, despite the fact that he rarely discussed the arts in any great specificity in his public speeches - at least until his break from Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam and the formation of the Organization of Afro-American Unity. For some Black Arts and Black Power activists, Malcolm X was a relatively distant, though commanding figure, often coming to them through the mass media, especially television and radio. However, for many others, especially in such early Black Arts Movement centers as New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston, Chicago, and Oakland, he was a much more personal presence, a leader who always seemed to have time to talk to and take an interest in grassroots people. This engagement with the grassroots in turn strengthened Malcolm X's longstanding interest in African American culture, making it a central part of the program of the Organization of Afro-American Unity - which in turn further influenced radical black arts activists, such as Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, and Askia Touré and promoted the rise of cultural nationalism as a powerful, organized tendency within the Black Power movement.