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5 May 2011
From someone who attended Tuesday night's performance of Schönberg's String Quartet No 2 performed by the New Zealand String Quartet and Jenny Wollerman:
"When I saw Schoenberg on the programme I told myself firmly it would be part of my education. And it was! It started with the informative, lively and interesting pre-concert talk, including a very useful definition of atonality, and the comments on the philosophical association between Stefan George’s Entrückung and Schoenberg’s departure from tonality. I guess, as a writer myself, I found the verbal depiction of Schoenberg’s move into a new musical idiom helpful.
Then there was the performance itself, opened out for me by the talk and the programme notes. I was surprised by my powerful preference for the atonality – a first for me. I thought it was simply thrilling. It was a release into new realms.
So, thanks again to everyone for a significant and memorable concert."
Below are some excerpts from Dr Calvin Scott's pre-concert talk given in Wellington:
Listeners are generally not predisposed to liking Schönberg and it would seem that the controversies associated with his compositions at the time they were first performed have, in many ways, led to a general aversion to actually engaging with them in an unbiased way. Schönberg’s compositions are not well known, not well liked and rarely performed. The name “Arnold Schönberg” seems to be connected more often with prickly theoretical terms such as “dodecaphonic”, “atonal” and “serialism” than with genuine and unprejudiced musical experiences. It is true that many of his works require a different approach to listening to music but it is possible, nonetheless, to appreciate them and even to like them in the same way that one appreciates and likes Beethoven’s works.
In many ways, Ludwig van Beethoven’s fifth string quartet, which opens this evening’s programme, represents a benchmark of the listening expectations and listening practice that Schönberg’s Viennese audience would have been accustomed to. This Beethoven quartet gives us now — 103 years after the Schönberg quartet was premièred and 213 years after Beethoven actually composed it — an idea of what a discerning Viennese audience at the beginning of last century would have expected to hear when a string quartet gave a concert. It also gives us an idea of how they may have perceived Schönberg’s music: by listening to Beethoven beforehand, we can gain a sense of the immense contrast and the radical shift that Schönberg’s second string quartet would have constituted for many listeners in 1908.
Prior to the première of his second string quartet, Arnold Schönberg had already made a name for himself in Vienna as a controversial composer. He had a group of loyal supporters and another group of fierce opponents. In order to understand the violent reactions to first performance of the second string quartet — reactions that I will describe in a moment — it is important to note that this event was preceded by a number of other first performances of Schönberg’s compositions in Vienna that had already provoked reactions as divided as they were lively:
Since each concert that featured a new work by Arnold Schönberg was always more agitated than the previous one, the première of the second string quartet can be said to have been a kind of culmination — a scandal of completely new proportions. This scandalous first performance took place on 21 December 1908 in the prestigious Bösendorfer concert hall in Vienna as part of a subscription series of concerts given by the Rosé Quartet.
Arnold Rosé, the leader of the Rosé Quartet, believed that Schönberg’s quartet was ahead of its time. He predicted, quite accurately, that it was bound to provoke unfavourable reactions in the same way that Beethoven’s string quartets did from opus 59 onwards. Rosé was definitely thinking of this parallel with Beethoven when he considered the programming for his December 1908 subscription concert: in addition to the “Rhapsodie” for string quartet and piano op. 37 by the Russian composer Paul Juon, which opened the concert, he also programmed Beethoven’s tenth string quartet — the “Harp Quartet” op. 74 — to follow the première of the Schönberg work. In effect, when the audience took their seats at this subscription concert in December 1908, they had programme notes in front of them which contained a review of Beethoven’s “Harp Quartet” written in 1811 at the time of this piece’s first performance. The critic of the Leipziger Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung at the time denounced this quartet’s senseless groupings of harsh dissonances, its feeble melodic coherence, and the obscure confusion of Beethoven’s score and claimed that this work must indeed signify the end of instrumental music. In the Vienna of 1908, citing this vitriolic 1811 article about a work that, in the intervening years, had become part of the established contemporary listening repertoire, had an evident significance: — Rosé’s intention was to discredit right from the start the hostile critique that Schönberg’s second string quartet would inevitably incite. And, as things turned out, Arnold Rosé certainly wasn’t wrong.
Before this 1908 concert the term “scandal” had only appeared fleetingly in the press in relation to Schönberg’s Chamber Symphony opus 9. After the quartet’s performance, the word was used in newspaper articles everywhere. The headline in the Viennese paper Der Tag the following day – “A major scandal, unique in the history of Viennese concerts” – was echoed in Berlin, Prague, Dresden, Munich, Leipzig, Stuttgart. And even across the Atlantic in New York there were reports of an “uproar such as no concert hall in the Austrian capital ever before had known” (Musical America 31.01.1909)
As was noted by commentators later on, a large number of people in the audience had indicated their dislike of Schönberg on previous occasions and had come to the concert less to make an opinion but to express their opinions and, ultimately, to sabotage the event. And it is true that the disorder in the concert hall really did pass a threshold: the tradition of listening silently, that had always been a fundamental part of the concert ritual was flagrantly disregarded. There were verbal protests, whistling and vociferous demands to discontinue the performance.
The first movement of the quartet received warm applause by the group of Schönberg’s supporters that were present – even to clap between movements was unusual. It was in the second movement, Scherzo, that the disturbances really began. There was a sudden outburst of laughter that was then followed by further noisy outbursts of increasingly uncontrolled hilarity. The performers played on undauntedly. The composer’s supporters tried in vain to reinstate silence by shouting loudly back at the trouble-makers. By the end of the movement, jeers, whistles and mock Indian calls could be heard.
As for the third movement, in which Schönberg took the considerable artistic risk of adding an extra vocal line to the score and, by doing so, seemed to attack the very genre of the string quartet, I quote the Neues Wiener Tagblatt (The New Vienna Daily):
“At this point Ms Gutheil-Schoder appeared on the podium. She was in charge of the vocal part of the cacophony. The witches dance of the third movement began. More laughter could be heard from the audience. Some people left the hall, others stayed, interested to observe how things would continue. The song unfolded and Ms Gutheil, who was applauded by her admirers, refused to notice or acknowledge the volume and intensity of the protest from other quarters. She finished by comprehending that the public was furious, since from all directions one heard cries “That’s enough!”, “Stop!”, “Stop playing!” (Aufhören! Schluß! Nicht weiterspielen!) and the likes. From other corners there were cries “Be quiet!”, “Let them play on!” (Ruhe! Weiterspielen!). After finishing, Ms Gutheil sat down and stared silently and motionlessly at the unruly audience. After a while, the final movement commenced.”
At the end of the third movement the uproar subsided and those that hadn’t left and chose to stay on were reasonably settled during the quartet’s fourth movement and also listened to the Beethoven quite attentively. However, in the days that followed, it was as if the Bösendorfer concert hall, a temple of high culture, had been profaned by scandalous scenes of riot. A week later in the Wiener Montagsjournal (Vienna Monday Journal), one could read the new regulation “All infection of art by the production of cacophonies is forbidden!” (28.12.1908).