Music and Philosophy Volume One

Legend of a Musical City, Schoenberg and His School, and Shostakovich

Max Graf, René Leibowitz, Ivan Martynov

• Publisher: Philosophical Library/Open Road
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781504064521
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musikgeschichte & -kritik

These three essential volumes on classical music theory and history explore the lives and contributions of some of music's greatest minds.

In Legend of a Musical City: The Story of Vienna, renowned Austrian music critic Max Graf shares his recollections of life with Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, and other immortals of the music world. Bringing to life several iconic composers as well as the city of Vienna itself, Graf recounts a charming, personal, and highly educational story of Austria's musical legacy.

In Schoenberg and His School, noted composer, conductor, and music theorist René Leibowitz offers an authoritative analysis of Schoenberg's groundbreaking contributions to composition theory and Western polyphony. In addition to detailing his subject's major works, Leibowitz also explores Schoenberg's impact on the works of his two great disciples, Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

In Shostakovich: The Man and His Work, Ivan Martynov presents a compelling and intimate biography of this pioneering legend. Martynov draws on extensive research, including interviews and conversations with Shostakovich himself, as well as his own expertise in the field of musicology.

Schoenberg and His School

René Leibowitz

Author’s Preface to the American Edition

It is gratifying to be able to say that many of the hopes I had when I wrote this book have already been fulfilled. Only a few months after the original French version was published I received letters from readers throughout the world, expressing agreement and telling me they had found this work valuable in revealing the real music of our time. This is all I had hoped to achieve.¹

Therefore, when I was given the opportunity to present my work to the American public, I immediately undertook to fill certain gaps which—some through involuntary carelessness on my part, some because of existing circumstances—remained in the first edition. I am both pleased and grateful, now, to believe that the United States, which is privileged to claim Arnold Schoenberg as a citizen, will profit from an improved effort to understand and explain the music of this greatest living master of composition.

In translation, the original process of thought inevitably undergoes some transformation. But this transformation can be fruitful, because the fundamental problem is seen in a new light, thus providing an opportunity for one to become more lucid and to measure more precisely one’s own limits.

A translation should not only aim to facilitate communication with the world of a different language; it should be in itself another approach to the basic problem—in this case, the international “language” of music. It is my hope that this translation will deepen and widen the comprehension of some of the most beautiful contemporary works of art. And every step taken in this direction brings us nearer to the point where these works will find the high position which should be theirs.

Perhaps only a few readers will appreciate fully the difficulties faced by the translator, as well as the courage, generosity and skill which she has spent on a task from which the cause of true music can only benefit. However, what every reader can know is the sincere and friendly gratitude expressed here to Miss Newlin for her work.

RENÉ LEIBOWITZ

Paris

Translator’s Preface

How often it occurs that, after a period of comparative silence or neglect, a particular subject is suddenly “in the air” everywhere at once! Thus it can happen that a number of works on such a subject will, though conceived quite independently of each other, appear at almost the same time. Surely this is no mere coincidence, but has to do with certain all-pervasive spiritual or philosophical movements which, at a given time, seem to affect all those of a given turn of mind with a certain inevitability.

It was immediately after the publication of my own book on Schoenberg and his predecessors that my attention was called to the present work, then newly issued. I was forcibly struck by its masterly handling of a theme which I had approached in a somewhat different way—Schoenberg as a continuation of the past equated with Schoenberg as a projection into the future. The further development of this idea—the presentation of Berg as the incarnation of the sense of the past, Webern as that of the future—seemed but the logical consummation of the concept of Tradition and Revolt in Schoenberg, which had occupied my mind for some years.

Here, then, was the book which those of us who consider the Schoenberg tradition the most fruitful trend of today had been wanting for years. That so revelatory a work should have appeared in France seemed a matter of profound significance. The great musical tradition of Vienna had been rooted out of its native country. It was—and is—now up to musicians of other lands to carry it on, and, in so doing, to give fresh proof (if such be needed) of its truly universal values. The great international values of music must not, cannot be destroyed by the aberrations of a single country.

Because of all this, it gives me great joy to have the opportunity of helping to place the work of René Leibowitz before the English-speaking public. The sincerity, enthusiasm, and devotion, coupled with the exact and exhaustive knowledge, which he has brought to his study of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern cannot fail to impress the reader already instructed in these matters. May his labor of love also win new friends and listeners for three of the greatest composers of our time!

DIKA NEWLIN
Western Maryland College
August, 1947

Author’s Preface

I have learned this book from those of whom it treats.

In writing this sentence, I do not mean merely to pay tribute to the three great musicians with whom I am concerned here, and who have been and still are—in the most profound and genuine meaning of the term—my masters; I should like, above all, to express something still more real and fundamental.

I am not a music critic, any more than I am a historian or an esthetician. I am a musician. Since this is so, most of my life is spent in direct contact with forms of sound, whether I myself make the effort of inventing and coordinating them or whether I find myself in the presence of the musical scores of others. As far back as I can remember, I have been delving into these scores for the instruction which my conscience demands. So I may be excused for seeming to want to reduce music—as far as it concerns me—to its simple didactic functions. To tell the truth, the reading or the hearing of any kind of musical work—and I have read or heard thousands of them—has never been, to me, an excuse for pleasure, distraction, relaxation, or even a manifestation of my curiosity. If certain readings or hearings of music have perforce brought with them pleasure and relaxation—or, for that matter, boredom and irritation—these qualities are superimposed on the musical exercises in question, exercises whose origin and real intention are quite different. Every time I hear music, whether in my imagination or through my senses, I begin anew to question all that I know, all that I am. Such questioning automatically enforces the participation of all one’s intellectual faculties, which are thus made keener and stronger by each new experience. It is in this gradual progress towards a greater intellectual lucidity that the instructive qualities of music, to which I referred above, are to be found.

But there is still more to the question. Composing music and being a composer, making music and being a musician, are not necessarily synonymous. It is comparatively easy to compose, to make music. A minimum of gifts and of technical means (which latter may be acquired comparatively painlessly) is sufficient. To be a composer or a musician demands more than that. Now, those who become composers begin (just like those who do not become composers) by making music or composing. But at one time or another there comes to them what some would call a revelation, and what I like to call a sudden consciousness of the true meaning of the language of music. From that day forward, if the activity of composing or of making music is carried on with the intention of solving those profound problems which have confronted the consciousness of the individual, that individual has a chance to become a composer, a true musician.

In the case of the composer, this sudden consciousness comes at the moment when, in the work of a contemporary musician, he discovers what seems to him to be the language of his epoch, the language which he himself wants to speak. Up to that point, he may have assimilated, in more or less accurate fashion, the language of the past; he may have believed that he has profited from certain excursions into a style which seems to him to furnish fresh possibilities. But his real consciousness of being a composer cannot be foursquare and unshakable until some master of our time brings him the assurance, the irrefutable evidence of the necessity and the authenticity of his personal language.

That is what happened to me on my first contact with the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. I did not immediately understand the language which their works speak; I must even add that it took me a long time to become familiar with it, and I do not know whether even today I have grasped (in a general way) its wealth of implications. But without having understood it completely, I understood from the beginning that it was the only genuine and inevitable expression of the musical art of our time. Since then, my certainty of this has grown, to the extent that my activity transformed the first intuition into knowledge which became ever more lucid and profound. But I owe all this activity, its very meaning and intensity—this activity, thanks to which I have acquired my knowledge—to the example of the three masters whom I have named. It is in this sense that I can say that I learned this work from them—this work which is nothing but the theoretical synthesis of the present extent of my knowledge with regard to the meaning of this musical language, the assimilation of which is the chief goal of my existence.

These remarks will make the reader understand the spirit in which this book is written. It represents, I believe, the first effort to make a profound study of the three composers who dominate our contemporary musical art. That such an attempt should have taken place in France—a land which is not the home of these three composers, a land which, in a certain sense at least, is not my home either, but in the midst of which I have meditated upon the lesson of my masters, a land whose language I use to preserve the results of these meditations—all this seems to me of the highest significance.

In the first place, it pleases me to see here one more proof that France is the very place where the most violent passions may be unleashed and where the maelstrom of intellectual and artistic life becomes so turbulent as to necessitate (before this problem arises anywhere else) a positive and constructive synthesis of the factors which have led to this state of affairs.

For, if it is in France that the music of Arnold Schoenberg and his school has provoked the most exacerbated hostility, it is also in Paris that there is now springing into being, for the first time since the existence of this school, a group of musicians who claim it as their own, but none of whom has been directly influenced by Schoenberg, Webern, or Berg.

This ought not to give the impression that the following pages are conceived in a spirit of propaganda for the school in question. The works of our masters have no need whatsoever for such support. If I wanted to make propaganda for Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, I would have nothing to say—except that they are among the most powerful, most original, and most virile composers of whom the history of music may boast. But this would not be nearly enough, and that is why I have set myself quite a different task.

Before I define this task, I shall say that in undertaking it I have been aware of the difficulties which it entails. The works of artists such as those whom we discuss are complex individual worlds. When on top of all this we are concerned with contemporary works, it is possible that we do not have sufficient perspective to view them in their total significance. Trying to comprehend the unique features of their meaning seems to me, then, an undertaking which is at least risky, if not foredoomed to failure. That is why I have chosen to approach the works of Schoenberg and his school not by considering them as self-contained phenomena, but by placing them in relation to the tradition which has produced them and of which they represent, in my opinion, the most advanced phase at the present time.

Such a method has a chance of being fruitful, and this is why: the fact that the music of the school which interests us is virtually unknown, not only to the general public, but also to the majority of musicians the world over, is explained chiefly by the innumerable difficulties which this music entails. No other music of today demands such arduous and constant effort—whether on the part of the performer, the listener, or the critic—to be understood, appreciated, and penetrated. The essential difficulty appears in that lost feeling which overwhelms most of those coming in contact for the first time with some page of Schoenberg, Berg, or Webern—a feeling caused by forms of sound which seem to have no relation to those with which we are familiar, and which appear to be quite incapable of producing a musical discourse such as we are generally accustomed to hearing. It is evident that such a state of affairs must be attributed primarily to the specific temperaments of our composers. Once again, I have nothing to say about these t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Legend of A Musical City
• Schoenberg and his School
• Shostakovitch: The Man and His Work
• Copyright Page