Schoenberg's legacy for romantics

[eschiss1]

It's always interested me that Ravel is said to have hated the first chamber symphony, found it mechanical (maybe all those contrapuntal combinations and thematic derivations?... people really were better trained in those days and caught those things ) and really took to Pierrot Lunaire- as, Schoenberg claimed, did Puccini, and others. (Not the academics, who hated it, but many who sung in it, he wrote, and who he later met in apartment buildings waiting on him as porters etc. Schoenberg, it should be remembered, was briefly politically a leftist but for much of his life a reactionary, and musically hard to describe in those terms at all, I think- I tend to take him at his word that he was no revolutionary. Several of the essays in Style and Idea explain in a very haphazard and piecemeal fashion how he gets from Pelleas und Melisande with its many sequences- which he soon rejected as extending too few ideas over too much length- to later works, through crisis periods in which the attempt to solve various different problems led to the creation of very few works at all. Remaining at heart a Romantic composer- which is a specific concept having little (nothing?) to do with allowable chord sequences, and everything to do with literary connections and music (the Romantic era)- and should be looked up- through it all, I think...)
Eric

[Alan Howe]

I am currently listening to Schoenberg's VC (Hilary Hahn's performance on DG, which is absolutely extraordinary: is there a technically more gifted violinist in the world today?) However, as with all my previous efforts to come to grips with it, I have just no idea where it is all going. The predominant impression is one of constant restlessness and yet also colossal immobility, which I assume comes from the refusal of the composer to allow the music to resolve in a readily comprehensible manner. It's like an incredibly beautiful extended nervous breakdown - an aural version of Edvard Munch's The Scream perhaps?

[Delicious Manager]

Schoenberg's Violin Concerto is arguably the most difficult of all his works to come to grips with (the Piano Concerto, on the other hand, is like serial Mozart - if such a thing can be imagined!). Hilary Hahn has done this piece (which most violinists shy away from) a great service. I agree about her technical abilities, but find that her performances lack soul (and in some instances any real musicianship). There is a coldness of supreme execution that leaves me, frankly, unmoved and rather exasperated. Mullova has the same effect on me (as does Heifetz).

[Alan Howe]

For those interested the Chamber Symphony No.1 is indeed a great bridge to the more radical, later music. I still find it disconcerting to listen to - the harmonic procedures make for music that pushes late-Romanticism towards expressionism - but I can follow it without too much difficulty. Thank goodness!