A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (review)

Abstract

A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life. By Joseph Auner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. [xxvi, 428 p. ISBN 0-300-09540-6. $45.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Joseph Auner, one of the foremost scholars of Schoenberg's life and music, has brought together a miscellany of writings, many either previously unpublished or untranslated, to add to the recent abundant interest in the composer. The book is aimed ostensibly at the layperson, but it will sit comfortably close by the hand of the Schoenberg expert. The amateur will find in it a sampling of the central issues in the composer's life, these sketched in Schoenberg's inimitable English prose style or in excellent translations assembled at the expert hands of the editor. For the dedicated Schoenberg scholar, the book serves as a reminder of the expansive scope of its subject-his prolific writing and his broad stature as a preeminent figure in twentieth-century music. The collection is organized chronologically into seven periods: the first maturity, 1874;-1906; the development of a new compositional aesthetic, 1906-11; the first war, 1911-18; the development of a second compositional aesthetic, 1918-25; the years of stability, 1926-33; the years of exile, 1933-43; and the final seven coda-like years, 1944-51, which witnessed the ultimate maturity of a man so central and yet so recalcitrant a member of the century's musical consciousness. The apparatus of the book is exemplary, direct and neat, concise and yet exhaustive given its clearly declared scope. The provenance of the entries is meticulously documented in a bibliography of sources that reveals the wide framework of the compiler's investigation. Many are taken from hitherto unpublished documents in the collection of the Arnold Schonberg Center in Vienna, others from the collections of manuscript letters housed in the Library of Congress, the Pierpont Morgan Library, and elsewhere. While a number of documents are taken from previously published sources, the bulk of these are obscure or out-of-print publications and thus not readily available to the layperson. Even the Schoenberg expert will find rarities, and some timely fortuities such as the outline text, entitled Death Dance of Principles, to the sixth movement of a large unfinished symphony, which Lydia Goehr addresses in an auspicious article on Schoenberg and Adorno (Adorno, Schoenberg, and the Totentanz der Principien-in Thirteen Steps, Journal of the American Musicological Society 56 [Fall 2003]: 595-636). …