Schoenberg's Handel Concerto and the Ruins of Tradition

Abstract

Arnold Schoenberg began his Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra "freely transcribed" from Handel's Concerto Grosso, Op. 6, no. 7 in May 1933 as a professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. When he completed the work in September he was an exile in Paris, recently reconverted to Judaism and preparing to travel to the United States where he would spend the rest of his life. The tensions and discontinuities manifest in the creative process and in the completed score can offer new critical windows onto Schoenberg's ideas of history and tradition, his position with respect to artistic trends in the 1920s and 1930s, and the eclecticism of his late style.