Schoenberg's New World: The American Years (review)

Abstract

Schoenberg's New World: The Years. By Sabine Feisst. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, [xvii, 379 pp. ISBN 9780195372380. $35.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Sabine Feisst, educated in her native Germany but currently on the faculty of Arizona State University, opens her notable monograph on Arnold Schoenberg's years with a chapter that shoots down one myth after another: that he was alienated in the New World (as a Jew, he was probably that much more of an outsider in Europe, but in any event, he had a large number of friends in the United States); that Schoenberg was burdened with financial and medical problems in America (he earned a solid middle-class income and enjoyed relatively good health); that he had fascist leanings (his Ode to Napoleon and A Survivor from Warsaw represented vivid musical indictments [p. 10] of fascism); that his works succumbed to popular taste, especially in their use of tonality (such developments represented a sound response to his changed environment and anticipated postmodern trends); that he was dissatisfied with the quality of his pupils (he had a number of exceptional students, including John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, Leon Kirchner, Oscar Levant, and several leading film composers); and that he was unappreciated and undervalued in America (he had considerable success getting his music published and performed, especially as compared with many of his colleagues, and in addition proved enormously influential). According to Feisst, many of these popular misunderstandings regarding Schoenberg derive from the anti-American prejudices of Eurocentrist commentators, who for polemical reasons have tended to cherrypick some of the composer's more provocative remarks. Feisst proceeds to provide a framework for a more accurate picture of Schoenberg in the context of the New World. Chapter 2 details the considerable interest in Schoenberg that preceded his emigration in 1933. The third chapter, the heart of the book, explores his three-fold as Austro-German, Jew, and subsequent to his arrival in the United States. The identity section considers his steadfast devotion to the German classical tradition and his relations with a distinguished circle of German and Austrian emigres, including Theodor Adorno and Thomas Mann, who are presented somewhat as conspirators in the making of Doktor Faustus, with Schoenberg an unwitting dupe; and his former student Hanns Eisler, whose deportation he refused to protest, a clear lapse, although understandable enough in light of his temperament and circumstances. (By contrast, he wrote a strong letter on behalf of the incarcerated Henry Cowell.) The identity section explores his fervent but unorthodox Jewish beliefs, including his exalted dream of a Jewish Unity Party under his leadership that would unite the Jewish people in a national homeland. The American identity section shows Schoenberg as successfully adjusting to his new circumstances, from adopting English as his primary language (including dropping the umlaut from his surname) and wearing brightly colored clothes to mingling with Hollywood celebrities and championing the cause of a national music (which, given the 1930s slogan Communism is Twentieth- Century Americanism, perhaps could be described in part as, Dodecaphonism is Twentieth-Century Americanism). In each of the three sections, Feisst isolates several compositions intended to illustrate these separate identities, discussions that highlight the risks or at least the limitations of dividing Schoenberg into three. Feisst herself, for instance, alludes to the influence of both Bach and Hollywood film scores on A Survivor for Warsaw, a work cited as exemplifying the composer's Jewish identity. Similarly, she mentions the German classical tradition and Hebrew cantillation in the context of the Fourth String Quartet, but treats the work as reflecting the composer's apparently on the basis of its relative accessibility and the popularity of string quartet composition in his adopted homeland. …