The hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Schoenberg’s birth arrives in September. A dedicated Web site, Schoenberg150, documents a surge of performances in Europe. Activity in America is far more meagre. The only top-tier orchestras that are playing original music by Schoenberg in the 2023-24 season are the San Francisco Symphony, the Cincinnati Symphony, and the Minnesota Orchestra. The L.A. Philharmonic, Schoenberg’s home-town ensemble, has performed only four of his works in the past ten seasons; the Berlin Philharmonic has featured as many in the past two months. Next season, the L.A. Phil will make partial amends by mounting Schoenberg’s gargantuan oratorio “Gurrelieder.”
It fell to Jacaranda Music, a twenty-year-old, exuberantly inventive chamber-music series based in Santa Monica, to give Schoenberg proper honors in his final homeland. Under the leadership of Patrick Scott, Jacaranda has presented scores by more than two hundred composers, most of them active after 1900. And, one evening in 2013, Jacaranda persuaded the keepers of the Santa Monica Pier Carousel to entertain riders with an all-twentieth-century playlist, ranging from Mahler’s Fourth Symphony to Gubaidulina’s St. John Passion. Sadly, in the wake of the pandemic, the organization found that it was unable to keep going. Its farewell season, “Planet Schoenberg,” unfolded from September to February, at the First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica. The title alluded to a line from the German Symbolist poet Stefan George, one that Schoenberg set to music in his Second Quartet: “I feel air from another planet.”
Works from various stages of Schoenberg’s career anchored the series: the string sextet “Transfigured Night,” a feast of overripe Romanticism; the First Chamber Symphony, a hard-driving exploration of tonality’s outer edges; the song cycle “The Book of the Hanging Gardens,” which hovers vertiginously at the border of atonality; the Five Piano Pieces, Op. 23, an inaugural exercise in twelve-tone writing; and the semi-tonal “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte,” which uses Byron’s verbal assault on Napoleon to commemorate the war against Hitler. Together, these scores showed the spectacular variety of Schoenberg’s language. At no time did he call for the end of tonality; nor did he stop writing tonal music. Tonality, he said, “is not a necessity for a piece of music, but rather a possibility.”
That radical expansion of the harmonic field had a sweeping influence on all subsequent composers, whether or not they followed Schoenberg explicitly. Hollywood composers paid particularly close attention to Schoenberg’s music, and some studied with him directly. The great man was not displeased to receive these genuflections, although he appeared to resent the idea that his non-tonal vocabulary was useful primarily as an expressive crutch for scenes of tension and terror. Years ago, David Raksin, who wrote music for “Laura” and other classic films, told me that he once asked Schoenberg how he should score an airplane sequence. Schoenberg archly replied, “Like big bees, only louder.”