For its second appearance, this new department devoted to “occasional” and more or less informal comment on events and cultural developments offers: a report by KURT LIST on the latest work (not yet publicly performed) of Arnold Schoenberg, perhaps our greatest living composer, and regarded by many critics as the creator of a unique synthesis of the specifically Jewish in form and feeling with the most fruitful tendencies in modem music; and a sceptical note by Irving Kristol on a recent attempt to translate anthropological findings into inter-group understanding via modem advertising techniques. Schoenberg’s cantata will have its world premiere over the French radio on December 13, under the direction of René Leibowitz. Dr. List is a composer as well as a critic; the latest performance of his compositions, by the Manhattan Wind Quintet, took place in New York in March of this year. He is editor of the magazine Listen and an editor of Bomart Music Publications, publishers of many modem scores. Mr. Kristol is an assistant editor of COMMENTARY.

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A Survivor of Warsaw, which Arnold Schoenberg completed about a year ago, is a cantata in a new form, telling the story of a Jew who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto. Even if Schoenberg were not the greatest composer of the century, the cantata’s concern with the most traumatic experience of modern Jewry would suffice to earn it serious attention. In addition, the new work offers solutions of truly extraordinary value to some of the current problems of Jewish culture in this country that have been under intense discussion of late in the community.

A Survivor of Warsaw is written for a narrator, male chorus, and orchestra to a verbal text which the composer fashioned on the basis of reports from Jewish survivors after the war. Its composition was begun in 1946, under the immediate impact of the revelations that made it impossible to disbelieve any longer the reality of Jewish extermination—a truth we knew intellectually even before then, but which we came to accept emotionally, if at all, only after repeated confirmation. The entire cantata was finished in August 1947 in particella—sort of musical shorthand that only an experienced musician can easily decipher—but not in the final orthographic form from which a publisher’s copy or parts for performances can be made. Since Schoenberg, because of failing eyesight, could not undertake the inditing of a publishable score, René Leibowitz, a young composer who had made a reputation for himself as a conductor and a theoretician of the Schoenberg school, finished the task in December 1947, and the result was certified by the composer.

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The text itself of A Survivor of Warsaw is far from an adequate indication of the emotions of the composer during its writing.

The narrator describes a day that led to the machine-gunning of thousands of Jews. They died singing the ancient prayer of Shema Yisrael—this prayer, sung by the chorus, concludes the composition. The narrator’s words are in English, with which Schoenberg has only passing acquaintance, and they read like a translation of German Expressionist style of the 20’s. It has always seemed strange that an artist of Schoenberg’s genius, who has with every new work opened up wider musical vistas, should have had his literary tastes fixed in youth, in Symbolism first and then in Expressionism. What came off convincingly when handled by writers like Bert Brecht and Georg Kaiser back in the 20’s sounds strange in his mouth; and, though an excellent essayist in German, he has mastered neither the art of narrative treatment nor the English language.

Attempts to create atmosphere with a single stroke of the pen result only in jagged, unrhythmical sentences. “The day began as usual. Revolt when it still was dark. Get out whether you slept or whether worries kept you awake the whole night: you had been separated from your children from your wife from your parents you don’t know what happened to them how could you sleep?” The immense tragedy begins to sound stale and melodramatic. Even more inept is the treatment of the German Feldwebel who gives the orders for the execution in a clipped Prussian accent out of Hollywood: “Achtung! Still gestanden! Na wird’s bald? Oder soll ich mit dem Gewehrkolben nachhelfen? Na jutt, wenn Ihr’s durchaus haben wollt!” One is almost relieved—and not only for obvious dramatic reasons—when the chorus finally breaks into the words of the Hebrew prayer.

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And yet Schoenberg has nonetheless achieved a major masterpiece in A Survivor of Warsaw. He has been able to do this, despite his faulty text, because the histrionics of the work are unimportant, the emotions beneath them everything. As Schoenberg himself once put it in a different connection, “I write music as music without any reference other than to express my feelings in tone. I do not shape my scores with a definite idea to express anything but music. All symbolic ideas are read into it by musicologists, for I have no intention when I write of solving tonal problems, creating emotional response, or building unusual patterns. All I want to do is express my thoughts and get the most possible content in the least possible space.” This Schoenberg has certainly done in the present cantata.

And though his intentions may have been limited to the expression of his thoughts, he has touched on problems that reach much further and, as in every great work of art, imply much more than his own particular feelings.

Thus the quality of Schoenberg’s text is, I repeat, of relatively little consequence to the total quality of the work. Since, as the composer himself says, “There are relatively few persons who are able to understand music, merely from the purely musical point of view,” the audience must be warned not to let its attention be deflected from what the cantata accomplishes musically by what it does not accomplish literarily.

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Into a rhapsodic musical structure that appears loose at first glance, Schoenberg infuses an atmosphere of horror and fear by purely musical means. This is accomplished in the first place-and on the surface—by impressionistic orchestral devices. More than in any other of Schoenberg’s works the instruments are here exploited for all their coloristic potentialities, with their individual techniques pushed to the limit by such devices as tremolos in the strings, Flatterzunge in the winds.

There is also a prodigious use of percussion instruments. Rhythmically, the atmosphere of horror is created by repetitive, almost obsessional, metric patterns of a kind that Schoenberg had not made use of since his Five Orchestral Pieces. (These were first performed in 1916 and Schoenberg himself said that their music “seeks to express all that dwells in us subconsciously like a dream.”) These rhythms express alternately the atavistic fear of the oppressor, the sadism of the persecutor, and the latent masochism of the victim. The words of the narrator are delivered in strictly prescribed rhythm, and the relative pitch of each syllable is indicated—this is a departure from the Sprechstimme in Schoenberg’s early Pierrot Lunaire, where the narrator recited the words at a given absolute musical pitch, but it repeats the system of the same composer’s recent Ode to Napoleon, where dramatic suspense was also expressed by a wavering, indeterminate pitch.

But none of these devices is used impressionistically, that is, as an end in itself. Nor are they employed solely out of a desire to create an emotional climate; they also have a formal function. The thematic introduction in the trumpets, divided into two symmetrical motifs, contains the physiognomy of the entire work. Its rhythms, intervals, structure, and orchestration indicate the events to follow. There is virtually not a single musical occurrence in the entire composition that is not derived from this thematic introduction. The grouping of three notes in the first motif, which appears originally in the form of triplets, is later repeated in groupings of three rhythmically varied notes (one eighth and two sixteenths)—a rhythmical occurrence already used in the beginning as an accompanying figure in the strings, or in groups of either three sixteenths or two eighths and one quarter-note. The intervals of the first motif—minor second, fifth and sixth, and the tritone that ensues from the combination of minor second and fifth—are, in either their original or inverted form, the only structure-forming intervals of the whole work. Their inversion plays a special role, since the second part of the theme is actually an inverted form of the original motif.

Much of the extravagance of the orchestration is likewise already implied in the theme, where accompanying tremolo figures in the strings set the jagged trumpet motif in relief. Technically, a good deal of this is done by the employment of a twelve-tone row, Schoenberg’s dominant form of compositional technique in his later years. But this fact itself is of only secondary importance.

The significance of the total work lies in its ordered evolution from a minute initial nucleus, to which every subsequent occurrence is then related. Thus what impresses the casual listener as a merely rhapsodic sketch is, for the more penetrating ear, woven into hermetic tightness by the most intricate relationships.

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Similarly, the Jewish prayer melody at the close is not grafted onto the texture but grows out of it logically, and not only because it is repeatedly hinted at before it appears in its entirety. Here Schoenberg works somewhat like Proust, who in his great novel gives us many glimpses of a character—a name, then a sentence, then a notion—before showing him fully. The logic of the prayer is made quite manifest in the preceding intervals, which appear first in the original motif, later on in its evolution, and finally in the prayer itself.

A most amazing feat is thus accomplished: a Jewish melody is preserved authentically by the use of the most intricate and complex devices of modem Western music. Yet at no point is the listener aware of a disparity between the Jewish timbre and the modem texture. Both are logically blended into one unity.1

In making a development from a tiny initial nucleus his chief aesthetic principle, Schoenberg accomplishes several things at once. He creates a dramatic impression by disguising, on the surface, the strictness of his technique; he weds his Jewish emotion and background to his high prowess as a composer of Western art music (thus pointing out a feasible way of bridging one of the gaps between the Jewish and Western cultural heritage); and he produces a work whose parts are so organically related that its unity satisfies the classical ideal. Three problems are solved at once: ideologically, culturally, and aesthetically. In this writer’s opinion, A Survivor of Warsaw marks a peak in Schoenberg’s career; and it continues radically his development away from romanticism and ushers in a new period of classicism.

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Two factors outside Schoenberg’s own orbit as a creator seem to have made possible the achievement of this work of classical perfection on a theme ostensibly unsuitable to such treatment.

Paradoxical as it may seem, one factor was Schoenberg’s inability to grasp completely the tragedy that was his subject matter. His text is written out of sympathy, hardly out of true empathy, and certainly not out of personal experience. Let us compare the stilted and artificial literary Expressionism of his cantata with the words of another musician, who, though of smaller gifts, was an actual witness of events similar to those Schoenberg describes. Shalom Katz was a cantor in Bucharest. When the Nazis took over Rumania he was sent to a concentration camp. He writes: “In the concentration camp where I was prisoner the SS-men one day singled out two thousand Jews, among them myself. We were to be shot—this for the purpose of providing Hitler’s supermen a few hours of relief from their boring role as fighters for the ‘New Order.’ We were handed pickaxes and shovels and unceremoniously ordered to dig our own graves. Having provided, each one of us, a place which would be a sure abode of release from the tortures of the so-called ‘upholders of civilization,’ I prevailed upon the SS-men to let me raise my voice in song during that last moment of our lives, both for my own sake and for that of my fellow-Jews. That this was permitted was doubtless with the thought of deriving further evil joy from our hapless plight. I was pushed out from the ranks of the condemned, and I began to sing El Mole Rachamim, the Hebrew prayer for the dead.”

If we discount the various ironic remarks about the Nazis—put in undoubtedly for the sake of his audience—we find no feeling, no emotion in Mr. Katz’s account. This is the natural reaction of one who has actually lived through terror. There is nothing here of the crescendo of Schoenberg’s text: “ . . . they began again, first slowly one two three four, became faster and faster so fast that it finally sounded like a stampede of wild horses and quite of a sudden, in the middle of it, they began singing Shema Yisrael.” For Cantor Katz the rendition of El Mole Rachamim is a logical ceremony. One has lived by prayers that fit the respective occasion, and now one dies by them. It is vain to try to comprehend the senseless inhumanity of which one is being made victim.

But for Schoenberg prayer becomes something different. This is not the first time that he uses it in his works. The oratorio Die Jakobsleiter, the opera Moses und Aaron, and finally his setting of Kol Nidre show that the Jewish prayer forms an integral part of his aesthetic contemplation just as the Protestant choral did for Bach. Berthold Viertel, speaking of Die jakobsleiter, characterizes the significance of prayer for Schoenberg accurately enough by saying: “Schoenberg could not write an oratorio merely because it is beautiful to pray. He asks immediately: ‘Do we pray?—When?—Why do we pray?—What is the root of praying?—Its aim?—Its effect?’ Praying becomes a fundamental problem to him. And not only his individual problem—but a general one. The problem of humanity. He must understand it universally, as action and fulfillment of the human soul—and in all its possibilities. He thinks it through in all its forms. He may have done so for years. Until, one day, the religious thinker, Schoenberg, had a vision which became the inspiration of the artist.”

For Schoenberg, then, the tragedy of the Warsaw Ghetto is a stimulus to artistic creation. The prayer becomes a heroic climax and not, as it was in reality, the grotesque distortion of daily ritual. And so it does not matter that the composer cannot fully comprehend the horror of extermination or the obsessional motives that force those who survived it to repeat endlessly and in unemotional tones the unspeakable terror of their experience. For Schoenberg the real event becomes stuff for his program, as Prosper Mérimée’s story of the cigarette girl became stuff for Bizet’s Carmen.

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Yet there is a difference. In Warsaw the issue is much too large, much too overwhelming to be used simply as material for a “story.” Goethe says: “The phenomenon is not separated from the observer, it is rather kneaded and woven into his individuality.” This is the relation between the Warsaw tragedy and Schoenberg, whose concern with the Jewish fate is real and strong, yet whose experience of such an extreme situation as that he treats in his cantata is necessarily derivative. On the one hand, the event is too large to be comprehended by the outsider in its material details. On the other, it is too new, too imposing to be comprehended by anyone in all its broad implications. But the artist masters the issue, and is not mastered by it, by contemplating it profoundly, by “kneading” it into himself.

Schoenberg, as a Jew and a man, is thus close enough to the actual experience to be engulfed by its horror, yet at the same time he is detached enough from it, as an observer, to retain the capacity to order into music his reactions of fear, insecurity, and discomfort. On the one side we notice the strongly rhapsodic, almost hysterical procedure inside the structure of the work; but on the other, his sensitivity escapes the full impact of the experience, remains basically unshaken; and the listener must shift the center of his attention from the event itself to the art, from consequences and self-concern to aesthetic contemplation. The integration here of Jewish melos with the highest Western art is born out of the artist’s concern with the Jewish problem and his simultaneous refusal to be overcome by its limitlessness.

The “solution” of a problem by its displacement and removal to another plane seems a characteristic of our age. In most cases, artists avoid facing the aesthetic problems of their art by shifting their concern to matters of an ideological nature or to the related field of another art. Stravinsky, for instance, copes with musical problems by escaping into stage-craft, the usual nationalist composer by grafting folk melodies onto an academic texture. With Schoenberg just the opposite is true. His inability, which is everybody’s, to cope with the gigantic problem of mass extermination, forces him to concern himself even more intensely with the problems of his art. This may be an escape from the reality of life; but it is an escape, in this case, into the reality of aesthetics, and as such establishes a higher truth than would have been possible for this composer had he addressed himself directly t political and social issues.

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But conflict engendered by the momentousness of the issue does not alone explain the high musical accomplishment of A Survivor of Warsaw. For that we must look into the position Schoenberg occupies in the evolution of music. At the beginning of the 20th century we observe a strange duality in music. There are composers who are motivated exclusively by a human and aesthetic experience, and there are those whose concern is chiefly with immediate passing sensations. Extending Croce’s famous description of d’Annunzio as “a dilettante of sensations” to the percussive composers of this century, we find in Stravinsky the observer, in Debussy the object of sensations; we see in Richard Strauss the dilettante of experience, and in Schoenberg the object of it.

Schoenberg is sucked into his experience so completely that he can write only on the basis of emotional value, never out of any literary conceit. Thereby his music has avoided the faddism of the new avant-garde experimentalism. The composer himself, with his traditional and historical background, is the measure of this art. He is also the measure of truth—and thus he returns to Goethe’s ideal of truth as beauty. (Since Schoenberg, discussions of aesthetic beauty in music, heretofore conducted along the formalistic lines of consonance and dissonance, have changed to discussions of the “veracity” of musical expression.)

That Goethe and Schoenberg intersect is hardly accidental. Goethe and Schoenberg present the artistic summits of the long evolutionary span of enlightenment that reaches from the French Revolution to the Weimar Republic. Goethe arrives at his ideal of objectivity and classicism in reaction to the Sturm und Drang, Schoenberg in rejection of the representational ideas and harmonic efflorescence of the romantic music of Wagner and Bruckner. Both begin as champions of romanticism; both develop into the ultimate incarnation of objective reason in the arts. (That music should reach such a stage a hundred years after literature is not so surprising when one takes into account the characteristic cultural lag of music—of which Russian and American music are perhaps prime examples—and the particular insularism of the German musician.)

Many authorities, recognizing the classicism in Schoenberg’s music, have stressed its traditional side. René Leibowitz writes: “Possibly most critics have failed to notice the traditional aspect, and it may be because of this that, until now, many things have been said about the so-called special qualities of the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, while hardly anything has been mentioned about their most important quality, which is their use of the essential principles of musical composition.” Schoenberg, too, likes to see himself as a traditional composer. In less capricious moments, however, he has well recognized the significance of the revolutionary side of his art. He himself writes: “The music of today is developing a field which must at first appear entirely new to us. And here probably is the difference: the field must first be cultivated. It is virgin soil. We are not at the high-point of an old art but rather at the beginning of a new one.”

The truth of the matter is that though Schoenberg, like any great artist, is a true child of the past, his merit does not lie in the fact that his music evolves from tradition, but in the fact that it transcends it and points the way to a new art. What is traditional about this music, aside from the all too obvious fact that it works within the syntactical principles of Western music, is its points of departure. But the classicism, its essential achievement, is revolutionary and goes far beyond tradition.

It is this classicism that once again, after a century of private and personal musical utterance, makes it possible to objectify the musical experience of the creator, and with this the various musical tendencies that have plagued music since the early 19th century.

In the classical edifice of Schoenberg’s music are fused the anti-classical tendencies of romanticism and nationalism; a cosmopolitan feeling is established that does not negate, but takes in, these different and contradictory impulses. This is the final meaning of Schoenberg’s music. And in the final analysis this is also the aim of any progressive, national culture—of the culture that Jewish culture must be if it wants to enjoy the fullness of life.

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That this aim is realized consummately in A Survivor of Warsaw—a work born out of two discrepancies, that between the largeness of the issue and the personal limitations of the composer, that between tradition and revolution—would show that the question of national culture and its problems stands on the threshold of a worldwide, high aesthetic solution.

But we already hear the objections of the self-appointed saviors of a Jewish national culture. The “Jewish flavor” will be lost—yet it is precisely the Jewish melismatic texture that is preserved in A Survivor of Warsaw. The music is too intricate and complex—yet it is precisely this complexity that is alone capable of comprehending modern life and modern aesthetic purpose. And finally they will say that, even so, such a blending of modem texture and folk idiom is too difficult to undertake. Is it really difficult? Victor Hugo answered that question long ago: “It is either easy—or impossible.”

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1 This testifies once more to the great potentialities and flexibility of the twelve-tone row, which, in the hands of a skilled craftsman, unbends to anything musically accomplishable. Thus Alban Berg employs it to quote a Bach Chorale in his Violin Concerto and a passage from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in his Lyric Suite, just as Schoenberg uses it here. And both composers exploit the twelve-tone row’s melismatic potentialities at the same time. Nor are these feats tours de force; on the contrary, a strict analysis of each work reveals the immediate musical cogency of the device.

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