To The Editor:
I have read with much interest Dr. Kurt List’s article about Arnold Schoenberg’s cantata, A Survivor of Warsaw, in the November COMMENTARY It anticipated the first performance of the work in Albuquerque and the article in Time magazine.
Schoenberg’s new work is unknown to most of us, the score is not published yet. But the new opus opens a wide interest in the whole area of musical structure, treatment of the speaking voice, setting of the text to music, the use of a traditional Hebrew song, the relation of the twelve-tone technique to the whole, etc. Above all the theme itself!
The amazing richness of Dr. List’s points of departure, the multitude of his associations, is more than stimulating, although his attempt to place Schoenberg as the border figure between Jewish and Western culture appears to me a bit willful and premature.
May I add that I found the November issue of COMMENTARY vigorous, serious, and stimulating as ever.
Karol Rathaus
Queens College
Flushing, New York
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