The German Genius

where Karl Kraus, Theodor Herzl, and Gustav Klimt were great friends. He mixed with the philosophers of the Vienna Circle. 40
    Schoenberg’s autodidacticism served him well. While other composers made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth, Schoenberg was more impressed by the Expressionist painters who were trying to make visible the distorted and raw forms unleashed by the modern world and analyzed and ordered by Freud. His aim was to do something similar in music. The term he himself liked was “the emancipation of the dissonance.” 41
    Schoenberg once described music as “a prophetic message revealing a higher form of life toward which mankind evolves.” However, he found his own evolution slow and painful. Though his early music owed a debt to Wagner, Tristan especially, it had a troubled reception in Vienna, its high seriousness out of place in a city that was, in Alex Ross’s words, “forced to glitter.” 42 In addition to his difficulties with the public, Schoenberg had problems in his private life. In the summer of 1908, the very moment of his first atonal compositions, his wife, Mathilde, abandoned him for a friend. Rejected by his wife, isolated from Mahler, who was in New York, Schoenberg was left with nothing but his music. But in that year he composed his Second String Quartet, based on the “esoteric and remote” poems of Stefan George. 43
    The precise point at which atonality arrived, his “voyage to the other side,” according to Schoenberg himself, was during the writing of the third and fourth movements of the string quartet. 44 He was using George’s poem “Entrückung” (Ecstatic Transport) when he suddenly left out all six sharps of the key signature. As he completed the part for the cello, he abandoned completely any sense of key, to produce a “real pandemonium of sounds, rhythms and forms.” As luck would have it, the stanza ended with the line, “Ich fühle Luft von anderen Planeten” (I feel the air of other planets). It could not have been more appropriate. The Second String Quartet was finished toward the end of July. Between then and its premiere, on December 21, one more personal crisis shook the Schoenberg household. In November the painter for whom his wife had left him hanged himself after failing to stab himself to death. Schoenberg took back Mathilde, and when he handed the score to the orchestra for the rehearsal, it bore the dedication “To my wife.”
    The premiere of the Second String Quartet turned into one of the great scandals of musical history. 45 After the lights went down, the first few bars were heard in respectful silence. But only the first few. Most people who lived in Vienna then carried whistles attached to their door keys. If they arrived home late at night, and the main gates of the building were locked, they would use the whistles to attract the attention of the concierges. On the night of the premiere, the audience got out its whistles en masse. A wailing chorus arose in the auditorium to drown out what was happening onstage. Next day one newspaper labeled the performance a “Convocation of Cats,” and the New Vienna Daily printed their review in the “crime” section of the paper. 46
    Years later Schoenberg conceded that this was one of the worst moments of his life, but he wasn’t deterred. Instead, in 1909, continuing his emancipation of the dissonance, he composed Ewartung , a thirty-minute opera, the story line for which is so minimal as to be almost absent: a woman goes searching in the forest for her lover; she discovers his body not far from the house of the rival who has stolen him. The story does not so much tell a story as reflect the woman’s moods—joy, anger, jealousy. In addition to the minimal narrative, it never repeats any theme or melody. Since most forms of music in the “classical” tradition usually employ variations on themes, and since repetition, lots of it, is the single most obvious characteristic of popular music, Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet and Ewartung stand out as the great break, after which “serious” music began to lose the faithful following it had once had. It was fifteen years before Ewartung was performed.
    Although he might be too impenetrable for most people’s taste, Schoenberg was not obtuse. He knew that some people objected to his atonality for its own sake. His response was Pierrot lunaire , appearing in 1912. It features a familiar icon of the theater—a dumb puppet who also happens to