Schoenberg's relaxations, with a note on his early masterpiece "Verklärte Nacht"

Author(s): LEO BLACK

Source: The Musical Times , AUTUMN 2015, Vol. 156, No. 1932 (AUTUMN 2015), pp. 63-72
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/24615810

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 LEO BLACK

Schoenberg's relaxations, with a note o

early masterpiece Verklärte Nacht

contradictory versions: 'if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing

One well-known saying
well', meaning that worthwhile is equally
things deserve true in either of two
trouble taken over
them - but also 'if a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing badly', since that
may be as well as one's genes allow one to do them. Arnold Schoenberg
could have agreed with either version. All his life he was intensely concerned
that things should be done well - not always according to accepted criteria,
but by his own remarkable lights. But he was quite human enough to derive
pleasure from doing things he could with the best will in the world never
expect to do more than badly.
He supported himself by teaching, which can be a time-consuming way
to earn one's living, and any composer desperately needs time to compose.
Fortunately he tended to compose very fast, in widely-spaced spells of
inspiration. But drawing up the score of an orchestral work, for example,
is itself time-consuming. Often he travelled considerable distances to
conduct; he organised performances of contemporary music; he not only
wrote countless letters but constantly set down his thoughts on every
musical subject, and others too. He wrote several books, including the vast
Harmonielehre, which sums up in memorable language his vision of a great
creative artist's role and fate, as well as being a most untheoretical treatise
on 'the lore of Harmony' (this work whose closing words are 'who dares
ask for theory here?' was of course published, once translated into American
English, as Theory of harmony).
All of which is enough to show that he was immensely active, yet he had
still other activities, and plenty of them, which one might call his relaxations.
In a way it's an odd word to use about him, for whatever he did was done
with passion and his own kind of originality, cutting through convention
to get to the point. His painting was a second line of creativity; other men
of high talent have painted, notably DH Lawrence and Henry Miller, and
one Austrian creative figure of some distinction, Albert Paris Gütersloh,
proved equally competent as novelist and painter, so that a greater writer
colleague who regarded him as a father-figure, Doderer, devoted a whole
book, Der Fall Gütersloh, to an examination of how such a 'twin talent'
could come about. In Schoenberg's middle thirties he suddenly discovered
that he could paint, and he produced pictures for many years. The trigger

THE MUSICAL TIMES Autumn 2015 63

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64 Schoenberg's relaxations, with a note on his early masterpiece Verklärte Nacht

may well have been his first wife's affair with the gifted painter Richard
Gerstl, who committed suicide when Mrs Schoenberg finally returned to
her husband; in the roughly contemporary one-act opera Die glückliche
Hand there is enough stress on the theme of the artist's rivalry with a figure
called Der Mann - which means man, but also husband - to suggest that one
theme in the forefront of Schoenberg's mind at the time was emulation, with
the creator aiming to respond to a challenge in the 'real world' by trying to
show he could do just as well, and losing. In life, he was 'der Mann', who
won in the end; in the opera he was the unnamed creator protagonist, who
provokes hostility because his 'well-tuned hand' can get results in a new and
original way ('das kann man einfacher!'), but who must renounce his vision
of 'die Frau'.

Various distinguished artists at a time when dabbling in other people's

specialisms was almost mandatory were quick to acknowledge that the
technical quality of Schoenberg's painting was the least important thing
about it. His pictures - unconventional, straight to the point, products of a
search for truth, symbols of a disturbing inner vision, call them what you
will — were taken seriously by men of the standing of Kandinsky. This was
no relaxation, and it's only when one examines the list of things Schoenberg
did almost entirely for what the world calls 'fun' that we get an idea how
compulsively active he was. Perhaps the only way in which he could never
relax was simply to do just that - relax and do nothing, letting the world go
by. Unlike Schubert, he was not one 'to stand and stare'. If he did, what he
saw was too terrifying.
A composer who can plan a complex work in his head might well be
expected to show a comparable talent in other directions — to be able, for
example, to pilot himself through the deeps and straits of a chess game. In
both cases he must sense options some way ahead. Like many musicians,
Schoenberg was fond of chess, but typically invented his own version using
a board not eight squares each way but ten. To fill the extra space with a
suitable polyphony of forces he thought up additional pieces. One was an
'admiral', the other a 'Bischof' (which of course chess already has when
played in English; the German word for a 'bishop' is 'Laiifer', runner,
something of which the English translator of Stuckenschmidt's Schoenberg
biography seems to have been unaware. This will not become important
until Schoenberg's 'hundred-chess' catches on in England). It wasn't his
only effort as an inventor; he designed a musical typewriter and went so far
as to apply for a patent, though as he couldn't pay the fee the machine was
in fact never patented. Bookbinding and carpentry were lifelong passions.
He made his own furniture for his study, including a desk: Hanns Eisler
reported that in true Viennese style he was always tapping and tinkering.
The very first comparison in chapter one of the Harmonielehre is between

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Schoenberg (centre) 'relaxing' in
Austrian dress with Louis Savant
(horn), Fritz Kreisler (violin), Eduard
Gaertner (violin) and Karl Redlich
(flageolet), c.1911

music and carpentry, at which there are masters but no theorists. And the
book contains a charming story about an encounter with an old Czech
carpenter who 'could hardly speak German properly but straight away put
his finger on the weakness in a spuriously attractive design for a music stand
Schoenberg had thought up — 'we're taught that an upright must always be
stronger than a cross-piece'. (That was 'conventional wisdom' which for
once Schoenberg didn't challenge.) The book also draws acid comparisons
between certain artistic misdeeds and the more vulgar practices found in
bookbinding.
But the most interesting thing about these relaxations of Schoenberg's
is that he used his body as well as his mind — his hands in his carpentry and
bookbinding, but also his limbs. He was short, stockily built and naturally
active; his Spanish pupil Roberto Gerhard, with whom Schoenberg lived for
a while as he was composing Moses und Aron after his expulsion from Nazi
Germany, remembered his great pleasure when someone said he looked
like a tennis coach. But after the crisis in his middle thirties he had a truly
awful health record, not as bad as Beethoven's but bad enough. His main
troubles were a nervous ailment of his eyes, and bad attacks of asthma,
an illness which is also closely bound up with the nervous system. So this
man who at times can neither see nor breathe has to develop a passion for
two sports demanding mobility and a good eye, since they involve hitting
a moving ball: tennis and table-tennis. Mobility and coordination are also
essentials in fine musical performance, so it's no surprise to find many
musical performers keen on table tennis, though accounts of how good they
are or were must always be taken with a pinch of salt; anyone who plays
regularly and competitively, at however mediocre a level, is likely to have
the edge over the untutored occasional player. By reputation Jascha Heifetz
was the best, and that at least is credible, though here, too, tributes from a
great performer's students are scarcely evidence — it would never do if they

THE MUSICAL TIMES Autumn 20l5 65

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66 Schoenberg's relaxations, with a note on his early masterpiece Verklärte Nacht
i. Given the standard of
tennis coaching already
reached in the California
of the 1940s, Ronnie
Schoenberg did in fact do
well in local tournaments.
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beat The Maestro, even if capable. The great Jânos Starker suffered from
the same foible.
In Schoenberg's case the details are at first sight unpromising. In 1926, at
the age of 51, he repeated an earlier move from Vienna to Berlin, this time to
take up the only job for which he was ever paid a salary in keeping with his
prodigious talent. As director of a master-class in composition at the Berlin
Hochschule für Musik he enjoyed the rank of Senator, and it was then that
Senator Schoenberg also blossomed into Schoenberg the Sportsman. He
had married for the second time, and Gertrud Schoenberg née Kolisch was
a considerable tennis-player. Now her husband too became one, of a sort.
For the rest of his life, one of his concerns in finding places to live was the
availability of tennis facilities, first for himself and his wife, and later for
his family. After seven years in Berlin he was driven into exile by the newly
elected Nazi regime, but once settled on the West Coast of the USA he kept
up his tennis. It was in those early American years that he used to play with
George Gershwin. His elder son, Ronald, inherited his mother's talent: to
quote his father, he learned tennis against their windows, at six dollars a
pane. Schoenberg found that when he got onto a tennis court he could run
hard after the ball with no trouble to his breathing, and he was convinced
that this helped his asthma. (A little uncomplicated happiness must help
most ailments that have anything to do with the nervous system.) I suppose
that, by the same token, when he was at the ping-pong table he could see as
well as needed in order to play the kind of game he played. (As someone
said to me very recently, "You can see very well when you need to!")
He took up table-tennis at just the right time, for in the 1920s it was
expanding. Like football, it originally came from England, and had been
introduced into the Austro-Hungarian Empire just before the 1914 outbreak
of war. By the 1920s it was a popular social activity in places like Vienna.
Doderer's novel Die Dämonen, set at the time of the civil strife in 1927 that
saw Vienna's Palace of Justice set on fire, includes a scene with a 'ping
pong' party, at which two minor characters, the Austrian Beppo Draxler
and the Hungarian Gyurkicz, have a fiercely-fought match. Doderer adds
the detail that Draxler 'had won a few championships',1 which in today's
professionalised world would be a ridiculous thing to claim for a character
- but it is a fact that some of the leading players of the mid-i92os were
from the old Habsburg countries and there was infinitely less competition:
the winner at the very first world championships, held in London in 1926,
was an Indian student, but the first widely-known world champion was a
Hungarian, and the Austrians, too, were a powerful presence. So Doderer
got it right with his two ping-pong enthusiasts, as with most such things.
The Hungarian line was to reach its peak in the 1930s with perhaps the
only table-tennis player ever widely known to the general public, Victor
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z. 'Schoenberg in America',
in The Musical Quarterly
vol.27 no-4 (October 1951),
pp.469-89.
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Barna, but he was only one of a whole squad of brilliant Hungarians, along
the lines of the French 'Musketeers' who ruled lawn tennis for some years
around the same time.
To go by accounts of Schoenberg's game, it seems unlikely that he would
ever have got beyond the first round of a 'championship' or tournament,
had he gone in for one, but he tried. In Berlin a table took up the whole of
one room in his apartment. And once settled in Los Angeles he played both
games with his students; at tennis they were careful to adjust their level
of performance so that he never felt outclassed, and as Walter Rubsamen
wrote, 'we learned to hit the ball directly at or close to him, so that he could
participate fully. If aware of this little trick, he gave no sign'.2 In a BBC
Radio 3 talk on Schoenberg the composer Hugh Wood commented aptly
that 'had he become aware, it would have been most unlike him not to give
a sign'! A delightful exhibit at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna is
a record-card with his personally-designed code for keeping track of a
tennis match - serves, faults, forehands, backhands, and so on, with the
most endearing pair of entries signs for 'advances to the net' and 'retreats
hastily'! That he had presumably done all too often.
Apart from the influence of his second wife, this sudden emergence of a
strong interest in sports for which all too clearly he possessed no particular
talent must have been associated with the need to face the fact of growing
old; a natural reaction is to attach all the more value to things that let you go
on feeling young. Very near the end of Schoenberg's life, he wrote that he
had always thought of himself 'as the one who does not cease to do youthful
nonsense ' (incidentally his last child was conceived when he was 66) - and
he added touchingly 'But now I see that I am old'. It took the truly wretched
health of his seventies to stop him playing tennis, much to his regret, for he
realised that the exercise on court had helped his asthma. And to a very late
stage he still took his table-tennis bat (for which the American is 'ping-pong
paddle') with him when invited out, just in case there should be a chance
of a game.
Game, sport - table-tennis can be either, and when merely a game it now
tends to be called by its very old name, ping-pong. Real players, unless
Chinese, never call it that, though the abbreviation 'ping' is acceptable. The
modern sport of table-tennis as practised is fearsome indeed, with complex
bat-coverings, endless training, lightning reactions and non-stop movement,
and even decades ago it offered scope for athleticism, speed of foot and
reaction, coordinated graceful movement, controlled aggression, resolute
defending and the exercise of explosive power. Most of which suggests
a young man's sport, allowing that good training can prolong youth far
beyond the twenties. But the tournament circuit in fact includes Veterans'
events, and there are whole Veterans' tournaments with categories as high
THE MUSICAL TIMES Autumn 20l5 67
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68 Schoenberg's relaxations, with a note on his early masterpiece Verklärte Nacht

the 'tennis
Schoenberg the 'tennis pro',
pro', c.
c.1930
1930

as 'over-8os\ Whatever technique and method one originally acquired one

is likely to retain or revert to, so veterans who were in their prime before
the great changes in the game (described later) may well still play that
way, and do well if they've stayed fit and wide awake; those who reached
the qualifying age of 40 when the revolution was already under way will
probably try to go on playing the fast attacking game whatever their age,
often with a surprising degree of success.
The aim, however, remains identical, whether one plays 'ping-pong'
or 'table-tennis': to hit a small hollow celluloid or plastic ball over a six
inch-high net, anywhere onto twenty-two-and-a-half square feet of wood,
more often than the opponent, regardless of athleticism, speed, aggression
or strength. There is a type of player known as a chiseller, meaning not
one who cheats, but one who works to give shape to a point, grafting,
concentrating, anticipating and digging into the ball; he gets it back any old
way he can, often with weird back- and side-spins, preferably to the precise
point on the table where the other player is least able to do anything positive
with it. Those who aim for the elegant, aggressive, athletic game can find
to their disgust that the chiseller is horribly effective. In recent years, new
developments in rubber technology, with the use of longer 'pimples' than
were formerly allowed, have added yet another weapon to his armoury, one
that can bewilder more-talented opponents. The chiseller depends little on
the youthful qualities, and can be any age whatever — there are 80-year
olds still playing competitively in leagues throughout the world. So there
was a type into which Schoenberg and his game (and for that matter his
equipment) would have fitted. By the time he came to table-tennis, bats
would have been faced with pimpled rubber, rather than the cork, vellum

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3- Since a recent change in
scoring games are mostly
played to 'eleven-up' rather
than 21 (but in compensation
a match is now the best of
five or seven rather than
three or five); the expedite
cut-off time has come down
to ten minutes, which is an
awfully long time for a game
that usually runs to fewer
than 22 points.
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or other substances already beginning to be obsolete though still legal. He
would have held his bat with the Western or 'shake-hands' grip that was
beginning to replace the 'penholder' grip more common at the time; an
advantage of holding the bat in that way rather than like a pen or a pair
of chopsticks is that switching from forehand to backhand is much easier
and less of a contortion. (It should be added that the very best penholder
players, predominantly from the Far East, have always succeeded, and still
do, in manoeuvring the ball on their backhand side with extraordinary
accuracy, despite the unnatural arm position that involves; the 'backhand'
side of their bat usually remains uncovered so that they aren't allowed to
hit the ball with it). As for the strokes used, 'pushing play' was a great deal
more common, and more productive, 80 years ago than nowadays. Indeed,
one world championship final between the two best women players was
declared void because they simply pushed the ball back and forth, each
waiting for the other to make a mistake, so that after a quarter of an hour
the score had not got beyond 0-0. One of them was so upset that she gave up
the game, while the other went on to be world champion for many years. To
prevent or at least abbreviate such play, the 'expedite ' rule was introduced,
under which a game not finished after a quarter of an hour had from then on
to be played with each point settled within 12 strokes, otherwise the server
lost the point. With the reduction of games to eleven rather than 20-one-up,
the limit has come down to ten minutes.
Given Schoenberg's physical condition, pushing play would have suited
him, and it takes a lot of skill to keep the ball in play, even pushing, long
enough for a game to last a quarter of an hour.3 So stamina needn't have
been a problem. He prided himself on 'a fast service directed very accurately
to the very end of the table'. Unfortunately that detail in itself gives us a
deflating measure of his standard; such a service is effective against weak
players, but suicidal against good ones except as a very occasional surprise,
since the faster the serve and the wider the angle, the more likely you are to
see the return fly back past you with interest!
One significant thing about these sporting activities of Schoenberg's is
that they seem to have borne no relation to anything in his boyhood, as a
passion for sport usually does. Even in that light-hearted respect he bore out
his own dictum that genius is the capacity to develop - to acquire what one
was not born with.
And there is a curious comparison to be drawn, which brings us back to
that 'great revolution'. What happened to music in his head between 20 and
27 was as much as anything a process of ellipsis, of cutting out intermediate
stages which he, being incredibly quick on the uptake, found unnecessary.
Once his inner ear had reached a point at which all 12 notes of the scale were
felt to relate to each other anyway, whatever they did (and music ever since
THE MUSICAL TIMES Autumn 20l5 69
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70 Schoenberg's relaxations, with a note on his early masterpiece Verklärte Nacht

Schubert had been working towards that), there was no longer any need
for a middle-man, a tonic or key, to keep them related. Music could thus be
what others vulgarly called 'atonal'. And in the matter of form there was a
comparable ellipsis; Schoenberg couldn't bear to repeat himself, to say things
he found obvious and superfluous. (In his music, that is: in his life he must
have brought himself to do just that, for he got married twice.) Because he
misses out obvious links, because he's elliptical, he makes the listener work
that much harder. One could say that, with him, music becomes less of a
pure spectator sport, or rather you have to get nearer in order to follow it.
Now, people who have followed table-tennis over the past half century may
find that formulation oddly familiar. In bygone days, people who literally
didn't know how to hold a bat would nevertheless flock to watch Victor
Barna playing against a great defender like Richard Bergmann. Nowadays,
only those who regularly hold a bat in one of the proper ways could even tell
you who the present-day Barnas and Bergmanns are, despite the enormous
expansion of sport-watching in general through the media. Why should
that be so?

I think the reason is that an invention in the 1950s quickly made the game
so fast and intricate that it virtually ceased to be a pure spectator sport;
nowadays those who love to watch Wimbledon on television won't feel, as
they might once have felt, that the pattern of table-tennis is similar enough
for them to understand and follow it. The invention that did a Schoenberg
on table-tennis was sponge rubber, used at first on the face of the bat but
rapidly forbidden, and then as underlay to the hitting surfaces, as which it
remains legal to this day; it has become standard with all but about one per
cent of those who play. Sponge made possible a new fierceness of attacking
play, for it can impart an enormously increased amount of top-spin. Like
Schoenberg's music, it at first fell foul of the Establishment, but it was soon
legalised and very many players began to use it. Even those of a very moderate
standard nowadays base their game on sponge rubber's attacking qualities;
for that matter, a great deal of 12-tone music of very moderate standard has
been composed since the fatal day in the 1920s when Schoenberg disclosed
his fatal secret to Erwin Stein. Long rallies, with one player standing back
from the table and defending, have become the exception; what tennis
would call baseline play has almost disappeared, at least from the top men's
game. Instead, there will be a rapid exchange of complex spins and violent
kills, with both players standing close to the table. If you're near enough
and know what they're up to, it's fascinating, but it makes rotten television
(coverage is a great deal better than it was a few years ago, but it's still very
hard to grasp the intensity of what's going on, the sheer distances covered
and the weirdness of the spins.) The intermediate links have been elided -
in music by Schoenberg, in table-tennis by sponge.

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 But to leave it at that would beg an important question. There is no such
thing as a pure spectator sport, only some sports that give the uninformed
onlooker pleasure, and some that don't. Who gets more genuine satisfaction
out of watching Wimbledon, the person whose total knowledge of the game
is that John McEnroe used to misbehave and that The Russians are Coming,
or the one who when he watches a McEnroe or the newest top Russian lady
can sense what it costs, for example, to get down to a low volley below the
level of the net, controlling the ball against heavy top-spin, or feel the effort
that goes into covering the court as a long rally develops, so that he 's a bit out
of breath just watching? Familiarity, empathy, always helps; the difference
is that with table-tennis it's by now almost indispensable. The same goes
for music; more and more it's used as a casual background, without one's
really following what's going on, but that's not to say it offers the most
satisfaction treated in that way. Schoenberg's music is hard to relegate to
the background, and perhaps a small part of his importance lies in this
nuisance-value of his. He reminds us about a situation that should confront

us whenever music, worthwhile music, is around - but which increasingly

doesn't.

Schoenberg's relaxations point to an endearing side of a predominantly

unendearing and much-misunderstood man; as he said, he liked occasionally
to step down from the pedestal where people insisted on placing him, and,
at least in the second half of his life, this extreme perfectionist, this rejecter
and hater of all artistic compromise had no compunction about being seen
to do something badly.

On Verklärte Nacht

The string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured night), composed in 1899

but not performed until 1903, must be the favourite Schoenberg work
with those prepared to have any such thing. Its deeply romantic setting,
melodic fluency and intriguing fullness of harmony should be enough to
contradict any impression of its composer as a cold, academic fellow who
merely invented an inhuman, artificial system for concocting a simulacrum
of music.

There is one intriguing, contradictory thing about this late-romantic

paragon with its ostentatious passage from deepest darkness* to brightest
* The falling scale-fragment
conveying that at the start of light. It follows the course of a poem by Schoenberg's contemporary Richard
the work was used to similar
Dehmel.This tells of a woman's despair at having, so she believes, sacrificed
effect by Richard Strauss a
quarter of a century later, the possibility of true love by letting her maternal longings override her
though to convey physical judgment to the extent, as she puts it, of 'letting her sex be captured by an
rather than emotional
darkness, at the opening of
available man', so that she finds she is pregnant just as she finally meets
his Alpine symphony. the one of her dreams. But he 'transfigures' that nocturnal despair by

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72 Schoenberg's relaxations, with a note on his early masterpiece Verklärte Nacht

accepting the stranger's child as a small price to pay for the right woman.
At the end 'two beings walk through the bright, lofty night', at which point
Schoenberg brings back a crucial passage from the opening, altering its
harmonies just enough to communicate the radical change of mood and
light. But one thing he can not or will not change: at that very moment of
final, musical transfiguration, within the phrase that originally summed up
the woman's irremediable despair, one crucial, originally contentious chord
is still there, unaltered and hence with its message undiminished. Musically
it is entirely appropriate; in terms of the work's programme and psychology
it is a nonsense.

How could this happen to a composer so awake to every nuance of

mood? The chord in question played an important role in the performance
history of Verklärte Nacht, for it was here that Schoenberg sprang one of his
surprises; the sheer logic of part-writing led him to set down a chord where
a descending series of diminished sevenths in the upper parts crossed with a
semitonal rise in the bass, to produce 'difficult' chord (*),

41 E 1 i
.m.

which is utterly logical and should cause no offence (delight rather!) to

a healthily unprejudiced ear. Yet when Verklärte Nacht was submitted to
the Vienna Tonkünstlerverein for possible performance the committee of
'experts' noted this chord, which is technically a 13th, though Wellesz, in
his early book on the composer, called it a ninth-chord in last inversion, i.e.
with the ninth in the bass. The Verein decided that no such chord existed,
and as Schoenberg said, 'what doesn't exist can't be performed — so no
performance for a while'. It took three years for the Society to relent. A
later performance in 1911 saw the second cello part played by no less a figure
than Franz Schmidt, who later told the young Hans Keller that, though he
didn't understand what Schoenberg was up to in his 12-tone music, he
trusted the composer of Verklärte Nacht. Zemlinsky is quoted by Wellesz as
saying that Schoenberg made light of the turn-down, laughing it off with a
caustic remark or two.

Whenever I hear Verklärte Nacht I wish that Schoenberg, most resourceful

of composers, could have found some way to re-write that chord on its final
appearance, so that it no longer disturbed an otherwise tranquil conclusion
to so great a work. Maybe something in his nature was pointing a moral
— that even with the maximum good luck there's still a hair in the soup,
something slight but jarring that reminds us of mortality?

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