from Haydn to Beethoven. In a deliberate rejection of fin-de-siècle grandiosity, it was scored for a mini-orchestra of fifteen instruments, its sonorities rough rather than lush. Schoenberg was throwing off excess baggage, perhaps in anticipation of lean years to come. The process of condensation led to Pierrot lunaire, in which the soloist is accompanied by an agile band of two winds, two strings, and a piano.
Just as Debussy imagined new sounds while perusing images in Verlaine and Mallarmé, Schoenberg let poetry guide him. He relished the erotic visions of Richard Dehmel, who furnished the story of Transfigured Night. He also investigated, at Strauss’s suggestion, the plays of Maeterlinck; and in 1902 and 1903, he fashioned a large-scale orchestral tone poem on the subject of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande, purportedly unaware that Debussy had just made a setting of the same text. But Schoenberg’s most crucial literary encounter was with the poetry of Stefan George, then the leading Symbolist among German writers.
George stood apart from his compatriots on account of his ardent Francophilia; he had gone to Paris in 1889, attended Mallarmé’s “Tuesdays” (the poet dubbed him “one of us”), and translated the major French poets into German. He might have met Debussy, though there is no evidence that he did. So determined was he to honor his French masters that he dropped capital letters from German nouns. A self-styled artist-prophet in the fin-de-siècle mode, George surrounded himself with a bevy of acolytes, among whom could always be found several beautiful adolescent boys. George’s circle inspired Mann’s satire “At the Prophet’s”; minus the homosexual element, it might also have served as a model for Schoenberg, who treated his students as disciples and seldom appeared in public without them. More important, George showed Schoenberg a way out of the easygoing pleasures of Viennese aesthetics. The sheer density of the poet’s imagery did not permit easy access, although sensual secrets resided in the labyrinth.
Schoenberg’s voyage to the other side began on December 17, 1907, when he set a poem from George’s collection Year of the Soul, much of which is concerned with an intense scene of farewell. It begins: “I must not in thanks sink down before you / You are the spiritual plain from which we rose.” The music hangs by only the thinnest thread to the old harmonic order. It purports to be in B minor, yet the home chord appears only three times in thirty measures, once beneath the word “agonizing.” Otherwise, it is made up of a ghostly flow of unrooted triads, ambiguous transitional chords, stark dissonances, and crystalline monodic lines, approximating the picture of an “ice-cold, deep-sleeping stream” with which the poem concludes. The date of composition is telling: eight days earlier, Schoenberg had bid farewell to Mahler at the Westbahnhof in Vienna. If, as seems possible, the fact of Mahler’s departure impelled the choice of text, then it carries a double message: the young composer has been abandoned by a father figure, yet he is also liberated, free to pursue a different love.
The next leg of the journey took place in the midst of personal crisis. Schoenberg had admitted into his circle an unstable character named Richard Gerstl, a gifted painter of brutal Expressionist tendencies. Under Gerstl’s direction, Schoenberg had taken up painting and found that he had a knack for it: his canvas The Red Gaze, in which a gaunt face stares out with bloodshot eyes, has come to be recognized as a minor masterpiece of its time and place. In May 1908 Schoenberg discovered that Gerstl was having an affair with his wife, Mathilde, and that summer he surprised the lovers in a compromising position. Mathilde ran off with Gerstl, then returned to her husband, whereupon Gerstl proceeded to stage a suicide that exceeded Weininger’s in flamboyance: he burned his paintings and hanged himself naked in front of a full-length mirror, as if he wanted to see his own body rendered in Expressionist style. The suicide took place on November 4, 1908, on the night of a Schoenberg concert to which Gerstl had not been invited; evidently, that rejection was the final straw.
Schoenberg himself struggled with thoughts of suicide. “I have only one hope—that I will not live much longer,” he wrote to his wife at the end of the summer. In a last will and testament that may have been an unused suicide note, he wrote, “I have cried, have behaved like someone in despair, have made decisions and then rejected them, have had ideas of suicide and almost carried them out, have plunged from one madness into another—in a word, I am totally broken.” He warned that he would “soon follow the path, find the resolution, that at long last might be the highest culmination of all human actions.” But, in an intriguingly vague turn of phrase, he could not foresee “whether it be my body that will give way or my soul.”
Suicide was not Schoenberg’s style. Just as Beethoven, in his Heiligenstadt Testament, resolved to forge ahead into a life of misery, Schoenberg pressed on. That same summer of 1908 he finished his Second Quartet, in which he hesitates at a crossroads, contemplating various paths forking in front of him. The first movement, written the previous year, still uses a fairly conventional late-Romantic language. The second movement, by contrast, is a hallucinatory Scherzo, unlike any other music of the time. It contains fragments of the folk song “Ach, du lieber Augustin”—the same tune that held Freudian significance for Mahler (or so Freud said). For Schoenberg, the song seems to represent a bygone world disintegrating; the crucial line is “Alles ist hin” (all is lost). The movement ends in a fearsome sequence of four-note figures, which are made up of fourths separated by a tritone. In them may be discerned traces of the bifurcated scale that begins Salome. But there is no longer a sense of tonalities colliding. Instead, the very concept of a chord is dissolving into a matrix of intervals.
In the final two movements of the Second Quartet a soprano voice joins the string players to sing two George poems, “Litany” and “Rapture.” The texts come from a larger cycle that George wrote in memory of a handsome boy named Maximilian Kronberger, who died of meningitis one day after his sixteenth birthday, leaving the poet in spasms of grief. Schoenberg seems to identify not only with the poet’s emotion but also with his urge to manipulate pain to expressive ends, in the name of self-abnegation and purification. “Litany” cries out for a quick end to sexual and spiritual agony: “Kill the longing, close the wound!” “Rapture,” the culmination of George’s “Maximin” cycle, presents the solution. It begins in a state of profound estrangement, with the alienation of the individual turning universal:
I feel the wind of another planet.
Growing pale in the darkness are the faces Of those who lately turned to me as friends.
This Martian breeze is mimicked in soft, sinister streams of notes, recalling the episode in Salome when Herod hallucinates a chilly wind. Special effects on the strings (mutes, harmonics, bowing at the bridge) heighten the sense of otherness, as singing tones become whispers and high cries. Then comes the transformation:
I dissolve in tones, circling, weaving . . .
I am but a spark of the holy fire I am but a roaring of the holy voice.
The soprano declaims her lines in a cool, stately rhythm. The strings dwell on sustained chords, most of which can be named according to the old harmonic system, although they have been torn from the organic connections of tonality and move like a procession of ghosts. At the climactic moment, under the word “holy,” the composer’s motto chord, the dissonant combination of a fourth and a tritone, sounds with unyielding force. Even so, Schoenberg is not ready to go over the brink. At the close the motto chord gives way to pure F-sharp major, which, in light of what has gone before, sounds bizarre and surreal. The work is dedicated to “my wife.”
Schoenberg stayed in his Stefan George trance through the fall of 1908, when he completed a song cycle on the poet’s Book of Hanging Gardens. The otherworldly serenity persists, together with vestiges of tonality. Then something snapped, and Schoenberg let out his pent-up rage. In 1909, as Mahler was sinking into the long goodbye of his Ninth Symphony and Strauss was floating away into the eighteenth-century dreamworld of Rosenkavalier, Schoenberg entered a creative frenzy, writing the Three Pieces for Piano, the Five Pieces for Orchestra, and Erwartung, or Expectation, a dramatic scene for soprano and orchestra. In the last of the Three Piano Pieces, the keyboard
