Schoenberg

[robert wiener <wiener...>]

This past Sunday's New York Times Arts & Leisure again had an article
on classical music with Jewish music interest.  This time it was
"Schoenberg's Cool Eye For the Erotic" (Sunday, August 8, Section 2,
pages 29-30) by the composer David Schiff (who has written Jewish
music himself).  It is related to the Bard College Music Festival that
I posted about a few weeks ago.

Schiff makes connections with Stanley Kubrick's film "Eyes Wide Shut"
and a book by Otto Weininger, "Sex and Character", "a crackpot blend
of pseudo-Darwinian racism, Wagnerian anti-Semitism and Schopenahauer,
[that] was the sacred text of what passed for sexual honesty in old
Vienna....  Genius was not available to women or to feminized men, a
category that for Weininger included homosexuals and Jews.  Such
half-men could never achieve the spiritual heights of gentile geniuses
like Beethoven."

Schiff sees "something silly at the core of Schoenberg's "Moses und
Aron" (and "Pierrot Lunaire") --  "Their opposition of ethical genius
and decadent depravity comes from the preachy world of silent movies."

Schiff sames that "the pathos of 'Moses und Aron' comes from its
historical context, the disaster of the Nazi era, which Schoenberg had
foreseen as early as 1923.  Reacting to a series of anti-Semitic
incidents Schoenberg wrote then: "I have at least learned the lesson
that has been forced upon me during this year, and I shall never
forget it.  It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed
perhaps scarcely even a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer
the worst of their race to me), but I am a Jew."

".. Exiled to the paradise of Los Angeles...[t]he subject was no
longer sex or theological abstraction but human suffering and Jewish
national identity."

"History offered Schoenberg another diabolical Einfall, and again he
was ready.  "A Survivor From Warsaw", of 1947, remains the most
soul-gripping musical mirror of the darkest moment of the century."

The excerpts above are just the sections dealing with Jewish themes
and do not represent the article in its entirety.

Bob

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+