Word: schoenberger
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...easier to find a good concert than a good course this week Soprano Lucy Shelton is offering an ambitious racital of 20th Century songs including Schoenberg's Book of the Hanging Gardens in this year of his 101st birthday. The excellent Music From Mariboro is in town again with chamber music of Hayden, Mozart, and Sir Donald Tovey whose compositions are being revived in his centennial year...
BERNSTEIN'S CASE for Stravinsky is eloquent and convincing. He quotes Theodor Adorno, a dogmatic advocate of Schoenberg who accused Stravinsky of hiding behind an insincere mask of eclecticism. Bernstein defends the neoclassical mask as a reaction to the extreme subjectivity of overblown Romanticism and draws interesting parallels to the poetry of T.S. Eliot. But here, too, his polemic dislike of Schoenberg leads him to inaccuracy and self-contradiction. Having accused the serialists of mechanically turning out music that is "form without content," he now condemns them for discarding the order imposed by diatonicism. Stravinsky's "great save," neoclassicism...
...Schoenberg once said that his music wasn't modern, it was just badly played. That is no longer generally true, but it applies to Bernstein's misrepresentation of him. The most convincing argument for Stravinsky on these records is Bernstein's new recording of Oedipus Rex, a neoclassic masterpiece, while Schoenberg is represented only by an excerpt from the Op. 23 piano pieces and a few bars of Pierrot Lunaire--Bernstein hammers out the flute part with one hand and growls the sprechstimme two octaves lower...
...Bernstein's treatment of Schoenberg suffers from the same dogmatism he criticizes in Adorno. His failure is a failure to listen to the music on its own terms. He imposes his tonal expectations on works that have a different internal logic. He points triumphantly to the Bach chorale quoted at the end of Berg's Violin Concerto, without recognizing it as a historical allusion like those he found in Stravinsky and Eliot. Berg used tonal devices frequently for certain kinds of effects, but rarely as a basic principle of his music...
...theory has found no way to distinguish between the mediocre and the great, no way to tell us what is art. That, finally, is the unanswered question. Bernstein speaks well on Stravinsky's behalf, but the proof is in his conducting. And no amount of pseudoscientific analysis will prove Schoenberg wrong. His music speaks for itself...