Word: schoenberger
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Last week, an audience of 1,500 filed into the University of New Mexico's Carlisle Gymnasium to hear the Albuquerque Civic Symphony and a men's chorus give the world premiere of one of Composer Schoenberg's infrequent new works. Inspiration had "called upon" him suddenly one day; the result was a cantata called A Survivor from Warsaw...
...most concertgoers, who don't get to hear much of his music, Arnold Schoenberg has a reputation as a musical wild man with some sort of grudge against melody. He has none of the look of a wild man about him, and wild is no word for the sobersided way he goes about plotting his revolution in music...
...heard a story ("partly true") of a group of Jews, marked to die in a Nazi gas chamber, who, with their powerful singing of the Shema Jisroel (Hear, 0 Israel), had unnerved, then frenzied, their executioners into bludgeoning them to death. Schoenberg fashioned a text for a cantata, with a sole survivor as narrator, then poured out the music in three weeks ("Oh, yes, I compose very fast...
Said optimistic Conductor Frederick: "This reception indicates that Schoenberg may become a popular composer." But Composer Schoenberg himself was more realistic: "I make a great difference between success and popularity. To become popular with serious music, one needs time. It must be heard oftener...
Nevertheless, things were looking up for Arnold Schoenberg. His Survivor from Warsaw was due for performances in London and Paris. Last month the New York Philharmonic-Symphony played his early Five Pieces for Orchestra and a Manhattan critic wrote: "It was something of a discovery for audiences to find [them] works of a poet and a craftsman hardly surpassed by any musician now among us. Of course, they were written nearly 40 years ago, and had been so successfully reviled by commentators . . . that the performance has an element of daring." Manhattan's New Friends of Music, in a daring...