Word: schoenbergs
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Wondrous Ladder. The fierce critical dispute last week concerned the work of the late Arnold Schoenberg, a Viennese composer whose atonal music still stirs controversy ten years after his death. This time the argument started at Vienna's famed Konzerthaus after the world première of a little-remembered Schoenberg work-a fragmentary, 45-minute oratorio, Jacob's Ladder. Schoenberg wrote the text for his oratorio in 1915, started to write the music but was interrupted by World War I service in the Austrian army. He abandoned the score for more than 20 years, returned...
...oratorio is based on the Biblical story of Jacob's dream of a wondrous ladder on which angels moved between heaven and earth. In Schoenberg's vision, the bottom of the ladder is occupied by earthbound souls-the cowards, skeptics, cynics, journalists and unclean ones. The top of the ladder is filled with geniuses, gods and angels. The ascending and descending figures represented for Schoenberg the reincarnation that keeps human events in motion. The Ladder's lesson: "Learn to pray: he who prays is become one with...
Heavenly Ascent. Last week's audience was attentive, respectful, but clearly puzzled by both text and music. Showing signs of Schoenberg's restless groping for a new musical language, Jacob's Ladder called for a chamber chorus, two choirs, and the 100-man Cologne Radio Symphony under Czech Conductor Rafael Kubelik. Spotted about the hall were speakers through which-in accordance with a marginal note made by Schoenberg in 1944-the distant, taped sounds of two orchestras and a choir were heard. Although there were occasional moments of sustained melody, Jacob's Ladder...
Noting the mixed reception Jacob's Ladder received, one critic regretted that Vienna had done "so little for her great son and also does so little for him today." But Gertrude Schoenberg, who attended the performance, seemed content. Asked if she thought her husband still needed to be defended, she replied: "Any man who protests against Schoenberg today is opposing an art form which is already historically anchored; he only makes himself ridiculous...
...lavish production put on by the Bavarian State Opera which featured Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Soprano Ingeborg Bremert, and they were unanimous in their praise. Said the authoritative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "Henze has arrived at the point of decision. All the lessons which he learned from Verdi, Berg, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Britten and Weill have been absorbed in his tremendously creative feeling for sounds and his sense of the dramatic." This mixture of old and new, of atonality and traditional harmony, was precisely what Henze was after. It was a synthesis that he had been building for a long time...