In his monograph on the music of Arnold Schoenberg[1], Charles Rosen describes one of the composer’s major achievements as “emancipation of the dissonance”: “a freedom from consonance, from the obligation to resolve the dissonance.” Although preceded in this project by the late Beethoven, Wagner and Debussy, it was Schoenberg in the Expressionist period who most courageously “demanded not only the full chromatic complexity that other composers … had already won, but even more: a release from the basic harmonic conception of the cadence, the movement toward release of tension, toward absolute repose, which had been fundamental to centuries of music. From this refusal of resolution comes the aptness of the style of the Schoenberg of 1908 to 1914 for the representation of anguish and the macabre.” (Rosen 26)

New beauties also accompany this representation; despite the division of Schoenberg’s career into “atonal” and “serial” periods, this particular demand stretches over the whole of his musical career. Rosen also goes on to discuss the specific exploration of this dissonance and the possibilites that inhabit it in both the chord and the melody. “[The] source of the dissonance of early Schoenberg (or of Skryabin, Strauss and Debussy) is not merely harmonic (or vertical [in the chord]) but melodic (or horizontal): that is, the melodies no longer imply pure tonal relations, and played by themselves alone they would defy attempts to interpret them coherently within a system of triads. … [The] individual melodies themselves … are no longer conceived in terms of triads and therefore demand a free-moving polyphonic texture.” (Rosen 35)

In the Expressionist drama, as in Expressionist music, a similar freeing of dissonance was attempted. Qualities of individual art forms may not be identical, but they may be similar, and it is these qualities that lend to a work an “Expressionist” dimension. One might spatially conceive of a “horizontal” melody that moves through time in music as plot or narrative moves through time in the theatre; similarly, the “vertical” conception of the chord may have a speculative equivalent in the idea of dramatic character. The implications are clear: tonal or triadic behaviors in music, behaviors which trap dissonance and insist upon its resolution, are paralleled by received ideological conceptions of how a plot must be constructed, how a character must behave: the plot must be “well-made” (according to a conservative structure, whether Aristotelian, social-realist or post-modern), the characters’ behavior explicable via traditional social or cultural conceptions of the “well-behaved” individual. Expressionist theatre, like Expressionist music, exploded these conceptions and freed the stage, wiping the canvas clear for the presentation of new dramatic and theatrical possibility. Before Schoenberg, the most remarkable example of unresolved dissonances was of course Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde; Schoenberg’s breakthrough was denying in his own work that opera’s closing resolution at the Act III curtain, leaving experiential possibilities even more open-ended.

Schoenberg’s music also had implications for tone color[2]; in freeing dissonance, he also freed the individual instrument, suggesting sonic possibilities and investigations of timbre necessarily unheard in a traditional conception of composition, as the performer’s instruments — the body and the voice — are similarly freed in the theatre. Like the individual musical instrument, the individual body is similar to others in some respects (thus the groupings of woodwinds, brass, string and percussion instruments) and extraordinarily variable in others (the violin and viola, for example, and even in the case of individual violins or any other given instrument). This calls for a greater discipline and precision on the part of the performer, especially where the musical structure is unfamiliar to the ear and grates against compositional tradition: one must needs pay attention to the instrument and the sound — as well as the body of the performer — in a manner hitherto unparalleled.

Without argument, Schoenberg has been one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century; even Stravinsky found inspiration in Schoenberg’s work. From solo to chamber to orchestral to operatic works, the music of Schoenberg (and the two other exemplars of the Second Viennese School, Anton Webern and Alban Berg) decisively introduced new beauties and aesthetic possibilites. Music before and after Schoenberg is not the same, but much of it still goes unheard, especially the works of the serial period; he has been accepted into the canon with grudging acquiesence.[3]

So too have the dramatists of the New Expressionism — many of whom are also grudgingly accepted into the canon, their works unperformed and unread outside of a comparatively small circle of cognoscenti. The dramatists have recognized the similarity. According to James Knowlson, Berg’s Woyzeck was one of Samuel Beckett’s favorite operas; David Rudkin’s familiarity with Schoenberg himself is exemplified through his translation of the libretto of Moses and Aaron for a 1964 Peter Hall production at the Royal Opera House.

The work of Samuel Beckett and Arnold Schoenberg was also, of course, central to the conception of Adornian aesthetics; Adorno had planned to dedicate Aesthetic Theory to Beckett, and his polemic Philosophy of New Music is an impassioned defense of Arnold Schoenberg against the neoclassicism represented by Igor Stravinsky. (Adorno makes something of a straw man of Stravinsky, which drew the anger of Schoenberg.) In his recent monograph on Beckett, Andrew Gibson cites Adorno in words that describe Schoenberg’s project as well, especially in the advanced capitalist culture of the 20th century:

Even as Beckett settles for the world of advanced capital as where he “happens to be,” however minimally, whatever the moments of collusion, he also holds open another space for thought to those that characterized the dominant ideologies of his era. This is what Simon Critchley means when he writes of Beckett’s “weak messianic power.” Beckett is scrupulous, almost beyond comparison, in his repudiation of suspect positivities. He is adamantine in his refusal to conspire “with all extant meanness and finally with the destructive principle” (to quote Adorno). He therefore chooses a via negativa. If “the task of thinking is to keep open the slightest difference between things as they are and things as they might otherwise be,” then that task is supremely exemplified in Beckett. As Connor says of Worstward Ho, Beckett will not surrender the idea of another sphere or possibility of value, however apparently absurd, minimial or purely negative its form. This negative space is the space of art; or rather, Beckett takes the preservation of the negative space to be integral to art’s task. (Gibson 159-160)

There is a fine Web site devoted to Arnold Schoenberg’s work maintained by the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna. This includes a complete list of compositions (with free recordings of most of the compositions, along with useful annotations) and — also intriguingly — a catalogue of Schoenberg’s library at the time of his death: no Freud, Hegel or Marx, only two unmarked volumes of Nietzsche, but many volumes of Karl Kraus’s Die Fackel and a near-complete (and heavily annotated in Schoenberg’s hand) edition of Arthur Schopenhauer.

1. Charles Rosen: Arnold Schoenberg, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975 [↩]
2. “Each phrase can be given an entirely new instrumental color, and is consequently characterized less by its harmonic content than by the instrumental combination that embodies it. This emancipation of tone color was as significant and as characteristic of the first decades of the twentieth century as the emancipation of dissonance. Tone color was released from its complete subordination to pitch in musical structure: until this point what note was played had been far more important than the instrumental color or the dynamics with which it was played.” (Rosen 48) [↩]
3. It also led, in Schoenberg’s own time, to a profound sense of isolation, not unlike that shared by many New Expressionist dramatists; in 1937 he wrote an extensive essay on his own work, with the puckish title “How One Becomes Lonely.” [↩]