Schoenberg and Redemption

Julie Brown reconsiders Schoenberg's step into atonality as a response to Wagner's charges concerning the Jewish influence on German music.

Julie Brown (Author)

9780521550352, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 June 2014

274 pages, 2 b/w illus. 3 music examples
26.2 x 18 x 1.8 cm, 0.71 kg

'Julie Brown's Schoenberg and Redemption newly testifies to the power of a composer's self-expressive prose … Bringing to light two previously [understudied] writings of Schoenberg, Julie Brown presents an absorbing view of his turn to atonality … Brown records a history of Schoenberg's modernist invention, and in the process, adds to Wagner's legacy too.' Victoria Aschheim, Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association

Schoenberg and Redemption presents a new way of understanding Schoenberg's step into atonality in 1908. Reconsidering his threshold and early atonal works, as well as his theoretical writings and a range of previously unexplored archival documents, Julie Brown argues that Schoenberg's revolutionary step was in part a response to Wagner's negative charges concerning the Jewish influence on German music. In 1898, and especially 1908, Schoenberg's Jewish identity came into confrontation with his commitment to Wagnerian modernism to provide an impetus to his radical innovations. While acknowledging the broader turn-of-the-century Viennese context, Brown draws special attention to continuities between Schoenberg's work and that of Viennese moral philosopher Otto Weininger, himself an ideological Wagnerian. She also considers the afterlife of the composer's ideological position when, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the concept of redeeming German culture of its Jewish elements took a very different turn.

Introduction
1. Schoenberg, history, trauma?
2. Schoenberg as Christ
3. Otto Weininger, Richard Wagner and musical discourse in turn-of-the-century Vienna
4. Schoenberg and Wagnerian Deutschtum
5. Compositional innovation and the redemption of Ahasuerus
6. Woman and the symbolism of self-redemption
7. Re-reading Schoenberg's Musical Idea
8. Coda: changing history into memory
Appendix. 'Every young Jew'.

Subject Areas: 20th century & contemporary classical music [AVGC6], Music reviews & criticism [AVC], Music [AV]