Music: Schoenberg Revisited

“We admit to an occasional musical ray of light,” said the Wiener Zeitung. “But essentially the work is dominated by that barrenness which has become a sign of progress but which is in reality a going-astray.” Almost as if its critic had been in a different concert hall, the Kronen Zeitung reported that “seldom have the beauties of a score of this century been so visible, seldom has the genius of a master been so worthy of admiration as in the present case.”

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 to it in 1945 but never finished it. At the request of Gertrude Schoenberg, the composer’s widow, the score was prepared for performance by Composer-Conductor Winfried Zillig after a painstaking study of Schoenberg’s musical sketchbook. A onetime student of Schoenberg’s, Zillig claims that the score as played in Vienna “contains not a single note that is not by Schoenberg himself.”

The 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 God.”

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 was for the most part a deliberately unmelodic complex of unexpected sounds, unsustained notes, a text rhythmically spoken rather than sung. The most moving moment occurred during the soprano’s heavenly ascent, in which the soul and a choir of angels seemed to wheel and glide about the hall as tapes were fed to the widely spaced speakers.

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.”