Today, Schoenberg’s genius (if not his saleability) is questionable only to insincere people, though Schoenberg himself had doubts. He said that God was telling him to say something new, but that his mortal ears couldn’t absorb God’s message. So instead of being pleased with having a few bona fide masterpieces under his belt, Schoenberg was often depressed, complaining that his music was derivative of the human condition, rather than accurately recording what God was telling him to say. This artistic quandary, both aesthetic and moral, didn’t exist before Schoenberg. He wasn’t a showman or an opportunist like Beethoven, who used his influence to sway court judges, or to charge fans money to watch him eat in restaurants. Schoenberg was the sort of guy who publicly affirmed his Judaism the day Hitler assumed the Chancellorship. The composer even travelled to Berlin just to do that. His absolute courage and sincerity extended to all things … Schoenberg believed that he was closer to God’s message now, and he never went back to tonality. His conviction influenced generations of composers who felt that a return to tuneful tonality was a backward tendency, fascistic even. A century of avant-garde music was thus born. Academics and connoisseurs really appreciated the results, though the general public assumed a thousand years of music just stopped being made. The closest thing we have to a recent mainstream compositional hero was the grinning deconstructionist John Cage, who was, incidentally, also Schoenberg’s student. The performance arm of classical has successfully kept the tradition breathing, but its pendulum remains stuck to the populist end of the artistic spectrum. Now we just keep playing the old favourites while, hopefully, new composers figure something out.
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