Schoenberg

Why He Matters

8 September 2023

Description

An astonishingly lyrical biography that rescues Schoenberg from notoriety, restoring him to his rightful place in the pantheon of twentieth-century composers

In his time, the Austrian American composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an international icon. His twelve-tone system was considered the future of music itself. Today, however, leading orchestras rarely play his works, and his name is met with apathy, if not antipathy. With this interpretative account, the acclaimed biographer of Toscanini finally restores Schoenberg to his rightful place in the canon, revealing him as one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers and teachers. Sachs shows how Schoenberg, a thorny character who composed thorny works, raged against the “Procrustean bed” of tradition. Defying his critics—among them the Nazis, who described his music as “degenerate”—he constantly battled the anti-Semitism that eventually precipitated his flight from Europe to Los Angeles. Yet Schoenberg, synthesising Wagnerian excess with Brahmsian restraint, created a shock wave that never quite subsided and, as Sachs powerfully argues, his compositions must be confronted by anyone interested in the past, present or future of Western music.

Reviews

"Lucid... Sachs's book is a succinct guide to Schoenberg's life and work, one designed in part to make the composer's music accessible to a wider audience. Much of the book's appeal lies in that implicit promise to help find the beauty hidden in what can seem, to the uninitiated, a writhing mass of noise. Sachs is neither a hater nor a glassy-eyed enthusiast... [he] is, as he puts it, 'a writer and music historian who is Schoenberg-curious.'... This is not to say that he doesn't admire the music—he does. And there's real pleasure to be found in the way Sachs writes about it. He clearly describes, for instance, the genius of the way in which Schoenberg composes the voice of God in his opera Moses und Aron, which Sachs calls a nearly ideal vehicle for twelve-toned music... The effect is perfectly eerie." — Christopher Carroll, Harper's

"[A] concentrated meditation . . . It may be recommended for anybody with an interest in the work of the Viennese-American composer Arnold Schoenberg—and perhaps especially to those who have never quite been able to “crack” his music . . . Despite his postwar decades in California, Schoenberg—with his rattles and shimmers, his craggy melodies and pervasive angst—never quite escaped the nightmares of what was then a crabbed and bloody Old World . . . Mr. Sachs’s fine study should inspire a fresh understanding of his life and work." — Tim Page, Wall Street Journal

"[A]n immensely valuable source for anyone desiring an accessible overview of this endlessly controversial and chronically misunderstood giant of 20th-century music... Sachs can be refreshingly candid, sharing his feelings at times as if he were whispering confidentially in your ear during a concert intermission... his genuine enthusiasm for those pieces that do stir him is enough to draw the reader in, and in so doing has done a great service to the cause. " — John Adams, The New York Times Book Review

"In this study of Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian-born composer who immigrated to the U.S. in 1933, Sachs blends fleet-footed biography with an accessible analysis of Schoenberg's works. " — The New Yorker

"[An] elegant and judicious book" — Rupert Christiansen, Literary Review

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