Destiny & Digestion

To most concertgoers, who don't get to hear much of his music, Arnold Schoenberg has a reputation as a musical wild man with some sort of grudge against melody. He has none of the look of a wild man about him, and wild is no word for the sobersided way he goes about plotting his revolution in music.

At 74, he is a bald, wizened little man whose greatest fear is that he won't live long enough to complete works he has started. Sixteen years ago he completed two acts of an opera, Moses and Aaron, but, he says, "I have not yet found the mood and power to compose the third act." Inspiration, he explains, "comes as mysteriously as hunger--and must follow the digestion of a lot of other things. One has to wait until one is called upon."

Last week, an audience of 1,500 filed into the University of New Mexico's Carlisle Gymnasium to hear the Albuquerque Civic Symphony and a men's chorus give the world premiere of one of Composer Schoenberg's infrequent new works. Inspiration had "called upon" him suddenly one day; the result was a cantata called A Survivor from Warsaw.

He had heard a story ("partly true") of a group of Jews, marked to die in a Nazi gas chamber, who, with their powerful singing of the Shema Jisroel (Hear, 0 Israel), had unnerved, then frenzied, their executioners into bludgeoning them to death. Schoenberg fashioned a text for a cantata, with a sole survivor as narrator, then poured out the music in three weeks ("Oh, yes, I compose very fast").

Cruel Dissonants. First the audience was jolted upright by an ugly, brutal blast of brass. Under it, whispers stirred in the orchestra, disjointed motifs fluttered from strings to woodwinds, like secret, anxious conversations. The survivor began his tale, in the tense half-spoken, half-sung style called Sprechstimme. The harmonies grew more cruelly dissonant. The chorus swelled to one terrible crescendo. Then, in less than ten minutes from the first blast, it was all over. While his audience was still thinking it over, Conductor Kurt Frederick played it through again, to give it another chance. This time, the audience seemed to understand it better, and applause thundered in the auditorium.

Said optimistic Conductor Frederick: "This reception indicates that Schoenberg may become a popular composer." But Composer Schoenberg himself was more realistic: "I make a great difference between success and popularity. To become popular with serious music, one needs time. It must be heard oftener . . ."

Nevertheless, things were looking up for Arnold Schoenberg. His Survivor from Warsaw was due for performances in London and Paris. Last month the New York Philharmonic-Symphony played his early Five Pieces for Orchestra and a Manhattan critic wrote: "It was something of a discovery for audiences to find [them] works of a poet and a craftsman hardly surpassed by any musician now among us. Of course, they were written nearly 40 years ago, and had been so successfully reviled by commentators . . . that the performance has an element of daring." Manhattan's New Friends of Music, in a daring mood too, is playing a season of Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Schoenberg.

Chromatic Wonderland. Though Schoenberg, along with his fellow Southern Californian, Igor Stravinsky, is one of the great musical innovators of modern times, few listeners are ready yet to say that they really like Schoenberg's ear-hurting music--and certainly no one is whistling any of his tunes. Forty years ago, after he had written his popular, Wagnerish Transfigured Night (which Antony Tudor used successfully for his ballet Pillar of Fire), Schoenberg had put conventional, barbershop-type harmony far behind him, and plunged into a chromatic wonderland where all twelve tones in an octave are of equal value, and there is no longer any "key." It is a wonderland where few fellow composers have yet dared to take up residence--although just about every nation but Soviet Russia (where it is officially discouraged) has its cells of hotly partisan twelve-toners.

Oxygen and No Tennis. For the past 14 years Schoenberg has been writing his music in California. Now retired from teaching at U.C.L.A., he lives in a white-stuccoed house in Brentwood Heights, near Los Angeles.

In a crowded combination living room-den where wife Gertrude's furniture is pushed aside to make room for a grand piano, a harmonium and an easel, Schoenberg works at manuscripts magnified for his weak eyes. Until six years ago, he played avid tennis: "Then, suddenly, no one wanted to play with me." He realizes that his opponents knew he shouldn't be playing: his asthma is so bad that when Who's Who asked him to list his recreations several years ago "I was tempted to say 'oxygen inhaling.' "

To those who say his theoretical contributions excel the beauty of his music, he replies wistfully: "If I have a choice, I would rather be considered as a composer than as a theorist. As a composer, I may be an artist. As a theorist, I am still a kind of an amateur. But then, I do not know my destiny."

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