The Year of the ‘S’ Word

Forget Stravinsky. That was so last winter, when tributes and festivals to the composer who died 30 years ago in New York seemed to spring up spontaneously in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Kansas City, when the music world seemed fixated on reviewing the past century through the long career of the mercurial Russian emigre.

Now it is Schoenberg’s turn. July 13 marks the 50th anniversary of his death in Los Angeles, and suddenly he has become the center of attention the world over. A large-scale Schoenberg Festival is in progress in the composer’s home town, Vienna, and it included a recent symposium on Schoenberg in America (which means Schoenberg in L.A.) hosted by the Schonberg Center, formerly USC’s Schoenberg Institute. The mass-market summer music festivals at Ravinia and Tanglewood (where the Chicago Symphony and the Boston Symphony have their respective summer residencies) will be paying tribute to Schoenberg this year. The militantly unimaginative Hollywood Bowl wouldn’t, perhaps, think of such a thing, but the Los Angeles Philharmonic will feature Schoenberg next season, as will Los Angeles Opera.

Last week, Schoenberg was unavoidable in New York. At Carnegie Hall, James Levine led a performance of the composer’s sumptuously massive oratorio, “Gurrelieder,” featuring the orchestra and chorus of the Metropolitan Opera and noted opera stars. The New York Philharmonic, finishing a monthlong Schoenberg “celebration” a few blocks away in Avery Fisher Hall, performed the short, noir-ish “Accompaniment to a Film Scene” Tuesday night and the large Romantic symphonic poem, “Pelleas and Melisande,” on Thursday.

Meanwhile, back at Carnegie, Pierre Boulez was involved in a weeklong workshop on his 1955 “Le Marteau sans Maitre” (“The Hammer Without a Master”), which could be said to be the most important of the groundbreaking postwar avant-garde successor to Schoenberg’s groundbreaking 1913 “Pierre Lunaire.”

What was particularly interesting about all this Schoenberg in New York was the context for what nervous-Nellie orchestra marketing departments refer to as the “S” word. Throughout the 20th century, debate raged about who was the most greatest or most important composer, Stravinsky or Schoenberg. The competition between the two men, both of whom spent a significant part of their lives in Los Angeles, was fierce. For a long while, it seemed that the influence of Schoenberg’s 12-tone system would prove the more lasting and profound contribution to the future of music. But by century’s end, Stravinsky (who adopted Schoenberg’s system, himself, in the ‘50s) proved the more intriguing figure to audiences (and to many of the younger composers), whereas Schoenberg had become a too-easy target for having made music challenging.

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There is no question that Schoenberg did write some complicated music that may take a listener several hearings in which to get attuned to the language (the same could be said, of course, of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, of Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, of Bob Dylan and Stephen Sondheim--but we have long had those extra hearings). Still, far more than Stravinsky, Schoenberg remained devoted to the traditions of classical music.

His early works are Romantic and as accessible as late Mahler. His Expressionist atonal pieces have a powerful dramatic and emotional immediacy. His later 12-tone pieces can be offset with the classical elegance of Schubert. And in some mature masterpieces, such as the opera “Moses und Aron,” all three of those elements are at play.

Certainly, it took no special effort to grab the Carnegie crowd for “Gurrelieder.” Written at the beginning of the century, the “Songs of Gurre” demonstrates Schoenberg’s enormous debt to Wagner in its gargantuan proportions (the orchestra and chorus are so large that four rows of seats had to be removed to extend the stage), its heroic vocal writing, its raptly ecstatic musical style, and its vivid and original theatricality in the telling of the legend of a Danish king and his illicit love affair in the castle of Gurre.

The effusive performance was a thrill, with the Met forces spectacularly overpowering. The heroic tenor Ben Heppner couldn’t always ride out the acoustical storm, but he was a strong presence anyway, as was the soprano Deborah Voigt. Especially impressive was the mezzo-soprano, Violeta Urmana, who sang the Wood-Dove’s song. The legendary 81-year-old tenor Ernst Haefliger recited the melodrama at the end with striking dramatic power. Hardly in fear of the S word, the audience acted extremely excited to have snagged a hard-to-get ticket and cheered mightily.

The New York Philharmonic’s Schoenberg festivities, on the other hand, were cautious. The nine-minute “Accompaniment to a Film Scene” was curtain-raiser for a performance of Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto beguilingly played by Martha Argerich, the world’s most popular pianist. Schoenberg’s imaginary film score evokes dark emotions, but the conductor, Charles Dutoit, oversaw clean playing but not much atmosphere.

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Two nights later, James Conlon conducted the 45-minute “Pelleas und Melisande” on the first half of a program that also had a noted soloist, the young, magnificent mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, who sang Wagner’s “Wesendonck” Lieder after intermission. Like “Gurrelieder,” “Pelleas” is post-Wagnerian but with a touch more dissonance. It was a one-dimensional performance, effortfully played, again missing the atmosphere that makes this music so striking, and it was interesting to hear the Met Orchestra play circles around the New York Philharmonic in this repertory.

The Philharmonic program made an interesting point, however, by offering the Wagner songs in modern orchestrations by Hans Werner Henze, who has been influenced by Schoenberg and, growing in Germany during World War II, troubled by Wagner; he subverts these songs with a courtly, understated chamber orchestration.

It is Boulez who has had the most topsy-turvy relationship with Schoenberg. After writing a controversial obituary of the composer saying that not only the composer but his music was dead, Boulez went on to fashion his own work in a way that continued to take many formal procedures from Schoenberg and to become the finest conductor of Schoenberg in our time. Witnessing Boulez rehearse his music with young players was simply to witness a tradition, that began with Schoenberg, brought to vivid and immediate life.

It was also proof, as was Levine’s performance, that the attitude and the degree of commitment a conductor and a presenter bring to Schoenberg can determine how well the music succeeds with an audience. Given how popular the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s exemplary Stravinsky festival was, that is one thing that Schoenberg and Stravinsky have very much in common, and something for Los Angeles to consider as it gears up for Schoenberg in the fall.