The New Music. Theodor W. Adorno

displacement: it simply appears in a low register, where it takes on this peculiar character [plays]. If you take a look at Berg’s op. 2 songs, incidentally, especially the third, you will see how such chords have lasting effects. Later on, in Erwartung, the opera Erwartung, the monodrama Erwartung, by Schoenberg, one can find such gestures and such things all the time, but now they have truly become absolute – that is, in Erwartung, in the opera Erwartung, the mediating elements, the repetitions and all that, are completely eliminated, and all that remains are events like this chord or this shock gesture that I tried to explain to you. So that is what I really wanted to tell you here about this song.

      I would also like to draw your attention to one thing in particular, namely the fact that the middle section at ‘Three opals glimmer’ – and this is also very indicative of late Schoenberg – that this is not simply a contrasting B section but, rather, is derived from the material of this chord; it follows on from the rest of the exposition and only really continues it, without leaving the context of this original situation; it has this quality of continuation, of further development, as Schoenberg’s middle sections often do, and not the element of mere contrast. I hold the view that the most important thing in composition is to learn how to consciously control possibilities like those I have mentioned, but I have the feeling that, today, countless composers are no longer even aware of such problems, that all this is being forgotten, resulting in a terrible impoverishment of composition. And what I really want, what I mean to encourage you to do, is truly to prevent this impoverishment of composition by becoming aware of all the possibilities that are manifest in these early works by Schoenberg. I will just look at this again so that you can see exactly what I mean. So, this appears once more in the song [plays]. Now this, like an Abgesang¹⁹ [plays], and so on. Also, note Schoenberg’s sense of form in giving this middle section the marking ‘A little more animated’. So he feels – and this relates again to the way such a composition is a force field – he feels the exhaustion that results from the sustaining of the chord but simultaneously feels the need to expand the chord, in a sense acting like his own conductor by, like a good conductor, giving an imperceptible nudge at certain points by raising the tempo slightly; so he raises the tempo slightly with his marking in order to smooth over the contradiction I was telling you about. So, that is what I wanted to say about this song.

The next song, ‘Schenk mir deinen goldenen Kamm’ [Give me your golden comb], also belongs very much to the sphere of art nouveau. An extremely important element of this art nouveau sphere is a certain kind of erotic shock, shall we say, but it is always connected to concepts such as ‘transfiguration’. So, on the one hand, it is constantly thumbing its nose at bourgeois morality; it is always about free love, yet sexuality is never really accepted as sexuality but instead is associated in a sort of pantheistic manner with the cosmos, with infinity and God knows what else. So if you look at the text of Gurrelieder – and Jacobsen was a great art nouveau poet – if you look at the text of Gurrelieder, you will also find a great deal of this strange configuration of pantheistic cosmic feeling and anti-bourgeois elements, criticism of marriage, and this sphere, which is implied with such phrases as ‘free love’ or ‘suicide’,²⁰ this whole conceptual sphere thus plays a very major part in Schoenberg’s early work. Now, the song in question is entitled ‘Give Me Your Golden Comb’. Its actual title is ‘Jesus Begs’, but Schoenberg evidently relegated it to a subtitle because of its shocking nature. This too is a poem by Dehmel, an erotic poem that is placed in the mouth of Jesus and should be imagined as being directed at Mary Magdalene. I think that, if you want to understand fully the core of reality behind these shocking chords from the young Schoenberg, you must feel that, you must try to reconstruct for yourselves what it would have meant in the bourgeois world of 1895 to represent Mary Magdalene as Christ’s lover. Only if you can truly feel this configuration, I think, can you gain a sense of the genuine risk that once lay within this music, perhaps comparable to what happens when one uses such chords nowadays in a totalitarian state, where one will get in similar trouble to when the Austro-Hungarian police would come knocking about such poems. So, the poem reads as follows:

      Give me your golden comb;

      every morning shall remind you

      that you kissed my hair.

      Give me your silken sponge;

      every evening I want to sense

      for whom you prepare yourself in the bath –

      oh, Mary!

      Give me everything you have;

      my soul is not vain,

      proudly I receive your blessing.

      Give me your heaviest burden:

      Will you not lay on my head

      your heart too, your heart –

      Magdalene?²¹

      Now, what makes this song very strange is that here, in very early Schoenberg, you already find the highly peculiar relationship with tonality that is crucial for Schoenberg’s work in general.

On the one hand, he is not at all satisfied with using an ordinary cadence, and instead of the usual cadential chords, as well as the typical Brahmsian secondary degrees, he introduces chords from other keys – he later spoke of them as ‘secondary dominants’²² – as very striking root progressions. On the other hand – and here is another extreme contrast to Richard Strauss; I would generally advise you, if you wish to grasp the full weight of the things I am trying to lay out for you here, you should look at the contrast precisely with songs by Richard Strauss, which in some ways emerged from this art nouveau sphere quite similarly – on the other hand, he takes tonality, as I said earlier, far more seriously than someone like Richard Strauss, who was not at all interested in ending up in God knows what key, and what happens with keys in general has no significance. I would assume that Schoenberg examined Wagner much better and more closely than Strauss did, because in Wagner it is almost always the case – Lorenz has shown this in great detail – that the unity of key has a formal function.²³ This means that precisely when the usual preconceived forms such as sonata form or operatic forms are no longer valid, then the music must first of all dictate what means of formal construction are actually left – and the answer is tonality. At the same time, it wants to move away from these conventional chords through its expressive power, and here one again finds this tension: on the one hand, tonality is significantly extended through the chords that are employed, but, on the other hand, these extensions only serve to reinforce the awareness of tonality. And this approach remained essential for the whole harmonic language of the young Schoenberg. In the great masterpieces too, such as the F sharp minor quartet and the first movement of the Second Chamber Symphony, one always finds precisely these foreign chords supporting the key. In one of the next lectures I will use one of the greatest masterpieces among all of Schoenberg’s songs, namely op. 6, no. 1, to show how this extension leads to an entire key becoming a kind of elaborated Neapolitan sixth, and what indescribable skill Schoenberg shows in the construction of harmonic perspective as early as op. 6. But first I will only show you this song.

Incidentally, I would also like to address another matter. Now, one can say that every composer really has a limited number of basic characters. When my friend René Leibowitz said earlier that one can judge the quality of a composer by the number, by the abundance of characters, this is certainly true in one sense, for the composer’s breadth is determined by how little the characters are repeated. At the same time, all of them have a form of – how shall I put it? – basic thematic experiences or basic thematic situations that keep returning. So, just as this shock gesture I showed you and this chord form such basic situations, this song I will play you now also displays a type that keeps returning in Schoenberg, for example in op. 6, but also in the song about the beautiful flowerbed from the George songs.²⁴ It starts and continues as this slow alla breve song, but its fabric becomes ever freer and ever more uncompromising. And it is also the case that the question of characters must be considered not only extensively but also intensively. That is, the quality of a composer also has something to do with their ability to present these characters increasingly vividly and, most importantly,