The New Music. Theodor W. Adorno

G major chord to the chord that I will incorrectly term a D flat minor chord, although it is in reality something far more complex – that this change ultimately leads to the chords being both thrown together at once.

Now, I had spoken to you just now of the harmonic origin of polyphony, that is, the root of modern harmony, of Schoenberg’s new harmony, in voice leading. But Schoenberg’s harmony has another root. The question of where this Schoenbergian polyphony actually comes from is an extremely peculiar one. Such elements as those I have just shown you are one dimension of that; there are also entirely different ones. And for that you have to go back to Wagner for a moment. As you all know, there is relatively little in the way of truly polyphonic passages, of true polyphony, in Wagner. And it is very strange that, as late as around 1910, if you read a book like Strauss’s treatise on orchestration, Wagner was considered a great exponent of polyphony²² simply because the inner parts in his music are – in the interests of a meaningful rendition, I would almost say – very prominent, but in Wagner things almost always stay within the framework of the four-part chorale. It is really always four-part chorales, with some of the voices partly elaborated, and true polyphony exists only in a small number of passages where he works with thematic combination, superimposing different leitmotifs. There are a few well-known, very interesting passages of this kind in Die Walküre, and naturally the most famous example of all is the threefold thematic combination from the Meistersinger prelude. Now, this aspect of thematic combination plays an oddly significant part as the origin of both Schoenberg’s polyphony and the new Schoenbergian harmony. And I would like to show you how such thematic combinations already appear in Gurrelieder, but also how these thematic combinations are clearly different from the later, mature polyphony. One finds such a combination in ‘Lied der Waldtaube’, where he combines this theme you will recall [plays], which is the same as this [plays] but with a different ending, with the theme that has those large intervals, which has a different rhythm here [plays]. And now there is also a third that is interwoven with these, namely the theme in the voice, but it runs partly – and this is no longer the case in late Schoenberg – in unison with the wide-interval theme, though it does not maintain the unison entirely strictly. So, I will play you this passage [plays]. And here you have the ‘wood pigeon’ harmony again [plays], and so forth. Now, I wanted to tell you something about the problem of the binding and the non-binding. Look here: the counterpoint in this passage has something non-binding, in the sense that none of the combined voices are really set apart from the others [plays], and now they go together [plays]. This would be quite unthinkable in late Schoenberg, of course. That is, in late Schoenberg, either the voices would be identical or move in parallel, or they would be highly contrasting. So this is one of those non-binding aspects connected to this tonal style. How one is supposed to envisage the concept of the contrapuntally binding, what it actually is, that is indeed one of the most difficult questions. Schoenberg himself once said that he only really learnt what counterpoint is when he wrote the Woodwind Quintet.²³ And I am convinced that he was quite serious about that, in a certain sense. For true counterpoint as found in mature Schoenberg does not mean putting several voices together, superimposing them and combining them as seamlessly as possible; true counterpoint means that the relationship between several simultaneous voices is organized in such a way that the one is conditioned by the other, and vice versa, and that there is no arbitrary relationship, no arbitrariness in the relationships between simultaneous voices. And I would say that this aspect, the fact that there can no longer be any chance connections between simultaneous voices, that these simultaneous voices must rather be utterly co-dependent, that this is really the central rule of musical development in late Schoenberg. The greatest area of interest in late Schoenberg is this absolute necessity of counterpoint, but necessity in the sense that the mutually complementary voices together form a unity of sense, and not simply that they are superficially adapted to one another in keeping with some rules or other. I think that we still lack a truly exact concept of new counterpoint to this day, and that the didactic notion of combined simultaneous voices and the genuinely artistic idea of this necessity of interrelated voices, that no distinction is made between the two, and it would be vital to articulate these aspects. And I can only touch on this problem, as indeed, in this course, in such a short course, I can only really touch on problems and direct your attention towards a number of questions; but the real work is for you to do, namely to absorb what I have said and, if it means something to you, to develop it further yourselves. I can only try to give you an idea of how to look at such things in order to understand what is going on within them. But I can by no means claim to give you a complete explanation of these works and all they have to offer, for I can really provide you only with those elements that I believe are necessary to understand them. I think this qualification of the purpose of my undertaking here is a necessary one.

Now, I was asked yesterday – and this follows on from the few references I made to ‘Lied der Waldtaube’ – about the oft-cited connection, I mean compositionally speaking, between Schoenberg and Mahler. ‘Lied der Waldtaube’ is one of the few compositions by Schoenberg that genuinely shows certain Mahlerian influences, if you will, such as some march-like interpolations that are reminiscent of Mahler, or recall this [plays]. Though I should add that, even in such passages in Schoenberg, the connection is not so unambiguous because here, at the end of the seemingly Mahler-like first part of Gurrelieder, one clearly sees the emergence of something that was a model for both Mahler and Schoenberg, namely Titurel’s great funeral music from the third act of Parsifal,²⁴ which, of all Wagner’s music, was probably one of the most consequential pieces for modern music. So if you look at the last two pages of Tove’s song, with the big bell climax, that idea truly came from this late work by Wagner. But I think that connections to Mahler such as those found in these passages are not what matters. If people are intent on hunting down Mahlerian elements in Schoenberg, they will generally have a very hard time of it. There are sometimes turns of musical phrase whose Austrian idiom perhaps has a slight hint of Mahler to them, such as the middle section of the incomparably magnificent song ‘Lockung’ [Enticement] from op. 6. But that is actually uninteresting. I think that the influence of Mahler is rather connected very closely to the factor I was just describing to you, namely the problem of binding counterpoint and a binding compositional approach in general. The element in Mahler that I have in mind is not so much a specific compositional element, more a kind of criterion that applies to much of Mahler’s way of composing: the criterion of clarity. All of Mahler’s orchestration – and this is why it is right to include Mahler in the category of new music, and why he does not really belong to the neo-Germans – the most fundamental principle of Mahler’s orchestration is never that of colouristic intoxication or creating the richest and most opulent sound. Such things certainly appear in Mahler, but only really as by-products. Rather, the principle that guides Mahler’s approach to composition, and especially to orchestration, is to give every musical event the utmost clarity, to ensure through the disposition of tone colours that it emerges unambiguously as the thing it is intended to be. This principle is the complete opposite of Wagner’s, which I have termed the ‘occultation of production’,²⁵ and points very clearly to chamber music, and this approach became more and more pronounced in the course of Mahler’s life. You can find a veritable prototype of this, developed with the utmost mastery, in the Fourth Symphony, where he achieves an indescribable clarity through the orchestration – one could almost call it a clarity of musical drawing in colours at the expense of the sonic totality. And this, the fact that the colour serves to make the construction absolutely clear, where the idea of a lush, rounded overall sound is not the prime concern, the true subordination of colour to the compositional principle: this is what Schoenberg adopted, and not only for his own art of orchestration, which is not always […]

[…] only in a form where clarity has become problematic. This means that, for someone like Bach, this problem of compositional clarity or clarity of instrumental sound did not arise at all in this way, because everything was already clear, so to speak. But now, with these composers, with all the traditional composers including Wagner, clarity was achieved largely through the relatively fixed types of medium, where one could always know and imagine more or less what would happen now and what would follow. And it is only when that is no longer the case, when this crutch is completely absent, that the question of how to clarify musical events poses itself. So, if I may put it like this, the more chaotic