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need to organize them through clarity and to present them in such a way that the whole can take on musical sense. And I think that this, ladies and gentlemen, brings me to a very crucial and decisive point for probably understanding Schoenberg. For the constructivism of Schoenberg, and hence the constructivism of all our music, results not from a joy in construction as such but from the necessity of wresting this now infinitely complex musical material, and with it this infinitely complex and rich musical imagination, from the chaos that threatens it at every moment. What makes this new music great, for heaven’s sake, is that it stepped out of its safe, predetermined civilizatory boundaries and took up this chaotic element once more, this element that can smash through convention. Precisely because of this, however, it constantly faces the problem of not regressing to the pre-artistic, to the barbaric, but rather to clarify itself; and clarity is really the same thing as construction. When we speak of the principle of construction in music today, then what this means is that the principle of clarity, that is, the precise determinacy of every musical event, has become total and places itself in front of every other event, and this – as I think I showed you especially in my deliberations just now – is really an exact function of musical richness but also of the chaotic, surging and yet unformed quality behind it. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if what I just told you is right, then it indeed follows that the principles of construction in music must always have a determinate connection to what is composed. This means it is only worthwhile to construct where these explosive forces are actually present. If this is not the case, if this dialectic, this tension, the thing I have very clumsily and crudely termed the ‘chaotic’, but where I think you can probably all follow what I mean somehow – if these forces, these diffuse, divergent forces are no longer felt, and there is instead a guarantee of calm and safety from the start, then the principle of construction really has no purpose in music. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to return to what I said to you at the beginning of today’s session, namely that, in criticizing certain current forms of constructivism, I am serving the cause of freedom rather than that of reaction. I think the danger is that the principles of construction, once they are no longer experienced in this state of tension with what is being constructed, lose their purpose and consequently decline. And that is what I wanted to show you specifically in the young Schoenberg: that this is not the case with him, that whenever principles of construction appear in his music, they purely serve this purpose of organizing masses of material that would otherwise be unmanageable.

Now, that is essentially what I wanted to say to you about Gurrelieder. I would just like to remind you, for the sake of precision, that the principle of thematic precision I showed you in that slightly clumsy passage from Gurrelieder, that this would subsequently play a far greater part in Schoenberg’s music than you think. Most of all, I would like to draw your attention in this context to the later parts of the First String Quartet, where almost all the themes previously presented are set in counterpoint with one another. But I would also like to point you – and this is an especially overt example of thematic combination – to the First Chamber Symphony, not only to the famous canonic passages in the development but also to the scherzo, where Schoenberg first contrasts the scherzo and the trio, but then he naturally cannot respect the convention A–B–A form in its usual guise. However, the scherzo character and the contrast with the trio are so clear that something resembling the A–B–A form must ultimately ensue, and he managed this by the very overt measure of simply placing the scherzo and the trio in counterpoint when he repeats the scherzo, that is, by simply superimposing them simultaneously. This is another principle that would have very significant consequences later on. You know that Berg used this approach most extensively, for example, that the final movement of Berg’s Chamber Concerto actually rests on this Schoenbergian principle. And then, finally, the most advanced consequence of this principle of thematic combination, if you like, is twelve-note counterpoint, in which – in sophisticated twelve-note works – the different forms of the row are constantly appearing together and being superimposed, meaning that the aspect of thematic combination is really a precursor to the later integral counterpoint. I would just like to augment what I told you yesterday about the connection between Schoenberg’s principles of construction and the eruptive or explosive element: that the later Schoenberg – whom we cannot discuss this time, unfortunately, but who should always be in our field of view when examining these early works – that Schoenberg also had an extremely sophisticated awareness of these things. So one might say that Schoenberg’s dodecaphony is always in proportion to the degree of complexity in the purely compositional events. If the compositional events are relatively simple, he operates with the row equally simply and does not engage in any great twelve-tone arts, as one can observe in his Accompanying Music for a Film Scene,²⁶ which you recently heard performed so well by Mr Rosbaud.²⁷ But if there is much going on in the music, if it is extremely complex in its own substance and its own sense, then naturally the full ‘amenities of the modern age’,²⁸ as he put it, will be deployed, and then the most incredible dodecaphonic skills will be used to present this correspondingly rich and nuanced musical content. Examples of this are the Third String Quartet and the Variations for Orchestra, which you have heard, the latter most especially. In their use of twelve-note technique, these two pieces probably represent the pinnacle of subtlety and artifice, and both works are extremely complex, incredibly polyphonic and authentically felt. In a certain sense, then, this is also a part of early Schoenberg: one must learn to recognize and realize, at every moment, the proportion between the degree of construction and the demands of what is constructed.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have not covered remotely as much ground as I had intended in this course, but I did at least have the feeling, even though I unfortunately spoke alone for the entire time, of being in a kind of dialogue with you about these things, and that is why I felt that my actual intention of discussing the young Schoenberg should be placed in the service of understanding the current problems, even at the price of being unable to show you the beautiful elaborated Neapolitan sixth in the song ‘Traumleben’, or the even more magnificent treatment of form in the song ‘Lockung’,²⁹ and suchlike. Regarding the op. 6 songs, however, I would like to add that the climate is an entirely different one here, that quantity truly turns into quality. All these titbits that I picked out of the early works for you to show how all these things are already latent in them, they now stop being titbits – if I may use so barbaric an expression – and become constitutive. So, from op. 6 onwards, the elements prescribed by the musical language really disappear altogether, and the elements that are used to construct the music’s tonality, which I could only touch on for now, these elements now become the only valid ones. In every one of these songs, tonality has already become a problem, a problem – please do not misunderstand me – not in the crude sense of being ‘problematic’, with the consequence that one cannot write tonal music any more. That would have been the easy way out. It was a problem in the sense that Schoenberg asked himself, I would almost say, just as Kant asked himself how synthetic judgements a priori are possible, that is, whether synthetic judgements are possible, Schoenberg similarly asked himself how tonality is possible, which meant: how is tonality still possible? And the answer he gave was really that, in the face of this abundance of surging events, it was possible only through construction, possible only if this same tonality that was once a given and constituted the framework for all compositions, if this became thematic, one might almost say, if all music set itself the task of re-creating this tonality on its own terms, instead of presupposing it merely as an external system of reference, as something finished. And, in the great evolutionary works from op. 6 onwards, this attempt to recuperate tonality for a musical content that is already conflicting with it at every moment brings about these incredible inner tensions that finally cause everything to fall apart. If you listen to the first introductory bars of the song ‘Lockung’, for example, you will immediately notice that, although one still essentially has a cadence and a tonal melody, its whole air of directness and the complexity of its elements really belong to a work by the mature Schoenberg. And you will truly feel here that this music only had to give a shake for the tonality to fall off it. To conclude, let me just touch on these few bars [plays no. 7 of Eight Songs, op. 6]. Essentially that is already the spirit of this [plays no. 4 of Six Little Piano Pieces, op. 19], and with such an abundance of musical shapes it is quite immaterial whether the chords are a little more or a little less tonal. This proves a superficial aspect by comparison, and

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