Arnold Schoenberg Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Alan Lessem

Critical Essay by Alan Lessem

SOURCE: "Schönberg and the Crisis of Expressionism," in Music & Letters, Vol. 55, No. 4, October, 1974, pp. 429-36.

In the following essay, Lessem associates Schoenberg 's creative crisis with the early-twentieth-century Expressionist movement.

In Arnold Schönberg's published writings, as well as those of Webern and Berg, there is no lack of reference to the decisiveness of the year 1908, in which he took the first steps in what has subsequently been described as 'free atonal' composition. Since then, too, there has been much wrangling over the implications of 'atonality', abstractly considered, but less willingness to explore some of the broader issues of the crisis into which Schönberg and his pupils were plunged—a crisis which has its place in the social and intellectual history of our century.

In pre-War Vienna the perilous closeness of political and moral collapse (and an inevitable general hardening to the pursuit of new enterprise) brought...
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