Arnold Schoenberg Goes to Moscow

"It is an oddity in Arnold Schoenberg's biography that, faced with life under the Nazis, he contemplated removal not to Western Europe and eventually the United States, the path he actually took, but to the Soviet Union--quite the opposite direction, in more ways than one. Could that really be true, I always wondered. What could the inventor of twelve-tone music (and a monarchist revanchist besides) have been thinking? Where, other than the country he was fleeing, would he have been less welcome? Now I learn from Classics for the Masses, Pauline Fairclough's scrupulous archival study of the evolving Soviet performing repertory and the policies that conditioned it, that within the Soviet musical community there was a faction, led by Ivan Sollertinsky (the young Shostakovich's bosom friend), who believed that putting Schoenberg in charge of composition at the Moscow Conservatory "would ... guarantee the Soviet Union's cultural pre-eminence". Following up on Fairclough's references, I further learned that Schoenberg was sounded out by his former pupil Hanns Eisler, an ardent communist, and that he took the prospect seriously enough to send in a proposal "for the establishment of a musical institute" in the Soviet capital, as he put it in a letter from 1934 to Fritz Stiedry, the German conductor then leading the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra.

"Thirty years later, Stiedry recalled warning Schoenberg off this "crazy idea", adding that "Russia was under the totally reactionary whip of Stalin", so that "friend Schoenberg would have been the least suitable musician imaginable". So I thought, too; but after reading Fairclough's book I wonder whether Stiedry's memory had not been coloured, as mine obviously was, by subsequent events, beginning in 1936 with the denunciation of Shostakovich's opera, The Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, ushering in the draconian arts policies that became synonymous with Stalinism and with the Soviet regime. In 1935, between the sounding out of Schoenberg and the chewing out of Shostakovich, Stiedry led a performance of Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra, the first big symphonic work to be written using twelve-tone technique, hence the very emblem of uncompromising modernism in those days. (According to Schoenberg's biographer Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Shostakovich attended every rehearsal.)

"As Fairclough shows (and it is one of many nuances she adds to our crude collective memory of Soviet music), there was a window between the Communist Party resolution of 1932 dissolving the "proletarian" associations of writers and musicians opposing modernist trends, and the clampdown of 1936, which coincided with the beginning of the bloody purges now known as the Great Terror. During that time, compositions using advanced academic techniques could be programmed at the discretion of performers. (Besides Schoenberg's Variations, she lists twelve-tone works by Alban Berg and Ernst Krenek in the Leningrad repertoire.) Still, it was a good thing Schoenberg stayed away. In a couple of years he would have been in even worse trouble than Prokofiev, who had been wooed back to his Sovietized homeland with promises of creative autonomy on which he felt, during the "window", he could rely."...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.music.classical/DfHUrqRWxxw

At best, Schoenberg's international reputation might mean that he is allowed to leave the USSR; at worst, he is executed or imprisoned as a Twelve Tone Trotskyist... (In between: like Shostakovich and Prokofiev he is forced to change his style to make his work more acceptable to Stalin.)

BTW, one weird effect of Schoenberg going to Moscow or anywhere other than Los Angeles: his son Ronald Schoenberg doesn't become a judge who lets O. J. Simpson off without jail after he was convicted on spousal abuse charges in 1989. (Ronald Schoenberg claimed that the city hadn't asked for a jail sentence; the city claimed that it did:
) What effect a jail sentence for Simpson at the time would have had on his subsequent behavior, I am not sure...
 
Top