Book Review of Bojan Bujić, Arnold Schoenberg and Egon Wellesz: A Fraught Relationship (London: Plumbago 2020) (original) (raw)

On 18 October 1923 Roberto Gerhard, in a creative crisis and seeking guidance, wrote a long letter to Arnold Schoenberg asking to be accepted as his pupil. Two weeks later he received a positive answer and, full of enthusiasm, left for Vienna at once. There he met Schoenberg and began a master‐pupil relationship that would gradually turn into deep friendship, as attested by fifty‐three extant letters written between 1923 and Schoenberg’s death in 1951. Existing in archives in several countries and, for the most part, unpublished, these letters provide a wealth of information about Gerhard’s personal life and professional career, with interesting insights into Gerhard’s compositional process.

It is commonplace to situate Schoenberg as the subject of music criticism, much of it staunchly negative. Schoenberg’s entire biography is coloured by his oppositional orientation towards music critics and criticism, and he frequently blamed the arbiters of his work for coming between himself and what might have otherwise been a more receptive listening public. This article makes a case for Schoenberg as not merely the subject of criticism, but rather, by virtue of his life-long engagement with critics and criticism—in letters, essays, and on canvas—as a key participant in the discourse of music criticism in the early 20th century, and as an important music critic in his own right.

Arnold Schoenberg's contributions to the fields of music theory and music composition remain studied, taught, and celebrated. His success is hardly surprising, as the introduction of his serial technique and practice has been a pillar of modernist composition throughout the greater part of the 20th century. However, a discussion of the reasons as to why Schoenberg's language has reached such widespread popularity and acceptance in the Western world remains largely non-trivial. To shed some light on the subject, we will turn to Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46.