Schoenberg’s Godless Silences: Atonality, Poetry, and the Challenge of Coherence

Abstract

Perhaps the two most famous defining moments of modernist music are the 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacré du printemps and the 1908 premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, Opus 10. While Le Sacré is most famous for the resulting riots, the last two moments of the Schoenberg Quartet, which also add a soprano voice, are often cited as the moment music arrived at absolute “atonality,” where there is no longer any sense of a pitch center around which the music is tonally organized. The performance, although it avoided the riots associated with Le Sacré, did incite controversy and dissent. Music critic Richard Batka wrote that “the majority of the public took against the work; various dissonances caused elegant ladies to utter cries of pain, putting their hands to their delicate ears, and elderly gentlemen to shed tears” (Reich 36). The text of the Quartet, by Stefan George, includes the phrase “Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten,” (“I feel air from another planet”), which is often cited as appropriate for the strange new world that music seemed to be entering.

Composition with twelve tones has no other aim than comprehensibility.

—Arnold Schoenberg (Style and Idea 215)

The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the contemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended.

—Theodor W. Adorno (Aesthetic Theory 118)

Oh! Blessed rage for order…

—Wallace Stevens (Collected Poems 130)