Schoenberg, Jewish Music, and the Limits of the Field of Study
This past week, the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience and The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music presented the West Coast premiere of composer Tod Machover’s opera Schoenberg in Hollywood to acclaim in the press and audiences in four well-attended performances. On the occasion of this landmark event, I am taking the opportunity to consider the fascinating and challenging details of Arnold Schoenberg’s engagement with the idea of Jewishness. In the space of this short blog post, I will also revisit Klara Moricz’s discussion of Schoenberg in her wonderful 2008 study of 20th century European Jewish classical musicians, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music.
A perusal of Schoenberg’s work, and especially his writings on Jews and Jewishness, suggests that the great 20th century modernist fits jaggedly into a conception of “Jewish music” as a discrete and self-explanatory topic. Schoenberg’s interaction with Jewishness was bound up with his self-conception as a representative of German culture and twisted into a painful and awkward reflexivity by his exile during the Nazi regime. The charmingly simplistic definition of Jewish music attributed to musicologist Kurt Sachs, as work that is “by Jews, as Jews, for Jews,” is miles from Schoenberg’s alienation from the Jewish community and the mental gymnastics of his post-exile attempts to forge a Jewish musical identity for himself.
Schoenberg serves as a test case for the porous boundaries around definitions of the topic of Jewish music. The conception of Schoenberg’s music as Jewish spotlights the manifold tensions in the academic field of study. “Schoenberg as Jew” highlights the play between a stereotype, a mystical or racialized conception holding all people of ethnic Jewish background as immutably expressive of a Jewish “essence,” and a more functional approach to the topic of Jewishness, a conception of identity anchored in shared practices that can be observed and rationally described.
As is well known, Schoenberg viewed his creative output as an extension of the German musical tradition. He described his modernist project of liberation of dissonance and the construction of the twelve-tone technique of composition system as a step in the evolution of harmony from the innovations of Beethoven, through Wagner, to himself. He viewed his own achievements as expressive of the dominance of German culture. Schoenberg’s beliefs in German supremacy in the cultural sphere was paralleled in the emerging virulent German nationalism of Hitler and the discourse of the Nazi Party. As Moricz notes, the parallels between Nazi polemics and Schoenberg’s writings about the political meaning of his work have been downplayed in the critical reception of his work, in part to protect the reputation of his status as an icon of modern music. The cognitive dissonance between the story of Schoenberg’s denunciation by the Nazis as “degenerate art” and his personal embrace of the mythos of German dominance is jarring. In 1933, Schoenberg went into involuntary exile, singled out by the regime as both Jew and as representative of an undesirable modernist art.
In his approach to thinking about Jews and music, Schoenberg seems to have at least partially embraced Wagner’s influential attitudes, as expressed in his infamous 1850 article, “Das Judenthum in der Musik.” Wagner articulated an essentialized correlation between national identity and creative potential. The Jew, as outsider to every nation, is incapable of musical creativity and can only function parasitically as a force that corrupts the musical purity of the nation in which they reside. As Moricz and James Loeffler have demonstrated in their writings on Jewish music and nationalism, Wagner’s racist musical theories had a profound influence on Jewish musical thinkers. Wagner’s racial vocabulary gave expression to the sense of shame some Jewish intellectuals felt in relationship to Jewish folklife, that they saw as impoverished aesthetically. Paradoxically, Wagner’s impugning of Jewish cultural crimes offered Jewish classical musicians a template for the creation of an elevated and elitist national music culture through which they could aspire to the achievements of the national schools of European classical music. In the discourse of Jewish nationalist classical composers, the transcendence represented by German romanticism took on the status of an ideal to be aspired to. If in the early period of his career, Schoenberg unambiguously placed himself in the lineage of German art, after the rupture of his exile from Germany, he was violently forced to reassess himself as a Jew. His efforts to redefine himself were shaped by the negative imprint of racist assessments of Jewish weakness and the destructive impact of nationless-ness. His attempts to redress the wrongs done to him by the Nazi regime were shaped by the value system of German nationalism.
I was reminded of one of the more bizarre episodes in Schoenberg’s Jewish journey during my recent conversation with Schoenberg in Hollywood director, Karole Armitage. Armitage listed among the surprising and quirky items in Schoenberg’s second act as an émigré in Hollywood, an imaginary role as the military leader of a Jewish nation state in exile. As Moricz describes in detail in her book, one of Schoenberg’s responses to the rise of Nazism was to appropriate some of the details of the Third Reich into an imaginary Jewish nation in which Jewish militant supremacy would prevail and he, Schoenberg would be the dictator. His political ambitions never got past the stage of fantasy but played a prominent role in his writings in the 1940s. This surprising flight of fancy could be described as a neurotic turn provoked by the stress of exile. But Moricz interprets Schoenberg’s fantasy of dictatorial power in light of his complete integration into a German nationalist mindset and his need to construct a counterbalance in his new role as an exile and Jew. In his fevered dreams, Schoenberg appropriated some elements of the fascist state he had just escaped but with which he still felt culturally identified.
This blog series, titled “Words and Music from American Jewish Experience,” is given form by my reliance on an unstated working assumption that Jewish music is a more-or less clearly delimited area of study that I don’t need to fuss over defining. My writings here depend for coherence on the reader’s indulgence of the legitimacy of the idea that Jewish music exists, as opposed to the not infrequent assertion that Jews are musical primarily within the vocabularies of the “dominant” cultures in which they reside as minorities. This slippery and politically volatile subject has, historically speaking, been a subject of much debate. My sleight of hands in the blog series depends on my reader accepting the idea that at least some forms of Jewish sound are so clearly embedded in Jewish communities and contexts that the old debate over “what is Jewish music?” can be safely bypassed.
Instead, I favor in-depth attention to musicological or anthropological questions that I find to be intellectually activating. I choose to mostly focus here on my niche area, the music of the Eastern European synagogue and the secondary Yiddish-speaking diaspora in the United States. But the question of where the boundaries of the field lie does not have an obvious answer, my own evasion of this topic notwithstanding. My idiosyncratic approach to defining Jewishness in music is far from offering a decisive locus of meaning making, even within the context of my own project. Drafting Schoenberg and his generation of modernist European artists (especially in the elite and influential German Jewish context) into the discussion of Jewish music throws a monkey wrench into the neat boundaries that I implicitly rely upon.
In conclusion, I will offer a quote from Klara Moricz’s conclusion to Jewish Identities in which she wrestles with how anti-essentialism can coalesce with the intellectual project of studying a collectivity that has been so over-determined by racial ideology. “Hard though it would be to prove, it could be that the urge for purification was stronger in artists of Jewish ethnicity than in their gentile contemporaries precisely because of their personal experience of being treated—covertly or openly—by the society in which they functioned as impurities.”
I am grateful for the disruption to my usual patterns of inquiry provided by this digression and hope it gives some useful context to that nebulous term, “Jewish music.”
Works Cited/Further Reading
Klara Moricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
James Loeffler, “Richard Wagner’s “Jewish Music”: Antisemitism and Aesthetics in Modern Jewish Culture,” Jewish Social Studies 15, no. 2 (2009): 2-36.