Julie Brown's Schoenberg and Redemption raises important questions concerning the broader intellectual contexts of Schoenberg's emancipation of the dissonance, the influence of Richard Wagner and Otto Weininger on his thought and music, and the development of his Jewish identity. Her approach demonstrates the necessity of close readings of his voluminous writings, with attention to his richly metaphorical language as well as the ways his ideas evolved over the course of a life that spanned two world wars and the shifting cultural terrains of Vienna, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Brown also focuses attention on some little-discussed published and unpublished materials by and about Schoenberg that merit further consideration. And while I have reservations about the ultimate conclusions she draws, Schoenberg and Redemption does make a significant contribution in opening up new dialogues on significant topics concerning Schoenberg and his music.

Brown's provocative central argument is that what she identifies as Schoenberg's ‘step into atonality’ around 1908, was ‘an act of compositional and cultural redemption made by a genuine Zukunsftsmusiker [sic], one who was born Jewish but subscribed to Wagnerian Deutschtum’ (94). The notion of ‘redemption’ she develops is derived from Wagner's Judaism in Music as read through Otto Weininger's Sex and Character (1903) and his essay collection On Last Things published posthumously that same year, after Weininger, the ‘notorious misogynist, anti-feminist and anti-Semite’ (56) killed himself in the building where Beethoven died. As Brown writes:

Brown asserts that during this period Schoenberg became a Christ figure for his followers and himself, which she links to Weininger's reading of Wagner and Christ as both seeking the ‘redemption of mankind from Jewishness’ (62). Atonality in her account was thus the product of an effort to free the ‘harmonic Others’, which she identifies in particular with Schoenberg's category of ‘vagrant harmonies’ (112–13) in the Harmonielehre, while at the same time cleansing German music and tonality from this ‘Jewish element’:

Brown then interprets many aspects of Schoenberg's later writings and works – those from after the rise of the Nazis and his return to the Jewish faith and his emigration from Germany to the United States in 1933 – as responses to the shame he felt for his purported earlier embrace of Weininger's anti-Semitism and for having ‘“subscribed to Wagner's Judaism in Music” and interpreted his texts “precisely in the sense of” the Nazi extremists of 1932, as he confesses’ (93). Focusing on an unpublished essay from 1934, ‘Every Young Jew’, and a lecture he gave in Los Angeles at the Jewish cultural society Mailamm the following year, Brown claims that Schoenberg was motivated by a deep sense of ‘guilt and self-loathing at his earlier rejection of his own Jewishness’ (81).Footnote ¹ Thus his advocacy of Brahms, the notion of monotonality, the writings on the Idea, and his empathetic commentaries on the anti-Semitism of Pfitzner and others during these years are all read as manifestations of an attempt to exonerate himself from having ‘subscribed to Wagner's anti-Semitic beliefs’ (170).

In the opening chapter, ‘Schoenberg, History, Trauma’, Brown compares her reading of Schoenberg to finding a new thread in a ‘familiar old sweater’, which ‘promises to unravel something more of the fascinating intellectual weave that he was’ (10). There is no doubt that Schoenberg and Redemption succeeds in showing that we need to understand more fully Weininger's influence as a thread that weaves through Schoenberg's thought and that of many other important artists and writers in the early twentieth century, including, as Brown points out, central figures for Schoenberg such as Karl Kraus. In addition to the impact of his misogynistic and anti-Semitic ideas, she also notes striking resonances of Weininger's musical interpretations with later writings, as, for example, in her discussion of Weininger's use of the idea of ‘breakthrough’ in Mahler's music: ‘The most powerful musical motifs of the world's music are those which attempt to represent this breaking through [dieses Durchbrechen] time in time, this breaking forth out of time’ (61).Footnote ²

But for me the book is less successful in its attempt to argue that the Wagner–Weininger–Schoenberg–Redemption thread actually constitutes, as she implies, ‘most of the sweater, as opposed to an isolated pattern’ (10). Brown does acknowledge that there were other factors that shaped Schoenberg's musical and intellectual development in the years around 1908 (at various points she touches upon Theosophy and mysticism, Freud, Loos, Kraus, Stefan George, Dehmel, Balzac, and Kandinsky). And yet her overall thesis and many specific interpretations of his music and writings depend on the claim that Weininger's reading of Wagner provides the ‘broad organizational framework for the many other literary and philosophical figures whom Schoenberg consulted during this period and from whom he took inspiration for individual works’ (77). While noting in the introduction that, ‘this is not to say that such a reading accounts for everything’, she does maintain that it offers ‘a coherent explanation for Schoenberg's various creative and theoretical innovations, as well as his responses to the changing politics in Germany’ (6).

The attempt to create a ‘coherent explanation’ of so much complex material based on this single thread leads at several points, in my view, to reductive and sometimes forced interpretations. For example, in her chapter ‘Compositional Innovation and the Redemption of Ahasuerus’, she links Schoenberg's ‘advocacy of brevity of expression, and explicit exploration of small forms in his early atonal pieces’ to Weininger's praise of Wagner's ‘extreme succinctness’ and ‘concentration’ (109):

And yet such an account leaves out the long history of very short works by Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and others, as well all the aesthetic and compositional factors related to brevity that Schoenberg explicitly discussed in these years, as in his correspondence with Busoni (a figure who does not appear in the book) and elsewhere.Footnote ³ We can see a related example in Brown's treatment of Brahms; because she so strongly associates Schoenberg's interest in Brahms with his renunciation in the 1930s of his earlier Wagnerian enthusiasms, she downplays the impact of Brahmsian developing variation on the increasing concision of Schoenberg's music in the years before the First World War.Footnote ⁴ Similarly, throughout the book, Brown tends to reduce ‘German music’ to Wagner. Thus, for example, she reads Schoenberg's statement in one of the Gedanke manuscripts from 1931 – ‘German music will not go my way, not the way I have pointed out’ – as an indication that he was starting to ‘rethink the nature of his affiliation with Wagner’ (182).

Brown's Chapter Two – ‘Schoenberg as Christ’ – points to the need for further research concerning Schoenberg's engagement with the figure of Christ and Christianity in the context of his Jewish identity and spiritual development throughout his life. Yet here too the attempt to see everything through the Wagner–Weininger–Schoenberg–Redemption lens has a tendency to distort the evidence. She argues that his renunciation of tonality was connected to members of his circle attributing ‘not only a priest-like authority to Schoenberg, but a Christ-like redemptive power – which itself was apparently secret to the group’ (22). Yet the evidence she provides is quite sketchy for such a literal view of ‘Schoenberg as Christ’ that could be clearly differentiated from the broad circulation of the trope of artists as Christ-like poet-priests that was applied to Mahler, Kokoschka, and others. It is likewise hard to reconcile the claim with such evidence as a note Berg sent to Schoenberg around 1912 on a postcard showing Mahler's birthplace: ‘Doesn't this resemble the shelter in which Christ was born?’ – not a question one would likely pose to someone they regarded, or who regarded themselves, as Christ.Footnote ⁵ Brown is also surprisingly ambivalent – given its many points of contact with her central argument – about the interpretation by the art historian Gemma Blackshaw of a Richard Gerstl self-portrait, as ‘“a formalized rejection of his Jewish identity” via Weininger's construction of Christ’.Footnote ⁶ She writes in the footnote where Blackshaw's article is discussed: ‘this may or may not be the case in this Gerstl portrait: the only signifier pointing strongly to a sacred meaning is this blue colour; the most striking thing about the painting is arguably the naked torso, which tends to make the “sheet” look more like a bath towel – eroticizing his body’ (208).

Schoenberg was not reticent in discussing his ambitions; had he self-consciously attempted a Wagnerian–Weiningerian Christ-like redemption of German music through atonality it is hard to imagine that he wouldn't have written about it a great deal, especially since, in Brown's interpretation, his commitment to Wagnerian Deutschtum only came to be shameful to him decades later. On the contrary, his contemporaneous writings on what he was attempting in his works from these years develop a constellation of many factors – including expression, intuition, inspiration, the unconscious, and synaesthesia – but not Christ, Weininger, or Wagner (with the exception of his remark to Busoni in 1909 about turning away ‘from the full “God and Superman” sound of the Wagner orchestra’).Footnote ⁷

Indeed, the central challenge Brown faces in asserting that the Wagner–Weininger–Schoenberg–Redemption thread is so fundamental to five decades of Schoenberg's life and creative activity is the paucity of evidence to support it. There is no question that Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern were aware of Weininger, and a 1908 edition of Sex and Character was in Schoenberg's library (though in contrast to many publications he read closely, it was not annotated). But beyond the single mention of Weininger in the Preface to the Harmonielehre – as one of a group of thinkers along with Strindberg and Maeterlinck who ‘thought earnestly’ and who show ‘that there are problems and that they are unresolved’Footnote ⁸ – Brown admits that ‘other explicit first-hand accounts of Schoenberg's engagement with Weininger's thinking on Jewish identity are difficult to find’ (74). As a result, she relies on more tangential evidence, such as a handful of annotations by Schoenberg of writings that mention Weininger and the claim by Schoenberg's son-in-law Felix Greissle, who would have been thirteen in 1908, that Weininger was someone Schoenberg read closely (72). And yet based on this slender evidence she strongly links the two figures, even conflating them at one point when she describes Schoenberg looking back anxiously at his ‘earlier Weiningerian self’ (76).

Brown also acknowledges that beyond ‘Every Young Jew’ and the Mailamm lecture, there are few signs of a fundamental role in Schoenberg's development of Wagner's Judaism in Music, either directly or filtered through Weininger. She writes, ‘To my knowledge, 1934 is the year of Schoenberg's first documented confession of his private yearning for redemption as a young Jew, and 1935 is the year of his first public confession to having earlier subscribed to the sentiments of Wagner's Judaism in Music’ (88). As a result, Brown argues: ‘It requires greater hermeneutic efforts to develop the argument that Schoenberg's decision in 1908 to reconceive tonality might have involved casting himself in the role of Wagner's good Jew: A Jewish “redeemer” in the sphere of music akin to Wagner's own dubious examples of Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne in the sphere of literature’ (107–8).

In the face of Schoenberg's huge volume of writing on so many topics, Brown's book plays a useful role in asking us to pay more attention to places where he is uncharacteristically reticent; she also reminds us that he was ‘an active player in, and playful about, his own historical construction and reconstruction’ (9). But I am less convinced about her effort to attribute the lack of extensive evidence for the Wagner–Weininger–Schoenberg–Redemption thesis to a conscious or unconscious ‘silence and silencing, self-censorship and censorship, repression and suppression’ (27). She justifies this approach through ‘trauma theory’, building on writings by Dominick Le Capra and others about silences and the absence of traces in narratives about the horrors of the Holocaust (27–9). But as she concedes in the final chapter – ‘I also struggle to find a memory void among the archival materials I have investigated’ (193). Moreover, while Schoenberg clearly attempted to shape how scholars would interpret his archival materials, there is little evidence that he deliberately falsified the historical record or suppressed materials that show him in an unflattering light, especially given the fact that so many troubling documents are preserved. Indeed she starts off the final chapter with an epigraph in which Schoenberg writes: ‘I want posterity to see me as I am – with all my shortcomings as a good, dark background of my merits – which then might shine brighter’ (190). For all these reasons I find hard to accept the weight Brown gives to ‘Every Young Jew’ as a ‘private, seemingly confessional statement’ (78) of shame and self-loathing, given the degree to which he seems to have expected his papers to become public, as well as its close relationship to a large number of writings and other public statements on his Jewish identity, including his libretto for A Survivor from Warsaw, a work that would have seemed to merit more than a few mentions in the book.

In the scholarship on Schoenberg, Brown also sees ‘trauma-like features’, based on what she characterizes as ‘certain absences in the literature’ (29). One absence she claims is that ‘Every Young Jew’ has been ‘only touched upon by previous commentators and never translated into English’ (25). And yet in his 1994 study of Schoenberg's play ‘The Biblical Way’ in the Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, Moshe Lazar discussed a substantial passage in English from ‘Every Young Jew’, accompanied by the full German text.Footnote ⁹ Five years later, Klára Móricz included a translation of the complete text in her Berkeley dissertation, ‘Jewish Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Art Music’, the basis of her book Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), a source for Brown's book. And while she suggests that ‘Every Young Jew’ is difficult to access through the Arnold Schoenberg Center (205), it is important to point out that the Center's online database has provided an unprecedented level of access to this and a vast range of documents. Indeed with three or four clicks on a mouse it is possible to search for the title ‘Jeder junge Jude’ in the catalog, and then download a transcription and facsimile of the document as well as the complete notes for a ‘Jewish United Party’ of which it is a part.Footnote ¹⁰

Due to the limited direct evidence for the Wagner–Weininger–Schoenberg–Redemption thread, there is sometimes a circular quality to Brown's mode of argumentation. She writes, for example, ‘let us consider Das Buch der hängenden Gärten where a moment of Parsifalian and/or Weininger resistance of Woman seems to be played out’ (140). Brown's probing and detailed exploration of the importance of the characters of Parsifal and Kundry for Weininger's reading of Wagner is one of the highlights of the book (58–64). But it is primarily on the basis of her assertions about Weininger's influence on Schoenberg that Parsifal emerges as such a central work in the book, appearing more than any other piece. And yet besides Schoenberg's 1912 article ‘Parsifal and Copyright’, which argues against Bayreuth's exclusive right to perform the opera, there are only isolated direct references or allusions to the work in his writings or music. Nevertheless, she gives a reading of Das Buch der hängenden Gärten as an intentional and quite literal extension of Parsifal, with the unnamed female protagonist recalling Kundry ‘a figure who embodies both feminine and Jewish threat’ (138), and the ‘Neuling’ as ‘part Gilgamesh, but also the perfect Parsifal – and the perfect ethical subject in Weininger's sense’ (146). This is of course not to say that Op. 15 could not have been heard this way, or that Parsifal and Kundry could not have been somewhere in Schoenberg's imagination while composing, or in Stefan George's when he wrote the poems. But without further evidence it seems a stretch to claim that Schoenberg consciously set out to compose ‘a whole song cycle around a Parsifalian novice's resistance to the Whore of Babylon’ (164) as a crucial part of a redemptive programme involving atonality.

Brown's reading of atonality in terms of gender and the ‘Woman Question’ also depends on accepting the premise of Schoenberg's embrace of Weininger's misogyny and thus Schoenberg's ‘use of Woman as an ambivalent screen onto which to project his musical revolution’ (152). She argues that Schoenberg gendered atonality as female, ‘through compositions featuring female roles and women performers’ (126). Brown places considerable weight on the fact that at the 1910 premiere of Das Buch der hängenden Gärten the female pianist Etta Werndorff performed the accompaniment and also played the Three Pieces for Piano, Op. 11 (125). Such a formulation downplays the crucial early role of male performers such as Eduard Steuermann while her focus on music with texts results in a de-emphasis on such central works as Op. 11 and the Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16.

Still more problematic is Brown's claim that through this gendering of atonality, Schoenberg somehow meant to cast an unfavourable light on both women and atonality: ‘to be aligned with “the new” was not necessarily a good thing. Sometimes, for example in the case of Das Buch and Op. 11, the spirit behind the association was by no means unambiguous; it guaranteed positive valuation for neither the music nor women’ (131). Brown acknowledges Schoenberg's connection to feminists such as Eugenie Schwarzwald and Marie Pappenheim, but because she equates Schoenberg so closely with Weininger she ultimately finds an anti-feminist, misogynistic agenda in his works and their performance:

While on first reading this claim may seem like a side point, it is in fact part of the core argument of Schoenberg and Redemption, namely that Schoenberg was carrying out Weininger's misogynistic and anti-Semitic agenda through a redemptive act that would ‘“cleanse” the system’ (112) from atonality, as I discuss further below.

Brown's book makes a significant contribution in asking us to think about the origins and implications of Schoenberg's emancipation of the dissonance in broader contexts. For that reason I would have welcomed a more detailed discussion of what she understands by the term ‘atonality’ (a term which incidentally does not appear in the index), beyond the short discussion of it in a footnote (202), and in connection with ‘floating tonality’ (111–20). Her analytical comments on Op. 15, No. 8, one of the few discussions of a specific passage in the book, describes the piece in terms of tonal chords and harmonic expectations set up for an arrival on a ‘longed-for “F”’, a ‘pseudo-tonic’ (144), the frustrated arrival of which is read as ‘coitus interruptus in musica’ (146). With her emphasis on Schoenberg carrying out a self-conscious, redemptive act, she repeatedly writes of a ‘step into atonality’ (12, 33, 111, 125, 126, 161), which she usually dates to 1908, thus suggesting that she means Op. 10 or Op. 15. Because the notion of atonality is so crucial to the central argument of Schoenberg and Redemption, it would be have been helpful for Brown to discuss in detail what the ‘step’ was, if it was a single step, or many small steps, and if the steps were all leading in the same direction. Schoenberg's later account in ‘How One Becomes Lonely’ (1937) of the ‘step’ he took in Op. 15 suggests that he viewed it as part of a ongoing process rather than a single redemptive achievement: ‘And this was only the first step on a new path, but one beset with thorns. It was the first step towards a style which has since been called the style of “atonality!”’Footnote ¹¹

I also feel that, as with her formulation of atonality, Brown's account of Schoenberg's understanding of tonality depends on a narrow Weiningerian reading of the evidence:

As Brown demonstrates very well throughout the book, Schoenberg often used a richly metaphorical language to think about and discuss tonal harmony. And in works like his Three Satires (1926), which he explains in detail in a preface, as well as with his ‘Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra after the Concerto Grosso, Op. 6, No. 7 By G.F. Handel’ he used musical metaphors to make statements about cultural politics.Footnote ¹² There is also no question that atonality could be read as Jewish and feminine, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s in connection with discourses connected to the Neue Sachlichkeit, Neoclassicism, and Degenerate Art. But it is more difficult to claim that Schoenberg maintained a Weiningerian reading of chromatic harmony as somehow inherently Jewish, especially given Wagner's extensive use of those vagrant harmonies in his own music, as Schoenberg discusses in terms of the ‘Tristan Chord’ in the Harmonielehre.Footnote ¹³

I also read differently what Schoenberg means by ‘system’, as for example in connection with Brown's discussion of his remark: ‘no non-harmonic tones, no tones foreign to harmony, but merely tones foreign to the harmonic system’ (115). She seems to be conflating ‘system’ in this case and elsewhere with ‘tonal music’ and, more particularly, with the German musical tradition, as in the quote cited above: ‘The picture of tonality that emerges from the Harmonielehre is one of a system perfectly legitimate in itself.’ But, in my view, Schoenberg is making precisely the opposite argument: rather than saying that all those vagrant harmonies and non-harmonic tones are not part of tonality, his point is that music theory had misunderstood tonality, as he notes in the first chapter ‘Theory or System of Presentation’: ‘These systems! . . . I will show how quickly this system fails, how soon one has to break into it to patch up its holes with a second system (which is still no system), in order even halfway to accommodate the most familiar facts.’Footnote ¹⁴ This relates closely as well to the central role of the overtone series in his rejection of an antithesis between consonances and dissonances, or as he calls them, the ‘more remote consonances’.Footnote ¹⁵ His main point is that all the overtones were integral to the tone, and that the evolution of music was drawing ‘into the stock of artistic resources more and more of the harmonic possibilities inherent in the tone’.Footnote ¹⁶

Brown argues throughout the book that Schoenberg was self-consciously ‘cleansing’ the tonal system of the Jewish influence through his act of redemption in 1908, and thus sending atonality and those vagrant chords off to ‘rove or wander endlessly’ (115). Yet rather than creating two self-sufficient musical spheres, as Brown's formulation of redemption suggests, I see Schoenberg's works and writings from this period and throughout his life as showing him constantly exploring and reconfiguring the relationship between tonality, in its many manifestations, and the emancipation of the dissonance, in all its many meanings and its wide-ranging implications for melody, harmony, form, rhythm, and especially timbre through his notion of Klangfarbenmelodie. For example, while he could write to Busoni in 1909 of his efforts to remove ‘all shackles of tonality’, two years later in the Harmonielehre the formulation is quite different: ‘Who would dare to differentiate right from wrong in the instinct, in the unconscious, to keep separate the knowledge inherited from predecessors and the intuitive power granted by the spirit?’Footnote ¹⁷ Similarly, where Brown reads Schoenberg's discussion of non-harmonic tones as embracing anti-Semitic stereotypes of ‘noise music’, I see him opening up a much broader conception of harmony: ‘I maintain that these are chords: not of the system, but of music’ (111). It is precisely this constant rethinking and reformulation of what music and sound could be – and thus his rejection of the notion that there could be some sort of singular act of musical redemption for once and for all – that motivated Schoenberg throughout his life and has made his music and ideas of such continuing relevance for more than a century.

Brown describes Schoenberg and Redemption as ‘both a cultural history and a celebration of some extraordinary musical works and the fertile mind of a pivotal composer who, politically, around 1908 was very much a man of his time, and in the 1920s and 30s was one way ahead of his time’ (7). Readers may not agree with all her interpretations, but the book does open up interesting new perspectives while showing that there are many important threads in Schoenberg's music and thought still to unravel.