2. World War I and after.

The war put an end to these developments. Concerts, especially of new music, were less in demand. Many of Schoenberg’s pupils were called up, and his teaching ceased entirely. In May 1915 he was himself medically examined in Vienna for the reserve, but to his surprise he was rejected on account of goitre. In September he moved his family back to Vienna, having accepted after some hesitation the offer of a rent-free house from his patron Frau Lieser. Then, after a second medical examination had reversed the decision of the earlier one, he finally joined up in December as a one-year volunteer. Schoenberg’s health had, however, never been strong; under the strain of a course of training at Bruck an der Leitha he began to suffer from asthma, to which he was subject all his life, and other ailments. Friends tried to secure his release, which came through quite unexpectedly in October 1916. In the last four years he had written very little music, apart from finishing Die glückliche Hand in 1913 and composing the op.22 orchestral songs at intervals between that year and 1916. But he had been constantly preoccupied with plans for a large-scale religious work. After his return to civilian life he finally decided to embody his ideas in an oratorio. By May 1917 the text of Die Jakobsleiter was ready.

In June he began to compose the music. The time could scarcely have been less favourable. Food and the coal necessary to cook it were becoming desperately short in Vienna; money, at least in the Schoenberg household, was shorter still. Yet in the space of three months Schoenberg set the whole of the first part of the oratorio, though without fully working out the orchestration. During the same period he made known plans for a seminar in composition which would avoid any set course of instruction unrelated to the individual needs of the pupil, and for which each pupil would pay only what he could afford. September brought further difficulties. Schoenberg found himself obliged to leave his house. Potential landlords showed themselves suspicious of his prospects, and for many weeks the family endured the acute discomfort of cheap boarding-houses. On 17 September he was called up again. This time he was given C grading, and, although a transfer away from Vienna remained a possibility until his final discharge in December, his duties were much lighter than before and he was often at home. Consequently he was able to go forward with his seminar at the Schwarzwald school. It prospered, and after his move to Mödling the following April he continued to hold classes there until 1920. But to the oratorio the short spell of military service proved fatal. Despite constant efforts to pick up the thread, he had managed by 1922 to compose only about half of the interlude intended to link the two halves of the work, after which he added nothing more.

A direct outcome of the seminar was the foundation of the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen, the object of which was to give properly rehearsed performances of modern works to a genuinely interested membership. For one class of seat members paid only according to their means. The press was excluded. Details of programmes were not available in advance, and many works were repeated as a point of policy. Orchestral works were given in arrangements for piano or chamber ensemble. In the three years between February 1919 and the end of 1921, when inflation put an end to the society’s activities, 353 performances of 154 works were given in 117 concerts. A number of Schoenberg’s pupils and ex-pupils helped with the organization of this vast enterprise, but he rehearsed and directed a considerable proportion of the performances himself. Meanwhile peace brought a renewal of international interest in his music. Conducting engagements took him abroad. In Amsterdam he was made president of the International Mahler League, and he returned there for the winter of 1920–21 to take part in a festival of his own works and give a series of lectures on music theory. This was the time of the formulation of serialism. The first three serial works, the op.23 piano pieces, the Serenade and the Suite for piano op.25, were written between 1920 and 1923. The Wind Quintet was completed the next year, which saw the first performances not only of the Serenade and Quintet, but of Erwartung (in Prague) and Die glückliche Hand (in Vienna).

In October 1923 Mathilde Schoenberg died. Despite the unhappy events of 1908, from which the marriage had never fully recovered, Schoenberg’s letters written at the time of her death leave no doubt of the depth of his attachment to her. A month later he completed his text entitled Requiem, a meditation on death the first section of which had been drafted somewhat earlier; he never set it to music. His widowerhood did not, however, last long: at the end of the following August, about a fortnight before his 50th birthday, he married Gertrud Kolisch (1898–1967), the sister of his pupil Rudolf Kolisch. (Kolisch was a violinist and the leader of a string quartet which became the leading exponent of Schoenberg’s chamber music in the 1920s and 1930s.) There were three children of this marriage: Dorothea Nuria (b Barcelona, 1932), who married the Italian composer Luigi Nono, Rudolf Ronald (b 1937) and Lawrence Adam (b 1941).

In 1925 Schoenberg was invited to take charge of the masterclass in composition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, in succession to Busoni, who had died the year before. He accepted, signed the contract in September, and after some delay because of an appendix operation moved in January 1926 from Vienna to Berlin for the third and last time. Some of his pupils, notably Gerhard and Zillig, moved with him, and Eisler, though no longer his pupil, did so independently at about the same time; Skalkottas was to join the class a little later. For the next seven years Schoenberg enjoyed better conditions of work than at any time in his life. He had a say in general questions of policy and administration in the academy, and absolute responsibility for his own courses. Moreover he was required to teach for an average of only six months in the year, and could choose his own times. His creative output increased correspondingly. The Suite op.29, largely written in Vienna, was followed by the Variationen für Orchester, the play Der biblische Weg, the Third Quartet, Von heute auf morgen, the Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene, Moses und Aron, the Cello Concerto after Monn, and various smaller pieces. His earlier works continued to gain ground with audiences, and his more recent ones were at least assured of a hearing, if not of approval: the orchestral variations, for instance, had a very mixed reception when Furtwängler introduced them in 1928.

Given that Schoenberg could never hope to make a living from composition, his job at the academy was well adapted to his needs. Perhaps in the long run he would not have stood the climate of Berlin, for in the winter of 1930–31 his asthma grew much worse, and he made so little progress in the summer that he was strongly advised not to risk the next winter in the north. So in October the Schoenbergs went to Barcelona to stay near Gerhard and his wife; various circumstances kept them there until May. However, it was not Schoenberg’s health but politics that robbed him of any sense of security in Berlin. Anti-Semitism had contributed considerably to the hostility towards him in Vienna even before the war. In the early 1920s, when he experienced the grossly insulting behaviour towards Jews that Hitler’s agitation was helping to make commonplace, he already foresaw violence as the probable outcome. By 1933 the realization of his fears had begun. It was no surprise when the government’s intention to remove Jewish elements from the academy was announced at a meeting of the senate on 1 March, at which Schoenberg was present. He left abruptly, and treated the announcement as his dismissal. This took effect officially from the end of October, in breach of his contract, which should have protected him for another 23 months.

The Schoenbergs left Berlin in May and spent the summer in France. The only work composed at this time was the String Quartet Concerto after Handel. On 24 July Schoenberg returned to the Jewish faith, which he had rejected in favour of Lutheranism in 1898. His Christian beliefs had not lasted, but by his own account he was at no time unreligious, let alone anti-religious. By the war years religion had become his sole support. At first he did not attempt to reconcile his beliefs with those of any recognized faith, but with the increase of anti-Semitism after the war he realized that the faith in which he had been brought up must eventually claim him, and he began to work his way towards his own not entirely orthodox version of it. The ceremony in Paris merely made his reconversion official.

Schoenberg, Arnold