Word: schoenberg
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...self-education was wide but shallow. Vienna was peopled with brilliant artists and thinkers; Sigmund Freud's researches, Arnold Schoenberg's music, Oskar Kokoschka's paintings, Arthur Schnitzler's plays, all had their roots in the city. But Hitler dismissed modern art as "decadent." To the impotent and solitary figure, power was what mattered, not aesthetics. The Ring of the Nibelung proved more fascinating for the drama than for the music. "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany," Hitler often said, "must know Wagner." Particularly the heroic, irrational world of blood and fire...
...Arnold Schoenberg, trying to explain why George Gershwin had been a natural composer, said that a true artist is like an apple tree, and when he feels the need, he bursts into flower without ever thinking about the market price of apples. Conversely, it would seem that an apple tree is a work of art, a rhapsody in green and white. And it grows -- this is the miracle -- from a little brown seed no more than half an inch long, of which there are half a dozen inside every apple core that you throw into the garbage pail...
Some 2 1/2 centuries after Bach welded the twelve major and minor keys into a harmonious whole in The Well-Tempered Clavier, 185 years after Beethoven stretched the boundaries of the symphony with the "Eroica," and 65 years after Arnold Schoenberg exploded the tonal universe by unleashing the power of the twelve-tone system, classical music can still be a vital, potent art. But it needs a kind of panoramic energy, one that explores and prizes its past, frankly assesses its present and enthusiastically prepares for its future...
...expand his repertory. Certainly Levine's reputation has flourished in Salzburg in recent years. This season he is supervising an elegant The Marriage of Figaro, in substantially the same staging as Director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's New York and Paris versions, and a daring new production of Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, also by Ponnelle...
...time the evening had ended, though, many were left wondering whether the production was anti-Nazi or anti-Semitic. Schoenberg's libretto makes an explicit extended centerpiece out of the episode of the Golden Calf: gold is collected and formed into an idol; a ritual slaughter of animals is followed by a sacrifice of Four Naked Virgins; there is an orgy of drunkenness, sexual license and suicide. By forsaking emotionally neutral biblical robes for specific ghetto mufti (only Moses, portrayed by Bass-Baritone Theo Adam, is outfitted in Old Testament garb), Ponnelle risked having the quarrelsome Jews appear like characters...