Two Arnolds – Bax & Schoenberg...

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) and Arnold Bax (1883-1953) are two of my favourite composers. The latter is neo-romantic, inspired by the Celtic Twilight and Irish poetry. His music is often evocative of landscape and always poetic in spirit and content. In 1941, Bax was named as Master of the King’s Music.

The former also wrote romantic, Wagner inspired, music in the early part of his career, such as the massive Gurre-Lieder (1900-03) settings of poems by Jens Peter Jacobson for soloists, chorus and orchestra, the tone poem Pelleas and Melisande, op.5 (1902-03) and the sextet Verklärte Nacht, op.4 (1899). He renounced this aesthetic after about 1903, and developed a style that was simplified, and concentrated. Counterpoint became more important to him. He abandoned tonality after 1907 and produced atonal works that “shocked and electrified” listeners. These evinced the equality of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Important atonal works included the last movement of the String Quartet No.2, op.10 (1907-08), the Three Piano Pieces, op.11 (1908) and the Five Orchestral Pieces, op.16 (1909).

After the Great War he developed his infamous 12-tone music that had no tonal hierarchy and used manipulation of devised series of notes or tone rows. The resulting works were “as precise as a mathematical formula, as coldly logical as a syllogism, [and] this music was often strident and ugly.” In later life, Schoenberg did return to the precepts of limited tonality, with such pieces as the Suite for string orchestra (1934), the Theme and Variations for band, op.43a (1943).

In the October 1951 edition of Music and Letters (p.307) various British luminaries of the musical community contributed to a commemoration of Schoenberg who had died on 13 July 1951. These included Humphrey Searle, Herbert Howells, Norman del Mar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Felix Aprahamian. Not all were critical of Schoenberg, some were dismissive, and a few supportive. 

With characteristic wit Arnold Bax wrote:

“I instantly developed an ice-cold antipathy to Schoenberg and his whole musical system on the far-away day when I first came upon those three piano pieces, op.11. [The Three Piano Pieces, op.11 were first heard in London on 23 January 1912 at the Steinway Hall. The soloist was Richard Bühlig. One must assume that Bax was in attendance.] I conclude that, dissatisfied with his early milk-and-water derivations from Tristan and Hugo Wolf, he deliberately resolved to turn himself into the world’s premier mathematician in sound.

I believe that there is little probability that the twelve-note-scale will ever produce anything more than morbid or entirely cerebral growths. It might deal successfully with neuroses of various kinds, but I cannot imagine it associated with any healthy and happy concept such as young love or the coming of spring.”