“Arnold Schönberg, the tireless visionary”, on Art: essential and misunderstood genius

ART – SUNDAY, OCTOBER 6 AT 00:10 – DOCUMENTARY

“I tried to do something quite conventional, but I failed and always against my will the result became something unusual. How right is the music lover who refuses to appreciate music that the composer himself did not want to write! » With this quote from Arnold Schönberg – Schoenberg after his American naturalization in 1940 – greeted René Dumesnil, in the world of July 17, 1951, one of the founding pillars of modern music of the 20th century^my century, disappeared four days earlier in Los Angeles (United States).

The composer, to whom Arte pays tribute with an excellent and extensive documentary by Andreas Morell, did not lack self-deprecation, paradoxes and the most delicious extra-dry humor. Thus, talking about his tennis matches with his new neighbors in Los Angeles, Schönberg would have said: “It’s going very well… But when they listen to my music…”

Because it was Schönberg who most profoundly questioned the foundations of tonal music. First by an atonality that blurred classical harmony (although he was not the first to practice it: Franz Liszt had already paved the way as a precursor), then by a system, dodecaphonism, that completely reorganized the melodic and harmonic order.

political works

For modernists, Schönberg is the savior of a music exhausted in a deleterious post-romanticism; For others, including the American composer John Adams (born 1947), for example, it is he who, for the first time in history, the general public stopped adhering to the music of his time.

But everyone admits that he was an essential genius, even in his most poignant and unpleasant scores, such as the monumental Variations op. 31 (1926-1928) for orchestra, an example of “beautiful ugly” in the avant-garde musical field, which only asks to be surrounded with respect. Didn’t Schoenberg say “My music is not modern, it is simply poorly interpreted” ?

In Arnold Schönberg, the tireless visionaryAndreas Morell, author of numerous documentaries, irregular but interesting, paints a rich portrait of the composer – who was also a painter, but of less indisputable talent -, from his first traditional compositions to more difficult works. He remembers his marriages, his years of failure, his financial problems, his conversion to Protestantism in a very anti-Semitic Vienna, his return “in the community of Israel” in Paris in 1933, before his exile in the United States.

The film focuses on political works, such asOde to Napoleon Bonaparte op. 42 (1941), whose text by Byron could then clearly evoke a kinship with Adolf Hitler… In 1947, Schönberg delivered the cantata A survivor in Warsaw op. 47, a striking work of which music lover Milan Kundera himself said, in his essay a meeting (Gallimard, 2009), which “It is the greatest monument that music has dedicated to the Holocaust”.

Additional and multiple talents

A survivor in Warsaw made to be heard, expressed in the manner of Sprechgesang − “spoken sung”, already used by Schönberg in his famous Moon Pierrot (1912) −, the chilling and moving story of a Holocaust survivor. The composer stated that his cantata sent “a message to the Jews: never forget what they did to us”. An excerpt is performed by the Franco-German actor Dominique Horwitz, who embodies the figure of Schönberg as a wandering and returned Jew on screen.

Arnold Schönberg’s children are still alive, including the eldest, Nuria Schönberg-Nono (92), widow of the Italian composer Luigi Nono. Guardian of the temple, she talks about the memory and culture of her father; The children (87 and 83 years old) tell how their father, a tennis fan, gave them lessons and wrote reports where they recorded the shots and points in great detail.

One of the most interesting moments of the documentary is the one in which Schönberg’s additional and multiple talents are recalled (patent project for a musical note machine, illustrations of unusual playing cards, etc.) and his reorganizing obsessions (new priority rules at crossings or evacuation in case of alert, etc.). Nothing surprising in someone who destroyed the musical language and then reinstalled it at will, for better or worse.