Listening between the Lines: Beethoven’s Große Fuge, Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie, and the Critical Debate over Bekker’s Neue Musik
In his 1919 essay Neue Musik, music critic Paul Bekker positioned Arnold Schoenberg as the “spiritual” heir to J.S. Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven, above all on the basis of a connection he heard between Schoenberg’s recent chamber works and certain fugues by the two earlier composers. Bekker’s essay immediately sparked controversy. Fellow critics understood it as an attempt to legitimize Schoenberg’s “atonal” music by locating its roots in highly revered works of the past. For some of these critics, such an appropriation of the greatest treasures of Austro-German musical identity was preposterous and intolerable. For others, Bekker had drawn a compelling musical connection capable of historically validating Schoenberg’s apparent iconoclasm. In this paper, I examine published responses to Bekker’s Neue Musik as a complex discourse through which critics negotiated conflicting interpretations of Bach and Beethoven’s legacies. These interpretations typically hinged on whether individual critics were convinced of the musical relationships Bekker identified among works by Schoenberg and his illustrious predecessors. Focusing on two works Bekker singled out as especially significant—Beethoven’s Große Fuge, op. 133 (1825/27) and Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie, op. 9 (1906)—I argue that connections between “linearity” in Beethoven’s late fugue and “atonality” in Schoenberg’s polyphony were obvious enough to be defended, but also ambiguous enough to be denied. Conflicting hearings of these works were thus capable of supporting conflicting readings of Bekker’s provocative text. At stake in this critical debate was the question of whether Schoenberg’s “new music” represented a deplorable corruption or a viable continuation of a musical tradition in which Beethoven played a central role. It was a question with special urgency at the end of the long nineteenth century, in a postwar context in which music was increasingly overburdened as a realm in which Germanic culture might still possess indisputable international prestige.
In his 1919 essay Neue Musik, music critic Paul Bekker positioned Arnold Schoenberg as the “spiritual” heir to J.S. Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven, above all on the basis of a connection he heard between Schoenberg’s recent chamber works and certain fugues by the two earlier composers. Bekker’s essay immediately sparked controversy. Fellow critics understood it as an attempt to legitimize Schoenberg’s “atonal” music by locating its roots in highly revered works of the past. For some of these critics, such an appropriation of the greatest treasures of Austro-German musical identity was preposterous and intolerable. For others, Bekker had drawn a compelling musical connection capable of historically validating Schoenberg’s apparent iconoclasm. In this paper, I examine published responses to Bekker’s Neue Musik as a complex discourse through which critics negotiated conflicting interpretations of Bach and Beethoven’s legacies. These interpretations typically hinged on whether individual critics were convinced of the musical relationships Bekker identified among works by Schoenberg and his illustrious predecessors. Focusing on two works Bekker singled out as especially significant—Beethoven’s Große Fuge, op. 133 (1825/27) and Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie, op. 9 (1906)—I argue that connections between “linearity” in Beethoven’s late fugue and “atonality” in Schoenberg’s polyphony were obvious enough to be defended, but also ambiguous enough to be denied. Conflicting hearings of these works were thus capable of supporting conflicting readings of Bekker’s provocative text. At stake in this critical debate was the question of whether Schoenberg’s “new music” represented a deplorable corruption or a viable continuation of a musical tradition in which Beethoven played a central role. It was a question with special urgency at the end of the long nineteenth century, in a postwar context in which music was increasingly overburdened as a realm in which Germanic culture might still possess indisputable international prestige.
