“Examining Anew”:

Schoenberg’s “Spontaneous Melody” in his Herzgewächse Op. 20 Re-considered from a Performance-oriented Perspective

Abstract

In common with many Viennese thinkers of his time, Arnold Schoenberg was an avid reader of the writings of Karl Kraus. In his day, Kraus was as famous for his recitations of his own works as for the writings themselves, his charismatic renderings producing almost ecstatic responses from audiences. Elias Canetti describes Kraus’ recitations as sites within which the audience was “learning how to hear”.^[1] This is both about refining one’s sensitivity to sound and about becoming more sensitive to ideas that are carried upon the acoustic cantilena of the words. 

The importance of a focus upon listening cannot be over-estimated if one is trying to understand the relationship between Kraus’ style of presentation, the compositions of the Second Viennese School and performances of their works. Schoenberg saw an expression of ‘truth’ in the language of Kraus, an artist for whom what is said and how it is delivered were intimately connected but whose art’s significance lay, as Nicholas Cook has written, “not in the effects it made on the audience […] but in how far the artist, in creating it had attained ‘the origin’”.^[2] This seems to echo the often problematic relationship between embodied sound and embedded idea that colours common perceptions of Schoenberg’s music. 

This article tests these claims through a case study of Schoenberg’s Herzgewächse Op. 20, linking a reassessment of its historicity with aspects of the tension between the musical material and its realisation when uncovered in performance. It suggests that the ‘remaking’ of the voice embedded in the demands written into the soprano soloist’s line becomes a series of ethically-charged encounters between composer, performer (idealised and actual) and, ultimately, audience. These encounters are fraught with hazard, redrawing the boundaries of what constitutes ‘right action’ in terms of creation, enactment and reception.

[1]   Elias Canetti, The Torch in my Ear, (London: Granta, 1999), 220.

[2]    Nicholas Cook, “Schenker’s Theory of Music as Ethics”, in Journal of Musicology 7.4. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 425.