Poland
In modern Poland, Karol Szymanowski (1883) has written symphonies, chamber music, songs, piano sonatas and many other piano pieces which reflect Polish national color and French impressionism (See Page [520]).
Lady Dean Paul, who writes under the name of Poldowski, although living in London, is really a Pole. (Page [439].)
Tadeusz Iarecki, of New York City, recently received a prize in Poland for writing the best composition by a native composer. This same quartet took the first Berkshire Chamber Music Prize (1918) and was published in New York by a society whose object is the publication of American Chamber Music.
Alexander Tansman (1892) a young Pole has met with unusual success in Paris, where he writes works for orchestra, chamber music and ballet.
Arnold Schoenberg, Musical Anarchist
Arnold Schoenberg, born in Vienna (1874), taught himself until he was twenty. He then studied with Alexander von Zemlinsky, who later became his brother-in-law. Zemlinsky once pointed him out saying, “He is in his early twenties and I have taught him all I know; he brought me an orchestral work recently for which he had to paste two pieces of score paper together to write out his score, so large an orchestra had he employed!” This was his tone poem, Pelleas and Melisande, first performed in 1904. To this early period belong some songs, a song cycle with orchestra on texts by Jens Peter Jacobsen, Gurrelieder, and the sextet, Verklärte Nacht (Illumined Night).
Both Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler were his friends, and through Mahler’s efforts many of his compositions were performed. His string quartet was played in America by the Flonzaley Quartet. His Chamber Symphony, and his second string quartet, with solo voice, performed (1924) at the Berkshire Chamber Music Festival, belong to this same period.
So far, all that Schoenberg composed was based more or less on models of the past, but being naturally an anarchist in music he tried to escape from doing what others had done. Instead of writing works that took fifty minutes to play like his string quartet (in one movement), he wrote five orchestral pieces and piano pieces that were mere suggestions of compositions, so short were they. He cut out all development of themes, all old forms, all feeling for tonality, writing in the twelve-tone scale which we explained as atonality; he built his chords in intervals of fourths instead of thirds, and purposely changed all the rules of harmony; he distorted all the intervals, using a seventh or ninth instead of the octave, and making every fourth and fifth a half step larger or smaller than was customary. His melodies are marked by large skips and queer intervals, but when one once knows his language, by its very queerness, it is easily recognized as Schoenberg’s. Although he has broken away from the slavery of old traditions, he may have “jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire”!
In Pierrot Lunaire, a cycle of twenty-one songs with chamber music accompaniment, he uses a curious effect for the voice “which must be neither sung nor spoken.” This same effect he uses in chorus in his music drama, Die Glückliche Hand (The Lucky Hand) for which he also wrote the libretto. Although this and another music drama Erwartung (The Awaiting) were begun in 1909, they were both performed for the first time in 1924 in Vienna. This long delay was due to the prejudice against the work of this innovator, who on the one hand has been laughed at, scorned, and reviled, and on the other praised to the skies by a small group of disciples and imitators whose works sound very much like their teacher’s.