Unconditionality
Our programme on the sesquicentenary of Schoenberg’s birth

13 September 2024 marks Schoenberg’s 150th birthday. In the 2024/25 season, we continue our celebration of this anniversary. The Berliner Philharmoniker will perform Schoenberg’s symphonic poem Pelleas and Melisande under the direction of Lahav Shani, and his Five Orchestral Pieces with Daniel Harding.  Members of the Karajan Akademie will perform Schönberg’s Notturno for solo violin, harp and strings.

Things did not work out as Schoenberg himself had hoped: he had wanted people to regard him as a “superior version of Tchaikovsky” and believed that “once they have got to know my tunes, they will want to whistle them in the street”. But no one need be afraid any longer of the erstwhile enfant terrible who was ridiculed in Berlin in 1911 as a “travelling entertainer and as the purveyor of humbug”. Moreover, no one would deny any longer that during his own lifetime Schoenberg was already one of the most influential figures in the whole history of music. His status as a thinker with a razor-sharp mind, as a sought-after teacher and as the composer of bold and revolutionary works has long been acknowledged, and yet his music is still too little performed when measured by the yardstick of his undisputed significance.

When the young Schoenberg abandoned his job as a bank clerk and, much to the dismay of his family, decided to pursue a career in music, no one could have foreseen the consequences of his decision. A native of Vienna, he moved to Berlin in 1901 and began to work in the city as a composer at Ernst von Wolzogen’s Überbrettl Cabaret. Richard Strauss, who was one of the conductors at the Court Opera, had words of praise for the compositions that his young colleague showed him, observing that “although they are over-elaborate, they nonetheless attest to great abilities & great gifts”. Schoenberg was soon to adopt a much less elaborate style and when he settled in Berlin for a second time in 1911, he was inspired by a new aesthetic programme: “I am striving to achieve a state of total liberation from all forms, from all symbols of cohesion and logic. This means an end to all ‘motivic working out’. And an end to harmony as the cement or brickwork of a building”.

Schoenberg never tired of stressing how much his music was rooted in the past

Schoenberg’s third stay in Berlin began very promisingly. He ran a masterclass at the Academy of Arts and his Variations for Orchestra op. 31 were premiered by the Berliner Philharmoniker under Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1928. Within five years, however, the National Socialists had driven him from the city. As part of the exodus of Jewish intellectuals, Schoenberg was one of the first to seek exile in the United States, where he remained until the end of his life, an uncomfortable outsider who inspired not only respect but even admiration.

Within the context of our sesquicentennial celebrations, audiences will be able to trace at first hand Schoenberg’s journey from late Romanticism to musical modernism. Concerts with the Berliner Philharmoniker, chamber recitals and an exhibition will demonstrate the multiple talents of an artist whose “commitment to the absolute”, to quote the Expressionist writer Franz Werfel, remains as fascinating as ever.