Program Notes

Inventing Genesis

Schoernberg - Prelude
Haydn - The Creation

Schoenberg’s last act before coming to the United States was his return to Judaism, in a ceremony in Paris (with Marc Chagall as one of his witnesses).  He wrote to Webern, “I am decided - if I am fitted for such activity - only to work in the future for the national state of Jewry.”  This decision had been building for many years, the evidence is in many of his works, especially his play The Biblical Road, his cantata Jacob’s Ladder, and the opera Moses and Aron.  The precipitating events were the ugly political climate of 1933, and the resulting loss of his teaching position in Berlin.  But as early as 1923 he had written to Kandinsky, “What is anti-semitism to lead to but acts of violence?”  A large portion of his later correspondence and personal interactions deal with his hope to emigrate to Israel and his effort to support other ex-patriates in the advocacy of Jewish causes.

At the same time he was avidly trying to integrate himself into American culture, engaging with students and colleagues,  and following American sports and entertainment media,  especially relating to his interest in composing music for films.  Thus he was receptive when approached by Nathaniel Shilkret, whose broad biography included dance arrangements for Fred Astaire, film and concert scores, and various big projects like Genesis Suite.  Participation in this collective composition -- settings of passages from Genesis for narrator, chorus, and orchestra -- was offered to Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Toch, Milhaud, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Tansman, Bartok, Prokofiev, and Hindemith.  The latter three declined the generous offer ($300), mainly for geographical reasons.  The others, with Shilkret also composing a segment, made up a virtual who’s-who of the distinguished California émigré composers involved in film writing.  Korngold was absent apparently due to his personal distance from Shilkret.  Schoenberg was still a suitor to Hollywood, not a participant.  And Stravinsky, the only non-Jewish participant, was engaged in abortive film projects eventually transformed into his orchestral piece, Four Norwegian Moods (He had negotiated with Shilkret a triple fee under the table).  Arrangements for the event also involved assurances that Schoenberg and Stravinsky would not meet, a separation maintained throughout their 11-year mutual residence (five minutes apart by car) in Los Angeles.  Like Brahms and Wagner 70 years before, they maintained a thorough, respectful, and covert curiosity about each other’s music.

The performance on November 18, 1945 was a glittering Hollywood event, attended by a conjunction of the motion picture, concert music, and émigré intellectual elite.  Schoenberg’s piece, which began the sequence, was the only one to (wisely) eschew the amplified actor-narrator.  Stravinsky’s Babel, which closed the set, elicited his rival-colleague’s only “live” comment on his music:  “The piece didn’t end, it just stopped,” which was widely interpreted as uncharitable when it could also be heard as a typically Schoenbergian honest, frank, and actually accurate comment on the Stravinskian aesthetic.  The two pieces were from the first reports considered the important music of the evening, (with an appreciative nod also to Toch), subsequent evaluation leaning strongly in Schoenberg’s direction.

Schoenberg had written quite a power-packed six minutes.  He had been silent for two years, hampered by heavy teaching burdens and ill health, and the piece sounds like a coiled release of energy and fantasy.  He later remarked that the pre-Creation universe must have been “powerful - but orderly” and he wrote the central episode as a double fugue because “Creation must have been a complex achievement” (one sovereign Creator commenting on another!).  The entrance of the choir is the only overtly Hollywood moment, one led up to with such concentrated purpose that we feel we’ve finally found the right moment for that movie cliché, the ecstatic wordless chorus.

Haydn’s Creation also originated in very unusual circumstances, involving, also, an ambitious organizer-promoter-participant, who arranged for an eccentric source of financial support.  Gottfried Baron van Swieten was an Austrian diplomat and musical amateur.  Haydn was probably introduced to him by Mozart as early as 1790.  Van Swieten hosted quartet parties, often involving Mozart and Haydn as players, and helped acquaint both composers with music by Bach and Handel in his private library.  While in England in 1794, Haydn had been given an English oratorio text once prepared for and apparently rejected by Handel, based loosely on Milton’s account of the Creation in Paradise Lost.  Van Swieten, having long encouraged Haydn’s interest in vocal music, and especially in Handel, saw a chance to play more than an amateur patron’s role.  He prepared a German translation of the text (eventually also later translating it wretchedly back into English).  He then even made suggestions about how to set it to music (he was said to be  a composer “of unparalleled stiffness”).  Haydn was fired by the idea in his own sober way:  “I was never so devout as when I was at work on The Creation.  I fell on my knees each day and begged God to give me strength to accomplish the work successfully.”

The funding was also solved by van Swieten, who put together a syndicate of twelve wealthy patrons who each put up fifty ducats, guaranteeing both the first performance and the composer’s fee.  Haydn clearly conceived of the piece as the major effort of his life:  “One moment I was cold as ice all over, the next I was on fire, more than once I was afraid I should have a stroke.”  It was an extraordinary undertaking for a composer whose great affinity through his career was for instrumental music, who had by then, at 65 completed all his symphonies and quartets.  (Actually, all but two movements for quartet). 

The exhaustion of writing the Creation didn’t derail Haydn.  The first performance was the occasion of his life; no cultivated city had ever embraced its own more whole-heartedly than the Viennese public that night (a moment to be recaptured in more melancholy terms at the 1808 performance, his swansong appearance shadowed by the strange, sad eight years of “retirement” from composition that preceded it). But soon after composing the Creation Haydn also achieved his last four grand Masses and the very different but equally original and ageless Seasons oratorio.

The ensuing silence is not entirely explainable by waning physical strength.  Recent scholarship has produced more intriguing and plausible theories.  The two movements of his last unfinished quartet don’t suggest arrest, but rather too much to hold, too rich to contain.

If we mention some of this oratorio’s admirable qualities - economy, wit, pictorialism, surprise, refreshment, simplicity, daring – if we note that it has no routine moments, that it is endlessly alive, all this it shares with any of his great symphonies, quartets and trios.  Its special magic has to do with the conjunction of artist and subject matter; Haydn is not a psychologist, not a willing explorer of behavioral variety like Mozart.  For this and other interesting reasons he is not really an opera composer, in spite of his extensive achievements in that field.  He is in the most blessed sense naïve, that is, he can inhabit this Creation material with the most mature musical imagination and no burden of irony or sophisticated privilege.

The British Haydn scholar Rosemary Hughes finds a perfect analogy:  “each descriptive passage makes its point, drawn with the directness and loving precision of Fra Angelico’s flowers or Giotto’s ox and ass.”

The two composers have given us good windows on how they thought about their work.  Schoenberg writing to Roger Sessions while he was composing the Prelude:

And finally I want to mention what I consider of the greatest value for a possible appreciation of my music:  that you say one must listen to it in the same manner as to every other kind of music, forget the theories, the twelve-tone method, the dissonances etc., and, I would add, if possible, the author.

(3 December 1944, Los Angeles)

Haydn answering a visitor: “How did you ever begin to write so many fine works?”:

I sit down at the keyboard and begin to improvise, happy or sad, as my mood dictates, serious or frivolous.  When I grasp an idea, my entire effort then is devoted towards developing and elaborating it according to the principles of art.  Early on I resolved to continue working in this manner, and it is here that so many new composers come up short.  They line up one little bit after the other, and stop before they have scarcely started, so that after listening nothing stays in one’s heart.

John Harbison