Schoenberg

Abstract For Schoenberg, at least (as for Freud) there was never any doubt. The bitterness of the struggle around his name is witness to his entire lack of compromise. Like Freud, he was an idealist driven by a daemon. As with Freud, his daemon drove him down a road of over-simplification, towar a dogma-the law of the twelve-tone system. Like Freud, I think, it was just the consequent sense of estrangement from fellow professionals and the public that caused him to draw the bonds of his pupil circle so tight. That he exercised a tyrannic fascination over them all is not in doubt. That they induced in him a God-the-father attitude is equally apparent. He paid a heavy price to his daemon for his gifts. But it is not the prices they pay but the work they do which determines the scientists’, the artists’ permanent value. If we keep our eyes firmly fixed on what these controversial figures were being driven to do and refuse to be side-tracked by prejudice or gossip, I think we can begin to see certain constants. The sequence runs something like this: a revolt against Victorian (or, if you prefer, bourgeois) complacency and sham; a passionate search for truth, however distasteful; a dogmatic attitude to the truth uncovered; a need for an inner esoteric brotherhood of initiates.