Arnold Schoenberg

Abstract On 7 December 1917, slightly less than two months after his forty-third birthday, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was finally discharged from the Austrian Army. His first period of military service had lasted from December 1915 until October 1916 and this second short spell had begun in September 1917. The disruption to his creative work was considerable. He was able to write the fourth of the Orchestral Songs Op. 22, in July 1916 (Nos. 1–3 had been composed while he was still in Berlin, between October 1913 and January 1915), but his main project during the war was the oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter. He completed the first draft of the text as early as January 1915 and began the music of Part One in June 1917, only to be interrupted by the second call-up three months later. Although he returned to the score as soon as his final discharge came through, and continued to work on it until 1922, the work was never finished. But for the wartime interruptions, the oratorio might stand–complete–as the most mighty and absorbing of transitional works. Certainly there is an element of tragedy in the picture of a genius at the height of his powers forced to let a major composition languish while providing a potboiler like ‘The Iron Brigade’, the march for piano quintet which Schoenberg wrote for a ‘festive evening’ at his army camp in 1916. From his early years as an orchestrator of other men’s operettas to his late years as a university teacher in America, Schoenberg suffered from the supreme frustration: the regular necessity to set his own work aside and perform other tasks in order to support his family. The sympathy for, and efforts on behalf of, other composers in a similar plight which his letters reveal are therefore as understandable as his often extreme irritation and impatience with bureaucracy and officialdom in all forms. For Schoenberg, in life as in music, inflexible systems were anathema.