The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Arnold Schoenberg, who died on Friday at his home at Los Angeles at the age of 76, was probably the most discussed musician of the twentieth century.

      His system of atonality, or, as he preferred to call it, twelve-tone music, though reached by process of evolution from chromaticism, was the most revolutionary movement in musical history since Monteverde in the seventeenth century. It is so subversive of established ways of thought that its general adoption is improbable in the extreme, but it has provided a ferment of far-reaching influence on modern music. In this respect, as in some others, Schoenberg is like Stravinsky; between 1910 and 1930 these two men were the outstanding figures in the history of modern music. Curiously enough, both suffered the same fate. At the height of his fame each was forced to leave his country and to adjust himself to new conditions.

      Schoenberg was born in Vienna on September 13, 1874. At the age of eight he learnt to play the violin and composed short violin duets for his lessons. Later on he taught himself the cello and composed a string quartet. For several years he worked without any outside help or supervision. Alexander von Zemlinsky (whose daughter he married in 1901), a composer of whom Brahms had a very high opinion, recognized his outstanding talent, gave him his first instruction in composition and brought him into the musical circles of Vienna. Schoenberg’s earliest works were written in the style of Brahms, whose technique he admired, and later set as a model to his pupils when he was teaching composition himself.

      The first work which Schoenberg made known to the musical world was a string sextet, Verklärte Nacht. It was an attempt to apply the symphonic form of a tone poem to chamber music. To the same period belong the Gurrelieder, a cantata for solo voices, chorus and orchestra written in 1900, a tone poem, Pelleas and Melisande, and a string quartet in D minor. A new development began with the Chamber-Symphony in E, opus 9, in 1906. Schoenberg’s style became concise, his harmonies more daring. It was these works which first roused the opposition of conservative musicians and the admiration of a younger generation who were trying to find new ways of expression. This aim was achieved in the three piano pieces, opus 11, 1909, written in the so-called ‘atonal style’ which aroused much discussion among musicians all over the world. At this time Schoenberg left Vienna and settled in Berlin. Here he wrote Pierrot Lunaire, a cycle of poems recited in a kind of song-speech accompanied by instruments. This work established Schoenberg’s fame as one of the leading modern composers. In 1913 he returned to Vienna to teach composition, and, after the end of the 1914–18 war, he founded a society for the performance of modern music. He embodied his technical principles in the Treatise on Harmony, begun in the early years of the century and since revised, but it is only recently in a volume of essays, Style and Idea, that he has discussed their aesthetic basis.

      The years between 1920 and 1925 were the most prosperous in Schoenberg’s life. His works were performed regularly at the festivals of the International Music Society; his principal choral work, the Gurrelieder, aroused general admiration at a performance in his honour at the Vienna State Opera, and most conductors included his works in their programmes. He had now gained an international reputation. When Busoni died in 1924 in Berlin, Schoenberg succeeded him as a member of the Academy of the Arts, a position which should have given him financial independence for the rest of his life. After Hitler came to power, however, in 1933, he lost his position and accepted an offer from the Malkin Conservatory, Boston. He felt the change as a great shock. His health suffered from the eastern winter and he soon moved to Los Angeles, where he was appointed professor of music in the University of Southern California. Here he wrote a suite for string orchestra (1934), the fourth string quartet (1938), a violin concerto, a piano concerto, and the Ode to Napoleon. Schoenberg retired from his university post in 1944 at the age of 70, to spend the rest of his life in composing and teaching. He completed the opera Moses and Aaron, on which he had been working for many years, not long before he died. He had the satisfaction of seeing a revival of his works after the defeat of the Nazi regime and the re-establishment of his fame as one of the most inspiring innovators of contemporary music. His wife died in 1923 and he is survived by a son and a daughter.

      Joseph Stalin

      Dictator of Russia for 29 years

      5 March 1953

      The death of Stalin, like the death of Lenin 29 years ago, marks an epoch in Russian history. Rarely have two successive rulers of a great country responded so absolutely to its changing needs and piloted it so successfully through periods of crisis. Lenin was at the helm through five years of revolution, civil war, and precarious recovery. Stalin, coming to power in the aftermath of revolution, took up the task of organizing and disciplining the revolutionary state, and putting into execution the revolutionary programmes of planned industry and collectivized agriculture. He thus equipped the country to meet the gravest external peril which had threatened it since Napoleon, and brought it triumphantly through a four years’ ordeal of invasion and devastation. The characters of the two men present a contrast which corresponds to the different tasks confronting them. Lenin was an original thinker, an idealist, a superb revolutionary agitator. Stalin neither possessed, nor required, these qualities. He was essentially an administrator, an organizer and a politician. Both were ruthless in the pursuit of policies which they regarded as vital to the cause they had at heart. But Stalin appeared to lack a certain element of humanity which Lenin generally maintained in personal relations, though allied statesmen who dealt with him during the war were unanimous in finding him approachable, sympathetic, and readily disposed to moderate the intransigence of his subordinates. As the war drew to its close Stalin, whether for reasons of health or for reasons of policy, became less and less accessible to representatives of the western Powers and so the rift began which was to widen in the counsels of the United Nations and in the policies towards the west of Russia’s satellites, until the open warfare broke out in Korea which still festers and poisons the whole international scene.

      A Man of Authority

      Public Enthusiasm

      In Russia and the adjacent Communist States Marshal Stalin at the time of his death occupied a position of personal eminence almost without parallel in the history of the world. His rare public appearances provoked scenes of tremendous enthusiasm; his speeches and writings on any subject – linguistics, the art of war, biology and history, as well as on the theory of Communism – were treated as virtually inspired texts and analysed in meticulous detail by hundreds of commentators. A quotation from the works of Stalin was the irrefutable end to any argument. The mere mention of his name at a political conference in any of the satellite States was sufficient to bring all present to their feet by a prolonged ovation. The Stalin legend became an integral part of the chain which united orthodox Communists all over the world. In appearance Stalin was grey; his hair grey and stiff as a badger’s; his nostrils and lower cheeks greyish white; his moustache, too, though in youth it had been richly brown and still showed some traces of that colour, was grey. He spoke softly, moved slowly, but his expression was quizzical, like a man enjoying a hidden joke, at times softening into abroad smile. Often as he spoke his look was oddly remote and withdrawn, the look of a man thinking through two or three processes at once. His expression was above all confident, without a trace of nerves; strong, calm or suddenly watchful in an amused kind of way. Tough, yet unathletic, dignified yet self-conscious, he dominated any group of which he formed a part for all his small stature.

      Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to the world as Stalin, one of his many revolutionary noms de guerre, was born at Gori, in Georgia, on December 21, 1879. His father, a cobbler of peasant origin, died when he was 11. Joseph was sent to the church school in his native town, where he remained until 1893. It was here that he learned to use Russian as an instrument of expression, since all ecclesiastical schools in Georgia at that time were the implements of the Tsarist policy of Russification. He emerged from the school at Gori sharply conscious of the suppression of Georgian nationalism and not unaware of the social inequalities and injustices prevailing in his native Georgia. Such feelings were never revealed however to the school staff, and in view of the fact that he was СКАЧАТЬ