Revised July 20, 2019

Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky emerged between the two World Wars as leaders of two radically different approaches to writing modern music. Not only rivals, they personally despised each other.

Schoenberg proclaimed himself the inheritor of the great German-dominated tradition of European music. He thought continuing that tradition required something as radical as Beethoven’s or Wagner’s innovations. Even if the general public disliked it.

He had no use for music that appealed to popular taste. In 1928 he wrote, “Art is from the outset naturally not for the people, but one wants to force it to be. Everyone is supposed to have their say. For the new bliss consist of the right to speak: free speech!”

Stravinsky came out of Russia. Tchaikovsky had struggled to come to terms with the German tradition, but eventually turned to Liszt for inspiration. Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s teacher, represented a movement that rejected the German heritage.

Eventually, though, he developed the neoclassical style. It amounted to a radical transformation of not only the German tradition but French and Italian as well.

The musical world saw them as leaders of rival viewpoints early on. In 1915, Debussy complained that Stravinsky was “leaning dangerously to the Schoenberg side” by losing his Russianness.

Debussy wasn’t alone in questioning the direction of Stravinsky’s style. Once Stravinsky turned toward neoclassicism, some stopped regarding him as a serious artist. In their eyes, he had demoted himself to composing pastiches.

Many important musicians of the time attended his performance of his Piano Sonata at a festival in Venice in 1925, including Schoenberg. Schoenberg walked out before the end of the piece.

What Schoenberg wrote about Stravinsky

Schoenberg vented his spleen in unpublished writings discovered among his papers only after his death. In one, dated 1926, he contrasted his own desire to write music for the future with Stravinsky’s desire to write only the music of today.

It seemed to him that Stravinsky thought it “old-fashioned to regard any work of art as significant for any period beyond the present.” In that case, why take up old music as a model? It seemed contradictory.

In Schoenberg’s view, Stravinsky produced nothing more important than, say neckties. He thought only of satisfying his customers. Schoenberg considered his own music more along the lines of seeking a cure for cancer. His tone reveals his envy even that early that Stravinsky’s music had won more public acclaim than his own.

So his Three Satires, op. 28 (1925-26), include this bit of verse:

But who’s this beating the drum?
Why, it’s little Modernsky!
He’s had his har cut in an old-fashioned queue,
And it looks quite nice!
Like real false hair!
Like a wig!
Just like (or so little Modernsky likes to think)
Just like Papa Bach!

What Stravinsky said about Schoenberg

Interviewed by a Barcelona newspaper in 1936, Stravinsky called Schoenberg more of a musical chemist than artist. He acknowledged the importance of Schoenberg’s research. After all, it did expand possibilities of what people might enjoy hearing.

But on the whole, he considered the twelve-tone method very much like Alois Haba’s experiments with quarter-tones. They exist only scientifically. Can anyone make genuine art with either method? Stravinsky thought not.

John Cage recalled Stravinsky telling him, “What I never liked about Schoenberg’s music was that it wasn’t modern.” Schoenberg, in claiming to represent continuity from Mozart through Wagner, might have even agreed with that assessment.

Stravinsky apparently didn’t reciprocate Schoenberg’s personal animosity. He told Robert Craft of his earliest relationship with Schoenberg. Diaghilev invited Schoenberg to hear Firebird and Petroushka. Schoenberg invited Stravinsky to attend a rehearsal of Pierrot Lunaire. And Schoenberg was friendly and warm.

Immediately after the war, Schoenberg sent Stravinsky some very cordial letters. “Then, in 1925, he wrote a very nasty verse about me (though I almost forgive him, for setting it to such a remarkable mirror canon). I do not know what happened in between.”

Later in the conversation, Stravinsky seemed to regard Schoenberg as an important master who “continued to explore new ways and to search for new laws of serial music right up to his death.” He added, “Schoenberg’s work has too many inequalities for us to embrace it as a whole.”

World War Two and the two composers’ reputations

Jealousy seems to have fueled Schoenberg’s contempt for Stravinsky. As much as he claimed not to care about popular taste, Stravinsky’s much greater popularity and acceptance in the years between the two world wars rankled. Then, suddenly, the trajectory of acceptance reversed.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Stalin and Hitler, representing totalitarians of the left and right, essentially annexed the Romantic tradition to serve their ideological ends. If it had ever been possible to avoid the politicization of twentieth-century music, it wasn’t anymore.

Stravinsky’s neoclassicism began to look like sweeping violence under the rug. Schoenberg, vilified by both Communists and Nazis, seemed a fit champion for opponents of tyranny. But then he started reintroducing some elements of tonality. After the war, Pierre Boulez and composers of his generation abandoned Schoenberg’s influence for the even more radical Anton von Webern.

In the late 1940s, Stravinsky produced such masterpieces as the Symphony in Three Movements, The Rake’s Progress, Orpheus, and Mass. And watched as more and more composers began to abandon neoclassicism to take up Schoenberg’s method.

In 1947 he began corresponding with Robert Craft, one of the few musicians who admired the music of both Stravinsky and Schoenberg, and one of the few whom both camps accepted.

Stravinsky defects, sort of

When Schoenberg died in 1951, Stravinsky began to listen to Schoenberg’s music—as well as Webern’s and Boulez’s––with fresh ears. He lamented to Craft that history had started to pass him by. In May 1952, he participated in a festival in Paris called Masterpieces of the XXth Century, organized by an old friend, Nicolas Nabokov.

Nabokov sought to oppose the rise of Communism in Western Europe by highlighting the music of democratic culture. Although he never actually liked Schoenberg’s music, he recognized that it fit his ideological aims.

Near the end of the festival, Nabokov programmed Schoenberg’s Erwartung, followed by Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. Followers of Boulez applauded Schoenberg and either left at intermission or stayed to boo Stravinsky.

Imagine! A Parisian audience had booed The Rite of Spring for being too radical. Forty years later, another Parisian audience booed Oedipus Rex for being too old fashioned.

His Septet (1952-53) included some tone-rows. Beginning with Agon(completed in 1957), most of his music depended entirely on them. Even then, he pointedly made his own rows of some other number of notes than twelve and acknowledged only Webern as an inspiration.

Defecting to Schoenberg’s method, Stravinsky restored his faith in himself. His fame, if anything, increased until the end of his life. But the public never warmed to his late works any more than it had embraced Schoenberg’s music. Stravinsky died more famous than any of them.

Schoenberg and Stravinsky in Los Angeles

The Second World War caused both of them to emigrate to the United States, specifically Los Angeles. Their animosity and contempt never mellowed. In fact, they made sure everyone knew that they were ignoring each other. They shared at least one experience, however.

Once they got to California, inevitably Hollywood studios took an interest. The two had different attitudes toward the prospect but with identical results.

Irving Thalberg heard the early Schoenberg work Verklärte Nacht on the radio and immediately asked Schoenberg to compose music for the film The Good Earth. Schoenberg heard his explanation of all that would happen in the big scene. He asked why, with so much going on, Thalberg needed music for it.

Thalberg continued to press and asked Schoenberg for his terms. When he demanded $50,000 and a veto in advance of any changes to his music, Thalberg finally decided to give up on working with Schoenberg. It pleased Schoenberg not to have to compose anything for the film.

Stravinsky needed money when he arrived in California, so he didn’t deliberately sabotage his chance to write for Hollywood. Louis B. Mayer told him, “I hear you are the greatest composer in the world. Well, this is the greatest movie studio in the world.”

After seeking to impress him, he asked how much Stravinsky would charge for a 45-minute movie score.  Stravinsky calculated the amount of work it had taken him to compose ballets of comparable length and suggested $25,000.

Although that figure was much more that he usually paid, Mayer agreed to pay the greatest composer in the world that much. Until he asked Stravinsky when he could have the music. When he estimated about a year, Mayer walked away in disbelief.

Sources:

The Book of Musical Anecdotes / Norman Lebrecht (Free Press, 1985)
Conversations with Igor Stravinsky / Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft (Doubleday, 1959)
Music in the Western World: A History in Documents / selected and annotated by Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, pp. 465-67.
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century / Alex Ross (Picador, 2007)

Photo credits:

Schoenberg teaching. Source unknown.
Schoenberg, Man Ray portrait. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
Stravinsky, Stádnik portrait. Public  domain from Wikimedia Commons 
Stravinsky, Time cover. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons