Enter Sch

When the new Malkiri Conservatory in Boston wanted a big name to plume its faculty list this autumn, it sent an invitation to Arnold Schoenberg who, being a Jew, was leaving his job at the Prussian Academy of Music in Berlin. Great was the interest aroused by Schoenberg's acceptance. He has upset conservative concertgoers more than any other modern composer. Philadelphia and New York have not forgotten the harrowing chromatics in Die Glueckliche Hand, which Leopold Stokowski gave three years ago. The much talked-of Wozzeck, which the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company put on, is a Schoenberg stepchild. His pupil Alban Berg wrote it.

Three weeks ago Arnold Schoenberg landed in the U. S., surprised everyone by being a shy, mild little man not a bit fierce or radical in his comments on music or German politics. This week Schoenberg classes began in Boston and New York. Paying pupils were few. Some 50 would-be composers had sent in scores, hoping to win scholarships offered by Stokowski, George Gershwin, Mrs. A. Lincoln Filene of Boston and the Steinway and Knabe Piano Companies. But if it was impossible to prophesy what importance Schoenberg would have as a teacher in the U.S., the reception given him as a composer testified to the fact that he is no longer regarded as terrifying or mad. Serge Koussevitzky has invited him to conduct his music with the Boston Symphony. The Pro-Arte quartet gave Schoenberg concerts at Harvard and Yale last week and the students did not seem to mind. The New York League of Composers gave a concert and a reception which half the musical somebodies in town attended. Most of them looked bored or completely baffled but they listened politely to two string quartets, a group of songs, three piano pieces. Schoenberg made a soft, frightened little speech. He was charmed . . . everyone was so kind. . . .

If he had been hissed it probably would have been no great surprise to Arnold Schoenberg who in his 59 years has become accustomed to ridicule and discouragement. From the beginning his way has been hard. His father died when he was 16 and he had to leave the music school where he was studying to be a violinist and composing on the side. By himself he learned to play the 'cello, went on writing music. But no one was interested until, under the spell of Wagner, he wrote Verklaerte Nacht, a romantic string sextet which is still played more than any of his other pieces. At 26 he started the Gurre-Lieder but for bread & butter's sake he had to put it aside and orchestrate operetta scores. Thirteen years later the Gurre-Lieder had a big success in Vienna. People were impressed by the enormous chorus. They liked the tender love motifs. But by the time Schoenberg was on the way to becoming a popular composer he had lost his taste for conventional harmonies. He started working on the 12-tone scale, gave up the idea that there had to be a dominant keynote, took the stand that dissonance was a logical development in music.

Critics took the stand that in his effort to develop something new Schoenberg had lost his real inspiration and become a hard-headed mathematician. (His Cancrizans can be played either backwards or forwards.) But no one has denied his genius as a teacher. In Europe where he had the facilities he took his pupils into his home to live, helped them study Bach and Beethoven, then let them write the kind of music which came naturally to them. His U. S. pupils will have to go through the same fundamental training. The one thing he will not encourage is imitation Schoenberg.

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