Expressionism in Painting and Music in the 20th Century as exhibited in the works of Oskar Kokoschka, Vassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg

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Expressionism in Painting and Music in the 20th Century as exhibited in the works of Oskar Kokoschka, Vassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg

Music and fine arts haven’t always followed the same course in history. The early twentieth century is one of those rare points when their paths converged. During these troubled years, composers of Western art music turned to radical new ways of expressing melody, harmony, rhythm, and tone colour, while artists began to emphasise the extreme expressive properties of pictorial form in order to explore subjective emotions and inner psychological truths. This convergence can be best observed in the simultaneous musical advances of Arnold Schoenberg and in the paintings of expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka in Vienna and of the first abstract painter Vassily Kandinsky in Munich. In this paper I would like to discuss the origins and development of this convergence in art and music by assessing both pictorial and musical examples.

At the fin-de-siecle, art was closely bound up with social status in Vienna. Music, theatre and architecture were central to the tradition of Austrian Catholic aristocracy. When the liberals came to power in 1860 having won against aristocracy and absolutism, they didn't supplant the aristocracy and they aspired to their life style. A deep sense of the value of art was therefore instilled in the bourgeois children. However the Constitutional monarchy only lasted from 1860 to 1897, as while the liberals’ wealth increased, their political power decreased. The supposedly modern, liberal, tolerant society failed to deliver on its promises and consigned many to poverty and misery. Social groups such as anti-Semitic Christian Socials, Socialists and Slavic nationals began to raise claims to political participation and they formed parties to challenge the liberals in the 1880s. Art provided a refuge from this reality for the liberals. Particularly the Secession movement, with its glittery and ornamental aestheticism, had no connection with reality. In 1897 Christian Social Democrats won the elections and began a decade of rule in Vienna which involved very anti-liberal policies such as anti-Semitism and clericalism. The defeat had a profound psychological repercussion on the liberals, who began to feel very alienated. The mood invoked was one of anxiety, impotence and a heightened perception of the brutality of social existence. In this climate the city’s intellectuals produced innovations in art history, music and psychology almost simultaneously . They engaged in critical reformulations of 1

Sigmund Freud lived and worked in Vienna during the same period. 1

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their traditions that the Viennese society perceived as radically new. They basically revolted against all the formative forces of the Austrian tradition that they had been reared in: the Catholic culture of grace and the value system of classical liberalism with its exaltation of aesthetic culture. Schorske (1981) suggests that the traditional liberal Austrian culture had centred upon the ‘rational man’ but that social and political disintegration in Vienna spurred the ‘psychological man’. Indeed when Oskar Kokoschka started painting psychological portraits, he described his paintings as being born from a feeling of alienation.

An artist, poet, and playwright, Austrian Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) is best known for his expressionistic portraits and landscapes. Expressionism was initially a German-Austrian development that arose in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna. Its aim was not to depict objects as they are seen, but to express the strong emotion that the object generated in the artist. In painting portraits what it involved was expressing the subject’s innermost feelings, anxieties and fears. Gradually, realistic representations gave way to highly personal and increasingly abstract expression. Kokoschka is considered a founding leader of Expressionism. His formative years were spent in Vienna, where in 1909 he began to make an impact with his psychological portraits, in which the soul of the sitter was thought to be laid bare. He was concerned with expressing human character and psychology through effects of colour, formal distortion, and violent brushwork. Good examples are his “Portrait of Adolf Loos” (1909) and the emotionally turbulent figurative painting “The Bride of the Wind” (1914), depicting his feelings on his affair with Alma Mahler.

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Portrait of Adolf Loos (1909) The Bride of the Wind (1914)

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Another contemporary expressionist was the Russian painter Vassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) who studied and was based in Munich until 1914. Kandinsky was one of the first abstract artists and is a key figure in the history of modern art. Initially he painted representational images as can be seen in his famous ‘Der Blaue Reiter' from 1903. After 1908 he began to remove recognisable forms from his work and to use strong colours to stimulate the viewer, which is discernible in the ‘Autumn Study Near Oberau'. He argued that colour and form can communicate as much as definite subject matter and that emotion and feel are as important as order and control (Harrison 1910). From 1911 onwards Kandinsky’s paintings became increasingly expressive, abstract works. “Paintings with 3 Spots” of 1914 is a good example of this trajectory. 2

In January 2, 1911, Kandinsky attended a concert devoted exclusively to Schoenberg’s music in Munich. The program included Lieds, the First and Second Quartets, opp. 7 and 10 and the 3 Piano Pieces, op.11. Kandinsky depicted this concert in his painting entitled ‘Impression III (Concert)’. The event also prompted him to write to Schoenberg, initiating a most renowned correspondence between the two creative artists. In his letter of January 18 to Schoenberg, Kandinsky wrote: “In your works, you have realised what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions, is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.” On the poster for the evening the concert producer Emil Gutmann had included a passage from a chapter of Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre. The passage included sentences about

Compiled from http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/wassily-kandinsky and The Oxford Index http://2

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Der Blaue Reiter, 1903 Painting with 3 Spots, 1914 Autumn Study Near Oberau, 1908

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dissonance and consonance that had an impact on Kandinsky: “Dissonances are only different from consonances in degree; they are nothing more than remoter consonances. Today we have already reached the point where we no longer make the distinction between consonances and dissonances.” Kandinsky wrote to Schoenberg: “And ‘today’s dissonance in painting and music is merely the consonance of ‘tomorrow.’ . . . It has given me immense joy to find that you have the same ideas” (Frisch 2005: 118).

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) grew up in Vienna. He was largely self-taught in music. As well as being a prolific composer, Schoenberg produced important books on music theory and painted pictures in expressionist style . As a Jew, Schoenberg was 3

forced to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power, and he spent the rest of his life in Los Angeles. He composed in a variety of genres, including Verklarte Nacht, a symphonic poem for string sextet; Five Orchestral Pieces Op. 16 1909; two chamber symphonies; a piano concerto and a violin concerto; five string quartets; Erwartung Op. 17 (1909), Das Book of the Hanging Gardens Op. 15 (1908-9); Pierrot Lunaire Op. 21 (1921). Schoenberg’s earliest works are written in the late Romantic style, with rich harmonies, chromatic melodies, expansive forms, and programmatic content. But by 1908, strongly influenced by Wagner’s chromatic melodies and harmonies, Schoenberg started to

Schoenberg allied himself with the Kokoschka and Schiele radical expressionist group because they were the first to 3

challenge the technical illusion of realism and representation in painting (Botstein, 1999). His most famous expressionist painting is the ‘Red Gaze’ from 1910. Of his 65 paintings, two thirds were painted between 1908 and 1910. (Harrison, 1996)

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Wassily Kandinsky, Impression III (Concert), 1911.

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compose works with no tonal centre and created “atonal” music . The revolutionary act of 4

rejection of tonality, which he called the “the emancipation of dissonance” , came with the 5

Book of the Hanging Gardens in 1908. Schoenberg’s first atonal work for solo piano was the Three Piano Pieces Op. 11 of

1909. Particularly No. 3, which is eruptive and quite virtuosic, represents a significantly new conception of form and character. While the other pieces display more traditional elements of development and recapitulation, in No. 3 these do not occur. Instead there are continuously unfolding diverse, self-contained ideas set off from one another by silences, changes in dynamic level and tempo and sudden shifts in surface rhythm and textural design. None of them is repeated, each functions as a little ‘development section’ on its own, and progress to the next seems the result of accumulated momentum. Brahms’s characteristically detailed motivic working is extended by Schoenberg to virtually every figure as there is a return of motivic particles such as single intervals, minute rhythmic gestures or even single durations (MacDonald, 2008). The texture is also more linear and contrapuntal than the earlier works. The relative unimportance of pitch in these compositions is compensated for by greater sensitivity to the dynamics, which range from pppp to ffff.

The Six Little Piano Pieces Op. 19 of 1911 is another example of Schoenberg’s early atonal piano pieces. No. 1 is the longest and occupies only 18 bars, the shortest (Nos. 2 and 3) 9 bars each. These miniature pieces present an extreme distillation of the expressive essence of Op. 11, isolating single elements in simpler, more delicate textures (MacDonald 2008: 228). The most expressive one for me is the sixth with its somber mood. Schoenberg wrote it after accompanying Mahler’s coffin to the grave-side. He also 6

painted a picture of the burial, basically trying to express his sorrow through all the artistic mediums he was capable of using. This piece is in a developmental ternary form. The outer sections (measures 1-6) and measure 9 are characterised by reiterations of a six note chord, whose prominent intervals of the fourth evoke the sound of church bells. The middle section (measures 7-8) has been interpreted as Schoenberg expressing his tributeto Mahler (MacDonald 2008).

‘The word “Atonal” was first used to describe Schoenberg’s new style by his student Egon Wellesz, in explaining the 4

Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11 (Simms 2000:8)

Schoenberg first mentions the “emancipation of dissonance from the rules of consonance” in 1926 (Harrison 1996).5

Schoenberg highly revered Mahler, who respected, or at least tolerated his work.6

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Schoenberg’s reasons for adopting atonality seem to be a combination of historical, political, technical and personal factors that were so tightly knit that they may not have been even fully known to the composer himself. Schoenberg published his views on tonality in 1911 in his book Harmonielehre, where he expresses his detestation of the prevailing musical, cultural, and social order . A canon of classical music had already been 7

formed in Europe with music by Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms dominating concert programs in Vienna and there was little room for contemporary composers (Ross 2007: 39). He experienced the alienation of being a Jew in Vienna. He was also going through a difficult time emotionally as he experienced his wife’s betrayal and abandonment. Ross (2007) cites how his turbulence may be sensed in some of the explanations that Schoenberg gave to his friends in the period from 1908 to 1913. To Kandinsky he wrote: “Art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one’s taste, or one’s upbringing, or one’s intelligence, knowledge or skill.” To the composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni he wrote: “I strive for: complete liberation from all forms, from all symbols of cohesion and of logic.” In public, however, Schoenberg tended to explain his latest works as the logical, rational outcome of a historical process. He insisted that he had no choice but to act as he did. He claimed that this music was the product of “necessity” (Schoenberg 1950:103). He presented himself as the heir of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven and pointed out that many canonical masterpieces had caused confusion when they first appeared (Ross 2007: 53). By “emancipating the dissonance”, Schoenberg enlarged all the expressive possibilities, thematic and rhythmic as well as coloristic and tonal. However the more radical his music became in giving voice to derangement, the more his social isolation and inability to reach the public increased. Audiences found his atonal music difficult with its lack of tonal centre, dissonance and disjunct melodies. Some performers refused to play his music, and when others did, audience reaction was occasionally violent. At one concert on March 31, 1913, the police had to be called in to restore order (Ross 2007). Therefore his achievement in finding a form of aesthetic expression adequate to the full range of psychic possibilities brought him

desocialisation. Despite this hostility, Schoenberg remained true to his own vision.When Schoenberg rejected tonal chord progressions and repeating melodies,

he had found himself facing the problem of how to write large-scale compositions

Adorno also emphasised the connection of atonality to a historical process that had produced a degraded capitalistic 7

society. Schoenberg’s music, according to Adorno, grew from a senseless world. Its effect upon the listener would always be to shock and to unsettle, to awaken him to the brutality of the society in which he lived (Simms 2000:4).

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in the new atonal style. His chromatic, atonal, non repeating melodies made traditional musical forms impossible to use. He was keenly aware of the problem caused by the ever-broadening dissonance and atonality. The problem was the danger of chaos. Simms (2000) states that after World War 1 an insistence on control, order and limitation spread throughout art and society. A new viewpoint in music that valued the known over the unknown and restriction rather than total freedom became prevalent. Schoenberg probably felt aware of the exhaustion of the old order and the need for a new one. Schorske (1981) also suggests that Schoenberg felt the need to organise the liberated chromatic world into the twelve-tone system. In the early 1920s Schoenberg found the way to impose order and control over the newly “emancipated” elements of music. He discovered a way of creating music that he called “composing with twelve tones”. Twelve-tone composition is a method of writing that employs each of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale set in a fixed, predetermined order. The composer begins by arranging the twelve notes of the chromatic scale in a sequence of his or her choosing, forming a “tone row.” Throughout the composition, these twelve notes must come in the same order. The pitches can appear in any octave, high or low. The twelve-note series may unfold not only as a melody but also as a melody with accompaniment, or simply as a progression of chords, since two or more notes of the row may sound simultaneously. Moreover, in addition to appearing in its basic form, the row can be transposed. It may go backward (retrograde), or upside down (inversion), or both backward and upside down at the same time (retrograde inversion). The rows can assume any rhythm.The purpose of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method was the last step in his quest for guaranteeing the perfect equality of all pitches so that none would seem like a tonal centre. This method became known as serialism.

The Prelude of the Suite for Piano, Op. 25 of 1921 was the first twelve-tone piece Schoenberg composed. He then added the other movements - Intermezzo, Gavotte, Musette, Minuet and Trio and Gigue between 1921-23 to create a suite of dances on the Baroque model in emulation of the Bach keyboard suites. In genre, form, gesture and motivic development these works appear historicist. Here Schoenberg uses only 2 transpositions each of the prime form (P-0 and P-6), the inverted form (I-0 and I-6) and their retrogrades (R-0 and R-6 and RI-0 and RI-6). The row is so designed that each of

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these begins on either E or B flat and ends on the other, all the prime and inverted forms have G and D flat as the second pair of notes, giving a consistency of sound. The exclusive use of these 8 rows was analogous to establishing a key in tonal music and allowed Schoenberg to preserve consistency throughout the suite, just like the dances of a Baroque suite which are set in the same key (Burkholder and Palisca, 2010: 67). That Schoenberg was thinking in terms of a tonal field analogous to a key is clear from a sketch where he labeled P-0 as “T” and P-6 as “D”. Here the tritone relationship substitutes for the normal interval of a fifth between tonic and dominant in tonal music. The first 4 notes of R-0, (B flat- A-C-B natural) form the letters BACH in German nomenclature.

MacDonald points out that it seems odd to find this ‘revolutionary’ twelve-note music accommodated in ancient ternary structures and suggests that it appears like a move from “‘Expressionist Impressionism’ to ‘Serial Neoclassicism’”. MacDonald then offers his own interpretation, which is that Schoenberg may have needed the strict design of the old forms simply to ‘put a brake’ on his fertility of invention while he worked out the implications of the new style (MacDonald 2008: 231). Schoenberg meticulously marked the articulation, dynamics, phrasing and tempo fluctuations in the Suite, knowing that in such an unfamiliar idiom the performer would have difficulty without guidance. In his later serial works, Schoenberg developed an even more sophisticated analogy to tonal procedures, one that permitted him to use all twelve possible transpositions of each form of the rows.

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Schorske (1981) suggests that the twelve tone technique allowed all the expressiveness of a Kokoschka portrait or a Schoenberg cry of agony, while allowing Schoenberg to do what God had done before: To place deep in the world an infrastructure

of his own creation, a set of relations too subtle to be grasped immediately by the senses, but accessible under the laws of logic to the inquiring mind. It allowed the democracy of twelve tones to cohere again in a systematic way created by the composer. Howver audiences didn’t fully embrace twelve-tone music either. For most listeners the style remains as inaccessible as Schoenberg’s earlier atonal music - irrational and arbitrary. However it did inspire generations of postwar composers.

In this paper I hope to have shown that it is not a mere coincidence that Kokoschka and Kandinsky began painting expressionist paintings at the same time as Schoenberg moved to atonality. They independently found the forms to express the soul of men, whose culture had prevented real feelings from finding public expression. They destroyed the conventions of the traditional art forms by asserting in visual and musical language the disturbing truths they were witnessing. However Schoenberg eventually appears to have felt the need to reconstitute what he destroyed, and tried to reorganise sound in a fully equal fashion with his twelve tone method.

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References:

Botstein, Leon. 1999. “Schoenberg and Audience: Modernism, Music and Politics of the Twentieth Century” in Walter Frisch ed., Schoenberg and his World, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press

Burkholder Peter J. 1999. “Schoenberg the Reactionary” in Walter Frisch ed., Schoenberg and his World, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press

Burkholder Peter J, and Claude Palisca. ed., 2010. Norton Anthology of Western Music, Volume 3: Twentieth Century, New York: W.W.Norton & Company, Inc.

Frisch, Walter. 2005. German Modernism, Music and the Arts, Berkeley, California: University of California Press, Ltd.

Harrison, Thomas. 1996. 1910 The Emancipation of Dissonance, Berkeley, California: University of California Press, Ltd.

MacDonald, Malcolm. 2008. The Master Musicians Schoenberg, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Neighbour, O.W. "Schoenberg, Arnold." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed May 13, 2014

Ross, Alex. 2007.The Rest is Noise Listening to the Twentieth Century, USA: PicadorSchoenberg, Arnold. 1950. Style and Idea, New York: The Philosophical Library, IncSchorske, Carl E. 1981. Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York: Vintage

BooksSimms, Bryan R. 2000. The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg 1908-1923, Oxford:

Oxford University PressAll paintings found on the webb. http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/artists/wassily-kandinsky http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100029641

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