A century and a half after his birth in Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg has been quietly relegated to the darkest corner of the gallery holding portraits of classical music’s most consequential figures. His countenance – self-painted, unlike the others, because Schoenberg could wield a paintbrush with style and determination, the way he did everything else – stares defiantly back at those few who care to find it, perennially returning their gaze with interest, gathering dust all the while.
It was not always so. While his music attracted scandal and notoriety during his lifetime – almost inspiring riots on more than one occasion, such as the infamous ‘Skandalkonzert’ which took place in Vienna in March 1913 – its composer was recognised and celebrated abroad as a figure of no less significance than fellow Viennese revolutionaries in their fields such as Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In London, Sir Henry Wood gave the first performance of the Five Orchestral Pieces Op. 16 at the Proms in 1912: ‘an occasion which had set all Europe agog’, recalled Edward Clark, who had taken lessons with the composer in Vienna. Wood asked Clark to invite Schoenberg back to London; the composer accepted with pleasure, and directed a further performance of Op. 15 himself in January 1914.
‘I remember,’ wrote Clark, ‘how delighted he was by the players of that “Old” Queen’s Hall Orchestra, by their youth and interest in the new technical problems he had set them – so very different from the partly bureaucratic, partly hostile attitude of many German orchestras, and he wrote and told Sir Henry so. I may mention that the respect was mutual; more than one player who took part in that performance has confided to me that at first they were not sure they were not being hoaxed, and tried out a “squeaker” or two, just to see. Schoenberg picked them out all right, so everybody was happy.’
Clark’s touching recollection is preserved in the memoirs of his wife, the composer Elisabeth Lutyens. As a new wife and even newer mother but by then practised composer – ‘And I still want to write music, fuck you!’ she told the startled obstetrician at the birth of her first child – the 24-year-old Lutyens attended a London concert given in 1934 by the Kolisch Quartet. Kolisch was another Schoenberg pupil; so was Anton Webern, whose music for quartet struck Lutyens with the force of a revelation. ‘I shall never forget my excitement, my certainty that this was the most thrilling music I had heard since the great classics.’
Lutyens took up the system of ‘composition with twelve tones’ which Schoenberg had devised for himself, after lengthy experimentation, in the early 1920s, and she would pass her sharp ear and grasp of modern harmony on to generations of British students of her own. She also played an instrumental role behind the scenes in founding the first concert series in London dedicated to modern music, led by the violinist Anne Macnaghten and the conductor Iris Lemare.
Meanwhile, the BBC continued to support new music both live and on the wireless. Also in 1934, at the Queen’s Hall, Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave the UK premiere of Wozzeck by Alban Berg: the third member of the triumvirate, along with Schoenberg and Webern, which came to be known as the Second Viennese School. Nevertheless, by 1968, there was a need and an appetite for a younger and more dynamic organisation dedicated to new music, as the conductor David Atherton recalled to the present author, early in 2024.
‘The contemporary music scene in London consisted of disparate little groups of enthusiasts who would get together and all go to the same concerts. There were the Macnaghten-Lemare concerts, the Park Lane Group concerts, lots of organisations that would put on nine or ten chamber concerts during the course of the year. But the audience was always the same 30 to 40 people, and half of them would be friends of the others. It was a kind of ivory-tower mentality, which I absolutely hated.’
Blackpool born and bred, lately graduated from Cambridge, Atherton set about changing that mentality with a friend from university, Nicholas Snowman. ‘We wanted to start something that was going to be accessible, and put new works in the context of older works.’ As students, they had put on semi-professional stagings of opera together, inviting the likes of Alberto Remedios to come and sing in Richard Strauss’s original version of Ariadne auf Naxos, with Clive James (then a postgraduate student) as Monsieur Jourdain. Then Snowman went to work as an assistant for Jani Strasser, head of musical preparation at Glyndebourne, and Atherton as a freelance pianist and conductor in London.
Atherton’s father was a music teacher and conductor, ‘very influential in the north-west of England, but Elgar was his idea of a modern composer. I don’t know what it was that interested me about contemporary music. It didn’t run in the family. But at the age of thirteen or fourteen, I was really getting into all that, and listening to invitation concerts led by Hans Keller on the Third Programme.’ He and Snowman made a contrasting but complementary pair: ‘very different people, different backgrounds. But we were both very good organisers. As well as being a musician, my father was a chartered accountant, and I’ve always had a good sense of numbers.’ The idea of the London Sinfonietta came together over late-night chats. ‘We wanted to build a family: a family of musicians who enjoyed performing together and taking intense joy from it, particularly playing twentieth-century music.’
The Sinfonietta announced its presence on the scene with a bang in January 1968, giving the first performance of The Whale, a cantata by their contemporary, John Tavener, with the speaker’s part unforgettably intoned by the BBC announcer Alvar Liddell. Snowman, who died suddenly after a fall in 2023, had a particular genius for masterminding such events, which thrust new music into the public spotlight. This organisational, persuasive talent led to him being invited by Pierre Boulez to co-found the Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1976, as a Parisian counterpart to the Sinfonietta.
‘Nicholas was very good at fundraising,’ remembers Atherton. He went out twisting people’s arms and raised the money. But that first concert with The Whale was a huge undertaking at the time: an unknown composer with a professional chorus and an orchestra of about 50 players. We didn’t have the money to do it. But we put it on, nevertheless. And then we went back to the Arts Council armed with books of reviews, saying, look how wonderful we are, we really do need support. And the gamble paid off. In those days, let’s say, the Arts Council appreciated quality.’
The make-up of the London Sinfonietta was modelled not by accident on the First Chamber Symphony composed by Schoenberg in 1906: solo strings and winds, potentially supplemented by percussion. ‘Schoenberg’s a difficult nut to crack,’ acknowledges Atherton. ‘Back then, his music was always performed by groups that were just scraping things together, under-rehearsed and never really sorted out.’ In the late 1960s, his contemporary Stravinsky was still alive, and accorded iconic status. By contrast, after his death in 1951, Schoenberg had begun to recede into quasi-academic obscurity, further hastened by a notorious polemic penned by Boulez, ‘Schoenberg est mort’.
Yet, as Atherton points out, Schoenberg continued to exercise a potent influence on contemporary composers of every stripe. ‘His earliest pieces, like Verklärte Nacht, are unbelievably romantic music, which you can directly trace to composers of the past. But as he started to develop his own serial techniques, he became a little bit more inaccessible to many people. And in a way the First Chamber Symphony is a nodal point in his output: our Beethoven Five, as far as the Sinfonietta was concerned. The individual parts are incredibly difficult, particularly at the tempi that Schoenberg insisted on. It needs an awful lot of rehearsal, but it is a fully symphonic piece.’
Taking the work of Sir Harrison Birtwistle as a point of comparison, Atherton outlines the interpretative challenges of Schoenberg. ‘The key to playing Birtwistle’s music is to accurately reproduce the notes that are on the page. Interpretation in a classical sense doesn’t come into it. The mechanical side is almost more important than anything else. With Schoenberg, you have to have that same degree of precision. But on top of that, the classical, interpretative element becomes almost overriding once you have conquered the former. When we played the First Chamber Symphony in concert – and we toured it everywhere – we’d always have a core of maybe nine or ten musicians, who had played it many, many times before. So any newcomer who had to come in – maybe somebody was ill or they weren’t available – would find it quite easy to become an additional cog in the wheel. Over time, an interpretation grew out of sheer familiarity with the notes, and an appreciation of what’s behind them.’
Max Harrison grasped the significance of this sea-change in mentality when the Sinfonietta performed the First Chamber Symphony at a London concert in April 1971. ‘Such pieces will never be easy, or anything like it,’ he wrote in The Times, ‘but … last night was another instance of a Schoenberg interpretation rather than a Schoenberg scramble … There was never the all-too-usual impression of a motor overheating, of a spring wound dangerously tight.’
Nevertheless, especially in its early years, the Sinfonietta had an artistic and financial imperative to take audiences with them by balancing out brand-new pieces with classics of the recent and the more distant past. ‘I was very much of the opinion,’ says Atherton, ‘that we need to place new works in a context which wasn’t going to tire either the players or the audience. Listeners could come to a new piece with their ears refreshed, rather than being fed a diet of nothing but one new piece on top of another.’
London Sinfonietta programmes in the early 1970s paired Bengt Hambraeus with Brahms, even Birtwistle with Wagner. This set accordingly presents a small but representative slice of the ensemble’s activity during its first fifteen years of life. It draws a direct line between the Viennese wind serenades of Mozart and seminal works of the Second Viennese School represented by Schoenberg and Berg. The line is drawn to an elegant if provisional conclusion with a trio of pieces in the ‘astrological series’ written by the Spanish composer Roberto Gerhard, who had been a student of Schoenberg between 1923 and 1928.
At the centre of the set is the survey of Schoenberg’s chamber music which the London Sinfonietta recorded for Decca between October 1973 and May 1974, a 5LP set never since reissued complete internationally on CD and digitally until now. Atherton was leaving his position as the Sinfonietta’s music director (though he took it up again between 1989 and 1991), but before doing so, he wanted to mark the centenary of Schoenberg’s birth. ‘I hit on the idea of examining all of Schoenberg’s works. Obviously, we couldn’t do Moses und Aron or anything like that. So we settled on doing the complete instrumental and chamber music of Schoenberg and stretching that to include the First Chamber Symphony. A piece like the Serenade is a fantastic work which will hardly ever be played, because of the demands of the rehearsal time, but also, the personnel required: the mandolin and guitar, for example.’
On a scale inconceivable today, supported by state funding from the Arts Council (forerunner of Arts Council England), Atherton and the Sinfonietta gave 26 concerts within five weeks, pairing Schoenberg with the complete chamber works of Gerhard – ‘who was falling into the same trap that Schoenberg had done, in that he had died in 1970, and after that nobody really was interested; the music almost disappeared.’
Beyond London, the Sinfonietta travelled across the UK, and to Brussels. ‘I remember it being a phenomenally intense period,’ says Atherton. ‘When we travelled somewhere in the morning, we’d get there by 11am, and rehearse one piece for a concert two weeks later. Then we’d have another rehearsal at two in the afternoon and go till five, and then do a concert at 7pm. We’d come back to London the same evening, and go somewhere else the next day, and keep repeating this unbelievable schedule. And of course you would have an illness one day, or the bus would break down, or you would miss a train connection. I wouldn’t say strife, but there was certainly tension to make it all happen. And at the end of it all, we went down to a nice little church in Kingston, and recorded a lot of it.’
The sessions took place immediately after the concerts, except for the First Chamber Symphony and Song of the Wood-Dove from Gurrelieder, both requiring larger forces. They are directly infused with the experience of making the music work for an audience, drawing a line through Schoenberg’s often traditional forms from beginning to end, in a way unrivalled by most studio productions.
The ‘nice little church’ was All Saints at Petersham, a fine piece of nineteenth-century gothic obligingly tucked away on the edge of a meadow between Kingston and Richmond. For the release of the set in the autumn of 1974, Atherton wrote an introduction which bears revisiting. ‘It has been our intention to present Schoenberg, not as the sterile revolutionary one often reads about, but as the “romantic” inventor whose music is essentially intuitive, and based on accumulated musical experience. He did revolutionize the technique of musical composition, but he always remained at heart a traditionalist, even when at his most innovatory.’
As Atherton outlined in the booklet, he had drawn from the Schoenberg archives in Los Angeles the manuscripts of pieces which had probably lain unheard since their first performances. These include a Presto for string quartet entitled Ein Stelldichein, the Weihnachtsmusik and Die eiserne Brigade, all of which, even in their apparently fragmentary states, present unexpected facets to Schoenberg’s creative personality (and yet have hardly been heard since, either). ‘After completing only 90 bars Schoenberg abandoned the piece leaving us only a score in draft form, with innumerable wrong notes, questionable dynamics, inconsistent phrasing, etc.’ writes Atherton of Ein Stelldichein. ‘We present here one solution to these problems, including the omission of the final twelve bars in order to give the fragment a suggestion of finality. If only Schoenberg had continued the only quintet in existence for oboe, clarinet, violin, cello and piano! Can you think of another work for this strange combination?’ On Die eiserne Brigade in concert, William Mann remarked in The Times, ‘I never expected to hear friendly laughter and applause for musical humour by Schoenberg, but here they were.’
By 1974, Atherton had already been working as a house conductor for the Royal Opera, and recording offbeat repertoire for Lyrita and Argo. Through this connection, he came to know one of Decca’s senior producers, James Mallinson, which led to the recordings reissued in the present set. Recorded in the same venue and at the same time as the Schoenberg, the Gerhard was released on Decca’s Headline sub-label, dedicated to contemporary music, but it also represented an act of tribute by Atherton to a composer whom he had known personally.
In flight from fascism like his teacher Schoenberg, Gerhard had settled in Cambridge, as an Anglophile who had made an opera from a Sheridan play, The Duenna. ‘He was a bit of a recluse,’ recalls Atherton, ‘but I got to know him and his wife Poldi. He was a wonderful, wonderful human being. And he was so grateful that somebody was actually taking an interest in his music. The slight austerity and Webern-like clarity of Gerhard’s music makes a nice counterbalance to undiluted Schoenberg.’
Gerhard had studied with Schoenberg firstly in Vienna, then Berlin, and he fondly recalled the contrast between the cities in those turbulent years. ‘I mean the difference not only between Vienna and Berlin in those pregnant Twenties, but also the difference between single and communal tuition with Schoenberg, the difference, that is, between being a private pupil of the master and being a member of the Meisterklasse at the Academy. Irresistibly, I’m afraid, some of us felt at times a little pompous about that. As members of the Meisterklasse, we rather looked down on the undergraduate population of the Charlottenburg Hochschule für Musik. In fact we very much played up to our higher academical status as Meisterschüler. In retaliation, the Hochschule referred to us, I believe, as Die Meistersinger von Schoenberg.’
The performance of Libra is notable (as is the Schoenberg Serenade) for the presence of the guitarist John Williams: not a regular member of the London Sinfonietta. ‘He took a bit of persuading to actually do it, but was phenomenally good – and a real trooper.’ As for the earlier repertoire in the set, the Schubert album emerged from another Viennese-themed concert series, pairing him with the complete works of Webern (which sadly never received the same treatment on record as Schoenberg, perhaps because both Boulez and Robert Craft had got there first). The Sinfonietta’s clarinettist was Antony Pay, who pursued concurrent enthusiasms for modern repertoire and historically informed performances, which brought a singular sense of style and authority to his playing of the concertos by Louis Spohr (born in Germany, but who both studied with Beethoven in Vienna and later worked there).
The degree of Atherton’s involvement in performing and recording these works depended on their complexity. Even though it involved only five players, the Wind Quintet of Schoenberg required a conductor at its premiere in 1924, and Atherton recalls that the Decca recording required ‘something like 195 takes, because it’s such a labyrinth of interconnecting parts.’ The value of their dedication was summed up by William Mann, reviewing another concert in the Schoenberg/Gerhard series for The Times. ‘During the past six years, David Atherton and his players have shown us that Schoenberg’s music can sound as beautiful and as emotionally comprehensive as Mozart’s, if the performers can play it sensitively and believe in it.’
Peter Quantrill