The Schoenberg shelf (2)

 

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These musical examples appear in my essay "Strauss's Place in the Twentieth Century," which is part of Charles Youmans's anthology The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss. The first is a famous horn passage from Strauss's Salome; the second is the bass clarinet and bassoon line at the beginning of Schoenberg's Die glückliche Hand. A certain resemblance, yes?

Die glückliche Salome

Strauss's enormous influence on the Second Viennese School has been much noted over the years, but I believe it's still underrated, not least because the eternal politics of twentieth-century historiography — radical vs. conservative, etc. — keep getting in the way. The fact is that Schoenberg adulated Strauss when he was young, and was intimidated by him in a way he never was with Mahler. I write this in lieu of a promised post on Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner's Cambridge Companion to Schoneberg — I'm a bit too frantic with other work to give this volume the attention it deserves. But let me note that Craig De Wilde offers an excellent summary of the Strauss-Schoenberg relationship from the other side. "It is rare when two great minds can parallel," De Wilde writes, "but it is even more remarkable when they intersect, if only for a moment."

Here's another set of examples — swirling flute passages by Strauss, Schoenberg, and Boulez (Salome, Pierrot lunaire, Le Marteau sans maître):