Schoenberg owes his survival to crime drama

George Gershwin once made a home movie of Arnold Schoenberg grinning in a suit on his tennis court in Beverly Hills but, sadly, never filmed one of their weekly matches. According to one observer, the composer of ‘I Got Rhythm’ played with languid strokes in a ‘nonchalant and chivalrous’ manner against the ‘choppy, over eager’ strokes of the creator of Erwartung.

That figures. But how odd that the two men should be friends and passionate admirers of each other’s work. Gershwin paid for the first recording of Schoenberg’s gnarliest string quartet, the Fourth; when the younger man died, Schoenberg described him as ‘a great composer’ and expressed ‘the deepest grief for the deplorable loss to music’. Few people would disagree – but it’s curious that Schoenberg, reliably mean-spirited about other composers, should be so drawn to Gershwin.

In his youth he had abandoned Judaism for Protestantism and declared that he was fighting for the hegemony of German culture over that of the ‘Latin and Slav’. He deplored tonal music for being riddled with ‘inbreeding and incest’. As Alex Ross notes in The Rest is Noise, this reveals a ‘weird undercurrent of racial pseudoscience’ and it’s not surprising that Schoenberg also loathed Weimar cabaret. By the time of his American exile he had returned to Judaism – a sincere decision motivated by horror at the Nazis. But he was also hanging out at George and Ira Gershwin’s parties; was there a touch of opportunism in his extravagant praise of George’s music?

I think the answer is no. It’s tempting to dismiss the opinions of a thin-skinned composer who sneered at Stravinsky and Bartok, but Schoenberg could recognise genius in popular music and, like Brahms, held Johann Strauss II in high esteem.