Schoenberg's choral symphony, 'Die Jakobsleiter', and other wartime fragments

This study reappraises Schoenberg's compositional activity and aesthetic in the months preceding the outbreak of World War I until the composition of his first twelve-tone pieces in the early 1920s. Although Schoenberg began many projects during these years, including a choral symphony and his oratorio Die Jakobsleiter most were never completed. While many scholars, adopting Schoenberg's evolutionary model of his own compositional history have dismissed his wartime compositions as unsuccessful experiments, I argue that the fragments should be reassessed as part of a single project through which the composer attempted to develop his new "gearbeitete" or "worked" aesthetic.;As an alternative to Schoenberg's model, this study adopts an intertextual approach through which the listener is encouraged to reconstruct the network of relationships among the music and text fragments. I first examine the text and music sketches for Schoenberg's symphony. In reconstructing the chronology of the sketches I argue that we can identify five conceptual stages in the symphony's genesis. Placed in the context of Schoenberg's other wartime compositions, we can also divide Schoenberg's compositional output of these years into two distinct spheres: one public, accessible, and tonal; the other private, exploratory, and atonal.;The symphony also became the basic source material for several of Schoenberg's other wartime compositions, including Die Jakobsleiter and a setting of Rilke's Liebes-Lied (Love-Song). Most significantly, this study highlights the importance of Schoenberg's recycling in these compositions of referential pitch-class collections and inversionally symmetric pitch-class structures. In light of Schoenberg's new aesthetic stance and in the context of the war, I argue that our recognition of the importance of Schoenberg's self-borrowing is fundamental to an understanding of his wartime projects as a genre of closely-related fragments, coherent in their own compositional and historical nexus. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications of our recognition of these relationships in the context of recent attempts to reconstruct "authentic" performances and performing versions of 20th-century "masterworks."...