{"id":9781,"date":"2024-02-27T14:12:07","date_gmt":"2024-02-27T13:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/?p=9781"},"modified":"2024-02-28T14:04:43","modified_gmt":"2024-02-28T13:04:43","slug":"schoenberg-als-lehrer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/2024\/02\/27\/schoenberg-als-lehrer\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI teach out of passion.\u201d Sch\u00f6nberg as a Teacher"},"content":{"rendered":"\u201cTeaching played an important role my father\u2019s life. He taught his whole life long, not just to make a living but because he truly enjoyed it. It was a challenge for him to pass on to his students his knowledge about and love for the art of the great masters and to analyse their works in all thoroughness. He\u2019d also surprise his students with virtuosically improvised written examples on the blackboard, sometimes joking with his dry humour,\u201d writes Nuria Sch\u00f6nberg-Nono about her father.<\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\n
\"\"
Sch\u00f6nberg as a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), ca. 1936 1940 \u00a9 Arnold Sch\u00f6nberg Center, Wien<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The passion for teaching and getting things across described by Sch\u00f6nberg\u2019s daughter also shines through quite frequently in the composer\u2019s writings and letters. Immediately after assuming his post at New York\u2019s Malkin Conservatory in October of 1933, Sch\u00f6nberg\u2014with his characteristic self-irony\u2014declared the following: \u201cI\u2019ve come here to teach. For teaching is perhaps the only one of my passions that I\u2019ve tried in vain to combat in myself. [\u2026] I teach out of passion, and even if I\u2019ve said a thousand times, \u2018I\u2019ve taught for nearly forty years, now\u2019, I immediately forget all of my wholesome resolutions and dive into new adventures when a new student comes along.\u201d<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The composer once again took a position on methodological matters where teaching was concerned in one of his final essays, penned in 1950. There, he stated his view that one of the tasks of the teacher was not to march pupils through rigidly fixed systems of composing rules in a stereotypical manner but rather to apply a method of practice-oriented learning-by-doing in the interest of developing individual and flexible potential solutions together with his students\u2014for as Sch\u00f6nberg commented in 1948: \u201cAs a teacher, I\u2019ve never taught simply what I knew but instead more what the student needed.\u201d<\/span>12<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\n

\"\"
Arnold Sch\u00f6nberg surrounded by his pupils (l. r.: Paul K\u00f6niger, Edward Clark, Erwin Stein, Eduard Steuermann, Arnold Sch\u00f6nberg, unknown, Heinrich Jalowetz, Anton Webern, Josef Polnauer), Leipzig, 1914 \u00a9 Arnold Sch\u00f6nberg Center, Wien<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even so, the function of a role model always needed to be upheld: \u201cA true teacher [\u2026] must possess the ability to himself do multiple times that which he requires a pupil to do once. [\u2026] he must work it [the assigned task\u2014MP] out in the pupil\u2019s presence by improvising several solutions to a problem, thereby demonstrating what is necessary.\u201d<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Sch\u00f6nberg had already propagated this methodology, which abandoned the conventional method of frontal \u201cex cathedra\u201d teaching \u201cin favour of a search\u201d, in his central pedagogical work\u2014his Harmonielehre <\/i>(Theory of Harmony<\/i>) of 1911, which opens with the telling sentence: \u201cThis book I have learned from my pupils.\u201d But as much as intuition, associative thinking, and spontaneous improvisation were focal points of his didactics, it was all the more that\u2014on the substantive level\u2014Sch\u00f6nberg placed importance on \u201cstructural correctness and what is necessary in the interest of coherence.\u201d<\/span>13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In practice, this entailed studying the art of composition in light of the artisanal soundness of the \u201cgreat masters\u201d (embodied especially by Beethoven\u2019s oeuvre). Learning from and with tradition was both a credo and a requirement of this \u201cconservative revolutionary\u201d (Willi Reich). In the 1925 criteria for admission to his Berlin composing class, Sch\u00f6nberg wrote that acceptance would be extended to those who \u201c[\u2026] have thoroughly learned all the tools of the trade (harmony, counterpoint, theory of form, instrumentation) either at a school, privately, or through independent study and are capable of submitting samples of their talent and skill in the form of finished works. [\u2026].\u201d<\/span>14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> His focus was hence on conveying general principles and on fundamental technical skills with no stylistic requirements, which is to say: on comprehensibility, logic, coherence, formal function, thematic thinking, and elaborative variation.<\/span>15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The fact that Sch\u00f6nberg enjoyed near-\u201cguru\u201d-like<\/span>16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> veneration not only due to his exceptional artistic and pedagogical abilities but at least as much by virtue of his personal charisma is attested to not least by the multitude of prominent Sch\u00f6nberg pupils. Sch\u00f6nberg himself speaks of \u201cover a thousand\u201d pupils whom he taught over the course of his long pedagogical career.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Alongside Alban Berg and Anton Webern, they also included figures such as Hanns Eisler, Erwin Stein, Josef Polnauer, Erwin Ratz, Karl Rankl, Egon Wellesz, Paul Amadeus Pisk, and Eduard Steuermann\u2014and in Los Angeles, even John Cage came for private composing lessons in 1935.<\/p>\n

In a 1912 collected volume on Sch\u00f6nberg initiated by Alban Berg, the students paid tribute to their teacher. Erwin Stein, who belonged to Sch\u00f6nberg\u2019s inner circle in Vienna along with Berg and Webern, summed up their praise by placing its essence in a broader, more general context: \u201cSch\u00f6nberg teaches one to think. He urges his students to look with their own open eyes as if they were the first to observe what can be seen.\u201d<\/span>17<\/sup><\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fact that Sch\u00f6nberg enjoyed near-\u201cguru\u201d-like veneration not only \ufeffdue to his exceptional artistic and pedagogical abilities but at least as much \ufeffby virtue of his personal charisma is attested to not least by the multitude of prominent Sch\u00f6nberg pupils.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":354,"featured_media":9783,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1453,1456,1483,854],"class_list":["post-9781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-special","tag-2024-1","tag-arnoldschoenberg","tag-schoenberg150","tag-special"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9781"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9972,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9781\/revisions\/9972"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mdw.ac.at\/magazin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}