Richard Gerstl, Portrait of Arnold Schoenberg, Seated, 1906. Vienna, Wien Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Vienna, July 1911. Arnold Schoenberg signs the preface of a book that Universal Edition is about to send to press, and at its head he places a dedication: to the memory of Gustav Mahler, who died on 18 May. Then the first sentence, which few authors of textbooks would have had the courage to write: Dieses Buch habe ich von meinen Schülern gelernt. I learned this book from my pupils.
The book is called Harmonielehre, and the man who signs it is at that moment the most uncomfortable composer in Europe. Two years earlier, with the Drei Klavierstücke op. 11, he has written music that no longer rests on any home key. He has no diplomas: apart from a few lessons in counterpoint from Alexander von Zemlinsky, around 1894, he has learned everything on his own, by transcribing and imitating what he played and heard. And yet the textbook he hands to the printer does not speak of the future. It speaks of triads, cadences, modulations, of the same material that Rameau had put in order in 1722. It is a book on tonal harmony written by a man who was leaving tonal harmony.
He wrote it between 1910 and 1911, in twenty-two chapters, and it is still read today with a certain amazement, because it does not have the tone of a code. It has the tone of a workshop. Schoenberg teaches the rules one by one, with a master’s patience, and meanwhile warns the pupil that they are not laws of nature but historical habits, convenient, reasonable, destined to change. Consonance and dissonance, he writes, differ in degree and not in essence: dissonance is only a more distant consonance, which the ear has not yet made its own. The so-called non-harmonic notes, those the treatises relegated among ornaments and passing notes, for him do not exist: they are harmony that theory has not yet managed to classify.
Here lies the apparent paradox of the book, and its strength. Whoever wanted to learn the craft found the whole craft, exercise after exercise. Whoever read attentively found also the reason why that craft could not last forever. The first sentence is to be taken literally: Schoenberg in Vienna lived on private lessons, and through those rooms had passed Alban Berg and Anton Webern. The manual is born of their questions, their objections, their mistakes corrected in pencil. It is the minutes of a teaching, more than a system handed down from above.
The dedication to Mahler is not a courtesy of circumstance. Mahler had defended Schoenberg when Vienna jeered at him and had gone on supporting him even when his music had taken paths that Mahler himself could no longer follow; in his last months he wondered who would look after him once he was gone. Schoenberg returned the favour in the strangest way: by dedicating to his memory a book on the rules that both of them, each in his own way, had carried to the breaking point.
On the last page, almost in passing, there appears an idea that has nothing to do with chords. Schoenberg imagines a melody made not of pitches but of colours, a succession of timbres followed the way one follows a song, and gives it a name, Klangfarbenmelodie. He does not develop it, does not explain it, he closes the book. The rest of the century spent a long time developing it in his place.
In 1922 the third edition came out, revised by the author, the one on which the translations are based. Universal Edition still keeps the volume in its catalogue, with the dedication to Mahler at the head, at number UE 3370.