But they, at least, impart a certain
sense of liberation. They, at least, bear certain witness to the
emotional flight of the composer. An instinct pulses here, an instinct
barbarous and unbridled, if you will, but indubitably exuberant and
vivid. These works have a necessity. These harmonies have color. This
music is patently speech. But the later compositions of Schoenberg
withhold themselves, refuse our contact. They baffle with their
apparently wilful ugliness, and bewilder with their geometric cruelty
and coldness. One gets no intimation that in fashioning them the
composer has liberated himself. On the contrary, they seem icy and
brain-spun. They are like men formed not out of flesh and bone and
blood, but out of glass and wire and concrete. They creak and groan and
grate in their motion. They have all the deathly pallor of abstractions.
And Schoenberg remains a troubling presence as long as one persists in
regarding these particular pieces as the expression of a sensibility, as
long as one persists in seeking in them the lyric flight. For though one
perceives them with the intellect one can scarcely feel them musically.
The conflicting rhythms of the third of the "Three Pieces for
Pianoforte" clash without generating heat, without, after all, really
sounding.
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