Were
the entire work of the fullness and lyricism of the last two movements;
were it throughout as impassioned as is the broad gray clamant germinal
theme that commences the work and sweeps it before it, one might easily
include the composer in the company of the masters of musical art.
Unfortunately, the magnificent passages are interspersed with unmusical
ones. It is not only that the work does not quite "conceal art," that it
smells overmuch of the laboratory. It is that portions of it are
scarcely "felt" at all, are only too obviously carpentered. The work is
full of music that addresses itself primarily to professors of theory.
It is full of writing dictated by an arbitrary and intellectual
conception of form. There is a great deal of counterpoint in it that
exists only for the benefit of those who "read" scores, and that
clutters the work. There are whole passages that exist only in obedience
to some scholastic demand for thematic inversions and deformations.
There is an unnecessary deal of marching and countermarching of
instruments, an obsession with certain rhythms that becomes purely
mechanical, an intensification of the contrapuntal pickings and peckings
that annoy so often in the compositions of Brahms. It is Schoenberg the
intellectualist, Schoenberg the Doctor of Music, not Schoenberg the
artist, who obtains here.
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