ABSTRACT

Prior to the late 1940s, few composers outside the Schoenberg circle embraced the principles of twelve-tone composition, the influence of Schoenberg remaining limited to his students for the most part. Two prominent outside figures to take up these principles during this period were the Viennese and Italian composers, Ernst Krenek and Luigi Dallapiccola. The isolation of Schoenberg’s teachings was due largely to economic and political factors, which prevented the dissemination of twelve-tone principles in the interwar period. Worldwide economic depression since about 1930 was in part responsible for the prevention of audience contact with new musical idioms. Furthermore, political censorship in Germany and Russia curtailed the spread of twelvetone composition. In Germany, such music was considered to represent “Jewish Bolshevism,” and in Russia, “bourgeois decadence.” The result was the suppression of Schoenberg’s teachings and compositions. Instead, neotonality and Neoclassical styles came to dominate the international musical scene of the 1930s and early 1940s. These two musical extremes—Neoclassicism and atonal Expressionism—were already in evidence by the mid-1920s. The polarization of these musical developments can be attributed in part to the longstanding political hostilities that burst forth in World War I, since composers from one country often avoided composing in the styles of composers from enemy nations vehemently. Furthermore, opportunities to hear performances of foreign works had disappeared during the war. These political tensions were to increase to new levels in the decade prior to World War II. Thus, many factors contributed to the isolation of Schoenberg’s teachings in the interwar period.