ABSTRACT
In June of 1921, Arnold Schoenberg traveled with his family and a group of his students to the Austrian resort of Mattsee where, freed from the distractions of daily life in Vienna, he planned to spend the summer composing. The vacationers had not been in Mattsee long when Schoenberg received a postcard addressed to “the famous composer A. Schoenberg, unfortunately at present in Mattsee.” The card called his attention to an anti-Semitic screed printed in the local newspaper, and was signed “an Aryan vacationer.” 1 After members of the town council subsequently informed him that the resort was closed to Jews, the composer and his party left Mattsee, finding alternative accommodations at Traunkirchen am Traunsee. 2 Josef Rufer, one of the students who had witnessed the incident at Mattsee, recalled in 1974 an exchange he had with Schoenberg after the relocation to Traunkirchen.
When in the summer of 1921—it was in Traunkirchen on the Traun Lake—I picked him up for our customary evening walk and the conversation turned to his work, he remarked: “Today I have succeeded in something by which I have assured the dominance of German music for the next century.” At that time Schoenberg had finalized and tried out in his compositions his “Method of Composition with Twelve Tones which are related only to One Another.” 3
