ABSTRACT
Surprisingly enough, given the extremely hostile reception of the first performance, the Five Orchestral Pieces were performed again in London only 16 months later on 17 January 1914 this time under the baton of Schoenberg himself to a much more positive, even enthusiastic, response from both audience and critics. It is within this context that we must look at the earliest comments about Schoenberg in Britain. Newman, in an article on Schoenberg written in late 1913, discussed Gurrelieder in an attempt to show how the composer's early music was compositionally sound, thereby justifying his later experiments in atonality. In the midst of this crisis, art critics such as Roger Fry and Clive Bell were generating a new critical language to deal with modernism, a language whose formalist critical methodology became integral to the conceptualization and discussion of modernism in English for most of the twentieth century.
