ABSTRACT
Before I came to understand – or, to put it more truthfully and modestly, to divine – Schoenberg, I knew that great music had to come from, and go to, another world, but it never occurred to me that music could encompass three other worlds – God, the remotest thinkable future, and the remotest feelable past. But then, it is of the essence of genius that he not only says for the first time, but also is for the first time. Every genius is the first genius; he destroys all previous conceptions and definitions of “genius”. Thus, while every talent has to put up with wrong criticisms from the ignorant, it is the tragedy of genius alone that he is greeted with irrelevant criticisms from the knowledgeable. I well remember the none too distant time when I used my professional knowledge for the reassuring purpose of rationalizing my acute aversion to – or, as I now realize, my deep-rooted fear of – Schoenberg. I kept these thoughts to myself, not only because of my intellectual and musico-technical respect for Schoenberg’s mind, but above all because I guiltily, if dimly, suspected that something was going on there which I considered basically weak because I was too weak – artistically too neurotic, too past-bound, group-bound – to dare open myself up to it. In sober words, I knew that I didn’t know what I was being knowledgeable about.
