Carpenter, Alexander

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# Cím Abstract Folyóirat Oldalszám
Schoenberg és Haydn abs.
Schoenberg and Haydn
Alexander Carpenter

This paper explores Arnold Schoenberg's curious ambivalence towards Haydn. Schoenberg recognized Haydn as an important figure in the German serious music tradition, but never closely examined or clearly articulated Haydn's influence and import on his own musical style and ethos, as he did with many other major composers. Although Schoenberg liked and valued Haydn's music, and would reasonably be expected to have listed Haydn—for his rigorous use of germinal motives and innovations in structure and form—among his principle influences and precursors, this paper argues that Schoenberg failed to recognize Haydn as a major influence because he saw Haydn as he saw himself, namely as a somewhat ungainly, paradoxical figure, a "conservative revolutionary" with one foot in the past and one in the future.
This paper considers a number of issues surrounding Schoenberg's view of Haydn. In his voluminous writings on music, Arnold Schoenberg frequently groups Haydn with Mozart, Beethoven, and a handful of other iconic composers, but virtually never affords Haydn the designation "master" or "genius." Haydn is mentioned by Schoenberg far less frequently than Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, and his music appears rarely as examples in Schoenberg's theoretical texts. When Schoenberg does talk about Haydn's music, he describes above all—with tacit negativity—its accessibility (Schoenberg's particular bugbear), counterpoising it with more recondite music, such as Beethoven's, or his own. On the other hand, Schoenberg strongly praises Haydn for his complex, irregular phrasing and for harmonic exploration he finds more adventurous than Schumann's.
Ultimately, Haydn appears in Schoenberg's writings as a figure invested with ambivalence: an irrevocable member of the First Viennese triumvirate, but at the same time he is curiously phantasmal, and is accorded an awkwardly peripheral place in Schoenberg’s version of the canon and his own musical genealogy.

Professor Alexander Carpenter’s (University of Alberta, Edmonton) essay in the original English language is expected to be issued in Studia Musicologica 2010/1-2.
2009., 47. évf. 4. szám 459. - 467.o