Schönberg und Mozart. Aspekte einer Rezeptionsgeschichte

Schoenberg`s compositional approach included productive references to and complex interaction with tradition. In this regard his relationship with the music of Mozart can be seen as an examplar of his creative and legitimizing engagement with his own cultural predecessors. Schoenberg himself repeatedly stressed Mozart`s importance for his composing and virtually all histories of 20th-century music make at least a reference to the proximity of the "Wiener Schule" to the "Wiener Klassik". By contrast, however, there have been very few scholarly attempts to ground these perceptions in an analysis of the music itself. One important reason for this is the extraordinary stylistic and timbral transformations that overtook music between Mozart`s time and that of Schoenberg. In between lie the the symphonies of Beethoven and Mahler, the string quartets of Schubert and Brahms, as well as Wagner`s operas. Thus, Mozart and Schoenberg`s acoustic frame of reference is necessarily entirely different and, accordingly, one can hardly expect to find precise stylistic correspondences or references with exact quotations, allusions, or textures. Schoenberg himself always stressed that he considered the musical "idea" the essential operative factor in Mozart`s music. According to him, such "ideas" convey by definition abstract compositorial strategies and methods independent of personal or historical characteristics. These abstract strategies thus develop their true potential only through historical transformation. The preceding considerations suggest a methodological approach for this study. It begins with a general overview of those aspects of Viennese musical thought between Mozart and Schoenberg with which Schoenberg would have been familiar (the final chapter returns to this subject through an critical examination of the ideologically fraught term "Wiener Klassik"). This mainly revolves around different aspects of Mozart reception that influenced Schoenberg`s own interpretation. There follows a documentation of Schoenberg`s general view of history and his specific references to and descriptions of Mozart`s music. The study then deals with compositional practice by discussing how Schoenberg himself conveyed his knowledge of Mozart in analyses and how he (and his circle) assessed the Mozart-interpretations of his time. A comparison between of temporal and spatial structure in Mozart and Schoenberg precedes detailed analysis of a number of Schoenberg`s works writtten between the 1920s and 1940s in which Mozart`s effect on Schoenberg`s composing becomes tangible. The result is a historical and cultural study that demonstrates how radically Schoenberg`s thinking was commited to tradition, while at the same time deriving from that commitment crucial elements of the innovative potential of the "Wiener Moderne".