Walter B. Bailey

"It seems to me that a new Mozart is growing up in Vienna," effused the
conservative critic Eduard Hanslick in 1898. ¹ The object of Hanslick's praise
was a twenty-four-year-old, largely self-taught composer named Arnold Schoen-
berg, whose first completed string quartet had recently been premiered through
the auspices of Vienna's Composers' Society. This String Quartet in D Major
was a derivative student work, but its fluidity, grace, and obvious technical
fluency, combined with Schoenberg's youth, evidently brought Mozart to the
reviewer's mind. Like Mozart, Schoenberg had assimilated the dominant musical
trends of his day, and he was not content to stop there. Compelled by his artistic
conscience, Schoenberg explored the most innovative aspects of contemporary
style. As he did so, he found that not all reviewers were as attuned to his style
as Hanslick had been to his early quartet. In 1905, just a few years after the
premiere of the String Quartet in D Major, Viennese critic Paul Stauber called
Schoenberg symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande"not music at all, but an
assassination of sound, a crime against nature, doubly damnable because the
'composer' does not merely upset old notions but also wants to renounce the
natural path of musical development." ² Thus, within the first ten years of his
public career, Schoenberg had experienced favorable comparison with Mozart,
at one extreme, and vilification as a destructive fraud, at the other.

The dichotomy illustrated by these two reviews marked the reception of
Schoenberg and his music throughout his career. He always drew a crowd of
dedicated supporters and an equal number of vehement detractors, and the in-
teraction of the two groups often led to controversy. The most famous example
of this interaction was the notorious "Skandalkonzert" of 31 March 1913, when
a Viennese audience rioted at a performance of works by Schoenberg and his
students. "Hisses, laughter, and applause made a bedlam," wrote a critic in a

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