Schoenberg as a Performing Artist

Extract

Translator's note. The violinist Rudolf Kolisch was brother-in-law of Arnold Schoenberg. He first played under Schoenberg's direction in the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen. Through the Kolisch Quartet, founded in 1922 on Schoenberg's instigation, and later in America, through the Pro Arte Quartet, he promoted the music of the Second Viennese School. Kolisch's essay was originally published in German as ‘Schönberg als nachschaffender Künstler’ in the issue of Musikblätter des Anbruch commemorating Schoenberg's fiftieth birthday (6 [August–September 1924], 306–7); this is the first English translation. Kolisch's text presents ideas about the rendering of ideas: it is essentially philosophical, and as such, many would argue, untranslatable. There arc no English equivalents for many of its terms. With this proviso, the translation is offered as a guide to the original. In those instances where recurrences of words in the original are not preserved in the translation and where it was felt that important nuances of the original were lost, the German has been added in parentheses. In this regard the words used by Kolisch to denote ‘performance’ are particularly varied: ‘nachschaffen’ (‘to reproduce’); ‘vortragen’ (lit. ‘to carry forward’, hence ‘to hold forth’, ‘to execute’; Kolisch used ‘declamation’ as a synonym for ‘Vortrag’ when referring to the way in which a specific musical passage is conceived and executed); ‘aufführen’ (‘to perform’); ‘reproduzieren’ (the latinate equivalent for the German ‘nachschaffen’); ‘darstellen’ (‘to represent’); ‘Wiedergabe’ (‘rendition’); ‘spielen’ (‘to play’); and ‘musizieren’ (‘to play’, ‘to make music’). Some of the connotations of the word ‘nachschaffen’ from the original title of Kolisch's article are captured by Erwin Stein in the Introduction to his Form and Performance: ‘Music consists of sounds, and the word “form”, applied to music, means the arrangement of sounds.