The Goethe Institute of San Francisco, in collaboration with Lieder Alive!, is sponsoring a lecture-demonstration about Arnold Schoenberg by Axel Ster, assistant professor at the Musikhochschule Lübeck and mezzo-soprano Kindra Scharich. Suggested donations are $15.
Ster's lecture concentrates on the influence of Schoenberg’s music on the expressionist movement of German poetry and art. Scharich will sing "The Song of the Wood Dove" from Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder.
Ster told Music News about the large context he is placing the composer:
In the decade immediately before the outbreak of World War I in arts, literature and music, radical changes can be observed. Progressive ideas and attitudes among artists and musicians were attacking, on purpose, the conservative taste of bourgeois society.“Music should show the truth” postulated Schoenberg. With his opinion that art has to express reality, Schoenberg described a development which could be seen later on all over Europe, and the world. His hometown, Vienna, which represents a place of tradition and history became the hotspot for the avant-garde in Europe and changed overnight to a "city of scandals."
Schoenberg's abolition of tonality was widely discussed in Vienna’s society, on the one hand regarded as the death of music and on the other hand understood as the new way of composing music.