Music: Schonberg's Revenge

If dissonances could kill—and be beamed 3,500 miles—the halls of Berchtesgaden would ring with Adolf Hitler's death yells. Last week the Albert Einstein of music, sad-eyed Composer Arnold Schönberg, took artistic revenue on the man who in 1933 swept him and his cryptic music from the concert halls of the Third Reich. The revenge: a recitation based on the booming rhetoric of Byron's Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, with string orchestra accompaniment by the New York Philharmonic.

Composer Schönberg's music, as usual, sounded to the uninitiated as if the Philharmonic were methodically playing the Chicken...