For 30 years, bald, parchment-faced, Austrian-born Composer Arnold Schönberg has written music so complicated that only he and a couple of other fellows understand what it is all about. This music, which sounds to the uninitiated not only queer but accidental, has been enjoyed by very few. But it has thrown the world of music into a Kilkenny cat fight. One cat camp maintains that Schönberg's music, like Einstein's theory, sounds queer because it is way over the average man's head; opponents swear that Schönberg is pulling everybody's leg, including his own, and that his miscalled music is a gibberish of wrong notes. Gibberish or no, Arnold Schönberg's music is fearfully difficult to play. The main difficulty is to get all of Schönberg's wrong notes in the right places.
Four years ago Composer Schönberg. having tied the orchestras of two continents in knots, set about composing something still more difficult. When he had finished his new piece, a Violin Concerto, Schönberg announced that it w?as practically unplayable, that, to play it, violinists would have to grow their fourth fingers an inch or two longer. Crowed he: "The concerto is extremely difficult, just as much for the head as for the fingers. . . .
I have created the necessity for an entirely new type of violinist." At last Composer Schönberg seemed satisfied.
Most violinists were content to let him keep his unplayable piece to himself. Not so Louis Krasner. This bald, soft-spoken Boston fiddler had already won sympathetic cheers for fighting his way through a similarly cacophonous, crossword concerto by Schönberg's pupil, Alban Berg. Stung by this new challenge, Krasner sent for Schönberg's piece and started in on it. For thankless months he sawed, plucked and stabbed away at its impossible chords and tuneless, jittery rhythms. "It was six months." said he, "before I began to understand it." But at the end of a year he had mastered this 30-minute-long chaos of caterwauling.
Last week in Philadelphia, Violinist Krasner and white-haired Conductor Leopold Stokowski's Philadelphia Orchestra gave Schönberg's Violin Concerto its first public hearing. While the aged Academy of Music's Friday-afternoon audience sat quietly from force of habit, Louis Krasner fiddled so hard he nearly dropped his bow. The bewildered audience couldn't tell whether all of Schönberg's "unplayable" notes were being played or not. When it was over, the orchestra looked embarrassed, the audience, impressed by an obvious feat of strength and skill, drowned out a few discreet hisses with well-bred applause.*
Fortnight before this public wrestling match, Violinist Krasner had invited Composer Schönberg to hear him play the piece, privately. Schönberg listened with gloomy amazement. Said he: "Now I will have to write a still more difficult concerto."