Musikalische Selbstauslegung: eine sichere Quelle historischer Musiktheorie?

To conceptualize music in terms of the historical context of its creation seems to offer a highly authentic theoretical perspective towards understanding musical works. This essay aims to show that, in contrast, composers’ self-interpretations must be considered with enhanced scepticism, even where they seem to provide substantial insights into the relation between compositional technique and theoretical conceptualization. By discussing two prominent examples from early twentieth-century music, the text points at the necessity of a critical assessment of such sources. While Alexander Scriabin supported Leonid Sabanejew’s deduction of his “Prometheus-chord” from the overtone series, a continuous evolution from Romantic harmonic tonality (particularly Chopin) to the complexity of the “Prometheus-chord” can be traced in his stylistic developement. Beside these historical facts, the significance of Sabanejew’s deduction is debatable, for nearly every chord of sufficient complexity can be traced back to the overtone series. Furthermore, Scriabin’s harmony cannot be reduced to one governing principle. In his late works, an interaction of different scales or modes, including whole tone and half tone-whole tone-scales, can be observed. Briefly summarized, Scriabin’s own explanation of the “Prometheus-style” is misleading and reflects the high social status associated with “scientific” justifications in the arts at the beginning of the 20th century, rather than a historically adequate interpretation. A similar scepticism is advisable for a reading of the self-interpretations included in Arnold Schönberg’s Harmonielehre. In one of its final chapters, Schönberg discusses the whole tone scale as a common stylistic element in the music of his time. Although as a composer he used this scale occasionally and its contribution to the destabilization of tonal harmony in his works is obvious, in the Harmonielehre he deduces the scale from an altered dominant chord. This marginalisation of the whole tone scale as an independent structural entity without a clear tonal centre is governed by Schönberg’s intention to delineate his own stylistic development in the years 1907–1911 from the music of Claude Debussy, Alexander Scriabin and other contemporaries and to stress the uniqueness of his abandonment of tonality.