Schoenberg and Brussels in the interwar period (1919-1939)

In the end of 1920s and the 1930s Brussels became an important centre of musical modernism. For example, the world premieres of Strawinsky’s Psalm Symphony (1930), Prokofiev’s Le joueur (1929) and Alban Bergs Wozzeck in a French translation (1932), serve as testimonies of the city’s high status comparable to other major European centres of modernist music.
It is therefore curious, it was only around 1938, that the discussion around atonal and dodecaphonic music revived in Brussels and Belgium.

This paper aims to reconstruct the reception history of Schoenberg's work during the interwar period in Brussels (1919-1940) based on the following questions. Which works were played? How did critics reacted? How did Schoenberg's music influence Belgian composers? Was his theory taught in the Belgian conservatoires?

During the interwar period in Brussels (and Belgium), the definition of musical modernism, as formulated by the music press, composers and musicologists, evolved profoundly. During the twenties, Belgian critics divided modernist music into two poles: the Latin and Germanic, with Stravinsky and Schoenberg as the most extreme exponents. Following the cultural elitism of Jean Cocteau in the twenties, most Belgian music critics considered the French culture as superior to the Germanic: the 'decadent' and 'anarchist' Germanic style is giving way to the Latin style (1924). From 1927 on Belgian critics are more nuanced about Germanic pole and Paul Hindemith (from 1927 onwards), Alban Berg (from 1930 onwards) and Bela Bartok (from 1935 onwards) were recognized as the most important modernist composers. Although Schoenberg's name was fairly well known, his music was hardly performed.

This research on modernist music in Brussels between 1919 and 1940, is based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of historical data sources of concert programs, press reviews and letters, collected and centralized in a relational database with ca. 5.000 records.