Schoenberg and Redemption

Julie Brown is Associate Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published articles and books on early twentieth-century music, including Bartok and the Grotesque: Studies in Modernity, the Body and Contradiction in Music (2007); her edited collection Western Music and Race (2007) was awarded the American Musicological Society's Ruth A. Solie Award (2008). She also publishes on screen music, with an increasing specialism in the sonic dimension of early film exhibition: she is contributing editor (with Annette Davison) of The Sounds of the Silents in Britain (2013).

• Introduction; 1. Schoenberg, history, trauma?; 2. Schoenberg as Christ; 3. Otto Weininger, Richard Wagner and musical discourse in turn-of-the-century Vienna; 4. Schoenberg and Wagnerian Deutschtum; 5. Compositional innovation and the redemption of Ahasuerus; 6. Woman and the symbolism of self-redemption; 7. Re-reading Schoenberg's Musical Idea; 8. Coda: changing history into memory; Appendix. 'Every young Jew'.

'This book reopens the subject of Jewish culture in the life and work of the twentieth-century classical composer Arnold Schoenberg … [it] draws on the writings of Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger, providing a welcome reintroduction of his work into musicological research. Above all, the author shows a remarkable ability to negotiate the shifting sands of Schoenberg's thought in an authoritative manner, not an easy task … this stimulating book should be available to all who are interested in European culture …' M. Dineen, Choice