Schoenberg’s drive theory fused Schopenhauer’s genius cult with a belief in constant musical progress

Evidence

The practice of giving free tuition resulted from the reverence he had for the true artist, the artist who was driven to create: He has the feeling that what he does is being dictated to him. As if he were doing it according to the will of some power or other which is in him, whose laws he does not know.' This concept of the artist as a genius carrying out a will which was concealed from him was a highly traditional one, familiar to the artists of that period primarily from their reading of Schopenhauer. With Schoenberg, however, it was combined with the assumption that musical progress was constant, and the conviction that everything which was produced when the artist went down again and again into the dark realm of the unconscious to bring back unified content and form’ must be justified. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 295

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 295
• XREF: connects to: Schoenberg joined a traditional genius myth to a belief in constant musical progress. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 295; Schoenberg held a Schopenhauer-derived view of the artist as a channel for unconscious will. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 295

Broader Connections

• Schoenberg joined a traditional genius myth to a belief in constant musical progress. #corroborates (0.95) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 295
• Schoenberg held a Schopenhauer-derived view of the artist as a channel for unconscious will. #expands (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 295