Schoenberg founded clubs and taught privately to escape profit-driven concert agencies

Evidence

Schoenberg stated in a circular that the composers’ organization was intended to emancipate both artists and the public from the concert agencies and companies, which were trying to exclude everything from their programmes which did not ensure certain financial success, and which had already caused a general waning of interest in music with their invariably identical programmes'. Numerous and frequent first-class performances would make familiarity with the new music possible. … Since too few people who were talented in composition came to the courses which he gave in Vienna from 1904 onwards, Schoenberg gave up this form of public teaching and took really talented pupils for private tuition instead. Among these were Anton Webern and Alban Berg. Berg was self-taught, and Schoenberg gave him tuition free of charge to begin with, until his family's financial position had improved. From 1919 to 1923 he also gave free tuition to the most gifted of his second generation of pupils, Hanns Eisler, another impoverished autodidact. 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, 93

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Schoenberg founded composers’ clubs to bypass concert agencies and their profit-driven programming; Schoenberg’s private teaching produced Webern, Berg, and Eisler through free tuition. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 295; Schoenberg founded composers’ clubs modeled on the Vienna Secession in 1904 and 1918

Broader Connections

• Schoenberg founded composers’ clubs to bypass concert agencies and their profit-driven programming #expands (0.95)
• Schoenberg’s private teaching produced Webern, Berg, and Eisler through free tuition. #expands (0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 295
• Schoenberg founded composers’ clubs modeled on the Vienna Secession in 1904 and 1918 #expands (0.75)