In all this, speculations about music played a considerable part, especially during my apprenticeship.
Music has been a dominant theme in my life. My mother was very musical: she played the piano beautifully. It seems that music is a thing that runs in families, though why this should be so is very puzzling indeed. European music seems much too recent an invention to be genetically based, and primitive music is a thing which many very musical people dislike as much as they love the music written since Dunstable, Dufay, Josquin des Prés, Palestrina, Lassus, and Byrd.
However this may be, my mother’s family was “musical”. It may have come down through my maternal grandmother, née Schlesinger. (Bruno Walter was a member of the Schlesinger family. I was not, in fact, an admirer of his, especially after singing under his direction in Bach’s St Matthew Passion.) My grandparents Schiff were both founder-members of the famous Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, which built the beautiful Musikvereinssaal in Vienna. Both my mother’s sisters played the piano very well. The elder sister was a professional pianist, whose three children were also gifted musicians—as were three other cousins of mine on my mother’s side. One of her brothers played, for many years, first violin in an excellent quartet.
As a child I had a few violin lessons, but I did not get far. I had no piano lessons, and even though I liked to play the piano, I played it (and still play it) very badly. When I was seventeen I met Rudolf Serkin. We became friends and throughout my life I have remained an ardent admirer of his incomparable way of playing, completely absorbed in the work he plays, and forgetful of self.
For a time—between the autumn of 1920 and perhaps 1922—I myself thought quite seriously of becoming a musician. But as with so many other things—mathematics, physics, cabinetmaking—I felt in the end that I was not really good enough. I have done a little composing throughout my life, taking pieces of Bach as my Platonic model, but I have never deceived myself about the merits of my compositions.
I was always conservative in the field of music. I felt that Schubert was the last of the really great composers, though I liked and admired Bruckner (especially his last three symphonies) and some Brahms (the Requiem). I disliked Richard Wagner even more as the author of the words of the Ring (words which, frankly, I could only regard as ludicrous) than as a composer, and I also greatly disliked the music of Richard Strauss, even though I fully appreciated that both of them were full-blooded musicians. (Anybody can see at a glance that Der Rosenkavalier was intended to be a Figaro rewritten for the modern age; but leaving aside the fact that this historicist intention is misconceived, how could a musician like Strauss be so unperceptive as to think even for a minute that this intention was realized?) However, under the influence of some of Mahler’s music (an influence that did not last), and of the fact that Mahler had defended Schönberg, I felt that I ought to make a real effort to get to know and to like contemporary music. So I became a member of the Society for Private Performances (“Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen”) presided over by Arnold Schönberg. The Society was dedicated to performing compositions by Schönberg, Alban Berg, Anton von Webern, and other contemporary “advanced” composers like Ravel, Bartók, and Stravinsky. For a time I also became a pupil of Schönberg’s pupil Erwin Stein, but I had scarcely any lessons with him: instead I helped him a little with his rehearsals for the Society’s performances. In this way I got to know some of Schönberg’s music intimately, especially the Kammersymphonie and Pierrot Lunaire. I also went to rehearsals of Webern, especially of his Orchesterstücke, and of Berg.
After about two years I found I had succeeded in getting to know something—about a kind of music which now I liked even less than I had to begin with. So I became, for about a year, a pupil in a very different school of music: the department of Church music in the Vienna Konservatorium (“Academy of Music”). I was admitted on the basis of a fugue I had written. It was at the end of this year that I came to the decision mentioned earlier: that I was not good enough to become a musician. But all this added to my love for “classical” music, and to my boundless admiration for the great composers of old.
The connection between music and my intellectual development in the narrow sense is that out of my interest in music there came at least three ideas which influenced me for life. One was closely connected with my ideas on dogmatic and critical thinking, and with the significance of dogmas and traditions. The second was a distinction between two kinds of musical composition, which I then felt to be immensely important, and for which I appropriated for my own use the terms “objective” and “subjective”. The third was a realization of the intellectual poverty and destructive power of historicist ideas in music and in the arts in general. I shall now discuss these three ideas.57