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Xenophilia - Xenophobia

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Watch “My war years - film”

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War-clouds diary

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Arnold Schoenberg, “War-Clouds Diary 1914,” edited, commented, and translated into English by Paul A. Pisk, in Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, vol. IX, no. 1, June 1986, pp. 53–77.

9/24/1914      My “sky vs. battles” World War I entries started, daily with one gap.

 

6/26/1915      My final diary entry. I used words like “pretty/gorgeous, overcast cloudburst,

                     battleclouds/battalions”

9/24/1914      “Repeatedly I notice that ‘golden glitter,’ victory-wind,’ a ‘deep blue sky,’ ‘bloody

                      clouds’ (at sunset) always preceded victorious German events.”

6/27/1915       “8:50 p.m. after sunset the following sword is visible in the sky (cloud

                      formation)”

The Farmer’s Almanac might be the closest and more current example of a similar practice of combining stories and emotions to nature.

I was 42 and had to leave many works and ideas unfinished. An officer even asked me if if I was the “notorious Schoenberg.” This is me in the Austro-Hungarian army (bottom row, second from right). I was enlisted from December 1915-October 1916, then during the fall of 1917.

 

 

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It is perhaps correct that one must be religious in order to compose church music, or in love in order to compose love songs […], but still one must certainly not be wounded in order to portray a wounded person or dying in order to portray a dying person. And so it would certainly be possible to compose a peace hymn without believing in an eternal peace.”

 

 

In May 1928, Schönberg penned an essay (together with Richard Strauss, Julius Bittner and Felix Weingartner) for the “8 o’clock Evening Paper” (“8-Uhr-Abendblatt”) on the theme “Does the world lack a hymn of peace?” (“Fehlt der Welt eine Friedenshymne?”)

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