Four days later, Schoenberg tracked them down and, in deep contrition, persuaded Mathilde to come home. She continued to visit her lover in the following months but, shut out by the Schoenberg circle, he fell to pieces. On November 4, after burning his letters, Richard Gerstl committed a particularly violent suicide, hanging and stabbing himself to death in front of a full-length mirror.
Coffer's abundant documentation appears incontrovertible, exploding any possible causative link between Schoenberg's atonality and his marital crisis and leaving everyone who has written about the subject with a blush on their cheeks. Wikipedia is wildly wrong, claiming that Mathilde left Schoenberg "for several months". I, too, am named in footnotes for having made the false link in my (excusably, I hope) naive first book, Discord, published 30 years ago. Dr Coffer has corrected us all.
Other things in the saga now start to make sense in light of his findings. Mathilde, sister of the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky (Alma Mahler called him "the ugliest man in Vienna"), was never an Alma-type femme fatale. Moved by Gerstl's deteriorating state of mind, she may have been as much mother to him as lover, unable to tear herself away from a sick child. Schoenberg, by all accounts a headstrong husband, modified his conduct after the reunion. He remained with Mathilde until her death in 1923.
The moral of this story is that life is not neat. Things don't fall into simple equations: love equals harmony, break-up equals discordance. Schoenberg must have learned that principle from his mentor, Gustav Mahler, who was suffering marital torments of his own. Music is a more sophisticated tool than a mere mirror to domestic life. It did not take an act of adultery to turn Arnold Schoenberg atonal.
Repeat that line before and after concerts, it still won't make any difference. No matter how solid the evidence, how strong the argument, most people will carry on believing that music went atonal because of a sexual misdemeanour. They want to believe that because, like other myths, it's so much easier to hear a fairy tale than to face up to life — and music — in all its complexities. Schoenberg knew that. Now, so do we.
