Revenge is a dish best served on a broken plate: the enfant terrible in Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg

Does an artist create in a vacuum or is there more at stake in a work’s production than art for art’s sake? A great deal has been written about The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky and the atonal works of Arnold Schoenberg, much of which has depicted their works as autonomous objects – objects that embodied an inevitable step in a natural evolution of Western art music. This essay reconsiders these works not as the product of Hegelian evolution, but as social acts of symbolic violence against cultural establishments in Saint Petersburg and Vienna by two remarkably similar personalities. Following an overview of their social and professional development, this essay considers primary sources on Stravinsky and Schoenberg in light of recent psychological research on identity. The system of sign and myth outlined by semiologist Roland Barthes is then brought to bear on Stravinsky’s Rite and Schoenberg’s Erwartung to further analyze conservative versus radical reception of these works. The essay concludes with a discussion of the concepts of cultural capital, symbolic violence and collective misrecognition proposed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as they relate to theoretical and historical writing on Stravinsky and Schoenberg later in the twentieth-century.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Dag Gabrielse