In Arnold Schönberg’s personality and art we honor above all his relentless striving towards the Absolute, a greatness and a strength of will and an ideal of perfection, which is scarcely comprehensable to a purposeless and mindless group of contemporaries. In his wholehearted devotion to this perfection this master of music is most adequately compared to the great masters of the Kabbala. Like these, by “sanctification of The Name,” who were intent to draw the divine into the earthly sphere, so Arnold Schönberg endeavors, through the consecration of a work of art, by means of complete elimination of all unclean, secondary motives, to draw the absolute into the world of music. Thus he achieves in the strong and courageous loneliness of the mystic, devoid of approval and sympathy, a work of the highest spiritual conception, for which a more powerfully minded and finer spiritually developed era will be able to find judgment.

Arnold Schönberg zum 60. Geburtstag, 13. September 1934. Wien 1934, 14