Schoenberg's quip

CHRIS FARLEY to PAUL MCCARTNEY: Remember when you were in the Beatles ... you did that album Abbey Road ...  [where] ... the song goes "And in the end the love you take equals to the love you make"?  Remember that?
PAUL MCCARTNEY: Yes.
CHRIS FARLEY: Is that true?
The Chris Farley Show, Saturday Night Live
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A quip is not quite the same as a line of poetry, and I certainly do not intend to be funny by questioning the factual basis of  Arnold Schoenberg's often mentioned quip:

My music is not modern, it is just badly played.

What did Schoenberg have in mind when he spoke of his music as "badly played"?  Technical defects of execution, such as wrong notes, faulty intonation, or poor ensemble?  Unacceptable deviations from clearly stated instructions in the score regarding tempo, dynamics, or phrasing?

This I find hard to believe.  During his lifetime Schoenberg's non-tonal orchestral works were performed by major conductors and top-tier orchestras [1], and his concertos were played by distinguished instrumentalists (Louis Krasner, Eduard Steuermann) who were genuinely inspired by the music of the Second Viennese School.  Would these musicians risk damaging their reputations by agreeing to preform works they did not understand or could not rehearse to the point of assuring technically adequate performances?  And even if orchestral musicians disliked Schoenberg's non-tonal music, would they dare to sabotage performances conducted by such dictatorial figures as Furtwangler or Stokowski?
     Schoenberg's letters to various conductors and instrumentalists contain all sorts of complaints - e.g., that Furtwangler did not program additional performances of Variations for Orchestra Op.31, or that Klemperer did not ask Schoenberg's permission before scheduling a performance of one of his works - but I've never seen a reference to a letter in which Schoenberg - a man whose egomania occasionally bordered on sociopathy - chastised a major conductor or instrumentalist for giving technically inadequate performances of his music.
 
Perhaps Schoenberg felt that performances of his works, even if technically adequate, failed to communicate the music's meaning behind the printed score, so to speak.  If so, Schoenberg's feelings may be of biographical importance, but they certainly do not justify describing technically adequate performances as "badly played".  Schoenberg's authority over his works ended with the published scores.  When it came to performances of his works, Schoenberg was just one of the listeners whose feelings do not automatically entail any objective defects or merits of a performance.[2]

My guess is that Schoenberg's quip had nothing to do with actual performances of his music.  Rather it was one way in which he employed his often bitter sense of humor to deal with the public's intense and aggressively expressed dislike of his non-tonal works.  I don't know if these works have become more popular with the passage of time, but they certainly no longer provoke outright hostility.  Maybe persistent advocacy by distinguished musicians has convinced the public that Schoenberg was not a musical lunatic, sadist, or charlatan, but an important composer whose music need not appeal to a large audience.

Be that as it may, it is hard to imagine anyone who enjoys the music of Late Romantic composers not being captivated by Schoenberg's Violin Concerto, Op.36 as heard in this 2019 concert performance by Isabelle Faust and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Daniel Harding.  Adding about five minutes to the typical duration of this work, the Faust-Harding performance zooms in on transitions and orchestral details to give them dramatic and structural significance reminiscent of old Furtwangler recordings.  In this interpretation the music indeed is not "modern", but not, pace Schoenberg, because it is played with consummate craft and musicianship.  The performance simply brings out the Late Romantic side of Schoenberg's musical personality, the side which makes his 12-tone orchestral works a stylistically convincing farewell to Late Romanticism.[3]

Of course, this side of Schoenberg's 12-tone music can be downplayed, but I think that doing so may only make the music sound stylistically amorphous.  This is not a negative value judgment because I keep returning to just this kind of anti-romantic concert performance of  Schoenberg's Violin Concerto by Christian Tetzlaff  and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski.  Fast and coolly phrased, this performance keeps transitions and orchestral details at a sufficient distance to focus on the structural arc of each movement.  Despite Tetzlaff's gorgeously rich tone, the motifs in the outer movements sound more pugnacious than dramatic, and the chilly central Andante leaves a slightly bitter aftertaste.  To me, the music in this performance sounds neither "modern" nor "late romantic", but strangely elusive with respect to its stylistic commitments.

It is utterly pointless to speculate which of these two performances Schoenberg would have disliked less.  (What I know about the man's character tells me he was rarely, if ever, happy about anything.)  But since it costs nothing to venture a meaningless guess, I think Schoenberg would have preferred the Faust-Harding performance for its more emphatic musical communication.  He might have even described the Tetzlaff-Jurowski performance as "badly played".  I, however, find both performances equally attractive, not the least because they prove that Schoenberg's concerto - like all good music - has more layers of meaning than can be revealed by any one interpretation.

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1.  The list of conductors includes Wilhelm Furtwangler, Otto Klemperer, Karl Muck, Leopold Stokowski, Henry Wood, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and Hans Rosbaud. The list of orchestras includes the Berlin Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Boston Symphony, the NBC Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic.

2.  Beethoven, for example, dismissively described Mozart's piano playing as "choppy", and he must have played Mozart's D-minor piano concerto (K.466) very differently from the way it was played by Mozart.  (Beethoven's cadenzas composed for that concerto already suggest this much.)  Had Mozart lived long enough, he might have disliked hearing his music subjected to Beethoven's overblown rhetoric, but I doubt Mozart's feelings would have convinced Beethoven's contemporaries (or today's music-lovers) that the latter's performances were "badly played".

3.  Or so they sound to me.  Superimposing 12-tone compositional techniques on entirely traditional conceptions of musical form and intelligibility does not make Schoenberg's music any more modern than putting tires and shock absorbers on a horse wagon makes it an automobile.  The music is still held together by prominent motifs which mimic traditional themes and whose recurrence in fragmented or otherwise manipulated form mimics traditional development procedures.  With dramatic cadenzas, dynamically underlined finales, and patently 19th century rhythms, orchestration, and rhetoric, this music is more likely to be heard as Brahms-with-wrong-notes than as a modernist challenge to tradition on a par with, say, Edgar Varese's works from the 1920s.