Schoenberg's Sheen

[Karl Henning]

These notes are Robert Craft's (and the composer's own) from the booklet for Vol. VI of the original Koch series:

Transfigured Night for String Orchestra (1943 arr.) [Robt Craft]

The string-sextet original of this most widely known of Schoenberg's creations was completed on the first day of December 1899.  It was first performed in Vienna on March 18, 1902 by the Rosè Quartet, augmented by a violist and cellist from the Vienna Philharmonic.  Fifteen years later the composer transcribed the music for string orchestra, with contrabass.  The 1943 revision of this 1917 score incorporates many improvements, such as the addition pf metronome marks, which seemed to indicate that brisker tempos were desired than those at which the piece was customarily performed.  The full string ensemble provided opportunities to exploit contrasts of volume and colors far beyond the possibilities of the solo sextet, as well as to revert, in one passage, to the original combination, which sounds to advantage in the context of the full string orchestra.  Other small combinations provide relief and contrast as well, such as the solo octet at bar 162, and the solo nonet at bar 165 (together with the full second-violin section).  Several times, too, the solo violin is accompanied by the full string orchestra, in concerto style.  The dynamic ranges are obviously much greater in the full string than in the solo ensemble, and the individual lines in the densely polyphonic music attain more salience.  Dynamics, articulations, and tempi – retards and accelerations – are readjusted in the 1943 score, and in a few places, bars 14, 16, 102-103, 119-130, and 161-166, the contrabass doubling has been eliminated.  The most astonishing effect in the full string version occurs at bars 133-134, where the basses, playing tremolando fortissimo, sound like kettledrums.

Transfigured Night was the first opus by Schoenberg to enter the standard repertory.  In April 1942, choreographed by Anthony Tudor, it became a popular ballet under the title Pillar of Fire.

Program Notes by the Composer (1950)

At the end of the nineteenth century the leading representatives of the Zeitgeist in lyric poetry were Detlev von Liliencron, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, and Richard Dehmel.  In music, by contrast, many young composers in the aftermath of Brahms's death followed the model of Richard Strauss and composed program music.  This explains the origins of Transfigured Night:  it is an example of program music designed to depict and express Richard Dehmel's poem, which may be summarized as follows:

While walking through a park one clear, cold moonlit night, a woman, in a dramatic outburst, tells a man of a tragedy.  She had married someone she did not love, and was unhappy and lonely in this marriage.  She remained faithful, however, and having obeyed her maternal instinct, is now carrying a child by another man, whom she does not love.  She had even considered that in fulfilling her duty towards the demands of Nature she had acted in a praiseworthy fashion.  The musical motif expressing the Woman's feelings of guilt and self-recrimination is elaborated in a passage that builds to a climax.  Filled with despair, she now walks beside the man she loves and fears that his judgment will destroy her utterly.  But "a man's voice" speaks, a man who magnanimity is as sublime as his love.  With that, the first half of the work comes to an end on E-flat minor, of which only the B-flat remains as a pedal point, forming a transition and providing a link with its most extreme opposite, the key of D major.  Harmonics ornamented with muted ascending scales evoke the beauty of the moonlight, and a subsidiary theme is introduced over an iridescent accompaniment, a theme that soon develops into a duet between violins and cellos.  This section reflects the mood of the man, whose love, in harmony with the glitter and gleam of Nature, is capable of denying the tragic situation:  "May the child you've conceived not burden your soul."  After the duet has reached a climax, it is combined with a new theme by means of a transitional passage.  Its melody expresses the warmth of love, that "glow of inmost warmth" that passes "from you to me, and from me to you," and is followed by the return of earlier themes that are repeated and reworked.  Finally, this leads into yet another new theme reflecting the man's dignified resolve:  his warmth "will transfigure the stranger's child, and you'll bear me that child, as if begot by me."  A crescendo leads to a climax and a repetition of the man's theme from the beginning of the second part.  A long coda brings the work to an end.  Its material draws on themes from the preceding parts.  All are reworked, as though to glorify the wonders of Nature, which have transformed this night of tragedy into a transfigured night.

My piece may perhaps have differed from other illustrative works for the reason that it does not describe a particular action or drama but is limited to depicting Nature and expressing human feelings.  It would appear that, as a result of this stance, my piece acquired qualities that satisfy listeners even if they do not know what is being described;  in other words, it offers the possibility of being judged as "pure" music.  For that reason, it may be possible to overlook the poem, though many aspects of it deserve recognition on account of its highly poetical description of the feelings that are aroused by the beauty of Nature and on account of its remarkable moral attitude in its treatment of a distressingly difficult problem.

[Cato]

Over six months since someone has written here specifically about Arnold?!

So eine Schande!

Yesterday I came across a Celibidache concert from 1974 with the Variations for Orchestra!  "Celi" was conducting a group called the Swiss Festival Orchestra.  Some of the comments show that people were unable to believe that Celibidache was actually the conductor.

https://www.youtube.com/v/2PUT1dLHDag

[Cato]

Over six months since someone has written here specifically about Arnold?!

So eine Schande!

Yesterday I came across a Celibidache concert from 1974 with the Variations for Orchestra!  "Celi" was conducting a group called the Swiss Festival Orchestra.  Some of the comments show that people were unable to believe that Celibidache was actually the conductor.

https://www.youtube.com/v/2PUT1dLHDag

I forgot to mention: the work is taken at a pretty good speed! 

[Karl Henning]

I am looking forward to mashing this link shortly!

[Cato]

My novel-in-progress has a section where the main character, a mediocre man desperately striving to stay that way, attends a concert (under very strange circumstances) with Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande.

I thought the description of the man's reaction might be of interest: he tried to become acquainted with the work through a recording, but gave up after the first 5 minutes or so.

(The man writes of this after his metamorphosis out of mediocrity.)

My eyes skimmed through the notes for the Schoenberg work.  They told me basically the same thing that the booklet for the recording had related: the music described the story of two brothers in love with the same woman.  The older brother kills the younger one, and causes the strange girl Melisande to die of sorrow.  Instead of a three-hour opera with all kinds of operatic bansheeing, Schoenberg had decided on a forty-minute tone-poem with no singing at all.  Obviously a great improvement over that opera idea!  Schoenberg, according to the notes, "meticulously set about to describe the three characters, and is especially successful in evoking the mysterious Melisande, who seems to have been doomed to cause fratricide and ruin by her inability to reveal anything about herself."  The author went on to claim that the work is also a symphony, with the four parts one expects in such a work, and that one can listen to it on that basis without knowing the story which inspired the composer.

And so the conductor reappeared, and wiped his hands and forehead with a cloth, as if he were already highly nervous about what he was about to unleash.  Finally the dark music began, and again my ears heard something quite different from the recording!  The musical lines were clear and meshed into sounds of a doomed future, rather than swampiness.  After I thought the orchestra was about to explode, everything subsided, and then, after some lovely sounding music, everything turned black, and with a short, increasingly portentous amount of threat-filled growling in the brass, a volcanic violence shook the hall, and I actually felt a chill in my body.  I know, I know: a cliché, but that's actually what I felt!  But afterward, all was calm and lovely again, as if people were dancing and going about their lives with a gigantic, unnoticed monster about to burst upward from the earth beneath them.  In fact, happiness surrounded by the most Cain-filled rage continued throughout the music, with those terrifying, murderous chords coming back in the middle and cracking the rafters at an even louder volume with manic, scurrying horror in the string section.  And then back came the music of the beautiful, mad, and maddening Melisande.  But things again turned manic, if not maniacal, and suddenly the bloody violence returned, this time worse than ever, splattering the audience with the insanity of a killing in a family.  One could almost feel the murderer sinking to his knees in horror after sacrificing the younger brother to the god of erotic jealousy.  Oddly, the music returned a little to the strange opening, and to Melisande's melodies, as if trying to ignore the slaying, as if trying to hide the anguish, the despair, and the incomprehension of a brother killing a brother, as if unable to understand why Melisande gradually started to die.  And yet all of these denials and mysteries nevertheless rose up at the end, refusing to be ignored, and shook a collective fist at the gods.  Then everything dissipated, and what was left?  Silence, complete silence, until the obviously exhausted conductor turned around.  From the balcony I sensed that he was not just physically exhausted.  For he had summoned up music  of a malign, infinite, and insoluble riddle mocking our incomprehension of Life and its enigmas of emotion and thought.

[Cato]

Are any members in Scotland or England (or Wales) planning on going to hear Schoenberg's Gurrelieder ?

Tickets are still available!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/e9nzc8

[Karl Henning]

Are any members in Scotland or England (or Wales) planning on going to hear Schoenberg's Gurrelieder ?

Tickets are still available!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/events/e9nzc8

Nice!

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

[Rons_talking]

Over six months since someone has written here specifically about Arnold?!

So eine Schande!

Yesterday I came across a Celibidache concert from 1974 with the Variations for Orchestra!  "Celi" was conducting a group called the Swiss Festival Orchestra.  Some of the comments show that people were unable to believe that Celibidache was actually the conductor.

https://www.youtube.com/v/2PUT1dLHDag

This work has always been one of my top three Schoenberg works (the recording seems a bit tentitive) and Variations helped make me a "modern " music monster, learning music history and theory in reverse order.  I wish I could hear this piece live...

[Cato]

This work has always been one of my top three Schoenberg works (the recording seems a bit tentative) and Variations helped make me a "modern " music monster, learning music history and theory in reverse order.  I wish I could hear this piece live...

Which performance of Pelleas do you have?

I came across this comment today in a Wall Street Journal review for a new book called Why We Love Music by a certain John Powell:

Mr. Powell's democratic, scientific approach presumes that all music has an equal claim on human affection, that no musical tradition can claim primacy or innate superiority. If so, "posh" classical music fans can no longer look down their noses at pop. In that light, I was perplexed that Mr. Powell had such unkind things to say about some of the tougher kinds of modern music, such as the serial works of Arnold Schoenberg, in which all 12 notes of the Western scale are used one by one in a rigid sequence. Strict serialism, he tells us, is "bonkers," a "musical backwater" of work that sounds "pretty much as if it had been composed by a carthorse—although perhaps I'm being a bit harsh on carthorses."

After inviting us to expand our tastes, to explore new music, not just what we liked as teenagers, it's odd that Mr. Powell's curiosity and openness has such limits. Even in his discussion of the powers of film music, he doesn't seem to notice how effective "difficult" modern music is in many dramatic contexts.

See:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-adele-makes-us-cry-1467151364

[ritter]

...Strict serialism, he tells us, is "bonkers," a "musical backwater" of work that sounds "pretty much as if it had been composed by a carthorse—although perhaps I'm being a bit harsh on carthorses."

Human stupidity knows no limits...

[Karl Henning]

Human stupidity knows no limits...

Glad you're finding no fault in the carthorses! 

[Karl Henning]

Strict serialism, he tells us, is "bonkers," a "musical backwater" of work that sounds "pretty much as if it had been composed by a carthorse—although perhaps I'm being a bit harsh on carthorses."

But it would be so, so wrong for anyone to make such snide comments about pop music!

[Mirror Image]

I like some 12-tone music, but just because I dislike a good bit of it, doesn't give me the right to mouth off about it. I just don't get it, but those who do get this music, I salute. That's where the line should stop, but, no, you have know-it-all, wiser-than-thou people like this John Powell character telling us we're basically wrong for using our ears and for being able to understand the aesthetic value, the intellectual stimulus and emotional gravitas of 12-tone music.

[Cato]

I like some 12-tone music, but just because I dislike a good bit of it, doesn't give me the right to mouth off about it. I just don't get it, but those who do get this music, I salute. That's where the line should stop, but, no, you have know-it-all, wiser-than-thou people like this John Powell character telling us we're basically wrong for using our ears and for being able to understand the aesthetic value, the intellectual stimulus and emotional gravitas of 12-tone music.

"You are making a mistake!  You really can NOT understand that music!  You really can NOT like that music!  It is impossible!"

 

Strict serialism, he tells us, is "bonkers," a "musical backwater" of work that sounds "pretty much as if it had been composed by a carthorse—although perhaps I'm being a bit harsh on carthorses."

But it would be so, so wrong for anyone to make such snide comments about pop music!

Which "John Powell," according to the reviewer, tries to lionize through a certain musical egalitarianism.

A ditty propped up on 3 or 4 strummed chords may charm us, and may qualify as "good music" in Duke Ellington's famous law that only two kinds of music exist, good and bad.  On the other hand, the ditty cannot be compared to e.g. Spem in Alium by Tallis , which - we must admit - probably does not appeal to as many ears as the lollipop la-la.

I suspect that, to many such ears, the Spem in Alium might sound as if a carthorse had composed it!  0:)

[Mirror Image]

"You are making a mistake!  You really can NOT understand that music!  You really can NOT like that music!  It is impossible!"

Yeah, I never should have listened to Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra as this started everything! Of course, I blame Berg's Violin Concerto, too!

[Karl Henning]

Well, the Op.16 pieces pre-date serialism, of course.

[Mirror Image]

Well, the Op.16 pieces pre-date serialism, of course.

True, it was written during his free atonality period, but it certainly got under my skin.

[Karl Henning]

That's what great music does!

[bhodges]

From last March, here is Pierrot Lunaire, performed by soprano Hila Baggio and the Israeli Chamber Project. This performance was recorded in Israel, but they also did it in New York, at the Morgan Library, and I thought it was one of the best of the year.

http://www.youtube.com/v/eH7OnSOHBWg

--Bruce

[Karl Henning]

Pelleas und Melisande, Op.5 ... how rich and voluptuous.  And what a magnificent orchestra for it: