AUSTRIA
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Introduction
Austria had already
been a cradle of European music-making for over a century
when, at the beginning of the 20th century, it became the
centre of intellectual progress in Europe in all intellectual
and artistic fields, including new music. Vienna had been
the city of Mozart and Beethoven, of Schubert and Schumann,
with Prague of almost equal musical importance, closely tied
to Vienna and Austria at the beginning of the 20th century
due to its position in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the
presence of Brahms (1833-1897), Bruckner (1824-1896) and Mahler
(1860-1911), the focus of German music-making, of dominant
influence on both sides of the Atlantic, had switched on the
death of Wagner to the Austrian capital.
The culmination
of the late-Romantic idiom, large in scale, employing huge
forces, turbulent, eclectic, and in its inspiration and subject
matter turning to the psychological soul-searching of the
new Freudian age, found its locus in Vienna, matched by contemporary
poetry and painting. Mahler and Schoenberg (1874-1951)
in his early works took the parameters of the late-Romantic
idiom, especially the harmonic foundation of traditional tonality,
to their limits, and in doing so in part reconciled the division
that had split the musical world in the latter part of the
19th century, between the hedonistic spirit of Wagner and
the development of the classical tradition, founded on counterpoint
and represented by Brahms. A number of lesser but still potent
composers such as Zemlinsky (1871-1942), Schreker
(1878-1934), the young Korngold (1897-1957), and Karl
Weigl (1881-1949), whose output includes six symphonies and
eight string quartets, continued this luxuriant and psychologically
turbulent idiom. The major German exponent of late-Romanticism,
Richard Strauss (1864-1949), himself became increasingly
influential in, and influenced by, Viennese musical life,
as his major librettist, von Hofmannsthal, was Viennese. He
himself directed the Vienna State Opera from 1919-1924, spending
the Second World War in Austria and becoming an Austrian citizen
in 1947. The more classical tradition of Austro-German composition
was continued and developed by Franz Schmidt (1874-1939),
and the Viennese pleasure in operetta by a number of composers,
notably Franz Lehár (1870-1948), whose major work, Die
lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow, 1905) has sufficient
depth and insight to be an opera rather than an operetta,
but properly belongs to the 19th century in idiom and subject
matter; it remains a staple of the international opera repertoire,
and its main tune (`The Merry Widow Waltz') one of the best
known of all melodies.
The major contribution
of Austria to 20th-century classical music (still resonating
through composition today) was the response to the crisis
of the limits of traditional tonal harmony represented by
Schoenberg and his two main pupils, Berg (1885-1935)
and Webern (1883-1945), who have become collectively
(and rather misleadingly) known as `The Second Viennese School'.
Their initial move was to atonality, abandoning any sense
of key and thus using the entire chromatic scale in the harmonic
palette; at the same time they reverted to smaller forces,
especially chamber forces, a medium hardly touched by Mahler
or Strauss, and to much shorter durations. The absence of
any formal harmonic structure was in part responsible for
the short length of works; the need for formal structures
produced adaptations of Classical forms. The next step, developed
by Schoenberg, was to formalize rules for the use and manipulation
of rows, or melodies, based on all twelve notes of the chromatic
scale (12-note rows - for fuller details, see Schoenberg).
A similar system had been simultaneously and independently
developed by a little known Austrian composer, J.M.Hauer (1883-1959),
who produced 71 opus numbers of 12-tone works, notably the
cantata Wandlungen (1927). Webern concentrated on concise
miniatures using this system, moving towards the serialization
(the systematization) of other parameters besides harmony
(dynamics, rhythm, etc.), fully developed by his followers
in the avant-garde movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Berg eventually
evolved the system to allow suggestions of a tonal base within
the row, in a style that has proved perhaps the most durable.
Berg also used first atonality and then 12-tone methods in
his two operas, within complex and innovatory formal structures,
and these have been the most influential of all 20th-century
operas, propelling the genre firmly into the century.
A number of other
Schoenberg pupils should correctly be included in the `Second
Viennese School', notably Egon Wellesz (1855-1974), whose
large output includes nine symphonies and nine quartets and
some works that returned to tonality; he is better known as
a musicologist and teacher than as a composer. Ernst Krenek
(1900-1992) was also a Schoenberg pupil, but came to fame
with a widely successful opera that incorporated jazz. The
surrealist movement was represented by Max Brand (1896-1980),
whose opera Machinist Hopkins (first performed 1929)
was equally successful; with its machines among the singing
cast and its working-class subject matter, is a powerful work
worth encountering.
The experimentation
that so much of this musical activity represented was cut
short by the rise of the Nazis and their control of Austria
(1938-1945). Most of the major intellectual and artistic figures
fled, including Schoenberg, Krenek, Korngold, Weigl and Zemlinsky
to the United States, and Wellesz to the U.K.. Since the Second
World War Austrian composers have not been nearly so prominent:
von Einem (born 1918), a major opera composer,
has probably been the most widely heard, though more recently
H.K.Gruber (born 1943) has attracted some attention, notably
for his compelling surrealistic Frankenstein! (1976-1977)
for narrator and orchestra, and as one of the first avant-garde
composers to return to tonality.
Austria has, though,
continued as one of the major international venues for music
both new and old, and has been home, if fleetingly, to a number
of other important composers, such as the Hungarian Ligeti.
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra has continued as one of
the two most consistently superb orchestras in the world (the
other being the Berlin Philharmonic), the Vienna State Opera,
revived and revolutionized (1897-1907) by Mahler in collaboration
with the designer Alfred Roller maintains its high standards,
and the Salzburg Festival, long ruled by the Austrian mega-star
conductor Herbert von Karajan (1908-1989), remains one of
the premiere festivals of its kind.
Austrian Music
Information Centre:
Österreichische
Gesellschaft für Musk
1, Hanuschgasse
3
A-1010 Wien
tel: +43 1 512
31 43
fax: +43 1 512
42 99
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BERG
EINEM
KORNGOLD
KRENEK
MAHLER
SCHMIDT
SCHOENBERG
SCHREKER
WEBERN
ZEMLINSKY
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BERG
Alban Maria Johannes
born 9th February
1885 at Vienna
died 24th December
1935 at Vienna
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The name and the
music of Alban Berg has been inextricably linked with those
of his teacher Schoenberg and his fellow pupil Webern.
Of the three, it was Berg who most completely fused the emotional
inheritance of the late Romantic composers - in particular
the emotional if not always the musical legacy of Mahler
- with the new ideas and explorations of Schoenberg. Collectively
the three composers have become known as the Second Viennese
School, a tag that has hindered appreciation of the individuality
of each composer, and of Berg in particular.
Berg produced
a very small number of works of astonishing power and emotional
and technical range, less strictly tied to the minutiae of
systems than his two fellow-composers. Unfortunately, his
name is so circumscribed by 12-tone ideas in the popular imagination
that many have shied away from the discovery of his music
for fear of a dissonance and complexity comparable to that
of Webern. This has been reinforced by the tendency of academics
to treat Berg's music in terms of quasi-mathematical formulae,
to the detriment of the emotional content and in particular
the expressive powers of word-setting that inform his most
powerful works. A couple of works apart (discussed below),
the actuality is quite different. Indeed, much of the type
of sound that Berg created has passed into the common currency
of subsequent mainstream composers. His music provides an
excellent introduction to that later mainstream, as well as
a comfortable initiation into atonal and 12-tone ideas, quite
apart from the intrinsic power of the music itself. It is
the overt emotional content, as opposed to the shift to the
cerebral in Webern's music, that provides an avenue of response
and a link with more familiar traditions for those unused
to or suspicious of such idioms.
His earliest music
consists of a large number of songs, long unpublished but
recently unearthed, that follow the tradition of Schumann
and Brahms. However in 1904 he started studying with Schoenberg,
developing his idiom through the late Romantic German tradition,
and then following his teacher's lead to increasingly atonal
works. The Seven Early Songs (1905-1908, orchestrated
in 1928) still have the feel of a grand outpouring of emotion,
the intensity heightened by a sense of tense restraint, rich
in colour, especially in the version for voice and orchestra.
The influential one movement Piano Sonata op.1 (1907-1908),
a model for later composers making a similar break with tonality,
is built on the transformation of a few seminal ideas. This
concise and fascinating work has a sense of transition, from
the echoes of late Romanticism in the melodic cast and the
feeling of broken chords, to a more astringent, angular idiom
in which the emotional content has become compressed. Any
tonal associations are almost lost apart from clear moments
of restful resolution, like a snake in the process of sloughing
off its skin. The last of the Four Songs op.2 (?1909-1910),
is totally atonal without any key signature, and it was followed
by the original and inventive String Quartet (1910).
Developing concepts initiated in the Piano Sonata,
Berg used themes and ideas without any tonal implications,
but constructed in such a way that they act as points of reference
analogous to traditional tonal development, thus providing
the listener with a clear aural map. Again, these devices
have been subject to countless analyses, but the potential
listener should not be put off by these, informative as they
can be.
Berg's next work
is a masterpiece that remained virtually unknown until given
its first complete performance by the Swiss conductor Ansermet
in 1952. The Fünf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtkartentexten
von Peter Altenberg (1912) for soprano and orchestra,
usually known as the Five Altenberg Songs, have been
described as `aphoristic', a misleading catch-phrase that
has been to the detriment of the wider dissemination of this
song-cycle. The songs are based on Expressionist postcard
texts by Altenberg (which are indeed aphoristic), and Berg
takes the huge apparatus of the Mahlerian orchestral song-cycle
and compresses it into five short songs (whose brevity led
to the aphoristic tag), extending the harmonic ideas into
spare and alienated regions. Quite apart from the multiplicity
of fascinating technical devices that create an extraordinary
cohesion in their web of inter-related ideas, the emotional
intensity and variety of these songs are knife-edged and tortured,
expressing the intense introversion, psychological turmoil,
and alienation of the age. Yet this is overlaid with an extraordinary
sense of the vastness of the nature in which this vision is
placed, augmented by the huge orchestra, simple bright colours
(such as the celesta) at its centre, by the magical and mysterious
ostinato opening (prefiguring more recent musical developments,
with no two patterns the same), by the climatic Mahlerian
outburst in the last song, and by the latent lyricism. In
this song-cycle Berg expressed an aspect of the troubled human
experience, verging on the neurotic and the despairing but
pulling back from the brink, that has come to everyone, if
momentarily. He does so in a fashion that has rarely, if ever,
been exceeded by any other composer. The Five Altenberg
Songs are one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.
Schoenberg was
scathing of the Altenberg Songs, and Berg's response
was to attempt in the Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano,
op.5 (1913) the kind of genuine aphorisms that his teacher
and Webern had explored. The pieces are exceedingly short
(12,9,18, and 20 bars). The technical brilliance is undoubted
(the pieces correspond to a four-movement classical sonata)
but the results are completely sterile, especially when set
alongside Webern's similar works. They are primarily interesting
as a musical example of psychological dependence. Berg's own
musical reaction to this bit of musical masochism was a controlled
explosion of emotional intensity: the Three Orchestral
Pieces (1914-1915, revised 1929). This wonderful work
bridges the sultry turbulence of late-Romanticism and the
asceticism of the new music Webern and Schoenberg were bent
on achieving. With the benefit of hindsight, the Three
Orchestral Pieces are unmistakably a development of the
idiom of late Mahler, most obviously in the use of a ländler
and a march, more covertly in the conjunction of fragmentary
ideas of eclectic emotions swirling around a central core
of progression, in the quick fusion of climax, in the orchestral
colours, in the use of timpani and trilling woodwind phrases.
The development lies in the adoption of the kind of thematic
structures and atonal harmonic idioms Schoenberg and Webern
were putting to different uses, and in the more pointed strands
of isolated instrumental colour. The genesis of thematic material
is contained in the opening `Präludium', to be unravelled
in threads in the subsequent movements. Above all, the impact
is emotional, not intellectual - the passion of the Altenberg
Songs revisited - from the opening, like a hollow groan,
to the sense of strands of resolution that precede the dissonant
close.
The Altenberg
Songs also act as a kind of prelude to the works for which
Berg is now perhaps best known, the operas Wozzeck
(1917-1922) and Lulu (1929-1935). At the heart of these
operas is a similar emotional intensity, combined with the
study of the human psyche on the edge of neurosis, circumscribed
by the dysfunctions of the world around. Wozzeck is
a seminal work, as central to 20th-century opera as Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde had been to the music of the late
19th century. Its place as the first atonal operatic masterpiece
has often been attested, being seen either as a break with
the Romantic tradition of grand opera or as the culmination
of opera itself. Less often remarked is the revolution created
by its plot (though Schoenberg was quick to recognize it),
based on Büchner's incomplete 1837 play (in its turn based
on a true story), which had received its first stage performance
only in 1913. Wozzeck is the first truly proletarian
opera, its main characters coming from the seamy underside
of social life, presented without a trace of sentimentality,
romantic hue, or patronizing. The characters that might traditionally
have been presented as examples of a higher social order -
the Doctor, the Captain - are equally starkly drawn, their
social position doubtful. In this, Wozzeck destroyed
the conventions of large-scale opera, attacked - and continues
to attack - the complacency of opera audiences, demanded their
compassion, and questioned the normality of social order.
Wozzeck, an ordinary private soldier, is naive, trusting,
but entirely human. His gullibility is preyed upon by the
neurotic Captain and by the obsessive Doctor, who performs
experiments on him. His essentially passive nature is incapable
of satisfying the more wanton dreams of his young wife, Marie,
who is wooed by a visiting Drum Major. Goaded on by those
around him, tormented by his bewilderment at the evil world
in which he finds himself and by the inexorable progression
of events, Wozzeck builds up angry passion until he is overwhelmed
by paranoia and murders Marie. The opera ends with the voices
of children, playing with Wozzeck's daughter and running off
to see her dead mother.
Berg was aided
in his setting by the fragmentary nature of the incomplete
play, in which the scenes, and thus the plot, were complete
but untrammelled by any 19th-century linkage. This entirely
suited his musical conception, which again made a break with
operatic tradition. The work is divided into three acts, further
divided to follow the scenes of the play. The five scenes
of Act II are the psychological centrepiece; Act I sets the
background, and Act III expounds the inevitable consequences
of those five scenes. For the musical realization of this
structure, Berg used forms that were associated with abstract
music, and not with opera. The opening five scenes are self-contained
musical units (`character sketches'), including a suite and
a passacaglia. The second act constitutes a five-movement
symphony, and is constructed as such. In Act III each of the
five scenes is an `invention': on a theme, on a sound, on
a rhythm, a tone, and a perpetuum mobile, the interlude being
an invention on a key. Musical motifs and their manipulations
and variations bind this structure together, and each act
ends with a cadence on the same chord. The danger of such
a scheme is that adherence to the formal musical requirements
will override the suitability for the dramatic action. This
Berg brilliantly avoids in an astonishing synthesis of form
and content, the structural elements providing a musical symbolism
for the characterization. His formal innovations have since
been widely emulated.
However, such
technical considerations should not disguise the purely expressive
intent of this powerful opera, as Berg himself was at pains
to point out. Indeed, it is not necessary to be even aware
of them for the work to have extraordinary impact, though
they add layers of depth when one becomes more familiar with
the opera. The atonal language with its varied vocal lines,
from wide leaps to Sprechgesang (half-speech, half-song),
is completely suited to the nature of the psychological torment
of the work, and many who have found such a musical language
otherwise difficult have found it perfectly acceptable when
heard in such a dramatic context. The score abounds in marvellous
moments, when Berg, who generally uses the orchestra on a
chamber scale, matches the musical content to the dramatic
situation: a march, a lullaby, the juxtaposition of innocence
and terrible knowledge at the close. Above all, he avoids
musical judgement, presenting the characters, their good or
their evil sides, for what they are, with compassion and understanding.
Recordings provide a marvellous opportunity to follow and
understand the formal constructs of Wozzeck; but they
can only hint at the emotional impact a good production of
this most important of 20th-century operas can have.
Berg's next work,
the Chamber Concerto (1923-1925) for piano, violin
and 13 wind instruments, is, after the Four Pieces for
Clarinet and Piano, the second odd work in his canon.
Given its dedicatory purpose for the occasion of Schoenberg's
50th birthday, it is tempting to see it as another attempt
to please the master rather than follow his own compositional
instincts. With its abstract formal designs and lean instrumental
textures, it has more than a hint of a neo-classical hue,
overlaid by harmonic procedures that, while using 12-tone
formal techniques, had not yet arrived at a fully organized
system. The results sound curiously stilted for such an emotionally
fluid composer. Berg used the full 12-tone system first in
a song, Schliesse mir die Augen beude (1925; he had
set the same song tonally in 1905), and then, using for the
first movement the same 12-note series as the song, in the
Lyric Suite (1925-1926) for string quartet. However,
Berg does not follow the strict constraints of the 12-tone
technique that were self-imposed by Schoenberg and Webern.
Instead, he evolved a less rigid (but intellectually equally
well-ordered) use of the main elements of 12-tone technique,
better suited to his expressive purpose. For the strict
adherence to the 12-tone rules, while it answered the aesthetic
of Webern, ill-suited the expressive nature of Berg's idiom,
with its roots in a late-Romantic expression and its latent
sense of extra-musical inspiration. The problem (as Schoenberg
himself, as well as many later composers, discovered) was
that while such strict adherence did provide a structural
base for musical expression that removed it from outmoded
Romantic tonal or chromatic formulae, in so doing it imposed
too many constraints to act as a vehicle for the wider expression
Berg was seeking. Berg's solution was create a structural
base largely outside the controls of the 12-tone system. He
used smaller scale integrated structures, usually echoing
classical models, building up a series of these units to create
an overall form (often using symmetry or palindromes): this
is a primary technical break with the Mahlerian late-Romantic
tradition, which had preferred sonata-first movement symphonic
structure. Onto this formal scaffolding he grafted the 12-tone
techniques to extend the harmonic language.
He had used such
a construction with an atonal harmonic language in Wozzeck;
in the six-movement Lyric Suite the 12-tone elements
are used to build the material that is placed within that
structure, and to unify the individual units (Lulu
has similar structural priorities). Thus only the first, third
(less its trio) and the sixth movements are built entirely
on 12-tone principles; the first movement has three 12-note
series, rather than the single one preferred by Schoenberg
(echoing, in the new context, Mahler's use of a number of
principal themes in the first movements of his symphonies).
There are 12-note ideas in the second and fifth movements
that prefigure those of the following movements, and themes
and longer sections are shared by more than one otherwise
autonomous movement. All these give an overall cohesion to
the work, and the return of ideas or material is aurally recognizable;
but the temperamental and structural aesthetic is very different
from that of Webern, where the structural base and the 12-tone
usage are inextricably interwoven. From this crucial difference
stem two of the main trends of post-1945 composition, the
serialists following the lead of Webern, and, as it has turned
out, a larger and more influential number of composers following
Berg in integrating 12-tone elements into languages and structures
that are derived from, or inspired by, other sources.
That the Lyric
Suite has primarily an expressive intent is confirmed
by its secret programme: the basic cell (B-F-A-B flat, in
German H-F-A-B) is based on Berg's own initials and those
of the object of his passion, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, the wife
of an industrialist. It is also an intense and dramatic work,
as if the quartet were together telling some dramatic tale,
and this drama is reflected in the titles of the movement,
each of which has a description (giovale, amoroso, misterioso,
appassionato, delirando, desolato) which themselves describe
the emotional progression. Berg himself suggested that the
changes to the initial 12-tone series that occur through the
work represented a `submission to fate'. It is also a technically
dramatic work, stretching the expressive range of the string
instruments by a plethora of techniques and sonic effects,
most obvious in the fragmentary, hallucinatory effects of
the `Allegro misterioso', with its use of harmonics. In 1928
Berg orchestrated three of the movements (the `Andante amoroso',
the `Allegro misterioso' and the `Adagio appassionato') to
form an orchestral suite. This is probably more often encountered
than the full suite for string quartet; unfortunately it is
usually billed as the Lyric Suite rather than its full
title of Three Pieces from the `Lyric Suite', which
can cause some confusion.
Berg's next vocal
work, Der Wein (1929) for soprano and orchestra, is
an extended dramatic aria to three poems by Baudelaire (in
German), equating wine with its power over world-weariness.
It anticipates some of the concepts used in Lulu, notably
the use of a saxophone and piano in the orchestration. Berg
uses a 12-note row freely, as a source of thematic material
and without following the strict permutations. A connection
with a tonal language is maintained, anticipating the Violin
Concerto, in that the row chosen has in its constituents
the possibility of tonal chordal implications. The work thus
still has its origins in an extension of a late-Romantic idiom,
particularly in the orchestral flow and the flowing vocal
line, with echoes of Mahler in the climaxes and the falling
orchestral swoops. Against these, the angular nature of the
intervals in the vocal line and the juxtaposition of thematic
ideas create a nervous energy and a disassociated, unsettled
atmosphere that takes the work far beyond a purely Romantic
aesthetic; the absence of a closing finality suggests the
insubstantial place at which the musical ambience has arrived.
The opera Lulu
(1925-1935) extends the musical and dramatic world of Wozzeck.
For many years it was given in a truncated two-act form, as
Berg did not finish the orchestration or short sections of
the final act. This was completed by Friedrich Cerha, and
first given in 1979 (Cerha had secretly completed it some
years earlier, but had to wait until the death of Berg's widow
before publishing it). Such is the formal and emotional importance
of that third act that any two-act version is best avoided.
The central theme of the opera, distilled from two controversial
plays by Frank Wedekind, is of the sexual obsession of men,
with the associated themes of power and death. Through the
often lurid scenes weaves the object of that obsession, Lulu,
at one and the same time a victim and an instigator of her
liaisons. Again, Berg makes no moral judgement on her or on
her surroundings, and in modern terms Lulu might be
described as a study of a series of co-dependent relationships.
The entire opera is built in an arch. The first act describes
Lulu's rise, the death of her husband when he discovers her
making love to a painter, her marriage to the painter, his
suicide when he discovers that she has a patron, and her manipulation
of that patron to cast aside his fiancée. The second act is
her triumph, with marriage to her patron, and a bevy of admirers
and lovers of both sexes. She murders her husband and is jailed,
but her Countess lesbian lover takes her place, allowing her
to escape. The third act is her fall. Living with the son
of her murdered patron, she is blackmailed in an attempt to
sell her into white slavery, but again she escapes. In the
final scene she has been reduced to living as a prostitute
in London. She is visited by the Countess, but, offstage,
she is murdered by one of her clients, Jack the Ripper, who
then kills the Countess.
Such a plot could
easily emerge as melodramatic. That it does not is due first
to a host of structural devices that Berg employs, including
an introduction by a circus-master, expressing the nihilism
of this aspect of the human condition, the duplication of
Lulu's three admirers in the opening of the opera by her three
clients at the end (with the same singers, and musical associations),
and a kind of substitute father figure from Lulu's past who
stalks through the work unscathed. Second the depth of characterization
is considerable, complete with the contradictory torments
that such obsessions imply: Berg spins an extraordinary expressive
atmosphere, creating a world in which such crazy behaviour
seems the norm. Again Berg takes advantage of relatively short,
self-contained scenes, that allow a series of snap-shots of
the long time-span of the story. The symmetry of the plot
is emphasized, with a three-minute film designated for the
central point of the opera, showing Lulu's trial and imprisonment,
and its retrograde, her escape from prison. A major change
from the earlier opera is that Berg now employs the 12-tone
system developed since Wozzeck by Schoenberg. Berg's
use of material derived from 12-note series and other core
cells binds the work together by association with ideas and
characters, whether they are recognized as such or subconsciously
assimilated. The actual analysis of that usage has prompted
endless argument and discussion, which although fascinating,
is about as relevant to Lulu as a work of operatic
art as a discussion of the structural stresses and mechanical
physics of the architecture of Chartres is to its purpose
as a cathedral. More important to those who wish to experience
this opera rather than dissect it, is the overall scheme.
Each act has a central musical structure (a sonata-allegro
in Act I, a rondo in Act II, a theme and variations in Act
III), used less rigidly than in Wozzeck, as they are
surrounded and interrupted by other self-contained musical
events. These shorter units hark back to earlier, classical
conceptions: ariettas, canzonettas, duets, interludes, and
the like. The vocal writing is wide-ranging (Berg himself
identified six degrees of vocal style used in the score);
jazz is employed (in the theatre scene) though for purely
dramatic purposes, as a distant backdrop to the foreground
action and music (which is, in the opening to this scene,
extremely lyrical, the orchestral start of the scene and the
more extended vocal writing recalling the Altenberg Songs).
All these devices
serve one single purpose: the realization for expressive ends
of the drama and the characters, of the slice of the human
dilemma, presented in a close marriage of music and word.
Of all the operas yet written, Lulu perhaps comes closest
to the fast interplay of human speech, of dialogue, interruption,
argument. This is partly due to the consummate dialogue of
the libretto, partly to the flexibility of the vocal lines,
again wide-ranging in technique, but most of all to the extraordinary
elasticity of Berg's musical setting. The instrumental language,
kept for the most part to chamber proportions, wraps itself
around the vocal lines like an outer skin, acting as a kind
of musical body-language to our encounter with the characters
and their emotions, pointing up here, colouring there, making
associations there; certain instruments are associated with
particular characters. The genius of Berg's setting is that
these constant fluctuations flow so naturally into each other,
a flow founded on the thematic and formal techniques already
discussed. The ending of the opera, with the Countess crying
out for Lulu, has the musical ambience of, and quotes directly
from, the final Altenberg Song, which itself describes
the emptiness of oblivion. This magnificent opera, more wide-ranging,
clearer, musically more lucid and ultimately more harrowing
than Wozzeck, clearly had autobiographical associations
for Berg. Wedekind's character Alwa is altered by Berg to
a composer (and at one point a quote from the opening of Wozzeck
cements the association), there are connections with the lives
of his own family, and there are echoes of Berg's passion
for Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. The suite of five symphonic pieces
from Lulu (Symphonische Stücke aus der Oper `Lulu',
1934, for soprano and orchestra) is probably more often encountered
than the actual opera. It utilizes the music from the orchestral
interludes (including those from Act III), Lulu's Lied from
Act II, and the Countess' final words from the end of the
opera.
Berg's final completed
work, the Violin Concerto (1935) is subtitled To
The Memory of an Angel, and was written following the
death from polio of the daughter of Mahler's widow and her
second husband, the architect Walter Gropius. Berg incorporates
a quote from the opening of the Bach chorale Es ist genug!
("It is enough!") and a Carpathian folksong.
However, there is also a second, secret autobiographical programme,
contained in the numerology of the bar numbers, in some of
the markings, and in the (unprinted) actual words to the Carpathian
folksong. This programme reflects Berg's first major love
affair, with a servant-woman that led to the birth of his
illegitimate child, and his last, with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin.
Musically, the concerto is founded on a 12-tone row, which
has strong tonal associations, as it unfolds two major and
two minor triads, and at its end the whole-tone scale, while
its penultimate three notes form the motif of the Bach chorale.
The subsequent material interlaces tonal and 12-tone elements,
and much ink has been spilled on the separation of these elements.
However, in essence Berg's harmonic language had arrived at
a position where the synthesis had reached a unity of its
own. It exists in itself, for expressive intent, and the 12-tone
and tonal elements are simply building blocks of that language,
like using a combination of brick and stone in a building.
The strict framework of the overall structure, as in most
of Berg's works, provided him with the base for expressive
and harmonic freedom. The four movements are divided into
two pairs, with the only silent break coming between the second
and third. The internal structures of these movements are
aurally clear, and founded on classical example. Following
the public programme, the first pair of movements portray
Berg's dead young friend, the second (which reverses the traditional
order, putting the slow movement at the end), the tragedy,
death and transfiguration, returning us to the principal philosophical
theme of late-Romanticism. The rocking opening of the concerto,
leading to the first recognition of the Bach chorale, is steeped
in the warmth of affection, and the work progresses through
the development of that mood, a lyrical sense of reminiscence,
echoes of the Viennese ländler, tense threat, and the
chorale-variations final movement, with its feeling of acceptance
and reconciliation. The solo line provides a continuous thread
among these changes of emotional expression, and is not merely
fluid, but has something of the freedom of flight, like a
swallow or a swift spontaneously darting and soaring over
a pond, keeping to the boundaries of its knowledge, buoyed
up by the eddies and gullies and thunderstorms of the orchestral
air in which it moves, eventually gliding in the calm of sunset.
Now that over
half a century has passed since Berg's death, it is becoming
clear that Berg's ties to Schoenberg and Webern existed primarily
on two levels. The first was psychological: a strange triangle
of dominance and submission, with Schoenberg as the tyrannical
father-figure, who seems to have answered some psychological
need in both his pupils. The second, stemming from this, is
the common exploration of certain new techniques, generated
by Schoenberg and developed to their own ends by Berg and
Webern. But, as the experience of the development of music
since then has made clearer, in the crucial area of the musical
results, the actual sounds received by an audience, there
is little other than technical means to link the mature works
of the three composers, and Berg in particular. It is high
time that the music of Berg was divorced from such tight associations;
then a wider audience might begin to appreciate Berg not for
what he is reputed to be, but for what he is: the composer
of some of the most emotionally intense and psychologically
compelling music written in this century, propelled, not dominated,
by a formidable intellect.
There is an International
Alban Berg Society, which has published since 1968 a newsletter
devoted to Berg studies.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- violin concerto;
Chamber Concerto for piano, violin and 13 wind instruments;
Lyric Suite (from suite for string quartet) and Three
Pieces for orch.;
- 4 Pieces
for clarinet and piano; Adagio from Chamber Concerto
for violin, clarinet and piano; string quartet; Lyric Suite
for string quartet
- piano sonata
- Five Symphonic
Pieces from Lulu, Four Altenberg Songs, Three
Fragments from Wozzeck and Der Wein for voice and
orch.; Seven Early Songs (also orchestrated version),
Four Songs, two settings of Schliesse mir die Augen
beide and many early songs for voice and piano
- operas Wozzeck
and Lulu
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
All Berg's mature
output is recommended. For those new to Berg, it is suggested
that they start with the Altenberg Songs, the Three
Pieces for Orchestra, and the Violin Concerto,
and continue with Wozzeck and Lulu. Specialists
may care to note that there is a recording of Webern conducting
the Violin Concerto and the Lyric Suite.
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
T. Adorno Alban
Berg, Vienna, 1978 (revised edition)
D.Jarman The
Music of Alban Berg, London, 1979
W.Reich Alban
Berg: the Man and his Music (Eng.trans.), Vienna, 1957
A short but detailed
survey of Berg's life and works by G.Perle will be found in
The New Grove Second Viennese School, (London 1980)
which includes an extensive bibliography.
───────────────────────────────────────
EINEM
Gottfried von
born 24th January
1918 at Bern (Switzerland)
died 12th
July 1996 at Oberdürnbach
───────────────────────────────────────
Von Einem is best
known as a composer of operas that have enjoyed especial success
in Austria and Germany, and some limited exposure elsewhere.
The most celebrated of these is probably Dantons Tod
op. 6 (Danton's Death, 1944-1946), his first opera,
to a libretto by his teacher Boris Blacher. Based on
the 1835 play by Georg Büchner set in Revolutionary France,
the music of this rather earnest work does not match the interest
of the dramatic libretto. Its colours are dark and monochromatic,
only occasionally relieved by the touch of a contrasting brightness.
Its generally diatonic harmonic language is leavened with
dramatically appropriate dissonances. Musical action is heavily
reliant on rhythmic action, creating rather obvious, two-dimensional
musical events. However, the large choral spectacular of the
second half is theatrically exciting, and the work has had
many passionate advocates since its original success at the
1947 Salzburg Festival. But for more satisfying musical and
psychological settings of Büchner (whose small number of works
have so ideally served the 20th-century aesthetic) readers
are advised to turn first to works by Berg or Wolfgang
Rihm.
Einem's next opera,
Der Prozess op.14 (The Trial, 1950-1952) was
based on Kafka, and its expressionist and jazz elements hark
back to the inter-war German cabaret operas (the subject was
appropriate as he had been jailed by the Gestapo for four
months without explanation). Der Zerrissene
op.31 (The Man Torn by Conflicts, 1961-1964) was a
comedy based on Nestroy, and in contrast to the earlier Expressionist
dramas follows the Viennese Mozart tradition of tuneful delight,
and has more in common with Einem's neo-classical orchestral
works. His fourth opera, Der Besuch der alten Dame
op.35 (The Old Lady's Visit, 1970) is less extreme
in its dark language than the first two, though it still has
the sense of `heightened emotions'. It is based on a play
by one of the most formidable of contemporary German playwrights,
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who himself adapted the play for the
libretto. Its subject is a blistering, black comment on the
universality of materialistic greed. The old woman of the
title, brilliantly characterised (her name, Zachanassian,
is a compound of Zacharoff, Onassis and Gulbenkian), has returned
as a billionairess to her home town, now in deep economic
depression. She had left it penniless and pregnant, and it
turns out that she has been responsible for its current state.
She will give the town a billion if they kill the grocer,
Ill, who was responsible for her original state. The town
(Güllen, Swiss for 'liquid manure') at first refuses, but
eventually works out a judicial sacrificial murder of the
grocer, and the woman leaves. Musically, the opera is not
innovatory, but the drama is effectively drawn together by
short linking orchestral interludes (the first is scored for
percussion alone, and then gradually instruments are added
and percussion withdrawn during the subsequent interludes)
and by harmonic motifs, including one from Bach's St. Matthew
Passion (the disciples' question "Is it I?").
The strength of the opera lies in its close marriage of musical
characterisation and plot; as such it is probably more effective
on stage than on recording (the opening and closing scenes
are set in the railway station, express train included), but
it is a fine example of a mid-century opera with a strong
social message. Of his later operas, Kabale unde Liebe
op.44 (Intrigue and Love, 1975) is based on a 'domestic
tragedy' by Schiller, while Jesu Hochzeit (Jesus'
Wedding, 1979), is a 'mystery opera'.
Of his non-operatic
works, the Piano Concerto No.1 op.20 (1955) turns to
the neo-Romanticism of Rachmaninov for its overall
cast, at least in the piano writing, with a grand solo opening
pitted against spartan orchestration. The contrast of soloist
and orchestra sets up a strange tension, in an alluring work
whose material constantly seems to parody or echo snatches
of famous piano concertos, without being either directly identifiable
or upsetting the generally lyrical flow. The Philadelphia
Symphony op. 28 (1960) is a short work in spite of its
title, and unimpressive in its nondescript neo-classicism.
The lyrical Violin Concerto op.33 (1961-1967) also
has a generally Romantic hue blended into a neo-classical
sense of the forces, with two slower movements framing two
faster ones. The importance of the solo line is underlined
by the long solo cadenza that opens the work, and the spirit
of the dance hovers over much of the concerto (with bongos
set against the solo violin in the third movement), but it
is more interesting in individual moments and in its clear
orchestration than in overall effect, like a novel with some
interesting characterisation but a weak plot.
From 1946 to 1951
von Einem was on the board of the Salzburg Festival (becoming
chairperson of
the Kunstrat, 1954), and from 1960 to 1964 he was director
of the Vienna Festival. He taught at the Vienna Musikhochschule
(1965-1973).
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- 3 unnumbered
symphonies including Philadelphia Symphony and Weiner
Symphony
- concerto for
orch.; 2 piano concertos; violin concerto
- Capriccio,
Meditationen (Meditations), Orchestermusik,
Symphonic Scenes and other works for orch.; Serenade
for double string orchestra
- sonata for solo
violin; violin sonata; 5 string quartets; wind quintet and
other chamber works
- 2 piano sonatinas;
Four Piano Pieces for piano
- 4 lieder cycles
for voice and instruments; 8 lieder cycles for voice and piano
- cantata To
the Posthumous for mezzo soprano, chorus and orch.; Hymn
for alto, choir and orch.; Rosa mystica for baritone
and orch.; Song of Hours for chorus and orch.; Das
Studenlied for chorus
- ballets Glück,
Tod und Traum, Medusa, Pas de Coeur, Prinzessin
Turandot, Rondo vom goldenen Kalb
- operas Der
Besuch der alten Dame, Dantons Tod, Jesu Hochzeit,
Kabale unde Liebe, Der Prozess, Der Zerrissene
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
opera Der Besuch
der alten Dame op. 35 (1970)
opera Dantons
Tod op. 6 (1947)
───────────────────────────────────────
KORNGOLD
Erich Wolfgang
born 29th May
1897 at Brno
died 29th November
1957 at Hollywood
───────────────────────────────────────
Korngold was one
of the most admired of film composers during the heyday of
Hollywood, winning two Academy Awards, and it is for his film
music that he is still best remembered. However, before moving
to the U.S.A. in 1934, he had already had a startling compositional
career first as a child prodigy, and then as a young composer
of late-Romantic, Expressionist operas that attracted attention
world-wide. Korngold was to a certain extent the victim of
fashion, for whereas his early works were considered the height
of modernity, their large-scale, voluptuous idiom was quickly
eclipsed in the 1920s and 1930s by the very different trends
towards jazz-inspired works and neo-classicism. In 1947, after
completing 21 major film scores, he gave up the silver screen
and attempted to regain some of his previous prestige as a
composer for the concert platform. Unfortunately, the Romantic
idiom he then cultivated, heavily influenced by the style
of the Hollywood epic and romantic film music he had himself
helped create, was completely out of touch with developments
in concert music, and old-fashioned even by the standards
of his own early works. He made one return to the studios
in 1955, to work on a film biography of Wagner.
His earliest published
work, the Piano Trio op.1 (1909-1910) is an astonishingly
assured work for a child of twelve, and never suggests the
age of its composer. In idiom it is an harmonically more daring
extension of Brahms, chiefly of historical interest in that
its lyrical, angular themes, with wide leaps, are recognisably
from the same milieu as those of Webern's early chamber
music. The luscious String Sextet op.10 (1917) is again
influenced by Brahms, pleasant and passionate but less remarkable
than the earlier work. However it was Violanta (1916)
that immediately signalled an opera composer of considerable
talents. Korngold had already written a ballet-pantomime Der
Schneeman (1910), and the lengthy one-Act Violanta
was originally given in a double billing with Korngold's Der
Ring des Polykrates (1916). The melodramatic story, set
in Venice in Carnival time during the Renaissance, equates
love and death: the heroine cannot give herself fully to her
husband until the roué who seduced her is murdered. The score
is an amalgam of Wagner and Strauss, with a lyricism
derived from Puccini, although the very opening has
an Impressionist feel that is more French than German. Sensuous,
heady and passionate, its sometimes clumsy transitions betray
Korngold's inexperience. But it has the turbulent passion
of a teenager, and the rich idiom makes it an opera worth
hearing.
None of that inexperience
lingered in Korngold's masterpiece, written when he was 23.
Die tote Stadt (The Dead City, 1920) is built
around a powerful and succinct libretto by Korngold and his
father, based on George Rodenbach's dark Symbolist novel 'Bruges
la Morte'. The story, set in Bruges, the 'city of the dead'
of the title, is very much of its time and influenced by Edgar
Allen Poe. However, its major theme - the excessive love of
widower for his dead wife, to the detriment of his subsequent
life - goes beyond the constraints of the period. The reduction
of the story is dramatic, psychologically interesting, and
completely suited to the medium: the widower Paul woos a lively
young dancer because she looks just like his dead wife. It
also has a considerable and effective theatrical twist, as
Paul murders the replacement (so she, too, will be dead),
only to find her walking in: the entire story has been a mirage,
Paul is cured of his necrofatuation, and the ending is one
of personal reconciliation. This vivid psychological exploration,
seen entirely through the eyes of the hero, is clothed in
a heady score of sumptuous richness, handled with a sure touch
for the dramatic, for atmospheric tone-painting (notably the
marvellous orchestral portrait of the dead city that opens
Act II), and with an understanding of characters in anguish.
The major influence is Strauss, but Korngold often
uses his very large orchestra on a more restrained scale,
with some of the intimacy of Mahler. Unlike Strauss,
he also had an instinct for the big tune in the Italian style
(there are two here, persuasively integrated into the flow
so that they remain a component of the dramatic action). The
vivacity of orchestral imagination is compelling, sometimes
twisting into the grotesque, as in the waltz that ends Act
I. With its concise drama and hedonistic atmosphere, this
remains a major 20th-century opera, in spite of its many detractors.
What prevents any frequent performance are the huge forces
required (including a battery of percussion and keyboard instruments)
and the very high writing for the soloists, which, while expressing
the psychological situations, places great demands on the
cast. However, with its sumptuous writing and clear story,
it is fortunately well suited to listening to on recording.
But by the completion
of his next opera, Das Wunder der Heliane op.20 (1927),
Korngold's late-Romantic idiom was already considered out
of date, while Die Katherin op.28 (1937) was banned
in Austria. Meanwhile, Korngold had scored considerable success
with re-workings of arrangements of operettas, and unfortunately
the spark of music-dramatic genius that had produced Die
tote Stadt was not again rekindled. His major orchestral
work of the period, the Concerto for Piano Left Hand and
Orchestra op.17 (1923), is in the tradition of the big
Romantic virtuoso concerto, and lacking the rich, heady sonorities
of his operatic writing, is of lesser interest.
The best known
of Korngold's works written after he had ceased writing for
films is the rather sickly-sweet Violin Concerto op.35
(1946), an unashamedly Romantic work based on the music of
four of his film scores. The Cello Concerto op.37 (1946)
is taken from the film Deception, where it formed part
of the plot. The four-movement Symphonic Serenade op.39
(1947) is interesting for its very beautiful Brucknerian slow
movement. This pleasant, completely anachronistic, and beautifully
wrought large-scale work is perhaps the best of Korngold's
later music, with a pizzicato scherzo and an energetic purposeful
finale, all without a trace of Hollywood sentimentality. The
Symphony in F-Sharp op.40 (1950) also has Brucknerian
overtones, especially in the slow movement, allied to Hollywood
gesture. It has some arresting moments, but overall little
to say. Of his three string quartets, the String Quartet
No.3 op.34 (1945) rather unsuccessfully incorporates two
film tunes. More interesting is the String Quartet No.1
op.16 (1924), with a patchwork of influences, notably Mahler,
and the rich lushness of the period.
Korngold's importance
to the Hollywood film industry lay in his contribution at
the Warner studios to the establishment of the grand Romantic
style, with `big' tunes, rich orchestration, and vivid colours,
which has remained the Hollywood norm. The first of his 22
scores consisted of arrangements of Mendelssohn; the rest
were original, apart from the late Magic Fire (1955),
which arranges music by Wagner. The best of the music is probably
to be found in the scores for The Sea Hawk (1940) and
Kings Row (1942), both of which will satisfy urges
for a Romantic wallow.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- symphony, sinfonietta
- cello concerto,
piano concerto (for left hand), violin concerto
- Schauspiel
Overture and Theme and Variations for orch.; Symphonic
Serenade for
strings
- violin sonata;
piano trio; 3 string quartets
- 3 piano sonatas
and other works for piano
- Songs of
the Clown, Four Shakespeare Songs; Sonett für
Wein (Sonnet for Vienna) and other songs; Prayer
for tenor, chorus and orch.
- operas Die
Kathrin, Der Ring des Polykrates, Die tote Stadt,
Violanta, Das Wunder der Heliane; musical The
Great Waltz; film operetta Give Us This Night
- incidental music;
22 film scores including The Adventures of Robin Hood,
Anthony Adverse, Captain Blood, Deception, Kings Row, Of
Human Bondage, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The
Sea Hawk and The Sea Wolf
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
film score Kings
Row (1942)
Symphonic Serenade
op.39 (1947)
opera Die tote
Stadt op.12 (1920)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
L.Korngold Erich
Wolfgang Korngold, Vienna, 1967
───────────────────────────────────────
KRENEK
Ernst
born 23rd August
1900 at Vienna
died 23rd December
1992 at Palm Springs (California)
───────────────────────────────────────
Ernst Krenek's
compositional career spanned most of the 20th century, and
so varied was his style, and so large his output, that many
aware of his activities in Vienna of the 1920s and 1930s are
unaware that the same composer continued his compositional
career for five decades after the Second World War in the
U.S.A., where he lived from 1937. His most conspicuous success
remains the opera Jonny spielt auf (1926), but even
that is better known by reputation than by acquaintance.
His early music
represents an attempt to move beyond the late-Romanticism
of contemporary Vienna, without making a major break with
that style (as his contemporaries grouped around Schoenberg
were doing). This led to extending chromaticism into atonality
(notably in the opera Orpheus und Eurydike op.21, 1923,
to a libretto by the famous painter Kokoschka). He then became
influenced by jazz, and it is the works of this period that
are probably of the most immediate interest. Following a period
in Paris, he was influenced by Stravinsky's neo-classicism,
and then in 1933 turned to 12-note methods (one of the first
composers outside Schoenberg's immediate circle to do so),
and he continued to develop a serial style after his move
to the U.S.A.. Throughout, he showed a predilection for polyphonic
writing, and sometimes for two-part structures, which occur
in some of his operas (mostly composed to his own librettos),
and in other works, such as the Trio for Clarinet, Violin
and Piano (1946).
The first phase
of this career is represented by Krenek's first three symphonies,
written in the space of two years. They were an attempt to
develop the form beyond the point at which Mahler had
arrived, extending the chromaticism into atonal areas. The
Symphony No.1 (1921) is a rather uneasy combination
of a late-Romantic impulse, aiming at the large sounds of
a Mahlerian orchestra, more concise orchestration, and motoric
rhythms and ideas. This rather fragmentary sense is heightened
by the structure, one movement divided into nine sections
with diverse material, though the aim is partly achieved in
the large-scale and imposing fugue towards the end. The Symphony
No.2 (1922) is in a more conventional three-movement structure.
The Symphony No.3 includes a dance-like section that
has some of the irony of Mahler with more steely colours.
All these three symphonies have moments of interest, often
of a technical nature, but none of them suggest a particularly
convincing overall idiom or a strong individual character.
The first three string quartets (String Quartet No.1
op.6 1921, String Quartet No.2 op.9 1921, String
Quartet No.3 op.20 1923) inhabit much the same dour world.
They are, however, more interesting than these early symphonies,
the mild atonalism having a genuine bite within the tighter
constraints of the form, and the overall impulse a stronger
drive, influenced by Bartók, especially in the propulsive,
droning, dissonant opening of the third quartet. The rather
diffuse seven-movement String Quartet No.4 op.23 (1923)
is in a lyrical, formal idiom, with shades of neo-classicism.
Krenek himself pointed to the influence of jazz in this work,
but any such influence is not aurally obvious. The fifth movement
has intentional echoes of Spanish music, while its final eighth
movement has remained missing.
The influence
of jazz transformed Krenek's idiom. This was immediately evident
in the fine Symphony for Wind Instruments and Percussion
(1924-1925), his fourth symphony but not numbered as such.
Its jazzy feel, more an integrated influence than an overt
style, leans towards the kind of insistent vertical rigidity
of rhythm that Stravinsky had developed. Distinct colours,
short, apparently inconsequential phrases, and little overlap
of those phrases, give that contemporary Berlin sense of mechanical
marionettes. The following year Krenek completed the opera
Jonny spielt auf (Johnny Strikes Up), to his own libretto,
which catapulted him into international fame, being performed
right across Europe, in the U.S.S.R., and in the U.S.A.. The
story is an ironic satire, in which jazz conquers the world
led by its hero, the high-living black jazz player Jonny.
Its central theme is the freedom of the artist, with the symbolic
contrasts of the jazz player, a virtuoso violinist, a composer,
and a beautiful soprano opera singer among the main characters.
Again the jazz elements are more of an influence on the general
idiom, rather than comprising a genuine jazz opera. The music
combines lyrical opera and a Berlin cabaret jazz (rather than
the more fiery American jazz), which appears when the scene
changes to a bar in a Paris hotel, and then accompanies the
protagonists through the work. The story is a mixture of realism,
fantasy and farce; its significance is that its setting could
only have taken place at the time the opera was written, and
it presented a new view of opera, in contrast to the historical
or mythological plots usually associated with the genre. One
brilliant touch is when the composer, high on a mountain-side
(in an anti-nature message), hears one of his own arias coming
from a radio far down in the valley. Prophetically, the opera
ends with the main characters taking a train to the U.S.A.
Besides being an important historical document, Jonny spielt
auf, though certainly flawed - the combination of idioms
is unconvincing - is also entertaining, with its swift-moving
and skilful story-line, its bursts of light-hearted jazz,
and its moments that look forward to the idiom of music-theatre.
The opera Leben der Orest (The Life of Orestes, 1929)
has a similar jazzy feel.
Just before turning
to 12-tone techniques, Krenek moved away from jazz-inspired
works to a kind of neo-Romanticism, rooted in Schubert, which
included the song cycle Reisebuch aus den Österreichischen
Alpen (Travel Book from the Austrian Alps) op.62 (1935),
modelled on Schubert's Winterreise, and the lovely
Schubertian and mostly tonal String Quartet No.5 op.65
(1930), whose first movement has a song-like intensity and
lyricism, while the second movement is a theme and variations,
and the third (which quotes from Monteverdi) a `Phantasie'
adagio, with at times a strong feel of the blues.
Krenek's use of
12-tone technique was initiated in the opera Karl V
op.73 (Charles V, 1930-1933) which inevitably incurred
the wrath of the authorities when first performed in 1938.
The String Quartet No.6 op.78 (1936) is the most severe
of the 12-tone works; following this period, Krenek's use
of 12-tone techniques is free, often breaking down the rows
into smaller groups, which are themselves used as the basis
for thematic material, regularly introducing ideas not connected
with the original 12-tone idea, either with some suggestion
of a tonal base, or, particularly in later works, in an atonal
harmonic idiom. Often the actual row is hidden, so it is only
infrequently heard. These techniques give an elasticity to
his idiom, making it less severe than some of his later contemporaries
working within a serial framework.
A major work composed
during the war years is the long and austere Lamentatio
Jeremiae Prophetae op.93 (Lamentations of the Prophet
Jeremiah, 1941) for unaccompanied choir. With the influence
of Gregorian chant, a unifying 12-note row, slow-moving textures,
and unrelieved atmosphere of gloom, it is perhaps best left
to specialists who might be interested in some of its anticipations
of later serial and avant-garde choral writing. The String
Quartet No.7 (1944) is in five linked movements, the thematic
material of the opening being developed in later movements,
and using a 12-tone row that is usually divided into smaller
series of notes for development and manipulation. The central
movement is a fugue. The work is not as daunting as such a
description might suggest: the drive is created by the counterpoint,
and the harmonies have a suggestion of a tonal base. The second
movement is an expressive and dark adagio.
Krenek's works
after the Second World War covered a wide range of genre,
and are mostly in his developed, free serial style, with some
exceptions (such as the Piano Concerto No.3, 1946).
Works such as Aus drei mach sieben (From Three Make
Seven, 1961) for orchestra show the fragmentary orchestral
serial style, building up patterns from a succession of note-pointings
by individual instruments or instrumental blocks that is typical
of the serial scores of the time. The avant-garde concepts
of chance were used in Sestina for voice and ten players,
while in some scores elements are left to the performers'
choice, as in the orchestral work that gave Krenek the title
for his autobiography, Horizon Circled (1967), and
there are a number of works with tape. A slightly impish humour
also appeared, and many of these elements are found in Kithauraulos
op.213 (1971), which exists in two versions, one for oboe,
harp and orchestra, and one for oboe, harp and tape (op.213a).
The humour appears in the tape section, with whistling sounds,
bleeps and blops, that comment on the instrumental lines.
His later operas ranged widely - Pallas Athene weint
(1955) comments on the eclipse of Greek democracy, with obvious
parallels, Der goldene Bock op.186 (1963) is an absurdist
treatment of the story of the Argonauts, while Der Zauberspiegel
(1966), written for television, has sci-fi elements, and ranges
from 13th-century China to modern times. There are also a
number of concertante works, of which the Capriccio for
Cello and Orchestra (1955) shows the integration of the
various elements of Krenek's idiom, with a lyrical, conversational
line for the cello, a 12-note structure, brief moments suggesting
a jazz rhythm and concise and clear orchestration. The String
Quartet No.8 op.233 (1980) represented a return to the
medium after an absence of 36 years. In one movement divided
into ten loose sections, it has at its base a 12-tone row,
but this is used only sporadically, material moving away from
it, or being added, before returning to the manipulated row.
The result is a deliberately episodic work, with a variety
of mood, as if the dialogue is regularly taking new directions
before being turned back.
Throughout his
career, Krenek wrote songs and song-cycles, following the
different styles of his output, and his sensitivity to the
medium is often rewarding. However, for those wishing to explore
this multi-faced composer, the Symphony for Wind Instruments
and Percussion and the opera Jonny spielt auf provide
an immediate and attractive introduction to the jazz-influenced
works. But it is the string quartets, covering the whole range
of Krenek's stylistic changes, which provide a perhaps unexpected
overview of his achievement. They are often fascinating in
their technical means (especially in their sense of unity),
and consistently compelling in their musical impact. Even
so, they only hint at the extraordinarily wide compass of
this composer's musical multiple personality, which never
quite seems to achieve a striking musical individuality, but
whose music is consistently interesting.
Krenek was also
active as a writer, critic, poet and playwright. Among his
many books are those on Mahler (with the conductor Bruno Walter),
Ockeghem, and modal counterpoint in the 16th century. Among
his many pupils were Henry Mancini, the big-band arranger
and film-score composer, and the American composer and musicologist
George Perle.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
(selected from very large output)
- 5 numbered symphonies;
symphony for wind instruments and percussion; Little Symphony;
symphony Pallas Athene
- 2 cello concertos;
concerto for harp and small orch.; concerto for organ and
strings; 4 piano concertos; concerto for two pianos and orch.;
concerto for violin, piano and small orch.; Kithauraulos
for oboe, harp and small orchestra (or tape); concertino for
flute, violin, harpsichord or piano and strings; 2 violin
concertos
- Concerto
Grosso; Brazilian Sinfonietta, overture Campo
Marzio, Fivefold Enfoldment, from Three Make Seven, Horizon
Circled, I Wonder as I Wander; Kette, Kreis und Spiegel; Perspectives,
Quaestio temporis, Six Profiles, Statisch und ekstatisch,
Theme and Thirteen Variations, Von Vorn Herein
and other works for orch.; Hexaedron for chamber orch.
- Symphonic
Elegy, Symphonic Piece for strings; Suite for clarinet
and strings
- sonata for solo
viola; viola sonata; 2 sonatas for solo violin; 2 violin sonatas;
trio for clarinet, violin and piano; piano trio; Trio-Fantasy
for piano trio; string trio; 8 string quartets; wind quintet;
Pentagram for wind quintet and many other chamber works
- 7 piano sonatas;
Hurricane Variations and many other works for piano
- organ sonata
and other works for organ; Orga-nastro for organ and
tape; Opus 231 for violin and organ
- many songs and
song cycles, including Reisebuch aus den österreichischen;
Deutsche Messe for chorus and instruments; Feirstage-Kantate
for mezzo, baritone, speaker, chorus and orch.; Kantate
von der Vergängkichkeit for soprano, chorus and piano;
Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae for unaccompanied choir;
and many other choral works
- scenic cantata
Zwingburg
- operas The
Bell Tower, Cefalo e Procri, Der Diktator, Das geheime Königreich,
Der goldene Bock, Karl V, Jonny spielt auf, Leben des Orest,
Orpheus und Eurydike, Pallas Athene weint, Sardakai, Schwergewicht,
Oder Die Ehre der Nation, Der Sprung über den Schatten; chamber
opera What Price Confidence?; television operas Ausgerechnet
und verspielt and Der Zauberspiegel; drama with
music Tarquin
- Quintona
and San Fernando Sequence for tape
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
opera Jonny
spielt auf (1926)
String Quartet
No.1 (1921)
String Quartet
No.2 (1921)
String Quartet
No.3 (1923)
String Quartet
No.5 (1930)
String Quartet
No.6
String Quartet
No.7 (1943-1944)
String Quartet
No.8 (1980)
Symphony for Wind
Instruments and Percussion (1924-1925)
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
E. Krenek Horizons
Circled: Reflections on my Music Berkeley, California,
1974
───────────────────────────────────────
MAHLER
Gustav
born 7th July
1860 at Kalischt (Bohemia)
died 18th May
1911 at Vienna
───────────────────────────────────────
Debussy
and Mahler are the two major figures that span the end of
the 19th century and the start of the 20th, and each had a
profound influence on the subsequent development of 20th-century
music. Debussy's music has been widely heard throughout the
century, but the works of Mahler were little known to a wider
public, as opposed to a few champions, composers and music
specialists, until the 1960s. Since then, aided by the establishment
of recordings in stereo which allowed music-lovers to learn
his music in a medium that illuminated the scale and detail
of his works, Mahler has taken his rightful place as one of
the major composers of any century.
Mahler appears
a colossus, the composer of huge symphonies on a vast scale,
taking the musical inflation of the 19th-century to its limits.
But he was also the composer of myriad details of an intimate
and far from epic nature. It was Mahler's genius to recognize
that a grand scale and chamber-like intimacy were but two
aspects of the same whole, and to reconcile them in his music.
Behind this musical reconciliation lay a temperamental and
artistic aim: the expression in music of the most profound
philosophical questions, humankind's place in nature and the
cosmos, and the contradictory human experiences that illuminate
that place: tragedy, joy, turbulence, redemption. From these
spring the necessity for the grand scale and the involvement
of intimacy. There is also an implied and inherent contradiction,
between the gaiety of the world and its suffering. One method
of coping with such a contradiction is irony, which is a recurring
component in Mahler's work, alongside the beatific vision
and the tormented tragedy. Another implication is religious,
and there is a strong spiritual element in Mahler's music
(most direct in the Symphony No.8), that reflects the
symbolic and spiritual attractions of Catholicism, to which
Mahler converted. He himself stated that he was merely the
vessel through which the music emerged.
Such a philosophical
quest or reflection propels all his music; consequently, his
output embraces only two genres, apart from an early unfinished
piano quintet. The first is that of the song and the song-cycle,
especially the orchestral song-cycle, where the actual words
can impel the musical expression of philosophic content. The
words Mahler chose to set almost always allow an entry into
a wider, more abstract, spiritual experience. Although himself
an opera conductor, he never attempted a stage work (apart
from one early aborted attempt, and the completion of a Weber
opera), for the nature of opera is essentially concerned with
more concrete, direct human interactions (whatever the wider
implications), in contrast to the kind of material Mahler
preferred. The second genre is that of the symphony, which
had been since the time of Haydn the chief musical vehicle
for philosophical comment or abstraction. Moreover, four of
Mahler's ten symphonies use words, one has a vocal format
throughout, and material from Mahler's earlier or contemporaneous
song-cycles continually informs the symphonies. In addition,
Mahler's symphonies all started with programmatic and largely
philosophical conceptions, which remained latent or overt
in the finished works, however far the direct musical realisation
subsequently departed for the original programme. This aspect
of Mahler's symphonies has provoked much discussion, but it
is clear that the generating impulse was invariably extra-musical.
Mahler's later suppression of such programmes, which mainly
exist in early drafts or in letters, was in part a response
to an age which was beginning to frown on such programmatic
music, in part a need to avoid confusion for audiences when
the actual music had developed beyond the original impulse,
and contained only a programmatic essence rather than substance.
Combined with
this impulse is a singular consistency of voice. Although
his idiom developed and expanded in emotional range, every
single Mahler work is instantly recognisable as coming from
his pen and no other, and the hallmarks of his idiom remained
consistent. His main melodic lines are founded on song, whether
in vocal works or in symphonies, and are characterised in
particular by the interval of the falling fourth, and by the
technique of starting a melody with a prefigure of a series
of short rising notes (again, often encompassing a fourth)
before slowing the actual melody down in longer note-values
(a technique derived from Bruckner), creating a sensation
of expectation and then expansion. The progression of the
melody often includes large interval leaps, heightening the
expressive power. His idiom is founded on counterpoint, and
often more than one melody will intertwine and unravel simultaneously.
A second major characteristic is an aural eclecticism, drawing
material from sources that hitherto had not been included
in serious works in such an overt form. Chief among these
are bird-calls and bird-song, created by woodwind; march themes,
often instrumented more like a band than the customary symphonic
orchestral treatment; and the lilting Viennese ländler.
To these are added such devices as the chorale and the funeral
march, but also less expected borrowings, such as echoes of,
or quotations from, Beethoven, submerged into the general
idiom. All these, fully integrated into his own voice, create
a music of association, where the extra-musical associations
elicited by the echoes of the eclectic original material are
transferred, perhaps unconsciously, by the listener to the
context of Mahler's creation. This process emphasises and
reinforces the philosophical content.
It is Mahler's
use of orchestral colour that probably most contributes to
the instant recognition of his music. Far from using his huge
forces en masse, as Wagner and Bruckner had been inclined
to do, Mahler divided them into what amounts to a number of
chamber-sized forces, reserving the full orchestra for moments
of special impact. This division allows a progression of varied
combinations of simple colours (emphasised by his use of the
extreme registers of instruments, often contrasting with each
other), and sudden changes in the texture. It also creates
the sense of intimacy and lucidity for which Mahler was so
often striving. All this has expressive intent, and is furthered
by the addition of instruments not traditionally found in
a symphony orchestra: cowbells, piano, guitar or mandolin,
even the harmonium. These add to the range of colour and texture
available. They also contribute to the eclecticism and association
already created by the use of aural sources outlined above.
Mahler's harmony
remained rooted in the traditional tonal system, but is regularly
on the edge of subversion by extreme chromaticism: he took
tonality to the brink of its elastic limits. A favourite device
is to end a movement in a different key to that in which it
began; although this broke the traditional rules of symphonic
harmonic progression, it was a perfectly logical extension
of the tonal system, creating a goal at which the harmony
aims with an expressive as well as a technical purpose.
The earliest Mahler
work likely to be encountered is the youthful ballad-cantata
Das klagende Lied (1880) for soloists, chorus and orchestra.
The first half tells the tale of a minstrel whose new flute
describes a fratricide; the second, set in a mythical castle,
describes the consequences of that knowledge, as the murderer
is about to marry the queen. Mahler's atmospheric and graphically
effective setting of this Gothic tale bestrides two traditions:
it is permeated by stylistic traits from the late-Romantic
heritage (notably that of Bruckner) while containing many
foretastes of Mahler's own later idiom (notably the use of
off-stage brass). In the period after Das klagende Lied,
the literary impulse behind much of Mahler's work came from
a famous collection of German folk poetry, Das Knaben Wunderhorn
(The Youth's Magic Horn). The texts of this collection
recount and praise the lives of ordinary folk, usually in
simple situational tales, looking back with a certain amount
of nostalgia to former, golden days when lives were simpler.
The dates of Mahler's
earliest settings of this material are uncertain, but the
gentle and ingenuous Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen
(Songs of the Wayfarer, c.1884-1885) for voice and
orchestra or piano, sets four texts by Mahler whose origins
were in the Wunderhorn collection, while direct settings appear
in volumes II and III of Lieder und Gesänge (before
c.1890) for voice and piano. Mahler reached a maturity in
the handling of such material in the thirteen songs that form
Das Knaben Wunderhorn (1892-1901) for soloists and
orchestra, where the colouristic possibilities of the orchestra
expand the range of expression. Mahler resisted any Romantic
temptation to pander to the nostalgic or folksy elements inherent
in the texts. Instead, he sliced to the kernel of the tales,
taking them at their face value, recognizing that the elemental
truths they contained were still valid, and eliciting the
dramatic potential of the situations. His settings are therefore
realistic, matching the emotions, vivid and direct in their
orchestral accompaniment. That orchestration is lucid, preferring
small groups of instruments or solos to the mass use of the
orchestra, giving a chamber-like clarity and swift changes
in the predominant colours. The songs fall into three stylistic
groups: those containing elements of the march (often with
percussion prominent); humorous songs (where Mahler's wit
comes into play); and purely lyrical songs. These stylistic
types were to recur throughout Mahler's works, while the orchestration
of the cycle provided the origins of Mahler's later orchestral
idiom, and the vocal lines the foundation of his later lyrical
melodies. There is also a close connection with the first
four symphonies, as two of the songs are used directly in
those symphonies (one with the words, one without), three
other songs in the symphonies are setting of Wunderhorn texts,
and other movements are clearly inspired by the songs. One
result is that Das Knaben Wunderhorn is usually heard
as a cycle of twelve songs, leaving Urlicht in its
place as the fourth movement of the second symphony. The two
songs of the cycle that were written last probably have a
reverse inspiration, being affected by Mahler's experience
in writing the fifth and sixth symphonies.
Mahler's next
song-cycle is perhaps his most poignant. Kindertotenlieder
(Songs on the Death of Children, 1901-1904) for voice
and orchestra or piano, sets five poems by Rückert describing
the anguished feelings and tragic moments of a parent who
has lost a child. Mahler identifies entirely with these emotions
(his own daughter was to die shortly after he composed the
cycle). The idiom is more sophisticated than that of the earlier
cycles, with the paradoxical effect of a simplified, rarefied
expression. The predominant emotion is of a resigned anguish,
until the angrier, more turbulent last song, although that,
too, ends in a kind of acceptance. The harmonic language is
more chromatic, the counterpoint and the rhythmic effects
more interwoven, the vivid orchestral poster-paint colours
now mixed with more subtle pastels, the passions more intimate
and introvert. Four other Rückert songs provide the texts
for the Rückert-Lieder (1901-1902), similar in both
musical and literary tone.
Kindertotenlieder
was Mahler's last song-cycle, apart from the quasi-symphony
Das Lied von der Erde, discussed below with the symphonies.
He then concentrated entirely on the form of the symphony.
However, it is worth noting that his song-cycles, with their
themes of love and departure, of grief and resignation, with
the ever-present threat of the funeral march but without the
Expressionist angst that infected may of his fellow contemporary
composers, anticipated the moods and themes of a number of
later 20th-century song-cycles. The influence is direct in
the works of Shostakovich and Britten, but also
has a the literary kinship with the many English settings
of A.E.Housman, which expresses moods and emotions similar
to those of the Wunderhorn collection - an ethos perhaps more
properly understood after the experience of the First World
War.
There has long
been discussion as to whether Mahler's symphonies are primarily
abstract (apart from No.8) or primarily programmatic. The
simple reality (as so often in such cases) is that they are
both. The symphonies can be listened to, enjoyed, and admired
purely as abstract music, for their formal construction as
symphonies, and for their solutions to the problems and development
of the form. The use of vocal forces in the first four symphonies
does not detract from this approach, as the vocal lines are
closely integrated into the orchestral writing as part of
the orchestral texture. Equally, they can be enjoyed without
any knowledge of those formal processes, as music of evocation
with programmatic or descriptive content, where some knowledge
of Mahler's original extra-musical conception is useful, but
not essential.
The symphonies
fall into three major groups: the first four symphonies (with
2,3, and 4 known as the `Wunderhorn' symphonies), where the
fourth symphony, with its increased musical command, stands
as a bridge to the second group; the fifth, sixth and seventh
symphonies, which omit vocal forces; and the quasi-symphony
Das Lied von der Erde, the ninth and the incomplete
tenth forming the final group. The eighth symphony stands
on its own, as a kind of shout of triumph, though it has connections
with the preceding group of three symphonies. Moreover, each
group, besides having musical connections or stylistic resemblances,
also has a philosophical unity. The pattern in each group
is (crudely) the struggles of life, the mystery and horror
of death, and the puzzle of the after-life. Each group presents
these seminal questions in a different fashion, reflecting
Mahler's increasing understanding.
The Symphony
No.1 (1886-1888, revised 1893-1896), which has close thematic
links with the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, is
a largely happy work that reflects Mahler's joy in nature.
Sometimes titled `The Titan', Mahler conceived it as having
a Hero, but the impulse of the first movement is a reflection
of the landscape Mahler loved, with a hushed opening of birdcalls,
horn cries and offstage brass, followed by a typically lyrical,
flowing dance that comes, so to speak, with the dawn. The
scherzo has a strong rustic feel, while the marvellous slow
movement, haunted by a late 19th-century sense of the macabre,
introduces irony with a distortion into an eerie funeral march
of the famous round `Frère Jacques'. The more turbulent finale
is the least successful movement. The symphony originally
had five movements, but after the first performance Mahler
withdrew the second movement, and this beautiful but rather
sentimental adagio (known as Blumine) is now sometimes
heard on its own, and very occasionally restored into the
symphony.
The Symphony
No.2 (1888-1894, revised 1903) for soprano, contralto,
chorus and orchestra, expands the scale of musical and philosophical
content. Often subtitled `Resurrection' because of the words
of the final movement (based on Klopstock's Resurrection
Hymn), it opens with an extended funeral march that covers
a wide range of mood (Mahler himself described it as the funeral
of the hero of his first symphony). Built in sonata form,
it is remarkable for the power of its opening, with an emphatic,
broken, rising line from the cellos that bursts onto the silence
at the start of a performance, for its multiplicity of themes
and sub-themes derived from the major ideas, and for the compression
of the development section in what is a long movement. The
progression of the symphony is towards the goal of the final
two (linked) movements: the gentle beauty of the Wunderhorn
song Urlicht in the fourth, and the monumental cry
of the Day of Judgement and the subsequent Resurrection in
the fifth. The intervening movements act as a kind of reflection
on the life that led to this journey, with a lilting Beethovenesque
andante, and a swirling scherzo based (without the words)
on one of the Wunderhorn songs, touched with a satirical humour
and infected with the macabre, like some witches' dance.
The Symphony
No.3 (1893-1896, revised 1906) for contralto, woman's
chorus, boy's chorus, and orchestra, extends the number of
movements to six (Mahler dropped a seventh, later using it
as the finale of the fourth symphony). This is more obviously
a nature symphony, combining pictorial representation with
the emotions roused by the natural world around the composer
- he once called it `A Summer Morning Dream'. In the sonata-form
first movement the range of power is extended, from the driving
force of its opening (and the regular maintenance of a titanic
rhythmic urge throughout the movement) to the strong contrasts
of idea, largely founded on military marches but encompassing
counter-passages of descriptive beauty. The build-up of turbulence
is given more potency towards the end of the development by
the superimposition of themes, creating a series of almost
independent lines. This first movement and the last of the
second symphony are the longest that Mahler wrote, each lasting
half-an-hour. Here this monumental construct is immediately
contrasted by a touching little minuet, classical in feel
and orchestration, that forms the basis of the second movement.
The scherzo also has the general feel of an interlude, until
a final progression to a climactic outburst, like a summer
day leading to a thunderstorm where Mahler explores the atmospheric
possibilities of off-stage brass. The following two movements
are paired: a slow-moving song for contralto (to words by
Nietzsche expressing the eternity of night), and a Wunderhorn
song for the soloists and chorus, expressing heavenly joy,
which has the overtones of a sophisticated choral folk-song.
The finale was the first of Mahler's large-scale adagios,
dominated by string-lines and using the whole of its considerable
span to expand emotionally to the eventual climax of sublime
achievement, rather than triumph. Although the individual
movements contain finer music and a more developed idiom than
those of the second symphony, this is the one Mahler symphony
where the accusation of inflation has some validity, not through
the sheer size but due to the overall disparity of its parts.
The second symphony emerges as more unified, and has generally
been more popular with audiences.
However, it is
the Symphony No.4 (1899-1900, revised 1901-1910) for
soprano and orchestra that remains the most popular of his
symphonies, and which is perhaps the best introduction to
his work in general. Although still 50 minutes long, it is
more concise than all but the first symphony: the movements
are cut to four, the forces are smaller, and the sense of
huge climax is absent. It is also the most radiantly happy
of his symphonies, a more direct, less philosophical evocation
after the terrors and triumphs of the second and the drive
and sublimity of the third. The other-worldly still hovers
at its edge - the Devil's macabre dance in the second movement,
to a violin tuned a whole tone higher, the suggestions of
heavenly joys in the Wunderhorn words of the finale - but
these are subservient to the more direct expression, nature
experienced for what it is rather than for what it might lead
to.
Mahler then embarked
on what amounted to a trilogy of purely instrumental symphonies.
The Symphony No.5 (1901-1902, later revised) again
opens with a funeral march, but it is one of new confidence,
breadth and poise, broken into by the tumultuous and the macabre.
There is a clear grouping into three in the five-movement
layout: the opening two movements, the hinge of the scherzo,
and the adagio introducing the finale. The harmonic progression
of the key of each movement in itself describes a large-scale
modal cadence, justifying the movement from C♯ minor
at the opening to D major at the ending. Throughout, the linear
weave is thicker (this is the most obviously contrapuntal
of Mahler's symphonies). The isolated bird-calls and cries
are absent, or submerged into the general fabric. There are
pre-echoes of Kurt Weill in one treatment of the funeral
march, brass over a dotted rhythm, and in the opening of the
second movement, which itself has a new, self-confident tone
in a little woodwind figure repeated over the main string
melody. The long scherzo, more robust and less tortured than
those of the earlier symphonies, is imbued with the swirl
of the dance. The fourth movement is the famous `adagietto',
often played on its own, but carrying considerably more weight
when heard in context. Scored only for strings and harp, it
is extraordinarily beautiful, and the poignancy of the main
theme, nostalgic and hauntingly regretful, shades of things
past against a limpid background, is all the more marked when
heard after the emphatic ending of the scherzo. That main
melodic line seems to reach into the present in its impassioned
cry, and in doing so leads into the horn call of action that
opens the finale. This cheerful movement (which has thematic
connections with the adagietto) reaffirms the overall tone
of the symphony: the joy present in the kernel of life, even
when, as in the adagietto, that depth of intense feeling is
recalled rather than presently lived. The Symphony No.5
is the most fluent of all Mahler's symphonies, and (perhaps
because audiences have come to expect more tortured expression
from Mahler) is probably paid the least attention apart from
its lovely slow movement.
The Symphony
No.6 (1903-1904, revised 1906) is sometimes subtitled
`The Tragic' (following Mahler's own lead), which describes
its overall mood, the obverse (or perhaps the penalty) of
the more luminous emotions laid out in the fifth. The opening
movement is mostly tense and turbulent, founded on march rhythms,
the complex thematic development derived from two conglomerations
of themes. Mahler specifies a repeat of the exposition, and
that repetition takes on a different hue after the intervening
experience of the martial rhythm on the timpani - a prime
example of Mahler's understanding of the emotional impact
of his technical procedures. The movement attempts a blaze
of glory at its end, but is countered by the wide-ranging,
fragmentary moods of the scherzo (matched by strong differentiation
in the orchestration), from the menace of the march to the
chamber-like grace of the trio, with a suggestion of Wagner's
Ring cycle along the way (Alberich's transformation
music). The sometimes hollow laughter of the scherzo gives
way to another beautiful slow movement, less regretful than
its predecessor, the flow of strings alloyed by woodwind.
The inherent threat of tragedy, lying in wait in the first
three movements, is unleashed in the huge finale. It opens
with an Impressionistic swirl, countered by a theme from the
first movement. Then it moves swiftly through ominous calls,
a funereal miasma in dark orchestral colours, the lift of
a dance, and the sense of a haunted, fog-bound landscape,
and arrives at a sudden explosion, where, to the stroke of
the drum, a small figure from the first movement suddenly
takes on ominous import. From these beginnings the movement,
one of Mahler's finest creations, gains in linear purpose,
passing through strange haunted interludes of distant bells
and horn calls, building in passionate intensity, and eventually
leading to what seems a song of joyful triumph. But that triumph
disintegrates, and the apparently quiet brass close is shattered
by the return of that ominous stroke, carrying the whole weight
of the previous movements on its shoulders. So pictorially
vivid is this movement, with its cowbells, its timpani strokes
of mortality, its snatches of angry percussion, a moment of
Turkish exoticism, its harp swirls, its fanning into passionate
flames, that it is difficult to conceive that this music did
not have a programmatic base. If it did, Mahler did not admit
to it. It should be noted that Mahler made a late revision
to the symphony, cutting the final great stroke and reversing
the order of the middle movements. Both versions may be encountered.
The Symphony
No.7 (1904-1905, later revised) turns the tragedy of its
predecessor into a kind of cynical counter-display. The structure
pairs the outer movements, and then the second and fourth
movements (both nocturnes), with a central scherzo. The first
movement has the grand scale of its predecessor, the haunting
sound of the tenor horn prominent, but also a sense of the
enigmatic, especially in its conclusion. There are moments
within the Mahlerian idiom that recall Bruckner and Strauss,
and at one point an idea that could have come directly from
Sibelius before it dissolves into a quotation from
the sixth symphony that itself returns in the second movement.
After the enigmatic nature of this opening, the symphony slithers
into the first of the nocturnes, a sinuous movement scored
with extraordinary lucidity and economy. It is announced by
a series of disillusioned fanfares, and the subsequent march-like
themes seem to carry the disillusionment of soldiers returning
to the wars, carrying with them the faded recall of dances
behind the lines. The scherzo declares its tone with broken,
disjointed opening rhythms and the raucous extremes and swoops
of the instrumentation. There is a suggestion of more than
mere satire in this movement, with its distortions of the
ländler and the waltz: evil seems to stalk somewhere in the
background, `shadowy' as Mahler instructs in the score. The
second nocturne is still somewhat unsettled, without much
of the stillness of the night that its title might imply,
until the peaceful close. The mandolin makes an unexpected
appearance, and the movement suggests a miniature story of
a love-affair. The large finale combines elements of sonata
and variation form, and includes parodies of a theme from
Wagner's Meistersinger and the waltz from Lehár's The
Merry Widow. There is a parallel in this movement with
Elgar in his more turbulent, triumphant mood, but just
as in Elgar there can be an underlying sense of uncertainty
that undermines any triumphal conviction, so in the finale
to this work. The whole symphony invokes something of the
spirit of Lucifer the fallen angel, hand-in-hand with death,
cynically stalking a corrupt world, but still with many flashes,
often distorted, of the former beauty among the angels. Seen
in this light, the unusual form (often criticised) makes episodic
sense; but of all Mahler's symphonies, this is the one that
most benefits from some knowledge of the symphonies that preceded
and succeeded it, when its strange atmosphere can then be
placed in context.
From this strange
symphonic world Mahler moved to his expression of faith and
praise, the mighty Symphony No.8 (1906-1907). The huge
forces - two sopranos, two contraltos, tenor, baritone, bass,
two large choirs and boys' choir, orchestra and organ - have
led to its name of the `Symphony of a Thousand', though that
is something of an exaggeration, and ensured that every performance
is still a major event. The work is divided into two parts.
The first is a setting of the 9th-century Whitsuntide Vesper
hymn Veni, Creator Spiritus (Come, Holy Ghost),
attributed to Hrabanus Maurus, and acts as a sonata-Allegro
first movement. It is the affirmation of the traditional Catholic
faith in God's love. The second, much longer section, combines
a slow movement, a scherzo, and finale in a setting of the
final scene from Goethe's Faust Part II, which ponders,
in Romantic and humanist fashion, the same contemplation of
that love, finally concluding in affirmation. The first part
is a triumphant, optimistic and astonishing web of vocal strands,
often repeating lines and words out of the linear flow of
the hymn. A section for the soloists near the beginning seems
to invoke the spirit of Beethoven's ninth symphony, dissolved
by a typical rising Mahler string line, and the vocal density
is fleetingly dispelled by short instrumental passages, notably
a magical moment when the chorus fall away like the collapse
of a wave into the rising tension of the orchestra, complete
with a tolling bell. The second part starts entirely orchestrally,
a dark, rocky aural landscape; eventually a half-whispering
chorus, representing anchorites, joins the orchestra. A series
of solo and choral ecstasies of various kinds (some of them
troubled and disturbed) follows, but all point to the climax
of the ending, the sublime and triumphant `mystical choir',
echoing, in Goethe's words, the expression of the hymn that
opened the work. Throughout, Mahler binds the symphony with
a weave of thematic reference and idea, and not the least
achievement of this symphony is the marvellously clear vocal
and choral textures achieved with such massive forces, something
that eluded almost every other late Romantic composer of choral
works. It should also be pointed out that for many of those
who love Mahler's music (this writer included), the symphony
is also problematic in the context of Mahler's complete output.
Magnificent though it is, there is the uncomfortable feeling
of something absent: perhaps it lies in the constant texture
of voices (especially in the bulk of the second part), as
opposed to their appearance in a single movement, that limits
Mahler's mastery of symphonic colour, and lacks the kind of
imagic detail and inspiration that the poetry of the song
cycles supplied. Brian's Gothic Symphony, also
inspired by Goethe and setting a Latin spiritual text, perhaps
better achieves what Mahler would seem to be striving for
(and requires even larger forces).
No such doubts
can be attached to Mahler's next work, Das Lied von der
Erde (The Song of the Earth, 1908-1909) for tenor,
contralto or baritone, and orchestra. Its six movements are
symphonic in construction, and the only reason that Mahler
did not call it his ninth symphony was his superstition over
writing nine symphonies (the number that Beethoven completed).
It forms, with the ninth and the incomplete tenth, the final
trilogy of symphonies, coloured by the knowledge, learnt just
after the completion of the eighth symphony, that he had a
fatal heart disease. A setting of German versions by Hans
Bethge of Chinese poems whose main theme is the quick passing
of youth and happiness, it is a passionate combination of
regretful resignation and an insistent joy and celebration
of the beauties of nature and life. Every moment is steeped
in the fierce depth of Mahler's feeling, and this is one of
the most powerfully emotive works of any period. A major theme
in the violins near the opening provides unification throughout
the work: its exotic (pentatonic) hue has a suggestion of
the oriental, and it is later found in various guises, including
its inversion (upside-down) and retrograde (backwards) forms.
The mixture of
the sorrowful and the affirmative opens the four movement
Symphony No.9 (1908-1909), the most breathtakingly
inspired of all Mahler's symphonic movements, completely immured
in the beauty of nature, as if Mahler was surveying all that
he loved around him. Even when impending death seems to break
in with ominous timpani strokes, Mahler insists on leading
it out into a more glorious light. Throughout there is an
underlying pulse, mostly given to the lower strings, that
suggests not only the pulse of Mahler's heart but the pulse
of time itself. This movement has rightly been compared in
its depth of illumination to Beethoven's late works. The second
movement is a dance, an earthy ländler that gradually whirls,
through a waltz, into darker and more obscure harmonic regions,
distorting tonality and swinging the mood from rustic pleasure
into something far more disturbing, ending in a terrifying,
empty frenzy before a close of faded dance echoes. The rondo-burlesque
third movement is one of the angriest Mahler wrote, combined
with moments of gallows humour, sometimes bitingly satirical,
sometimes tongue-in-cheek. In the middle of this comes a beautifully
sublime passage, countering the anger, until the raucous,
somewhat tempered, has the last word. All this is assuaged
by the last movement, a luminous redemption whose main theme
recalls the opening of Beethoven's Les Adieux piano
sonata. A vein of uncertainty still weaves half-submerged
through this movement, until the visionary final pages, ranging
from a climax of assurance to the sublime.
Mahler's idiom
continued to evolve through this symphony, the polyphonic
textures getting more complex and convoluted, and the harmonies
at times more dissonant, both impelled by the expressive intent,
but both heralding later 20th-century developments. In the
Symphony No.10 (1910) the exploration goes still further,
into regions of extreme chromaticism that stand on the very
threshold of the collapse of traditional harmony. For it would
be quite wrong to see the ninth symphony as Mahler's swan
song. Although the Symphony No.10 remained unfinished
apart from the adagio (often played on its own), enough was
completed to give a comprehensive idea of the whole work.
There have been a number of attempts to complete the symphony
(largely the orchestration), but one in particular stands
out, the `realization' (and that it what it is) by Deryck
Cooke (1960-1964, revised 1976). So successful is this, that
his version now stands alongside the other symphonies to complete
the canon. Those who have objected to the very idea seem more
concerned with propriety than music, for the experience of
the tenth symphony immediately places the ninth in its proper
context as the central work in a trilogy, whose overall trend
only becomes apparent through the last work of the triptych.
The symphony returns to a five-movement structure, with an
opening adagio whose first bars, for strings alone, probe
and wander until reaching the adagio proper, which in a less
sublime fashion picks up the mood of the end of the ninth
symphony. Its inexorable build-up towards a climax is shattered
by the unexpected arrival of that climax, bursting in in a
different key, allowing the movement finally to embrace the
sublimity that had marked the end of its predecessor. The
second movement is remarkable chiefly for its abruptly altering
tempi, the third (`Purgatorio') for its clashes of key and
its tortured, dance-like feel. The fourth movement makes allusions
to the previous movements, Das Lied von der Erde and
the ninth symphony, as well as quoting one of the themes of
Dvořák's ninth symphony (`The New World`), which cannot
be a coincidence - Mahler wrote this symphony in New York,
and the ending of this movement was inspired by a funeral
seen from his New York hotel; one wonders whether the complete
movement describes his feelings and experience in the U.S.A..
This movement is also turbulent, but multi-faceted, and that
funeral memory is evoked by a march, ending with a great drum
stroke. That sound of the drum dominates the last movement,
starting it and returning in the middle. This finale is the
most remarkable section of the symphony, ending with a sense
of joy and a kind of bliss absent in the earlier works: it
is this conclusion, full of more than just acceptance, that
puts the ninth symphony in a different perspective.
It is undeniable
that not everyone responds to Mahler's idiom, to its large
scale and deep and extensive emotions: but few remain indifferent
to his music. His impact on succeeding composers has been
in three disparate directions. First, he stood behind the
movement of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg
from the late-Romantic idiom into completely new harmonic
directions, his own solutions to the breaking-point of tonality
acting as the springboard for their developments. Second,
a number of composers, notably Zemlinsky, continued
the large-scale late-Romantic aural landscapes Mahler had
epitomized. Third, he had a direct influence on a number of
subsequent composers who attempted to continue the symphonic
idiom and the humanist ethic without recourse to the new 12-tone
harmonies, or the dense late-Romantic Expressionist idiom.
Most notable among these are Shostakovich and Pettersson.
His music has also haunted a number of later scores, notably
works by Berio, Del Tredici and Schnebel.
Mahler was a distinguished
conductor, considered by many to be the greatest of his times,
and his period as director of the Vienna Court Opera (1897-1907)
revolutionized opera in the city, and is still considered
a golden period of Viennese opera presentation. He had earlier
worked at opera houses in Prague (1885-1886), Leipzig (1886-1888),
Budapest (1888-1891) and Hamburg (1891-1897), and subsequently
became conductor of the New York Metropolitan Opera (1908-1910)
and the New York Philharmonic (1909-1911).
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- 10 symphonies
(No.2 Resurrection for soprano, alto, chorus and orch.;
No.3 for alto, chorus, woman's chorus, boys' chorus and orch.;
No.4 for soprano and orch.; No.8 for soloists, chorus, boys'
chorus, orch. and organ; No.10 incomplete, performing versions
by Wheeler, Carpenter, and Cooke)
- song collection
with orch. Das Knaben Wunderhorn; song cycles with orch.
Kindertotenlieder, Das klagende Lied (for soloists, chorus
and orch.), Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Das Lied von
der Erde (for two soloists and orch.); Five Rückert
Lieder; songs with piano Lieder and two vols. of
Lieder und Gesänge
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Such is the consistency
of Mahler's limited output that all the works listed above
are recommended.
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
M.Kennedy Mahler,
London, 1974
D.Mitchell Gustav
Mahler, 3 vols., 1958 rep. 1975, 1980
───────────────────────────────────────
SCHMIDT
Franz
born 22nd December
1874 at Bratislava
died 11th February
1939 at Vienna
───────────────────────────────────────
Not to be confused
with his contemporary, the French composer Florent Schmitt,
or with the American composer William Schmidt (born 1926),
Franz Schmidt studied under Bruckner, and was cellist under
Mahler with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (1896-1911).
He belongs to that group of composers who maintained the large-scale
19th-century ethos during the first half of the 20th century,
and which includes Pfitzner and Zemlinsky. While
not as interesting as either of these composers, he may well
appeal to those who enjoy such late-Romanticism. There is
a Franz Schmidt Society, based in the Archives of the Society
of Viennese Music-Lovers.
His music is an
amalgam of a number of late 19th-century Germanic traditions:
Strauss and Wagner in some of the thematic ideas and
in the orchestration (such as the use of brass), Bruckner
in the long breadth of melodic construction, Brahms and Reger
in the use of variation forms and of the fugue. Magyar folk
music sometimes influences his work, and the Hungarian influence
is prominent in the Variations on a Hussar Song (1930-1931)
for orchestra. Unusually for an Austrian composer of the period,
lieder are absent from his output.
His Symphony
No.1 (1896-1899) is a bold and vivacious work, showing
the influence of Strauss and Beethoven. Although an
assured score for a young composer, it is overlong (especially
in the finale), with a long-windedness emphasized by the lush
orchestration, that also mars the two succeeding symphonies,
relegating them to the status of an occasional curiosity.
The Symphony No.2 (1911-1913) is richer and smoother
in its textures, again indebted to Strauss and Wagner. Its
chief interest lies in the second of the three movements,
cast in the form of variations and without the tone of the
slow movement one would normally expect in such a work. The
variations have a neo-classical opening before reverting to
a lush Romantic idiom, and include a Dvořák-like Czech
waltz. The highly chromatic opening to the finale is also
of interest, but again the movement outstays its welcome.
The rather dull Symphony No.3 (1928) was written for
a Schubert competition in the U.S.A. (won by Atterberg).
In keeping with the Schubertian inspiration, the orchestra
is smaller, the textures dense and sinuous, the melodic lines
long. All these three symphonies are essentially joyous; it
is the injection of tragedy that makes his Symphony No.4
in C major (1933-1934), written as the requiem for his
daughter, stand out. The orchestral sound is still Romantic,
extremely conservative for its date, but the heart-felt tragedy
lifts the work beyond anachronism. The form, too, is unusual.
The symphony is cast in one movement, divided into three sections
built around a central funereal adagio, and integrating variation
principle and sonata form (as other composers of the period
were attempting to do). The tone is set by the mournful elegiac
opening, and throughout there is a breadth of line, a slow
unfolding of material reminiscent of Bruckner, and a predominance
of the string colours of the orchestra. It is a moving work.
The other work
for which he still known is the vast oratorio on the Book
of Revelations, Das Buch mit Sieben Siegeln (The
Book with Seven Seals, 1938). It carries the great weight
of the German-Austrian oratorio tradition on its shoulders
while anticipating the apocalypse that was about to engulf
Europe. Its opening suggests the long-winded Romantic, but
this belies the later development of the work. At times it
harks back to the model, and sometimes the sounds, of Haydn,
and includes Bachian and highly chromatic fugues. Interludes
are given by the organ, as an independent element, and the
orchestra accompanies the vocal writing in a highly dramatic
style, sometimes painting a musical picture. The orchestral
colours are generally rich and heavy, but gradually evolve
into an individual sound world with unusual touches, such
as an extraordinary clinking percussion and pizzicato strings
against dark low brass. Anachronistic though much of the work
may be, it is utterly intense and genuine, a profound work
whose dramatic subject is matched by its music.
The intermezzo
from his opera Notre Dame de Paris (Our Lady of Paris,
1904-1906, often incorrectly given as 1902-1904, based on
Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame) is sometimes played
(it was written before the rest of the opera). The opera itself
suffers from an absurd libretto, and musically is often constructed
on symphonic lines. It does, however, have a lyrically attractive
idiom, usually slow-moving, and a restraint in the orchestration
allows clarity to the long-flowing vocal lines. For those
exploring the bywaters of post-Wagnerian opera it is worth
the acquaintance. Its successor Fredigundis (1916-1921),
set beside the Seine of the 6th century with 19th-century
sensibilities, is less interesting. Schmidt used its fanfare
leitmotif as the basis of a set of organ variations Fredigundis.
Of his other works, much of Schmidt's writing for piano was
composed for the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein, including
a piano concerto (1934), three piano quintets (1926,1932,1938),
and a Toccata (1938) for solo piano. His output also
includes a number of organ compositions.
Schmidt taught
at the Vienna Academy (1914-1937), where he was successively
professor of piano, composition, and the director (1925-1927),
and Rector of the Musikhochschule (1927-1931).
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- 4 symphonies
- piano concerto
(for piano, left hand, and orch.); Concertante Variations
on a Theme of Beethoven for piano, left hand, and orch.
- Variations
on a Hussar Song for orch.; Fuga solemnis for wind,
organ and timpani
- 2 string quartets;
3 piano quintets, all for piano left hand (Nos.2 and 3 for
clarinet, strings and piano)
- Toccata for
piano left hand and other piano music
- number of works
for organ
- oratorio Das
Buch mit Seiben Siegeln
- operas Fredigundis
and Notre Dame
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
oratorio Das
Buch mit Sieben Siegeln (1935-1937)
Symphony No.4
(1932-1933)
───────────────────────────────────────
SCHOENBERG,
Arnold Franz Walter (also spelt Schönberg)
born September
13th 1874 at Vienna
died July 14th
1951 at Los Angeles
───────────────────────────────────────
Schoenberg is
one of those unfortunate composers whose name is better known
than his music. Indubitably and irrevocably he changed the
course of classical music, for no subsequent composer could
be unaffected by the existence, if not the practice, of first
the purely atonal works and then the 12-tone system of harmonic
usage that he developed, once they had become more widely
known. Yet the music of composers who built on those developments
is still more likely to be encountered than that of the instigator.
In addition, the very name of Schoenberg still sends a chill
down the musical backbone of many a potential listener, a
prejudice (for that is what it is) all the more remarkable
when one considers that his earlier music is in the rich,
sumptuous fin-de-siècle idiom now so widely appreciated; that
his late works, even if intellectually complex, are filled
with markers the averagely musically literate will recognize;
and that even the most difficult of his 12-tone works (a mere
handful) now sound tame compared with Webern, let alone
more recent developments. It is perhaps ironic, and a comment
on the gulf between musicology and musical practice, that
there can scarcely be a composer more written about, and whose
music has been more minutely analyzed, in the last 50 years.
An entry such as this can hope to do no more than touch upon
Schoenberg's technical accomplishments and ideas, of crucial
importance to the music of our century, and readers who wish
to explore his technical accomplishments and ideas in more
detail will find no shortage of sources.
Aside from his
very earliest works, Schoenberg's output falls into four general
periods. However, his overall development was consistent,
and the changes represent a rapid evolution rather than the
abrupt departures of some of his contemporaries, in spite
of attempts to suggest otherwise. In his earliest mature works,
sometimes employing the huge forces of the period for effects
of colour and drama, he took traditional harmony to its limits
(often with a favourite key of D minor as the basis). The
emotional tensions, and the corresponding harmonic relationship
between expectation and resolution, became virtually unsustainable.
The next logical stage (in emotional terms) would have been
the depiction of emotional breakdown, and (in harmonic terms)
such a total chromaticism that musical anarchy would occur.
In fact, the end of this period was a retrenchment into smaller
forces and tauter forms, and a relaxation of the emotional
tension in the first steps towards an alternative solution
to this problem. The second period can be dated from 1908.
In it he took the logical and deliberate step of divorcing
dissonance from resolution, abandoning any key structure,
and then sought ways of integrating what had traditionally
been thought of as dissonance as an active principal participant.
This is the period of the atonal works. At the same time,
and equally logically, he also explored in Expressionist stage
works the possibilities of using the resultant dissonant language
to reflect states of mind that had actually gone beyond the
brink, entering a world of the dream or of neurosis.
Shortly after
the end of World War One Schoenberg abandoned the attempts
on which he was then engaged to utilize the atonal language
in large-scale late-Romantic works. The problem of freeing
a musical language from traditional harmony, and thus the
structures it symbiotically supported, was to find an order,
both structural and harmonic, to contain the freed sounds
within the boundaries that music requires. Two concepts had
provided containment during the atonal period: that of continual
variations, in which ideas evolve into other ideas in a continuous
process, and the written text, which imposes its own particular
structural demands. The problem with the first (though Schoenberg
did not totally abandon it) is that it restricted the development
of a particular idea through the course of a piece, rather
than its transmutation. The problem with the second is that
it did not provide solutions to the structures of abstract
music. As he moved away from Expressionism to more strict
control of material, Schoenberg's solution was to return to
classical and baroque forms, and to create a self-imposed
discipline of construction using all 12 notes of the chromatic
scale: the 12-tone system. In this the basic material is a
melody (a `row' or a `set') composed of all 12 notes, in a
pre-determined order, in which no note may be repeated. This
row can also be used in its inversion (upside-down), retrograde
(back-to-front) and retrograde-inversion, thus giving four
basic rows. Each of these can be transposed. The basic material
can apply to a whole work, a movement, or indeed part of a
movement. Such a manipulation of melodic material was endemic
to Classical and pre-Classical composers; the enormous difference
was that they were working within a tonal harmonic system,
underlying the melodies, while Schoenberg was using a system
in which the melody of all 12 notes, its permutations, and
the resultant combinations create the harmonic interplay without
recourse to a traditional, externally imposed, harmonic scheme.
There is clearly a parallel with the contemporary neo-classical
movement; however, the neo-classical composers also returned
to the Classical harmonic system, and to a sense of the ethic
of Classical music, absent in Schoenberg's works. In addition,
Schoenberg became increasingly concerned to integrate the
vertical possibilities arising from the material contained
in the rows with the horizontal flow of those rows, and it
is this interaction, an alternative system to the tonal harmonic
structure, that marks his music and that of his followers.
The works that
explore and consolidate the new technique occupied the period
1923-1936, and include all genres from the string quartet
to opera, with the exception of the symphony. By the latter
date he was resident in the United States, having as a Jew
fled Nazi domination, and the final phase of Schoenberg's
output suggests at least a partial reconciliation with tonality,
as if the composer, having grappled with, formulated, and
developed an alternative, could then afford to relax and explore
the possibilities of interactive elements. Thus Schoenberg
no longer paid strict observance to his own rules, and rows
were sometimes chosen to suggest the possibility of tonal
resonances. The very fact that Schoenberg had so consistently
adapted Classical and Baroque forms to contain the new 12-tone
system perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, made it inevitable
that he would then explore the interactive possibilities those
forms might suggest. This fascinating period of Schoenberg's
music is perhaps the least known.
Schoenberg's output
is relatively large, and some of the works are more interesting
for the light they shed on Schoenberg's development than for
general listening (particularly the choral works). Therefore,
in the discussion of his output that follows, only the major
works are emphasized. All these will reward the listener,
be they new to Schoenberg's music, or generally familiar with
it.
Schoenberg's earliest
works, only some of which survive, culminated in the fluent
but Brahmsian String Quartet in D major (1897). He
then embarked on a series of programmatic works influenced
by Wagner and by the example of Strauss, which if he
had written nothing else would have placed him firmly as a
major fin-de-siècle late-Romantic composer. They depict heightened
human emotions and experience in a musical language that matches
the emotional tension by stretching tonal harmonies to their
brink, and, for three of the works, employing huge orchestral
forces that allow dense textures and vivid colours. The first,
the string sextet Verklärte Nacht op.4 (Transfigured
Night, 1899) is based on poetry by Dehmel, recounting
a man's conversation with his lover, who is pregnant by another
man; its five movements correspond to the five sections of
the poem. Headily sensual, dripping with nostalgia, regret,
passion, and a transfiguring reconciliation, as if the emotional
humidity had reached saturation point, it is with Pierrot
lunaire (see below) the Schoenberg work most likely to
be encountered, either in its original form or in the arrangement
Schoenberg made for string orchestra (1917, revised 1943),
in which the intimacy of the original scoring is lessened,
but the emotional drama developed in the massed string sonorities.
The oratorio Gurrelieder (1900-1901, orchestration
completed 1911) is for enormous forces, five soloists, a speaker,
large chorus, and huge orchestra, and is a setting of a long
ballad poem by the Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobsen. Its subject,
conveyed through a mythical Danish story in which the detail
of the nature imagery is more potent than the actual tale,
is the equation of love and death, and the rebellion against
God represented by the passions, though it ends with summer
light. Schoenberg's response is a work of expansive power
and range, one of the finest pieces of its type and period.
The long tone-poem Pelleas und Melisande (based on
Maeterlinck, 1902-1903) is less successful (in relative terms),
its length unable to sustain the material without the structure
of a text.
In these last
two works Schoenberg had been developing his contrapuntal
mastery, and his structural ideas were taken a stage further
in the String Quartet No.1 in D minor op.7 (1904-1905),
which is in a single movement in a kind of sonata form into
which are inserted a scherzo, a rondo, and a slow section
(which, to illustrate the integration, acts as a second subject).
The Chamber Symphony No.1 op.9 (1906) uses a similar
structure, and its opening includes a falling theme, reminiscent
of Verklärte Nacht, that would seem to herald a continuation
of the late-Romantic expression. Instead, there is a new-found
concentration, a drastic reduction of orchestral forces, and
a further, but not complete, dissolution of the traditional
harmonic structure in which dissonances begin not to resolve,
but themselves become part of the harmonic idiom. The vertical
structure is being freed from the melodic line, and at the
same time becomes more interrelated with it (by using vertical
chord structures that have lineal relationship to a melodic
theme). The result is a bouncing, confident work, with a lovely,
delicately textured slow movement; one can feel Schoenberg
revelling in the new-found structural freedom.
The String
Quartet No.2 op.10 (1907-1908) is both a personal work
and transitionally experimental: it includes a popular melody
that had reference to his personal life, and settings of two
Stefan George poems for soprano and string quartet that again
trace transfiguration from worldly toils. The four-movement
quartet begins tonally (in F# minor); but its final movement,
notable for the dark abandon of its opening, the delicacy
of the vocal setting, and the luminosity of the ending, abandons
tonality for much of its span, and there is no key signature.
This movement towards the abandonment of the traditional harmonic
structure was completed in the Three Piano Pieces op.11
(1909), and the song-cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten
op.15 (The Book of the Hanging Gardens, 1908-1909),
again to poems by Stefan George. The first piano piece explores
the possibilities of generating material from motivic cells;
the song-cycle, for the most part pale and ghostly in atmosphere
and slow and fragmentary in rhythmic impulse, regularly avoids
any sense of tonal resolution. The expressive setting of the
texts, shifting and distilling the emotions of the poetry,
allows this lack of resolution to appear natural. The effect
is to distance, to alienate the listener in a manner entirely
suited to the subject-matter. In the Five Pieces for Orchestra
op.16 (1909, revised 1922, version for reduced orchestra,
1949) the emotive passion of the early works is toned down,
honed into a new emerging language, but it is certainly present,
and this, one of Schoenberg's most satisfying works, can be
heard with perfect understanding for its purely evocative
qualities, without any knowledge of its technical fascination
and advances. Each piece has a descriptive title, and in each
the material is derived from the opening in the principle
of continuous variation. In spite of the atonal idiom there
are ghosts of a half-lost key (D minor) throughout. Especially
effective is the central slow Farben (`chord colours'),
a kind of German Impressionism using a technique known as
klangfarben, referring to an underpinning chord which
is sustained, or imperceptibly changed. Schoenberg's 1949
title for this piece, `Morning by a Lake', exactly describes
it, complete with a jumping fish motive.
The monodrama
Erwartung op.17 (1909), based on a libretto by I.M.Papenheim,
also uses perpetual variation technique. But much more striking
in this extraordinary work is the use of the extremes of Expressionist
tension, reinforced by the atonality, to express the nightmare
story of murder and necrophilia expressed by a woman entering
a forest to find her lover: this is one of the first operas
influenced by Freud, a masterpiece of the expression of extreme
neurosis. The text is an intense study of breakdown caused
by extreme emotion; the music matches and amplifies it, apparently
spontaneous in its rapid illustrations of the woman's anguish.
It was followed
by an even more extraordinary work, Pierrot lunaire
op.21 (1912), for speaker/singer and five instrumentalists
(playing eight instruments), and intended for stage performance.
Based on 21 expressionistic poems by Albert Giraud that in
inspiration look back to comedia dell' arte, its protagonist
is the Pierrot of the title, whose abstract foil is the moon.
The short poems encompass a gamut of human emotions, in a
style sometimes bordering on the surrealistic, and the overall
atmosphere is one of extremes, entering that no-man's land
between what is normally considered sane and that which is
touched with madness, akin to the surface illogicality of
dreams. Divided into three parts, the first largely presents
the Pierrot as lover and poet; the second is suffused with
images of guilt and punishment; while in the third the Pierrot
reaches back to the lost world of the commedia, the
moon threading in and out of the Pierrot's fantasies. The
soloist employs Sprechgesang (`song-speech'), fully
notated but given with a speech-like freedom of declamation,
while the instrumental writing often opposes the vocal line,
with considerable independence. An extraordinary variety of
colour and idea is achieved in the various songs, partly by
a continuous change of instrumental combinations, the entire
group coming together only in the final song. Parody and humour
are also an important component in the panoply of the fantastical
atmosphere. A wide variety of structural devices are employed,
from development out of generating cells of ideas to complex
fugues. None of this conveys the impact of the unique atmosphere
of this work, which has never left an audience indifferent.
Schoenberg establishes a musical world between sleeping and
waking, close to substantiality yet insubstantial, fantastical
but half-real, a region where emotions and fantasies, kept
semi-submerged, are allowed a brief reign, threatening or
fascinating depending on the listener. The effect of the Sprechgesang,
half-spoken, half-sung, only heightens the sense of a momentary
limbo, a temporary suspension of the normal parameters and
boundaries of expression. Pierrot lunaire is a seminal
work of the 20th century, first for opening up this nether
region of the psyche, second for showing the musical means
for doing so, and third for creating a form of small-scale
yet highly potent dramatic means, music-theatre five years
before Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale.
The dramatic stage
elements of Pierrot lunaire were considerably extended
in Die Glückliche Hand op.18 (The Skilled
Hand, 1910-1913), a heavily symbolic drama for one singer,
mime-artists, and orchestra. Techniques similar to film are
employed (swift cutting, rapid changes of scene, careful consideration
of visual angles), and the layer of action largely belongs
to the mime-artists, the emotional expression to the singer
and the orchestra. The story (by Schoenberg) is partly surrealistic,
partly composed of myth and dream elements, and has an obvious
autobiographical content in the symbolic allegory of the artist.
The Expressionist idiom opens and closes with chorus and includes
distortions of popular music, but the overall effect is heavily
dependent on the detailed stage and visual requirements, especially
symbolic lighting. At the time of composition, these must
have seemed both extreme and impossible, but recent multi-media
theatrical developments have made this a much more viable
piece, perhaps best suited to a television treatment.
Schoenberg then
planned and started a gigantic symphony, which in design would
have followed the Mahlerian pattern, and in idiom extended
the late-Romantic breaking-point of tonality into the atonal
sphere within the huge Mahlerian structure. Some of the material
for this abandoned project was then incorporated into the
equally huge oratorio Jacobsleiter (Jacob's Ladder,
1917-1922), which originally envisaged forces of 720 (including
20 flutes). Schoenberg abandoned this, too, partly because
he was interrupted by the war, and when he returned to it
he was already moving onwards to the concept of the 12-tone
system. But the first half of the fragmentary score has been
rendered into a usable form by Winfried Zilling, and is interesting
because it shows firmly the continuity from the late Mahlerian
idiom to the 12-tone system (a row is actually included in
the work), and because it is an expression of Schoenberg's
religious dilemma: the dichotomy between the need for and
the internal leaning towards faith, and an external world
increasingly materialist and atheist, with organized religions
that become dogmatic.
With the abandonment
of Jacobsleiter Schoenberg turned to smaller-scale
structures, in the development already outlined. The Five
Piano Pieces op.23 (1920 and 1923), the Serenade
op.24 (1920-1923) for seven instruments and bass voice, and
the Piano Suite op.24 (1921 and 1923) signal this change
and the development of the 12-tone system. Four of the Five
Piano Pieces, for example, use the principles of 12-tone
procedures, while the fifth, a waltz, uses a strict row in
a fairly simple manner. The Piano Suite is composed
of dances whose forms echo the late-Baroque, complete with
repeats, and every one of the dances is composed from the
same 12-note series, which includes the retrograde of the
notes (in German notation) B-A-C-H (B flat-A-C-B), deliberately
asserting the continuity of German music in the new system.
The tone of both sets of piano pieces is of an introverted
exploration of the new constraints, while the seven movement
Serenade, also utilising dance forms, has as its central
movement a 12-note vocal setting of a Petrarch sonnet; as
the Petrarch lines have eleven syllables, the row-use sets
up asymmetrical effects. Its instrumentation, reflecting the
desire for particular and new sonorities, includes the mandolin.
There is a jauntiness to the Serenade, a sinuousness
to the woodwind sonorities, that perhaps makes it an easier
introduction to this important period in Schoenberg's development
than the more austere piano pieces.
In the works that
followed, Schoenberg consolidated and developed his understanding
of the system that he had evolved within classical forms.
The first movement of the Wind Quintet op.26 (1923-1924)
is in sonata form, the last a rondo, and with its short-phased,
light textures, its purely abstract exploration, it is far
removed from the emotional Expressionism of earlier works.
In tone, if not in harmonic structure, it has strong affinities
to the works of contemporary neo-classical composers. The
Suite op.29 (1925-1926) for piccolo clarinet, clarinet,
bass clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano, also uses Baroque
forms, but is more flowing, more obviously lyrical, the emphasis
on the effects of colour, with a sense of spontaneous flow
that belies the technical complexities. Its final gigue, with
its atmospheric colours, may well appeal to those who might
expect this period of Schoenberg's output to be too demanding
or austere. The rather dour but fluently integrated String
Quartet No.3 op.30 (1927) is modelled on Schubert's A
minor quartet, its four movements being a sonata, a set of
variations, a scherzo, and a rondo. In the powerful Variations
for Orchestra op.31 (1926, 1928), written in part at the
request of the conductor Furtwängler, Schoenberg combined
the techniques of the immediately preceding works with something
of the grandeur and emotional expression of his earlier music.
Scored for a large orchestra, including celesta and mandolin,
it is in the form of an introduction, nine variations, and
finale, with a solo cello presenting the 12-note row theme,
subsequently manipulated in all the mirror versions as well
as in transposition. With its wide range of mood, from a suggestion
of the abstract playfulness of the wind quintet to moments
of high drama, it is capable of a wide range of interpretation,
from the sumptuous, emphasizing the expressive, to the more
abstract, emphasizing technique and construction, depending
on the conductor involved.
The relative paucity
of works in the early thirties is partly a reflection of the
political and social atmosphere of the time, but also of a
return to the stage, first with the small, and largely forgotten,
one-act domestic comedy of manners, Von heute auf morgen
(op.32 (1928-1929), to a libretto by Schoenberg's wife in
which the woman shows that she can match her husband's propensity
for another woman, and then with Schoenberg's only full-scale
opera, Moses und Aron (1930-1932). This major work
is rarely performed, partly because he never wrote the third
act (eventually authorizing a purely dramatic performance
of the end of the libretto), although the previous two acts
feel complete in themselves. More daunting is the nature of
the libretto itself: based on the biblical story of Moses
and Aaron, it is in part Schoenberg's profession of faith.
Central to the opera is the contrast and conflict between
the two brothers, Moses exhorting the people to understand
an abstract God, Aaron requiring concrete images (faith against
materialism). The libretto is earnest, the moral severe and
unbending (as is the character of Moses), and on the level
of libretto and drama it seems to have been thought out rather
than felt. On the one hand it fails to exploit the possibilities
of the audience's involvement and recognition of the potential
psychological struggles, and on the other it removes the story
completely from the potential resonances of myth. Dramatic
elements are created by powerful visual effects (sacrifices,
burnt offerings, orgies of destruction), but that fails to
disguise the uncomfortable feeling that the opera stage is
the wrong arena for this particular statement. This is unfortunate,
for Schoenberg invested the score with some of his finest
music, drawing on all his experience of the previous decade.
Moses and Aaron are contrasted in voice, the former, a bass,
almost always employing Sprechgesang, the latter a
lyrical tenor. Technically the opera is based on a single
12-note row, with a complex evolution of the possible permutations
of that row; expressively, the music is wide ranging and powerful,
with an extraordinary range of emotion, and especially effective
choral writing that ranges from the ethereal (pre-echoing
Ligeti) to the savage and destructive. It is difficult
not to see a parallel between Moses and Schoenberg's own artistic
position, or between the stern father-figure of Moses and
the psychological hold that Schoenberg had over Berg and Webern.
In 1934 Schoenberg
left for the United States, and his first work in his new
country, the Violin Concerto op.36 (1934-1936), continued
the consolidation of the 12-tone technique in the new format
of the concerto, laid out in a traditional (but internally
unconventional) three-movement scheme. The opening, with the
row first divided between violin and orchestra, and then played
by the soloist, announces the nature of the solo writing,
technically virtuoso, but imbued with the traditional rich
and soaring character of the instrument. Dense, gritty, uncompromising,
but with a sense of freedom and flight in the extremely difficult
solo writing, this concerto is not for the casual listener,
but it is an engrossing work that should be better known.
It was followed by Schoenberg's last string quartet, the four-movement
String Quartet No.4 op.37 (1936). As with the violin
concerto, the classical layout is not followed strictly, and
in this closely constructed, austere, but lyrical work Schoenberg
achieved a fluid linear melodic flow using the parameters
of the 12-tone system, the culmination of this period of his
output.
Already, in 1938,
he had written a rather bitty, over-emphatic, and undistinguished
Kol nidre op.39 for speaker, chorus and orchestra,
which is unmistakably tonal, even if the main chant theme
is open to the kinds of manipulation Schoenberg had used in
his 12-tone rows. He also, in 1939, reworked the unfinished
Chamber Symphony No.2 op.38 (1906-1916 and 1939), thus
returning to his own pre-atonal period. In the strange Ode
to Napoleon op.41 (1942), for reciter, piano and string
quartet or string orchestra (a setting of Byron's poem), Schoenberg
returned to elements of Sprechgesang, but without the
associated sumptuous Expressionism. The instrumental accompaniment
is often emotive, but in a more dry, incisive and ironic manner,
occasionally recalling the parody of Pierrot lunaire,
using a 12-tone series in a very free fashion, and eventually
ending in E flat. This process of a partial backward glance
while progressing forward is continued in the Piano Concerto
op.42 (1942), where Schoenberg continued his preoccupation
with compressing material into a one-movement form: here there
are four distinct sections with the general cast of a four
movement plan, while corresponding to sonata form. There is
again the feel of a tonal base, largely created by the sense
of cadence and resolution that material arising from the original
row allows, rather than from an actual tonal usage. The character
of this demanding but rewarding concerto is again incisive:
each incident emerges with a calculated precision, and at
times the concerto debate seems to be as much between the
desire for linear flow and this accurate determinacy of detail
as between solo and orchestra.
In 1946 Schoenberg
recovered from a serious heart-attack, and the experience
was reflected in one of his most completely satisfying works,
the String Trio op.45 (1946). In many ways it is a
summary of his work. The overall shape is a distant derivation
of Schoenberg's compression of classical forms, with one long
movement shaped into three sections, of which the last reflects
the first, redistributed among the instruments and using an
inversion of the opening idea. More important, he achieved
a synthesis of the vivid Expressionist emotional content and
swift-paced expressive episodes of the much earlier works
with the terser, angular style of the 12-tone period, and
in a manner that sounds spontaneous and fresh; the experience
of the immediately preceding works allows (through the triad
implications of the tone-row) a sense of tonal atmosphere
without any tonal procedures. This dense and concentrated
work is by no means easy to grasp overall, although many of
its moments have immediate impact or attraction; but it has
something of the visionary quality given to some composers
at the end of their lives, doubtless due to Schoenberg's immediate
experience, and, with its ending disappearing into the ether,
deserves in its own fashion to stand alongside Strauss'
Four Last Songs or Janáček's late string
quartets. The idea of a dramatic narration returned in the
short (six-minute) Survivor from Warsaw op.46 (1946-1947)
for narrator, chorus and orchestra, Schoenberg's protest against
the Nazi experience, to his own text. The dense, expressive,
harrowing score, full of instrumental effects, entirely matches
the intensity of the text, and ends with "Shema Yisroel"
sung in Hebrew by the chorus to an original melody, the orchestra
being used in full for the first time.
It may turn out
that Schoenberg's current position, more honoured in the breach
than in the observance, his music more written about than
heard, will prove lasting. For, aesthetically, there really
does seem to be some essential element missing in his music.
He does not have the single minded fascination and focus of
Webern, the vision of Berg, the passion of Bartók,
or even the humanism of Shostakovich. For much of his
music, one gets the sense that he erected a wall between his
own psyche and its expression in music, seeking solutions
through the pure application - the iron will - of intellect.
It is perhaps this, rather than any fear of the `difficulty',
that is responsible for the relative paucity of performance,
for his idiom has long been easily encompassed by musicians.
Schoenberg comes closest to letting down that guard in the
passions of the earliest works, when he can let it tangentially
slip past through Expressionism or, in Pierrot lunaire,
through an ironic slant (in both cases exploring the edge
of madness, the flip side to the coin of iron control), and
in works such as the Five Pieces for Orchestra or the
String Trio where the means merge with the ends. It
is perhaps no coincidence that in one of his own paintings
(for he was an accomplished painter) he depicts himself with
his back to the viewer. The mighty flaws and the strengths
of Moses und Aron stand as an allegory for the composer
himself, quite apart from the overt autobiographical symbolism.
Either way, anyone with even the most cursory interest in
20th-century music should try to gain some understanding of
the rudiments of his ideas, and at least sample his music.
Schoenberg was
active in promoting new music, founding the Society for the
Private Performance of Music in Vienna in 1917. He was also
an important teacher, first as a private tutor, then as Professor
at the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts (1924-1933), and finally
teaching at the University of California (1934-1944). He published
five pedagogical books on composition. Many subsequently distinguished
composers were among his pupils, of whom the best known are
Webern and Berg. He himself was the brother-in-law
of the composer Zemlinsky by his first marriage, and
father-in-law to Nono through his second. There is
an Arnold Schoenberg Institute that since 1976 has regularly
published a Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute
with scholarly articles on the composer and his works.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- 2 chamber symphonies;
piano concerto; violin concerto
- Begleitmusik
zu einer Lichtspielszene, Five Pieces, Pelleas
und Melisande and Variations for orch.
- Phantasy
for violin with piano accompaniment; string trio; 5 string
quartets (4 numbered); wind quintet; string sextet Verklärte
Nacht (also version for string orch.); Serenade
for septet
- piano music
including Five Piano Pieces, Suite for Piano,
and Three Piano Pieces.
- Variations
on a Recitative for organ
- staged song-cycle
Pierrot lunaire; many song cycles including Das
Buch der Hängenden Gärten, Four Orchestral Songs,
Herzgewächse and Six Orchestral Songs; Ode
to Napoleon for reciter and orch.; many other works for
solo voice or for chorus
- oratorios Gurre-lieder
and Die Jakobsleiter (incomplete); A Survivor from
Warsaw for reciter, chorus and orch.
- operas Erwartung,
Die Glückliche Hand, Moses und Aron, and Von
heute auf morgen
- arrangements
and re-workings of works by earlier composers, notably of
Monn's Cello Concerto
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
`monodrama' Erwartung
op.17 (1909)
Five Pieces
op.16 (1909) for orchestra
oratorio Gurrelieder
(1900-1911)
opera Moses
und Aron (1930-1932)
Ode to Napoleon
op. 41 (1942) for reciter and orchestra
Pelleas und
Melisande op.5 (1902-1903) for orchestra
Piano Concerto
op.42 (1942)
staged song-cycle
Pierrot lunaire op.21 (1912)
Serenade
op.24 (1920-1923) for septet
String Quartet
No.1 op.7 (1904-1905)
String Quartet
No.2 op.10 (1907-1908)
String Quartet
No.3 op.30 (1927)
String Quartet
No.4 op.37 (1936)
String Trio op.45
(1946)
A Survivor
from Warsaw op. 46 (1947) for reciter, chorus and orch.
Variations
op.31 (1926-1928) for orchestra
Violin Concerto
op.36 (1935-1936)
Verklärte Nacht
op.4 for string sextet (1899) or string orchestra (1917, rev.
1943)
Wind Quintet op.26
(1925-1926)
───────────────────────────────────────
selected bibliography:
A.Schoenberg Letters
(ed. E.Stein), English trans., 1964
Style and
Idea (ed. L.Stein), 1975 (104 essays)
W.Reich Arnold
Schoenberg: A Critical Biography, trans. L.Black, 1971
C.Rosen Schoenberg,
1976
H.H. Stückenschmidt
Arnold Schoenberg
trans. H.Searle and E.Temple-Roberts, 1959
A short but detailed
survey of Schoenberg's life and works by O.Neighbour will
be found in The New Grove Second Viennese School (1980),
which includes an extensive bibliography.
───────────────────────────────────────
SCHREKER
Franz
born 23rd March
1878 at Monaco
died 21st March
1934 at Berlin
───────────────────────────────────────
An important and
successful opera composer in the first two decades of the
century, Schreker is now better remembered for his Chamber
Symphony of 1916 than for his stage works, although in
recent years there has been a revival of interest in the latter.
His musical idiom is late-Romantic, following the inheritance
of Wagnerian Germanic opera; the format is that of music-drama,
with a continuous flow of idea and action rather than obvious
divisions into arias.
Of particular
interest is his luxuriant orchestral style, influenced by
Strauss but also by Mahler, and in turn influencing
Berg. Using very large forces, the orchestration is
rich in detail, and often employs passages of chamber-proportions
in colour and detail, sometimes fragmenting the instruments
in an almost pointillistic style. He also extended the use
of percussion, with large batteries of instruments, especially
the tuned percussion, joined by the colours of the harp and
the celesta. His plots (most of which he wrote himself) extend
the Wagnerian inheritance. Although they are mostly folk-tale
subjects, they are treated with an interest in the extremes
of internal human motivation and in human sexuality, daring
at the time, but somewhat tame in retrospect. The emphasis
is on individual characterization, rather than the archetypal
qualities of the protagonists.
His first success
was with his second opera, Der ferne Klang (The
Distant Sound, c.1901-1910), which makes striking use
of extra orchestras both onstage and offstage (the hero of
the opera is a composer of operas), and is full of subtleties
of orchestral detail. Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin
(1909-1912) is a 'mystery play' in one act, set in the Middle
Ages. It has a marvellous seamless flow, touches of Mahler
in the orchestration, and typical moments when Schreker produces
passages of magical orchestral timbre, around a story that
ends with the soul of a dead violinist being laid to rest,
and the Princess and the Apprentice starting a new life. But
its very luxuriance becomes wearing, unrelieved by contrast
of incident or idiom. Die Gezeichneten (The Marked
Men, 1913-1915) is marred by its complicated plot (concerning
the orgies of a Genoese nobleman), but the best of its music
is found in the orchestral suite Vorspiel zu einem Drama
(Prelude to a Drama). Its successor, Der Schatzgräber
(The Treasure Digger, 1915-1918), is his major work,
and received 385 performances in 50 locations in the period
of the German Weimar Republic. The story (again with a fairy-tale
medieval setting) is a combination of elements of the tales
of Lady Macbeth and of Orpheus, its central characters being
an over-sensual murderess and a minstrel with semi-magical
powers, and there is an intended metaphor of the power and
limitations of the arts. Again there is a wealth of fascinating
orchestral detail, but also a considerable variety of mood
and dramatic situation and location, and a strong Straussian
influence (reminiscent of the contemporary Die Frau öhne
Schatten, which has some parallels in its basic plot).
Ultimately, the vocal writing and the plot do not match the
interest of the orchestral sound, but those who enjoy a late-Romantic
idiom in the manner of Pfitzner or Zemlinsky
will find the work of interest.
However, by the
1920s the heyday of the large-scale late-Romantic opera was
over, and in his later operas Schreker turned to a more neo-classical
idiom. None of these was a success, partly because their sexual
liberality (and Schreker's Jewishness) came under increasing
criticism from the emerging Nazi movement. Apart from some
songs, occasionally heard, and a handful of chamber works
where Schreker drew on his atmospheric sense of scoring, notably
in the pleasant Der Wind (1908-1909) for violin, cello,
clarinet, horn, and piano that shows the influence of the
French Impressionists, it is the Chamber Symphony (1916)
for 23 instruments that has prevented Schreker's music from
falling into obscurity. Again, the delight in the changing
textures and instrumental combinations (including piano, harp
and harmonium) are greater than the overall effect, but it
is full of charm and subtle pleasure. Of his songs, the song-cycle
Fünf Gesänge für tiefe Stimme (Five Cantos for Low
Voice, 1909), setting one tale from the Arabian Nights
and three poems by Edith Ronsperger, is especially beautiful,
luminous, quietly passionate and intense, and notably effective
in Schreker's 1920 orchestration, where washes of orchestral
colour, sometimes languid, sometimes with subtle detail, often
dark, support a sensuous vocal line devoid of Expressionist
extremes of emotion.
Schreker was active
as a conductor, founding the Vienna Philharmonic Choir in
1902, and conducting it until 1920, including the first performance
of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder. He had a considerable
influence as a teacher at the Vienna Academy of Music (from
1917) and at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, although his
teaching was cut short by the rise to power of the Nazis.
Among his pupils was Hába, while Berg, who prepared
the piano reduction of Der ferne Klang, was influenced
by his orchestration and the sensual nature of his operatic
subject-matter. As a composer, Schreker's position is an ambiguous
one: although a friend of the circle of Schoenberg, and involved
in new musical activities, he did not succeed in breaking
out of the mantle of late-Romanticism, with its rich chromatic
palette, into new harmonic conceptions. His operatic plots
now seem dated, and the luxuriance too continuously rich for
the musical stomach. But the prowess of his orchestral skills
will appeal to those who enjoy such idioms, and will interest
students of orchestration and of that fertile decadent period
of Vienna's musical history.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- Chamber Symphony
for 23 instruments
- Dance Suite,
overture Ekkehard, Fantastic Overture and Romantic
Suite for orch.
- Der Wind
for violin, cello, clarinet horn, and piano
- songs including
song-cycle Fünf Gesänge für tiefe Stimme; Psalm
cxvi and other works for chorus and orch.
- operas Christophorus,
Der ferne Klang, Die Gezeichneten, Irrelohe,
Der Schatzgräber, Der Schmied von Gente, Der
singende Teufel, and Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
Chamber Symphony
(1916)
song cycle Fünf
Gesänge für tiefe Stimme (1909, orchestrated 1920)
opera Der Schatzgräber
(1915-1918)
opera Das Spielwerk
und die Prinzessin (1909-1912)
───────────────────────────────────────
WEBERN
Anton (Friedrich Wilhelm von)
born 3rd December
1883 at Vienna
died 15th September
1945 at Mittersill
───────────────────────────────────────
The art of Anton
Webern is the most elusive of any 20th-century composer. It
profoundly influenced the generation of composers who emerged
in the 1950s and 1960s, and through them it resounds today.
It has baffled the majority of audiences, totally unequipped
for its means and techniques, for its concept, and for its
purpose of expression; yet it weaves a fascination over those
who have learned to enter its strange world.
Webern was the
supreme composer of the miniature. Yet he is not a miniaturist,
which implies taking some small aspect of the world and honing
an exquisite glimpse of that facet. Rather he is an imploder,
attempting to take the enormity and wonder of the world and
convert that wonder into the smallest possible distillation,
a tiny facet that in itself contains the enormity. There is
an appropriate analogy: faced with one of the expansive mountain
landscapes that he loved, he describes musically not the profundity
of the vast scene, but rather a single mountain flower, showing
how the mountain flower is in itself a perfect microcosm of
that landscape, the distillation of the glory of God. Such
an analogy is pertinent to Webern's aesthetic: in 1926 he
found a poet, Hildegard Jone, who expressed just such a vision,
and many of his later works are settings of her poetry.
This art emerges
as much less a break from the late Romantic tradition than
is popularly supposed: rather it is simply the inversion of
that tradition, the Mahlerian world turned inside out, an
aesthetic and emotional involvement that Webern's followers
have almost universally ignored. New thinking in art often
parallels new thinking in other human fields, and Webern's
musical discoveries are analogous to contemporary developments
in physics, particularly atomic and sub-atomic physics, where
in place of the huge conception of the universe, the basis
of the entire physical world has been shown to be encapsulated
in a miniscule structure. The implosion in Webern's music
accounts for the brevity of his works, and the desire for
perfection their relative paucity: Webern's entire output
can be heard in a little over four hours.
The elements of
Webern's music are not easy to assimilate, but much easier
to understand when the overall principle, the purpose, is
grasped. The major problem of such a distillation into the
miniature is that every aspect of that miniature must be perfect,
without a single element that could be substituted by another;
a different miniature can be created, but within the individual
work the purposefulness of form and content must be complete.
Webern's entire mature output can be seen, on this level,
as an attempt to find forms that would most completely fulfil
this vision in its different aspects; unfortunately, most
of the attention has been given to those formal elements,
to the detriment of the expressive content, since in the final
analysis it is easier to discuss the building blocks than
the building.
Webern found the
catalysts of those forms in the ideas of his teacher Schoenberg,
and throughout Webern's career Schoenberg developed new formal
ideas that Webern was able to embrace and evolve for his own
purposes. A second, sometimes latent, influence on Webern's
formal structures was his knowledge of the Renaissance polyphonists
(his PhD was on Isaac), who in their own sphere had similar
problems to overcome. Webern's output can be divided into
four periods: the earliest works that represent the final
breakdown of late-Romantic tonality; the move to atonality,
and increasing brevity; the earliest 12-tone works; and the
maturation of Webern's use of the 12-tone system. Within this
development, his main output is of chamber music and song,
both solo and choral, and five orchestral works, and is perhaps
most easily grasped by dividing it into those groups.
His first mature
work was the Passacaglia for Orchestra op.1 (1908).
Its techniques are derived from those of Brahms, its sensuous
atmosphere, held in tense check until bursting out in climax,
and its heady orchestral colours from late-Romantic tone-poems,
and in particular Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. The
tonal basis is bursting at the seams (creating much of the
tense energy), and its form of the passacaglia, and its use
of Schoenberg's technique of continuous variations (see Schoenberg)
give it a formal ruggedness that marks the work out from its
late-Romantic antecedents. It is also an exceptional beautiful
work, that if it were by a less controversial composer would
be widely known. The Six Pieces op.6 (1909) for orchestra
are also for Mahlerian-sized forces, but they are put to quite
different uses. The elements that might have formed a late-Romantic
work are here presented in fleeting wisps, with constant change
of colours, often with unusual effects. Nothing is repeated;
ideas slip and clash; the emotional expression changes from
moment to moment, from the sweetest lyricism to raucous expression,
with the extreme of instrumental range and rapid redeployment
of instrumental groups. Although there is a feel of tonal
undercurrent, the harmonic language is atonal, and there is
a powerful sense in these pieces of the collapse of the late-Romantic
idiom, as if we are hearing the pieces of the musical landscape
actually imploding as a prelude to the later miniature examination
- it is quite easy to take out any one snatch of these pieces,
and in the aural imagination develop it into the context of
a late-Romantic idiom, but quite impossible with their entirety.
By the Five Pieces op.10 (1911-1913) for orchestra,
this connection with the late-Romantic idiom has been almost
entirely broken. What is left are the wisps of fragments,
reduced to their utmost brevity, introducing in the opening
the device of `pointillism' in which each note is assigned
a to different instrument, and elsewhere employing the minimum
of instrumentation, so that individual orchestral colours
appear and die away. No.4 lasts only seven bars, and uses
all 12 notes in the opening. Newcomers to Webern (or for those
sceptical of his expressive power) might like to try listening
to these three orchestral works in succession, in the order
in which they were written; the power and beauty of the language
of the Five Pieces is then naturally evident, whereas
a plunge into them can be bewildering.
By the Symphony
op.21 (1928), scored for clarinet, bass clarinet, two horns,
harps, and strings, Webern had adopted and developed strict
12-tone principles, especially the use of mirror reflections
of 12-note rows, and symmetrical relationships between rows.
The symphony is in two short movements (Webern planned a third,
but abandoned it), and in the basic row the second half is
a mirror of the first. The intervals are often very widely
spaced (with, for example, an octave shift of any given note
of the row), pointillism is much in evidence, and silences
between these individual notes are an integral device. The
second movement is especially tightly constructed. Cast as
a theme with seven short variations and a coda, it uses complex
interrelationships of the theme, so that, for example, the
fourth variation uses mirror images, and the rest of the piece
is a mirror image of the preceding theme and variations, while
the initial presentation of the theme is accompanied by its
retrograde. The complexity of this formal scheme is impossible
to follow without a score (and indeed, a prior analysis of
that score), but what the interrelationships seem to achieve
in the listener is a subconscious sense of order, of cohesion
in what might otherwise, on the aural surface, be totally
isolated points of music. The effect is of a meditative eeriness,
with one faded echo of a waltz in the second movement, a sense
of having experienced something much deeper than the surface
reception would have suggested. It is this expressive effect
that Webern would appear to have been striving for, aside
from the sheer technical achievement: a complex, interrelated,
and largely hidden formal design than would allow the rarefied
expression to emerge. The Orchestral Variations op.30
(1940) represent Webern's final paring down of material in
orchestral form. The theme and six variations are played without
a break, and last around six minutes. The theme, a four-note
phrase, is handed around the different components of the orchestra
(making it in itself a variation through timbre and colour),
and in the variations the rhythmic pattern of the theme is
subject to careful modification, as well as other parameters,
thus making the work approach the total serialism that was
to be adopted in a more systematic and controlled fashion
by Webern's followers. The orchestration is especially lucid
in this most rarefied of Webern's orchestral works, and the
chordal effects give it a strong lineal impetus. One other
orchestral work may be encountered, the Five Movements
for strings; it is an arrangement made in 1928 of op.5 for
string quartet.
It was with those
crepuscular Five Movements op.5 (1909) for string quartet
that Webern started to apply his own aesthetic to the chamber
medium. In the earlier String Quartet (1905) he had
attempted to bind differing tonalities and speeds within a
single movement, but the sound world is indebted to Schoenberg's
Verklärte Nacht; the equally attractive Piano Quintet
(1907) is Brahmsian. In the Five Movements, with the
use of unusual string sounds, the range of timbre is extended
in an expressive work in which every detail carries weight,
like pinpoints of light in a mist. The slow movements have
an other-worldly cast, with echoes of Mahler in the
scherzo; the haunting mood is created by the mostly slow tempi
and by the string techniques (especially the use of harmonics).
The Six Bagatelles op.9 (1913) for string quartet use
similar extended timbres, and are built on two or three note
motifs, completely chromatic in using all 12 notes. The six
pieces have a common use of ostinati, and the sense of reduction
(in both the musical technique and the expression) is overt,
notably in the extraordinary nothingness of the fifth bagatelle,
just impressions of sound in an otherwise empty vision, and
in the ending that seems to sigh away. The atonal experimentation
is even more marked in the Four Pieces op.7 (1910)
for violin and piano. These very short and bare Expressionist
pieces, like dying shards of sound, are characterized by wide
leaps and extreme changes of dynamics. The limits of such
compression are reached in the two-and-a-quarter-minute Three
Little Pieces op.11 (1914) for cello and piano, where
every note carries a different weight of dynamic and attack,
silences become of integral importance, and the last piece
consists of just twenty notes.
By the String
Trio op.20 (1926-1927), Webern had adopted 12-tone techniques,
and the characteristic 7ths and minor 9ths are prominent.
It is perhaps the most difficult of Webern's works to grasp
(the cellist of the first London performance gave up in disgust),
and the two movements are based on a classical Rondo and sonata
form (including a straight repeat), although these may appear
quite inaudible. The most jagged of all Webern's works, it
is technically full of mirror reflections. Analytically fascinating,
the music will almost certainly seem incomprehensible on first
acquaintance. But if followed with a score, the visual aid
to the aural perception allows the recognition and reception
of Webern's patterns. The structural power of this work and
its subtle coordination of miniature ideas - like examining
a snowflake through a microscope - suddenly emerge. The abstract
intensity, once experienced, is difficult to forget. The Quartet
op.22 (1930) is for clarinet, tenor saxophone, piano and violin,
and is as rarefied, though both the two movements have a gentle,
swaying nature that is appealing. The Concerto op.24
(1931-1934) is for chamber forces, a nonet of flute, oboe,
clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, piano, violin and viola.
The reduction to single points of instrumental colour is almost
complete: they are dispersed widely on the vertical scale,
silence moving in as the linear progression shifts to another
vertical mark, emphasized by the differentiations of the instruments
involved. Shaped in three movements, it rather unexpectedly
arrives at an almost humorous, rumbustious, swinging feel
in the last movement, as if Webern was both showing that his
idiom was capable of such a mood, and delighting in turning
his own technique emotionally on its head. In the String
Quartet op.28 (1936-1938) the technique is again formidable,
the series based on the four notes (in German notation) of
B-A-C-H (B Flat-A-C-B), and brilliantly using sections within
its row to reflect that motif in multiple forms (which has
made it a model for later serial composers). It is more flowing
and opaque than the String Trio, but at the same time
it does feel more sterile, the whole subordinated to the demands
of the 12-tone writing without the internal wonder of the
earlier work. Apart from some early music, Webern wrote only
one work for piano, the late Piano Variations op.27
(1935-1936). `Variations' is a little misleading, unless it
refers to the mirror imaging of the first of three movements,
and the development of ideas in the last: Webern himself referred
to it as a kind of suite. The second movement is particularly
notable for its strong pointillistic contrasts, constant tension
and resolution created by alternating dynamics.
The largest body
of music by Webern, which most clearly shows his development
and his aesthetic, is for the voice, yet these are the works
least likely to be encountered. Historically, one of the reasons
is their sheer difficulty, although Webern always uses the
voice melodically, without Sprechgesang or other extended
techniques. The solo lines, in particular, are extremely taxing,
in spite of modern developments in vocal technique. A more
important failing, given the concentration on words that Webern's
later style imposes, is that the texts he chose after 1926
are all by Hildegard Jone, wordy in their combination of Christian
and pantheistic mysticism, and of dubious quality. A third
reason may be a simple if illogical one of psychological salesmanship.
Webern did not give these works descriptive titles: "Four
Songs" (which could be one of three different Webern
works) carries much less resonance than, say, Das Lied
von der Erde.
The first published
songs are (like those of Schoenberg) settings of Stefan
George. The wispy and short Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen
op.2 (1908) for chorus introduces Webern's love of four-part
canon, still with elements of tonality (and bitonality) and
with prominent 3rds and 6ths. With the Five Lieder
op.3 (1908) and Five Lieder op.4 (1908-1909) he moved
to pure atonality. There is a gossamer feel to these works,
the rhythmic sense broken down, with wide leaps of intervals,
the use of 7ths and minor 9ths that became so characteristic
of Webern's writing, and with apparently inconclusive endings.
The op.3 songs are strictly linear; the op.4 songs are more
dramatic, with a chordal feel at points, but Expressionism
is the dominant aesthetic, the anti-Romantic music stripping
the poetry of its more romantic elements.
As soon as Webern
replaces the piano with instrumentation, his settings literally
take on a different dimension. In the Two Songs op.8
(1910) for voice and eight instruments, to verses by Rilke,
the solo line is again full of wide leaps, but now woven through
a fragmented instrumentation, whose points of timbre and individual
colour so effectively and pointillistically meet the soloist.
The Four Songs op.12 (1915-1917) are rather more full
and flowing, but the Four Songs op.13 (1914-1918) for
soprano and small orchestra are one of the summits of Webern's
output. The instruments create the atmosphere behind the vocal
line rather than amplifying it or commenting on it. The use
of the celesta and harp add unexpected delicacies of colour
in settings whose extreme economy of means is paradoxically
so rich in weight of detail that there is a strong impression
of the vocal line being one of those actual instruments. The
Six Songs op.14 (1917-1921) for soprano, two clarinets,
and two strings (to verses by Trakl) are more existentialist,
with sometimes little direct sense of the music fitting the
words. The vocal line is more extreme, the colours darker,
and the dynamics of each individual note more marked, as is
the importance of constantly changing dynamics (emphasizing,
for example, the saxophone in song II). The solo part is extremely
taxing; the overall effect is of allusions rather than emotions.
The next two groups
of songs are on sacred texts, and in them Webern returned
to the use of canon as a major structural device. A double
canon ends the Fünf Geistliche Lieder op.15 (Five
Sacred Songs, 1917-1922) for voice and five instruments,
which demand high purity from the soloist, whose line is more
obviously continuous while retaining the wide leaps. The Five
Canons on Latin Texts op.16 (1923-1924) for soprano, clarinet
and bass clarinet are another highpoint in Webern's vocal
output. These little canons are like some set of smooth chips
hewn off a block of runic stone, the strange ending disappearing,
almost inconsequentially, into the blank rock. The strict
canonic structures, stark in their instrumental simplicity,
bind the group, but there is a wonderful simplicity and flow
to the immensely difficult and high vocal line, which darts
up and back in a very wide leaps at fairly fast speeds, the
graph of its flow another consistency in the group. The Three
Traditional Rhymes op.17 (1924-1925) for soprano, clarinet,
bass clarinet and violin doubling viola were Webern's first
12-tone pieces, and continue the use of canonic techniques.
The continuity from op.16 is obvious, but the effect is more
jagged and angular. In the Three Songs op.18 (1925)
for soprano, E flat clarinet, and guitar, the connection between
music and the folk-texts has almost totally disappeared, and
they are chiefly interesting for the use of the guitar in
such an unexpected context. Webern ended this series of vocal
works with a work for chorus, violin, two clarinets, celesta
and guitar, the Two Songs op.19 (1926), which set two
short Goethe texts. Both songs use the same 12-note row, the
orchestral accompaniment is detailed and pointillistic, the
canonic choral writing densely stranded, and there is a closer
connection between words and music (in the rhythms of the
instrumental opening to the second song, evoking the sheep
leaving the meadow of the verse).
Webern's return
to vocal writing in 1933 reflected his discovery of Hildegard
Jone's writing: all his remaining vocal works are settings
of her words. In keeping with the Nature-soulfulness of the
texts, the Three Songs from `Viae inviae' op.23 (1933-1934)
for voice and piano are less extreme and less compressed in
both form and content than the preceding vocal works, with
a more obviously tuneful flow to the vocal writing, in spite
of the wide leaps. More successful are the Three Songs
op.25 (1934) for voice and piano, partly because the words
are more succinct, one single-image verse to each song rather
than the extended sentiments of op.23. Whether the actual
musical process is here more important than the word-setting
is debatable; certainly the correlation between words and
music veers by now between the extremely tenuous (the opening
of the first song) and the clearly apposite (the butterfly
movement of the piano of the second song). The 12-note row
is used with considerable freedom, shared by voice and piano,
each supplying the missing notes of the other. Webern's final
three vocal works are all for chorus. The intense four-and-a-half
minutes of Das Augenlicht op.26 (1935) for chorus and
orchestra combine drama, especially in the brass, with delicate
events created by the orchestration, with a marked contrast
between the chordal density of the chorus, with canonic writing
vying with chordal sounds passed between voices, and the particularism
of the instruments. The impressive three-movement Cantata
No.1 op.29 (1938-1939) for soprano, chorus and orchestra,
is more extended, with an explosive choral opening to its
first movement, after a quiet instrumental introduction. There
is a pulse to this opening movement, created by the alternation
of quiet meditation and emphatic outburst, while the solo
lines of the second canonic movement return to the lifting
and falling flow of the Five Canons. The form is a
compression, a fusion of a number of forms, fugue, scherzo
and variations, and again is dramatic, building in a step-like
manner to a central climax in which the soloist suddenly enters
on a high B flat, when it gradually falls to an ending of
tranquillity. The larger Cantata No.2 op.31 (1941-1943)
for soprano, bass, chorus and orchestra is in six short movements,
the vocal line of the bass solo more flowing, but pitted against
instrumental writing that constantly shifts in its time-values.
The atmosphere is more mystical, apart from the angular drama
of the third section, and the sound of a bell adding a suggestion
of rite. The cantata is summarized by two of the lines: "The
hives of bees are like constellations / so full of drops of
light that creation brings."
Webern's importance
to the succeeding generation of composer is considerable.
The carefully constructed rhythmic irregularities and the
detailed changes of dynamics in the later works led the way
for serialism (or, as it is sometimes called `total serialism')
in which these aspects of the construction of a piece were
subject to a systematisation similar to that of the harmonic
structure. But few of those successors have had such an deep
aesthetic instinct as Webern (Kurtág is a notable exception),
or created such a particular and individual sound-world.
Those new to that
sound-world are advised to ignore the accumulation of musicological
analysis of his work (insofar as it is possible), and initially
approach it purely for that aesthetic experience. Contemplated
as one might contemplate an Alpine flower, for its miniature
perfection of detail, each tiny item contributing to the whole,
rather than the grandeur of the mountain landscape, and the
expressive magic emerges. Those with the temperament are then
in a position to explore the equally fascinating appreciation
of the cerebral rigours, the actual construction of the music
(which is anyway a different intellectual exercise). Those
familiar with Webern may well consider a similar approach:
it is all too easy to get so involved with those structures
and techniques that one forgets that the music expresses both
the composer and the world as he saw it.
Webern was active
as a conductor, working at Prague's Deutsches Theater (1917-1918)
and with Austrian radio (1927-1938). He directed a number
of groups, notably the Vienna Workers' Symphony Concerts (1922-1934)
and the Vienna Workers' Chorus (1923-1934), where he brought
new (and old) music-making to a social strata not usually
associated with the contemporary musical life of Vienna. He
taught musical theory at the Jewish Cultural Institute for
the Blind from 1926, and his private pupils included Hartmann.
His death was tragic, since he was shot in error by an American
soldier.
───────────────────────────────────────
works include:
- symphony; concerto
for nine instruments
- Passacaglia,
Five Pieces, Six Pieces, and Variations
for orch.
- Three Little
Pieces for cello and piano; Four Pieces for violin
and piano; string trio; Five Movements, Rondo,
and Six Bagatelles for string quartet; quartet for
violin, clarinet, saxophone and piano; quintet for strings
and piano
- Piano Variations
- 18 song cycles
for solo voice and piano or instrumental ensemble and other
solo vocal settings; choral works including 2 Cantatas
───────────────────────────────────────
recommended works:
All Webern's mature
output is recommended, and has been quite widely recorded.
Those new to Webern might consider first listening to the
sequence of orchestral works outlined above.
───────────────────────────────────────
bibliography:
H.Moldenhauer Anton von Webern: Chronicle of his Life and Works,
1978
A short but detailed
survey of Webern's life and works by Paul Griffiths will be
found in The New Grove Second Viennese School, which
includes an extensive bibliography.
───────────────────────────────────────
ZEMLINSKY,
Alexander von
born 14th October
1871 at Vienna
died 15th March
1942 at Larchmont (New York)
───────────────────────────────────────
For many years
Zemlinsky was best known as Schoenberg's teacher (for
a brief period) and brother-in-law, and as the composer of
a single work, the Lyrische Symphonie (Lyric Symphony,
1922). He emerged into musical maturity just as the late-Romantic
style was about to be eclipsed by the new developments of
Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and his neglect is partly
due to his continuation of that late-Romantic idiom, including
the use of large forces, and partly to his limited output,
curtailed by his considerable activities as an opera conductor.
But recently, as the comparative conservatism of his idiom
has been mellowed by the distance of time, he has emerged
as one of the few composers continuing in the late-Romantic
vein with an individual and sometimes striking voice, especially
as the symbolist and psychologically allegorical content of
his operas are once again more generally accepted.
In his mature
music, until in his last works he adopted a more neo-classical
style, Zemlinsky's idiom might be described as being somewhere
between Mahler and Strauss, without the immediacy
or instant genius of either. However, his distinctiveness
and individuality comes from a different impetus: using his
sumptuous sense of orchestration, backed by marvellous orchestral
craftsmanship, and keeping his music in constant flux to a
much greater extent than either Mahler or Strauss, he created
unfolding kaleidoscopes of sound that are perhaps akin to
the constant visual shifting and complications of dreams,
the restless chromatic harmonies verging on the breakdown
of tonality without ever crossing the boundary. His opera
subjects reflect this psychological aspect, and in almost
all his operas there are marvellous moments when the dream
world suddenly opens out into a broader and more ordered musical
landscape, often utilizing themes that had been entangled
in the thickets of the earlier journey. This is a subtle art,
belied by the very luxuriance of his orchestral usage, and
not always an immediate one, in which the impetus (in the
operas, the actual text) is of importance; it is easy to overlook
the potency that this can generate when first encountering
what seems to be an over-sumptuous and derivative idiom. However,
he perhaps reflects the hothouse intellectual atmosphere and
internal self-questioning of his contemporary Vienna better
than any of the better-known composers.
The early Clarinet
Trio op.3 (1895) is assured but derivative, and not of
especial interest. The big and expressive Symphony in B
flat (Symphony No.2, 1897) better shows his youthful
influence, with a few Wagnerian and Brucknerian and many Brahmsian
touches, but also the springing rhythmic vitality and melodic
organization of Dvořák. Like most Zemlinsky works it
has a markedly atmospheric opening. With its big slow movement
and energetic finale, its general vitality makes it more than
just a curiosity. The first signs of his mature style emerged
in the sumptuous tone-poem Die Seejungfrau (The
Mermaid, c.1903), whose programme is based on the Anderson
fairy-tale. Requiring an enormous orchestra, this rich and
often beautiful work is well worth the discovery.
But it is in his
vocal works that Zemlinsky's idiom found its ideal genre.
His operas are more closely allied to text than many: with
his very fluid and dense orchestral style, the orchestral
matrix constantly shifting to match the moment, the librettos
need initially to be followed closely for the operas to have
their full impact. His third opera, Der Traumgörge
(1904-1906) coincides with the maturing of his musical style;
to a libretto by Leo Feld, its subject is a mill-owner who
writes fairy-tales, seeking to apply them to real life: story
and fairy-tale, reality and dream, become intertwined. With
its passionate, swirling, long high vocal lines, and a more
obvious division into aria-like passages than the later operas,
it has echoes of the Czech pastoral woven through the lyrical
flow, sometimes an almost Scandinavian sense of light and
colour, and passages of considerable beauty. His next opera,
Kleider machen Leute (Clothes Make the Man,
c.1908, revised 1922), also to a libretto by Feld, is based
on the comic story by Gottfried Keller, and has been overshadowed
by Joseph Suder's opera on the same subject. The next
two operas (and two of Zemlinsky's most effective works) are
based on the writings of Oscar Wilde, which, with their willingness
to admit to - and unleash - the darker psychological motivations,
echoed the self-tormenting tone of Freudian Vienna. Eine
florentinische Tragödie op.16 (A Florentine Tragedy,
1914-1915), is a powerful and compact one-act work, Expressionist
in its violent story. It is based on Oscar Wilde's decadent
play of a love triangle in Renaissance Florence, uniting sex
and power and with a ending disturbing in its parody of the
`happy ending': through the murder of the lover by the husband,
the husband recognizes his wife's beauty, and his wife her
husband's strength and her own sexual reaction to the violence.
The music is swift-moving and sumptuous, closely matching
the psychological undercurrents and developments of the plot,
and the turbulent portrayal of the main characters. Its build-up
of passions, power, and anger, is subtle, gradual, and inexorable,
and when the climax does arrive, it is to music of impact
and conviction, the thematic network becoming recognizable
and cogent. In the same vein, and finer still, is Zemlinsky's
sixth opera, The Birthday of the Infanta op.17 (1920-1921),
as it now seems to be generally titled, although the original
title was Der Zwerg (The Dwarf). Short and succinct,
it is based on the Oscar Wilde story of the English title,
in which a misshapen dwarf is carried off as a birthday present
for an Infanta. In the palace, he sees a mirror for the first
time, and realizing his ugliness dies, while the Infanta continues
her birthday, unmoved by what the dwarf has in the meantime
shown her: the power of the imagination and of creativity.
It was his most successful opera during his own lifetime.
Zemlinsky's last
completed opera, Der Kreidekreis (The Chalk Circle,
1931-1932) was based on the wildly successful play by `Klabund'
(Alfred Henschke), itself based on an old Chinese drama (later
made famous by Brecht). In the first Act, the heroine, Haitang,
is sold to a `tea-house' by her mother (against the wishes
of her brother), following the suicide of her father outside
the house of the rapacious tax collector, Ma. The Prince Pao
falls in love with her, but Ma appears, is attracted to the
woman, and outbids the prince to take her away as his wife.
In the second Act, Haitang has had a child; Ma's first wife,
who has a lover, Chow, realizes she will not inherit if she
remains childless. Ma wishes to divorce her, and asks Chow
to make the arrangements. Haitang unwittingly gives Ma a cup
of tea poisoned by his first wife, and is arrested for his
murder. In the final act, Ma's first wife bribes the judge
and numerous witnesses into confirming that Haitang's child
is actually hers. She is sentenced to death, and her now revolutionary
brother is sentenced for contempt of court. An announcement
arrives that the Emperor has died, and a general commutation
of sentences by the new Emperor saves them; they are taken
to the Emperor - who is the former prince Pao - along with
Ma's first wife, and though the device of the chalk circle,
the truth of Haitang's tale is shown. The child is actually
Pao's (he had made love to her while she was sleeping in the
tea house), and the story ends happily. The treatment of this
powerful drama is a combination of symbolist tale and social
and political comment; with the exception of the heroine,
the character are largely archetypes. Zemlinsky responded
with a setting that moves with considerable fluidity between
a tough, more direct style (including shades of Weill)
and passages of his rich, expressive idiom. The marriage between
music and words is close - this is not an opera easily excerpted,
and has no big `tunes' - and he makes considerable use of
speaking sections (associated with wrong-doing); it makes
for compelling music-drama, and an interesting development
of Zemlinsky's operatic skills. Der König Kandaules
(c.1935-1942) was based on Gide, but its orchestration remained
incomplete.
The Lyrische
Symphonie op.18 (Lyric Symphony, 1922) for soprano,
baritone and orchestra is Zemlinsky's masterpiece, and if
by the time of its composition its style was already outdated
it nonetheless inspired Berg, whose Lyric Suite
was dedicated to Zemlinsky, and quotes from the symphony.
Zemlinsky himself suggested the work was in the tradition
of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, but if the general
tone is similar, with many echoes of Mahler, the layout and
the emotion is its own. The structure combines that of a one-movement
symphony with that of a song cycle, with the seven songs separated
by orchestral interludes. The songs themselves are to poems
by the Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, of love and of
dreams, and especially of the distance between dreams and
dreaming desires and reality. They have little of the self-searching
angst that had so informed earlier, similar Viennese song-cycles:
rather their tone is ecstatic, whether the ecstasy of sadness
or joy, and Zemlinsky responded with an ecstatic score. Its
passion is announced in the emphatic orchestral opening and
in the sense of loneliness and longing in the song that follows,
with its uneasy harmonies and restless orchestral movement.
That orchestration, as rich and evolved as a complex Oriental
carpet, turns easily from huge orchestral swellings to delicate
underpinnings, illustrating and amplifying the ecstatic vocal
lines, characteristically long-flowing and with wide opening
leaps. The constantly shifting orchestra echoes the technique
of the operas, though with cleaner textures and a delight
in the delicate. This exceptionally beautiful work will be
too rich for many, but those who respond to Strauss or to
Mahler's song cycles will find it a discovery to be treasured.
The most important of his songs are the cycle Six Songs
to Poems of Maurice Maeterlinck op.13 (1910-1913) for
mezzo or baritone and orchestra, Straussian in feel, beautifully
crafted, their subject women and death; the later Sinfonietta
uses a melody from the last song.
Zemlinsky wrote
four string quartets, which reflect the different periods
of his musical development. They are less interesting than
his vocal music and the operas, but have enough qualities
to appeal to those with an affinity for the period. The String
Quartet No.1 op.4 (c.1895) reflects his formative influences,
but the Expressionistic String Quartet No.2 op.15 (1914)
will interest students of Schoenberg, its inspiration
coming from the latter's op.7. The String Quartet No.3
op.19 (c.1923), with its beautiful slow movement and a sense
of emotional withdrawal, is perhaps the most immediate for
the general listener, while the String Quartet No.4
(1936) is in the shape of a Classical suite in six movements,
with echoes of early Webern in the rapidly changing string
effects of the driving second movement. The only mature piano
work is the Fantasien über gedichte von Richard Dehmel
op.9 (c.1900) for piano, inspired by verses by the poet who
inspired Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, in which chromaticism
is extended to a point where any sense of tonality is almost
dissolved in the dark exploration.
Of the handful
of later works, the effective Sinfonietta (1934) is
a combination of the neo-classical with a sense of tone-painting,
with moments of Mahlerian lilt. The slow movement has phrases
reminiscent of Webern's Passacaglia, and the overall
effect is like looking back over Viennese musical life through
the medium of a sometimes troubled dream. The fine Psalm
13 op.24 (1935) for chorus and orchestra remained unperformed
until 1971, and has thematic correspondences to Zemlinsky's
two earlier psalm settings (Psalm 83, 1900, Psalm
23, c.1910). As in the Sinfonietta, the idiom is
less Romantically luxuriant, the harmonies more tart.
Zemlinsky was
a conductor of opera in Vienna (1899-1911), Prague (1911-1927),
and Berlin (1927-1930), and taught in Prague (1920-1927) and
at the Berlin Musikhochschule (1927-1933). His reputation
as a conductor, especially of new works, many of which were
stylistically far more advanced than his own idiom, was considerable,
and with Schoenberg he founded the Vereinigung Schaffender
Tonkünstler in Vienna in 1904 to promote new music. To escape
the Nazi regime, he left Berlin for Vienna, and then fled
to the U.S.A. in 1938.
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works include:
- 3 symphonies;
sinfonietta; ; Lyrische Symphonie for soprano, baritone,
chorus and orchestra
- Die Seejungfrau
(The Mermaid) for orch.
- trio for clarinet
or viola, cello and piano; 4 string quartets; string quintet
- Fantasien
über gedichte von Richard Dehmel and Ländliche Tänze
for piano
- Six Maeterlinck
Songs for mezzo or baritone and orch; Psalm 13,
Psalm 23, Psalm 83 for chorus and orch. and
other vocal works including many songs
- ballets Das
gläserne Herz and Der Triumph der Zeit
- operas Es
war einmal, Eine florentinische Tragödie, Kleider
machen Leute, Der König Kandaules (orchestration
incomplete), Der Kreiderkreis, Sarema, Der
Traumgörge and Der Zwerg (The Dwarf), often
known as The Birthday of the Infanta
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recommended works:
opera The Birthday
of the Infanta (Der Zwerg, 1920-21)
opera Eine
florentinische Tragödie (1914-1915)
opera Der Kreiderkreis
(1931-1933)
Lyrische Symphonie
(1922)
tone-poem Die
Seejungfrau (c.1903)
Sinfonietta (1934)
Six Songs to
Poems of Maurice Maeterlinck (1910-1913)
opera Der Traumgörge
(1904-1906)
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