Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Six a cappella Mixed Choruses
In August 1928 the “State Commission for the
Folksong-Book for Youth,” Berlin, invited Schoenberg
to arrange (harmonize) three sixteenth-century popular
German folk-songs according to his own dictates.
Schoenberg became deeply absorbed in the work and
created three miniature polyphonic masterpieces. In Los
Angeles in 1948 he decided to compose three more of
these choruses in the same style.
String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10
Schoenberg began the composition of his second, F
sharp minor, string quartet, Opus 10, in Vienna, on 9th
March, 1907. The four movements were not written in
chronological order, the first having been composed
more than a year before the others. The third movement,
Litanei, was completed on 11th July, 1908, the second
movement (Scherzo) on 21st July, 1908, and the whole
piece was completed on 1st September, in Gmunden. In
the summer, some time before this, the 25-year-old
painter Richard Gerstl, a keen musician, student of
philosophy and of Greek and Latin, eloped with
Schoenberg’s wife Mathilde. Three months afterward,
in November, blaming himself for the flagitious act,
Gerstl committed suicide. He had been living in a rented
studio in the same building as the Schoenberg
apartment, had painted both of them, and given lessons
to Schoenberg in the painter’s art, but also developing a
passion for his wife, who was nine years younger than
the composer. Largely through the mediations of
Webern, she was persuaded to return to him, and he to
accept her, but her maternal feelings for their two very
young children must have been her most compelling
reason. Schoenberg’s diaries about the experience
(published in Allen Shawn’s superb book about the
composer)1 are a revelation of his acrobatic
psychological processes and the impregnability of his
ego.
The two vocal movements that conclude the quartet,
Litanei and Entrückung, presage a new world in
Schoenberg’s musical development, the feeling of “air
from another planet”, as a line in Entrückung puts it.
The present writer cannot say whether or not the music
was composed during or after these tempestuous events,
but in any case, the quartet is dedicated “To My Wife”.
It was performed by the Rosé ensemble in the
Bösendorfersaal, Vienna, 21st December, 1908, with
Frau Marie Gutheil-Schoder singing the settings of the
Stefan George poems. These movements mark
Schoenberg’s greatest advance in harmonic discovery
and sensitivity thus far in his life: every chord,
progression, combination of pitches, is utterly new and
unerringly right, and the quiet, deliquescent string
introduction to Entrückung, and the enthralling
combination of voice and quartet throughout are a peak
in early twentieth-century music.
Schoenberg’s attraction to George is a subject for a
writer with deep knowledge of German as well as music,
and a book-length study of the interrelation is long
overdue. The present writer has chosen to present the
Quartet, Op. 10, in its original form and not in
Schoenberg’s 1929 string orchestra version for the
reason that the latter tends to overweight the bass line
where it doubles the cello. Further, the vocal movements
contain some of the most inward Schoenberg ever wrote;
Opus 10 does not make public statements.
Suite for Strings in G
Schoenberg’s first American composition is in five
movements: Overture (11), Adagio (12), Minuet (13),
Gavotte (14), and Gigue (15). In August 1934, after a
bitter winter in Boston, the composer visited the
summer music school at Chautauqua, New York, at the
invitation of one of its directors, the Australian pianist,
Ernest Hutcheson, who had studied at the Leipzig
Conservatory in the 1880s, and whom the composer had
known and befriended in pre-World War I Germany.
Coincidentally, Hutcheson was president of the Juilliard
School of Music in New York, and hoped to engage
Schoenberg to teach there. The Boston experience had
convinced him that the New York climate would be too
severe for him, but, needing a source of income, he
asked Hutcheson to postpone, not withdraw, the offer.
In a letter to his brother-in-law discussing possible
salaries, which Hutcheson feared might be exorbitant —
Schoenberg’s reputation as a teacher was unparalleled
— the composer coyly remarks: “True, they don’t know
how cheap I’d be”. Ultimately he moved to the more
salubrious climate of southern California. Informing
Hutcheson of this decision in a letter of 28th March,
1935, Schoenberg adds a further reason, which should
interest culture historians: the inadequacy of the average
American music student’s “basic grounding”:
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I was always very dissatisfied with the
European student’s qualifications … [but] I did
usually find that there was at least a certain
fairly general knowledge of the works of the
masters … in the main lacking here.… The high
price of printed music … makes it impossible
for most students to own even a rudimentary
collection of something like the 200 volumes
that all but the poorest had in Austria.
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While at Chautauqua, Schoenberg met Martin
Bernstein, a young double-bass player from New York
University, who induced him to write a piece for young
players of the near future, whom American high school
and college orchestras were beginning to train.
Schoenberg, wholly unaware of the primitive level of
music training in American institutions at the time,
wrote:
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I have the belief that all composers, especially
modern composers, and very especially I,
should be interested in the promotion of such
endeavours. For here one can lay the
foundations of a new artistic culture, here
young people can be given possibilities of
understanding the new fields of expression and
the means which are suitable for these.
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Toward the end of August, Schoenberg began work on
his “Suite written in the old style for string orchestra”,
and by 7th September had sketched the stretto of his
first-movement fugue. “Alten stile” must be understood
as pertaining more to the eighteenth-century dance
forms of the pieces than to the contrapuntal, harmonic,
rhythmic, and instrumental aspects. The Gavotte was
completed on 11th October, the Minuet on 23rd
October, the Adagio on 6th November, and the entire
work on 26th December at “5860 Canyon Cove,
Hollywood”, according to his inscription in the score.
The first performance was given by the Los Angeles
Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer
on 18th May, 1935. At the bottom of the title page of the
manuscript, now in the collection of Dr Arthur Wilhelm
in Basel, the composer wrote in red pencil: “The spots in
this score are Klemperer’s drops of sweat”. In fact,
Klemperer and his professional players found this
“student level” opus extremely difficult to perform, for
which reason it is still, seventy years later, practically
unknown.
No programme notes seem to be necessary apart
from a characteristic foreword by Schoenberg, not
found in the score:
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This is what I had to achieve. I had to prepare
[the students] using harmony which leads to
modern feelings, for modern performance
techniques. Fingerings, bowings, phrasing,
intonation, dynamics — all this should be
developed without the introduction of
insuperable difficulties. But modern intonation,
contrapuntal technique and phrase formation
were also to be emphasized, so that the student
might gradually come to realise that “melody”
does not consist only of those primitive
unvaried symmetrical structures which are the
delight of mediocrity in all countries and
among all peoples.… In doing this, I was
guided by my personal knowledge of the
stringed instruments.
An analysis should enrich the knowledge of the
players, but it should also be informative for
their teacher and conductor. Today, so many
call themselves conservative who have nothing
to conserve because they possess nothing that is
worth conserving, not even the capacity to write
a fugue like the one in this work. Therefore they
maintain and conserve only their own incapacity
and ignorance; they want to protect themselves
and others from the possibility that new things
should ever be said which would call for at least
one prerequisite: technical competence.
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Robert Craft