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WD_446/ 2008
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 5 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 40.2 x 25.2 | | Size (mm): | 1020 x 640 | | Catalog #: | WD_0446 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
Arnold Schönberg: String Trio (for Violin, Viola and Cello) op. 45 (1946)
The String Trio op. 45 was commissioned by the music department of Harvard University for a symposium on Musical Criticism in spring 1947. It was premiered by members of the Walden String Quartet at Harvard (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) on 1 May 1947. Also contributing new works for the occasion were: Paul Hindemith (“Apparebit Repentina Dies”), Gian Francesco Malipiero (“La Terra”), Aaron Copland (“In the Beginning”), and Bohuslav Martinu (6th String Quartet). Schönberg had begun work on the piece already in June 1946, but the majority was composed between 20 August – i.e. only two-and-a-half weeks after Schönberg suffered a severe heart attack – and 23 September. This traumatic episode, which Schönberg survived only through an injection directly into his heart, took its toll on the 71-year-old composer, and Schönberg told Thomas Mann (as reported in “Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus”) that his Trio reflected his physical and psychological suffering during this period. The single-movement work is divided into five sections: three “parts” and two “episodes.” Part three begins like Part one and recapitulates aspects of the whole work. Thematic development is spread throughout the work. The piece ends with a 12-note statement in the violin in which the basic motifs are presented. The variety of surface details (abrupt dynamic contrasts, expressionistic string effects, variations in tone) stand in contrast to the rigorous serialism that undergirds the work’s structure. - Camille Crittenden
© Arnold Schönberg Center
-www.schoenberg.at/6_archiv/music/works/op/
compositions_op45_notes_e.htm
"Schoenberg's 'Opus' Compositions for Strings Transports Symposium Participants" by Lee Simmons, 1999 - Special to the Gazette
Two hundred scholars and musicians from around the world gathered in Paine Concert Hall last weekend for a two-day symposium on Arnold Schoenberg's string quartets and string trio. Scholarly presentations were interspersed with performances by the renowned Mendelssohn and Juilliard string quartets.
The event was organized by James Edward Ditson Professor of Music Reinhold Brinkmann, a noted Schoenberg scholar, and was presented by the Department of Music on Friday and Saturday, Feb. 26 and 27, in honor of David Lewin, Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music.
Alongside the quartets of Bartók and Shostakovich, Schoenberg's music for string ensemble stands as one of the monumental cycles of our century. Although few in number, these works more than compensate in sheer weight. The music fairly explodes with restless creative energy. Indeed, one of the complaints Schoenberg often heard from the critics of his time was that he tried to make the quartet do the work of an orchestra.
The rare opportunity to hear these pieces together gave listeners a chance to trace the entire arc of Schoenberg's career.
The stage was set for the weekend's journey by a performance of Schoenberg's early string sextet, Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (1899), by students from Robert Levin's undergraduate performance seminar, Music 180. Written in the lush, late-Romantic style that was Schoenberg's musical inheritance and point of departure, this gorgeous fantasy breathes the hothouse atmosphere of fin-de-siecle Vienna.
The performance by Susan Koo '99 and Eileen Woo '01, violins, Sarah Darling '01 and Dana Lawson '01, violas, and Albert Pan '00 and Kate Bennett '02, cellos, was nothing short of astonishing -- beautifully played and perfectly balanced in its textures. Remarkably, only one of the students is a music concentrator. "It's a testament to the talent we have here in the student body at Harvard," says Brinkmann.
The first two string quartets, from 1905 and 1908, respectively, found Schoenberg gradually loosening the constraints of traditional tonal harmony and, in the process, forging a new musical language for the new century. By the end of the second quartet, he had dispensed with key signatures entirely.
The Mendelssohn Quartet delivered a masterful performance of the Quartet No. 1, Op. 7, on Friday night. Schoenberg once said of this feverishly ambitious work that it brought together all the musical strands of his time. It's the longest of his quartets, and in some ways the hardest to pull off. The Mendelssohn's account drew cheers from a very discriminating audience.
Harvard has enjoyed a special relationship with the Mendelssohn Quartet, who are in residence here under the auspices of the Blodgett Artist-in-Residence program for four weeks of coaching, teaching, and performing.
For Quartet No. 2, Op. 10, the group was joined by new music diva Susan Narucki to sing the verses of Stefan George that Schoenberg set in the final two movements. Narucki is one of only a handful of truly world-class vocalists who specialize in the music of our own time, and her presence on stage added a dash of glamour to the weekend's proceedings.
Narucki's entry on the line "Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten" (I feel the air of another planet) was chilling, her exquisite, dark-hued soprano floating like ether over the weightless harmonic world of the final movement.
Schoenberg spent nearly two decades exploring this new universe of atonality before writing another string quartet. The third and fourth quartets of 1927 and 1936, respectively, showed the composer inventing and consolidating an entirely new structural principle of composition, the so-called twelve-tone method.
It was a rare treat to see the Juilliard Quartet in a space as intimate as Paine Hall. The group is clearly committed to this repertoire and delivered fiercely gripping performances of these last two quartets and the string trio.
The Juilliard's interpretations emphasized the continuity in these mature works with the Expressionist aesthetic of Schoenberg's youth. There is another side to these pieces, though, which several speakers identified as a "neo- classical" spirit. In fact, Brinkmann argued that Schoenberg was here looking back even beyond Beethoven, to Mozart and Haydn. Paradoxically, it's precisely in his most radical works that Schoenberg is closest to tradition.
The String Trio, Op. 45, was originally commissioned by Harvard's Music Department in 1946 and premiered at a special concert in Sanders Theatre. It's an extraordinary work -- in ways a more personal expression than the quartets -- written when the composer was recovering from a nearly fatal heart attack. This homecoming performance by members of the Juilliard Quartet was a tour de force.
It's sobering to reflect that Schoenberg, whose innovations set the terms of aesthetic debate for so much of 20th-century music, died nearly 50 years ago. What seems clear at this remove is just how deeply his music is rooted in the Germanic tradition. Once reviled as an Oedipal destroyer in his native Vienna, the revolutionary turned out to be the most loyal son -- as Schoenberg himself always insisted.
From HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES
Copyright 1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College
-www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/03.04/schoenberg.html
Music of Arnold Schönberg
Works and ideas:
Schoenberg's significant compositions in the repertory of modern art music extend over a period of more than 50 years. Traditionally they are divided into three periods though this division "obscures as much as it reveals" as the music in each of these periods is considerably varied. The idea that his twelve-tone period "represents a stylistically unified body of works is simply not supported by the musical evidence" (Haimo 1990, 4), and important musical characteristics—especially those related to motivic development—transcend these boundaries completely. The first of these periods, 1894–1907, is identified in the legacy of the high-Romantic composers of the late ninteenth century, as well as with "expressionist" movements in poetry and art. The second, 1908–1922, is typified by the abandonment of key centers, a move often described (though not by Schoenberg) as "free atonality." The third, from 1923 onward, commences with Schoenberg's invention of dodecaphonic, or "twelve-tone" compositional method. Schoenberg's most well-known students Hans Eisler, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, followed Schoenberg faithfully through each of these intellectual and aesthetic transitions, though not without considerable experimentation and variety of approach.
Beginning with songs and string quartets written around the turn of the century, Schoenberg's concerns as a composer positioned him uniquely among his peers, in that his procedures exhibited characteristics of both Brahms and Wagner, who for most contemporary listeners, were considered polar opposites, representing mutually exclusive directions in the legacy of German music. Schoenberg's Six Songs, op. 3 (1899–1903), for example, exhibit a conservative clarity of tonality organization typical of Brahms and Mahler, reflecting an interest in balanced phrases and an undisturbed hierarchy of key relationships. However the songs also explore unusually bold incidental chromaticism, and seem to aspire to a Wagnerian "representational" approach to motivic identity. The synthesis of these progressive and conservative approaches reaches an apex in his Verklärte Nacht, op. 4 (1899), a programmatic work for string sextet that develops several distinctive "leitmotif"-like themes, each one eclipsing and subordinating the last. The only motivic elements that persist throughout the work are those that are perpetually dissolved, varied, and re-combined, in a technique, identified primarily in Brahms's music, that Schoenberg called "developing variation." Schoenberg's procedures in the work are organized in two ways simultaneously; at once suggesting a Wagnerian narrative of stable motivic ideas, as well as a Brahmsian approach to motivic development and tonal cohesion.
Schoenberg's music from 1908 onward experiments in a variety of ways with the absence of traditional keys or tonal centers. His first explicitly atonal piece was the second string quartet, op. 10, with soprano. The last movement of this piece has no key signature, marking Schoenberg's formal divorce from diatonic harmonies. Other important works of the era include his song cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, op. 15 (1908–1909), his Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16 (1909), the ominous Pierrot Lunaire, op. 21 (1912), as well as his dramatic Erwartung, op. 17 (1909). The urgency of musical constructions lacking in tonal centers, or traditional dissonance-consonance relationships, however, can be traced as far back as his Kammersymphonie, op. 9 (1906), a work remarkable for its tonal development of quartal harmony, and its initiation of dynamic and unusual ensemble relationships, involving dramatic interruption and unpredictable instrumental allegiances; many of these features would typify the timbre-oriented chamber music aesthetic of the coming century.
In the early 1920s he worked at evolving a means of order which would enable his musical texture to become simpler and clearer, and this resulted in the "method of composition with twelve tones" in which the twelve pitches of the octave are regarded as equal, and no one note or tonality is given the emphasis it occupied in classical harmony. He regarded it as the equivalent in music of Albert Einstein's discoveries in physics, and Schoenberg announced it characteristically, during a walk with his friend Josef Rufer, when he said "I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years" (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 277). A number of works in this period include the Variations for Orchestra, op. 31 (1928) piano pieces, opp. 33a & b (1931), and the Piano Concerto, op. 42 (1942). Contrary to Schoenberg's reputation for strictness, many of Schoenberg's works in this period drew on freely atonal or tonal materials, including his unfinished opera Moses Und Aron, and his Fantasy for Violin and Piano, op. 47 (1949).
Ten features of Schoenberg's mature twelve-tone practice are characteristic, interdependent, and interactive[1]:
1. Hexachordal inversional combinatoriality
2. Aggregates
3. Linear set presentation
4. Partitioning
5. Isomorphic partitioning
6. Invariants
7. Hexachordal levels
8. Harmony, "consistent with and derived from the properties of the referential set"
9. Metre, established through "pitch-relational characteristics"
10. Multidimensional set presentations
Controversies and polemics:
Understanding of Schoenberg's work has been difficult to achieve due in part to its dissimilarity to tonal music, misinformation about the system's "rules" and "exceptions", the "vastness" of the "unexplored territory", Schoenberg's secretiveness, and the widespread unavailability of his sketches and manuscripts until the late 1970s. During his life he was "subjected to a range of criticism and abuse that is shocking even in hindsight" (Haimo 1990, 2–3).
After some understandable early difficulties, Schoenberg began to win public acceptance, with works such as the tone poem Pelleas und Melisande at a Berlin performance in 1907, and, especially, at the Vienna première of the Gurre-Lieder on 13 February 1913, which received an ovation that lasted a quarter of an hour and Schoenberg was presented with a laurel crown (Rosen 1996, 4; Stuckenschmidt 1977, 184). Much of his work, however, was not well received. In 1907 his Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E major op. 9 was premièred. When it was played again, however, in a 31 March 1913 concert which also included works by Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Alexander von Zemlinsky, thunderous applause contended with hisses and laughter during Webern's Six Pieces, op. 6. Though Zemlinsky's Four Maeterlinck Songs calmed the audience somewhat, according to a contemporary newspaper report, after Schoenberg's op. 9 "one could hear the shrill sound of door keys among the violent clapping and in the second gallery the first fight of the evening began". Later in the concert, during a performance of the Altenberg Lieder by Berg, fighting broke out after Schoenberg interrupted the performance to threaten removal by the police of any troublemakers (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 185). Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, which were to have concluded the concert, had to be cancelled after a police officer was called in (Rosen 1996, 5). Schoenberg's music after 1908 made a break from tonality.
The deteriorating relation between contemporary composers and the public led him to found the Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen in German) in Vienna in 1918. His aim was grandiose but scarcely selfish; he sought to provide a forum in which modern musical compositions could be carefully prepared and rehearsed, and properly performed under conditions protected from the dictates of fashion and pressures of commerce. From its inception through 1921, when it ended because of economic reasons, the Society presented 353 performances to paid members, sometimes at the rate of one per week, and during the first year and a half, Schoenberg did not allow any of his own works to be performed (Rosen 1975, 65). Instead, audiences at the Society's concerts heard difficult contemporary compositions by Scriabin, Debussy, Mahler, Webern, Berg, Reger, and other leading figures of early 20th-century music (Rosen 1996, 66).
Schoenberg's serial technique of composition with twelve notes became one of the most central and polemical issues among American and European musicians during the mid- to late-twentieth century. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing to the present day, composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Milton Babbitt have extended Schoenberg's legacy in increasingly radical directions. The major cities in the USA (e.g. Los Angeles, NYC, Boston) have also been hosts for historically significant performances of Schoenberg's music, with advocates such as Babbitt in NYC and the Franco-American conductor-pianist, Jacques-Louis Monod; including the influence of Schoenberg's own pupils, who have taught at major American schools (e.g. Leonard Stein at USC, UCLA and CalArts; Richard Hoffmann at Oberlin; Patricia Carpenter at Columbia; and Leon Kirchner and Earl Kim at Harvard). Others include performers associated with Schoenberg, who have had a profound influence upon contemporary music performance practice in the USA (e.g. Louis Krasner, Eugene Lehner and Rudolf Kolisch at the New England Conservatory of Music; Eduard Steuermann and Felix Galimar at the Juilliard School). In Europe, the work of Hans Keller, Luigi Rognoni, and René Leibowitz has had a measurable influence in spreading Schoenberg's musical legacy outside of Germany and Austria.
Schoenberg was not fond of Igor Stravinsky, and in 1926 wrote a poem titled "Der neue Klassizismus" (in which he derogates Neoclassicism and obliquely refers to Stravinsky as "Der kleine Modernsky"), which he used as text for the third of his Drei Satiren, op. 28 (H. C. Schonberg 1970, 503).
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg
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