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Arnold Schönberg
(1874-1951)
Arnold Schönberg remains the most controversial composer of the first half of the 20th century. The difficulty in approaching his music is due to audience unfamiliarity with his composing methods and style. Most people find that they can accept his music, though, with repeated exposure.
• His Life
Schönberg studied violin very early, and began to compose duets for violin and piano. His father died when Schönberg was sixteen, after which Schönberg took a job in banking, but continued to study music. He played in string quartets with friends after teaching himself cello. He studied composition and counterpoint briefly with Alexander von Zemlinsky, one of his fellow quartet players. They were to become close friends. Zemlinsky would slowly gain public recognition, much later, as a solid romantic composer in his own right. Interestingly, this experience provided the only formal musical training Schönberg ever was to receive. The lessons provided a platform which enabled Schönberg to begin composing quartet music and music for various other stringed instrumental combinations.
After having composed pieces for his group to perform--very painstakingly, with help from studying scores from the early masters and from Zemlinsky’s teachings--Schönberg began serious composing. By 1899, he completed his first major work, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). The original version is for String Sextet. The work is considered an accomplished masterpiece by almost all who have ever studied or heard it. Its powerfully romantic, expressive musicality is reminiscent of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, two early musical models (not to mention Brahms and Wagner). The most prominent distinguishing feature is the profoundly accomplished contrapuntal mastery exhibited within the work, a trait not generally recognized in Strauss and Mahler. This trait represents a fusion in Schönberg of qualities contained in opposition in the music of Brahms (the traditional Germanic formalism - Schönberg’s formalist side) and Wagner (the equally traditional Germanic trait of heightened expressivity - Schönberg’s romantic expressive side). The dual characteristics were to co-exist in unusual degree throughout Schönberg’s life, whatever his method of composing for a given piece (SUM Slonimsky p. 1629).
After other works, large and small, within a Romantic style that became ever more restless and complex (notably Gürrelieder - 1900-11 and Pelleas et Melisande - 1902-3 for enormous orchestras), Schönberg found that Romanticism within a traditional tonal language had become outmoded. The old way ceased to be fresh; the oft-used sounds, new at one time, began to seem cliche-ridden and tiring. The orchestration became so large it was cumbersome. He explored stretching tonality to the breaking point. By 1906, Schönberg had reached a critical equipoise in several works that seemed balanced on the verge of suspension of tonality altogether. Several transitional works, most notably the first Chamber Symphony (1906), were composed. They were scored using mostly intervals of fourths (Slonimsky p. 1629) to heighten interest recently lost in post-romantic harmonies. The flavor of chords of the fourth-interval has a peculiarly unsettled quality. This chord usage allowed Schönberg a way to avoid tonal-sounding phrases. This style later developed into ‘atonality’ (literally, without tonality).
In the meantime, Schönberg gathered several pupils around him who were sympathetic to his revolution. The most prominent, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, became major composers in their own right. Soon the works that earned Schönberg his notoriety were composed. They include (completely from his atonal period): Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909), Pierrot Lunaire (1912), and Erwartung (1909) (Nightmares). The style in these works is extreme dissonance combined with extreme ‘Expressionism’, a musical trait that had contemporary counterparts in painting and literature (with the psychological underpinnings mentioned previously.)
The works in that period were necessarily brief, if not in whole, at least in the individual movements. Schönberg felt a large-scale piece would crumble formalistically under its own weight without some unifying principal to replace the abandoned system of tonality. Schönberg became silent thereafter for six years, during which he worked out the organizing system for which he is now famous (or infamous): the 12-tone method. It became an ordering procedure for tones, analogous to the formalization provided by functional harmony in tonal music. This method gave Schönberg the means to organize large atonal works.
The years thereafter saw the composition of several major large-scale works. Most prominent among them were: Moses und Aron (biblical opera - 1930-2), the third and fourth string quartets, the Violin Concerto (1936), Piano Concerto (1942), Variations for Orchestra (1928), Survivor from Warsaw (1943) for orchestra and sprechstimme (speech-song narrator). Finally, satisfied that he had accomplished the creation of a successful alternate method for composition, Schönberg began to return to tonal composition! The Kol Nidre (1938) for orchestra and chorus is a primary example................
• His Major Works
Verklärte Nacht Gürrelieder Pelleas et Melisande
First Chamber Symphony Pierrot Lunaire Erwartung
Five Pieces for Orchestra Moses Und Aron Violin Concerto
Piano Concerto Survivor from Warsaw Second String Quartet
Third String Quartet Fourth String Quartet Second Chamber Symphony
Kol Nidre Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra after Handel
Begleitungsmusik zu Eider Lichtspielszene (Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene)
CHAPTER PREVIEW - SCHÖNBERG
