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BACK TO SCHOOL
The Second Viennese School Revisited
Tuesday, May 16, 2000 |
Back by popular demand, SOLI presents a second program of the influential turn-of-the-(twentieth!)-century music of these three masters from Vienna. |
Variations for piano |
Anton Webern |
Adagio for violin, clarinet, piano |
Alban Berg |
| Slow movement for string quartet | Anton Webern |
Pierrot lunaire, op. 21 |
Arnold Schoenberg for Sprechstimme, piano, flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, viola & cello |
PROGRAM NOTES
Anton Webern (he dropped the "von" at an early age) was by training a musicologist, by necessity an itinerant conductor of operetta, but by vocation a composer of music that seems to have little to do with either musicology or operetta. But a close examination of the works we will hear tonight reveals both stucture and feeling, qualities that Webern’s training and experience made possible to a degree that may escape many listeners.
The Variations for Piano, Op. 27 of 1936 is a late work, and Webern called it "a sort of suite." This may be a better name for the work, since only the third movement corresponds to classical variation form. The first movement consists mainly of short phrases, some as brief as two or three notes.
The brief, playful second movement serves as a sort of scherzo, and the finale finds the composer expanding on his short phrases to produce a more thorough, yet still aphoristic, argument.
Is this "music for math majors," as some have scoffed? Some performances have made it seem that way, but the evidence is that Webern did not so intend it. The pianist and critic Peter Stadlen (1910-1996) was the pianist of the world premier and was coached by Webern in the Variations. He related that the composer "sang and shouted, waved his arms and stamped his feet in an attempt to bring out what he called the meaning of the music...his urge to express extra-musical contents went to such extremes that the notes had become almost incidental and were only regarded as carriers of expression." Stadlen wrote that Webern imagined the piece with an enormous amount of constant rubato. Not exactly the dry, academic Webern of his reputation, and certainly worth considering as we listen to this music.
Unlike Webern, Alban Berg had practically no serious musical education when he began his studies with Arnold Schoenberg, in that same year of 1904. After writing his first atonal works, Berg served in the Austrian army during World War I, during which time he also began work on his opera Wozzeck, which he completed in 1922. The following year, Berg set to work on his Kammerkonzert (Chamber Concerto) for Violin, Piano and 13 Winds. By this time, Berg was crossing back and forth over the "line" that separates tonal and atonal music and had heard the music of Stravinsky. The work is in three movements, of which the first is a "classical" theme and five variations and the third an introduction and rondo, also "classical." The middle movement, which we are hearing tonight in Berg’s own transcription for violin, clarinet and piano, is the most fascinating and free. Though marked adagio, much of the movement feels much faster than that and generates plenty of momentum within a generally slow tempo. The work is dedicated to Schoenberg "as a monument to our twenty-year-old friendship."
The violin gets most of the solo work in both versions. The movement is, like the first movement of the Chamber Concerto, divided into six sections grouped into two large divisions. Inevitably, the textures of the violin-clarinet-piano version are less dense than those of the original - but the original was relatively transparent anyway. The chief virtue of this transcription is that it makes available, for performance by a small ensemble, a fine piece of music that is seldom heard because of the forces required -- too many for a chamber music concert, too few for an orchestral concert. It may be that hearing this selection will encourage many listeners to investigate recordings of the complete Chamber Concerto, a work worthy of mention alongside the better-known Chamber Concerto No. 1 of Schoenberg, and the more recent Chamber Concerto of John Adams.
Langsamer Satz (Slow Movement) for String Quartet is a much earlier work, from 1905, the same year as Webern’s also-unpublished String Quartet. Webern had become a student of Arnold Schoenberg the year before, and he was still working on his doctorate at the Vienna University. This romantic idyll was composed in June, 1905 after a walk in the Austrian woods with his cousin, Wilhelmine Moertl, who soon became his wife. Her influence, and that of Schoenberg, are unmistakable throughout. This very accessible piece was largely ignored until recently, when it was taken up by the Emerson String Quartet. It has even been arranged for string orchestra by conductor Gerard Schwarz, who turns it into a Sehr langsamer Satz by taking it about 50 per cent slower than usual - truly a version for those who cannot get enough of this beautiful movement.
PIERROT LUNAIRE -- Expressionism was a movement in the arts to depict, not objective reality, but the subjective emotions and response of the artist to objects and events. In painting and sculpture, familiar examples are Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. In the drama, Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller and, later, Friedrich Duerrenmatt and Berthold Brecht are the German-speaking world’s contribution, while the American Eugene O’Neill and the Irishman Sean O’Casey used expressionist techniques in some of their works. Expressionist operas include Alban Berg’s two masterworks, Wozzeck and Lulu, as well as Hindemith’s Murder, Hope of Women. Spontaneous self-expression was the goal and, to that end, artists used distortion, exaggeration, fantasy and primitivism to get and retain their audience’s attention.
Arnold Schoenberg was attracted to the expressionist theatre of pre-World War I Vienna and Berlin, including a sort of high-class cabaret that used melodrama, words spoken to a musical accompaniment. The actress-singer Albertine Zehme (1857-1946), who sometimes declaimed poetry to the music of Chopin, was the artist for whom Schoenberg composed Pierrot lunaire. She had b een singing a song cycle by the now-forgotten Otto Wrieslander to poems by that name of the Belgian Albert Giraud, in German translation by Otto Erich Hartleben, but asked Schoenberg for a cycle of recitations with music for her evening cabaret performances. The composer saw this as a marvelous idea and selected 21 of the 50 poems, dividing them into three parts, each with a different tone. In Part I, Pierrot, under the influence of the moon, fantasizes on love, sex and religion. In Part II, we (and Pierrot) are in a nightmare underworld of violence, crime and blasphemy. Part III finds Pierrot heading home to Bergamo, with his past haunting him.
The poems of Giraud (1860-1929) are cast in strict rondel form, and Hartleben keeps the form, if not the content, in his German versions. We have nothing quite like this in English, so strict adherence to the rondel form could sound stilted to us. Yet Schoenberg’s music, which largely ignores the structure of the poems, helps prevent this from happening. He uses a variety of older forms, including canon and fugue, passacaglia and free counterpoint. He also varies the instrumentation so that no two poems sound alike. The entire ensemble plays only in the last poem. And Schoenberg employs, not the 19th century spoken melodrama (like Richard Strauss’ setting of Lord Tennyson’s Enoch Arden), but a system of precise speech-rhythms with the approximate pitch at which the "reciter" should speak each syllable indicated in musical notation. This is called sprechgesang, "speechsong," and the "reciter" is not referred to by conventional vocal category, but as sprechstimme, "speaking voice," Schoenberg gave specific instructions that the "reciter" not use either conventional singing or conventional speech. The pitch was to be sounded, but not held, the "reciter" immediately moving up or down to the next pitch.
There were 40 rehearsals(!) before the first performance, October 16, 1912 at the Choralion-Saal in Berlin. Frau Zehme stood alone on stage, with Schoenberg conducting the musicians behind a screen. Webern commented, "Naturally, there were a few people who hissed...but that meant nothing. There was enthusiasm after the second part, and in the third there was one place where unrest was caused by an idiot who was laughing...but at the end...it was an unqualified success." Stravinsky caught one of the Berlin performances and wrote his Three Japanese Lyrics under its influence. Later in life, he called Pierrot lunaire "the solar plexus of twentieth-century music." The show took to the road throughout Germany and Austria later in 1912, to mixed reviews. Some critics suspected they were having their legs pulled, a few were horrified and others full of admiration. The name and musical ideas of Arnold Schoenberg attracted plenty of attention.
The situation has not changed in much of the world, 88 years later. Although this is the second performance of Pierrot lunaire in San Antonio in as many years, it is not unusual to find music lovers who have never been able to attend a live performance. The work continues to challenge listeners and performers alike, and is in a dramatic form that has largely vanished. Opera, chamber music, orchestral music - where does it fit? A recent Toronto performance was staged. Another example of why musical categories can be misleading - and dangerous, since many fine works can get lost in the process. There have been many recordings of Pierrot since the pioneering version, conducted by the composer, that included Erika Stiedry-Wagner as "reciter" and Rudolf Kolisch and Edward Steuermann among the instrumentalists (Los Angeles, Sept. 24, 1940). A recent discography lists 37 different complete recordings, varying from 30 to 37 minutes in duration, with most around 32-33 minutes. So there seems to have developed a performance tradition. The work and its style have influenced such composers as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel.
There is a fascinating variety of effects to be enjoyed in this work. One thing not normally associated with Schoenberg -- humor -- is also present, if in somewhat sardonic form. Connoisseurs of viola jokes will appreciate No. 19, Serenade, in which Pierrot is pictured playing a viola with a huge bow. Guess which instrument does not play in No. 19. And then listen to which instrument tries to sound like a viola, and plays arco where the poem calls for pizzicato. A sort of double viola joke! The texts themselves, of course, provide much that is grotesque, fantastic, puzzling and thought-provoking. No. 12, Galgenlied, is all of these. Here Giraud’s original French provides the key to the meaning, in the expression etranglante caresse, usually rendered "embrace." "Stranglehold" would be closer, and it becomes clear that the noose itself is the "final paramour."
Pierrot lunaire was practically the last work Schoenberg wrote for a period of 12 years. During this time he devised a more ordered atonality we refer to as "serialism," and his first works in the new style began appearing in 1924. So we can term Pierrot a watershed work, in that the composer decided he could go no further without devising a more orderly method of composition. Some have continued to follow him, others did so for a while before returning to tonality, and some have never followed Schoenberg. The result has been almost a century of music with much more variety than before, and we are all the richer for it.
Program notes prepared by H. V. Doyle, Jr.
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