Arnold Schoenberg.... the mere mention of the name strikes fear into the hearts of the audiences everywhere while conjuring up feelings of admiration among many composers. Though Schoenberg wrote in a variety of styles, he is probably best, if not notoriously, known for the development of the 12-tone system of composing where, in its purest form, each of the twelve chromatic tones are ordered in a specific way and used melodically and harmonically, before the first tone of the twelve is repeated again.
Prior to developing this system, however, Schoenberg continued in and expanded upon the styles of his immediate predecessors in Austria - Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, and Brahms. One of his best-known and most widely performed works is
Transfigured Night, an early composition for string sextet/string orchestra, written when Schoenberg was 25.
Transfigured Night is romanticism at its best. Based on a story of love, tragedy and forgiveness, the work includes lush chromaticism; ever increasing waves of harmonic tension and release; and oodles of delicious, soupy violin writing in the extreme upper register.
Interestingly enough, my recording of Transfigured Night is paired with an equally wonderful piece from Schoenberg’s 12-tone period, his
Variations for Orchestra. I’ve always been a fan of the Variations, so much so, that even after grad school was over, and no one would have cared, I spent several days one summer analyzing the rows upon which it was constructed.
But earlier this week, I had the good fortune of listening to these pieces back to back and, though they were constructed with completely different methods, I was struck by the similarities between the works. In fact, I heard some nearly identical melodic gestures in the strings that seemed to be imbued with the same romantic underpinnings and yearnings for something beyond this world. It made me begin wonder, was Schoenberg a romantic all along?
Listen to the excerpts below. In both cases, I've placed similar melodic gestures from both works back to back. In both examples, the sample from
Transfigured Night precedes the sample from
Variations for Orchestra.
isn’t the same sense of drama, and romantic spirit present in both? Both works share similarities in their usage and treatment of half step melodic resolutions and in general, I get the same sense of sturm und drang in both. The difference between the two, is in the harmonic and textural content, where the Variations seems busier and much less settled harmonically.
The fact that Schoenberg returned to tonality in the latter stages of his life is often overlooked by music criticism. In the thirties and forties, he completed the
Suite in G for strings, the
2nd Chamber Symphony, and a
Theme and Variations for Band, all works based on tonality.
Of course, historians like figures that can be categorized into nice and neat boxes, so Schoenberg is often cast as part of the Second Viennese or twelve tone school. And, while this is a true categorization, it also ignores some of the important works he completed before and after his purely dodecaphonic period.
Composing takes a lot of time, and at the end of our life, when we sense that at any given point, we could be composing our last work, we only have time to write in the styles we truly believe in. The time for exploring is essentially over and the rush to make final musical arguments is on.
Doesn’t the fact that Schoenberg returned to tonality for some of his later works illustrate that he never truly disavowed tonality as a viable and equally effective compositional system to dodecaphony? Otherwise, why return to it at the final stage, when time is running out?
Is it possible, he was a romantic all along?

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