Arnold Schoenberg: Griffin Kelley

Arguably the most influential composer of the twentieth century, and perhaps of all time, Schoenberg's fame arose from his escape from tonality and his innovation of the serial method. While theorists may still demonize him for having “destroyed” music, the largely self-taught and hugely inventive Schoenberg saw his work as a logical evolution of cherished tradition. Arnold Schoenberg initially began by writing tonal music in the late Romantic style: highly chromatic and expressive, yet still traditional in form and harmonic function. Hoping to free his own creativity from any constraints and express raw, unadulterated emotions in his music, Schoenberg developed a new approach to harmony known as atonality. Atonal music (Schoenberg himself preferred the term “pantonal”) is not grounded in a single key; rather, it uses the full chromatic spectrum of pitches instead of the hierarchy of seven in a traditional diatonic scale, and relies on dissonant harmonies instead of consonant triads.
Schoenberg composed Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) in three weeks in September 1899. He originally wrote it for string sextet; in 1917, however, he reconceived it for string orchestra, softening the broodiness of the original. The music is a response of sorts to a poem by Richard Dehmel from a collection called Weib und Welt (The Woman and the World). It was first published in 1896, but republished as part of Dehmel’s 1903 verse novel Zwei Menschen (Two People). The poem was modern for the time in which it was written, especially in regard to its realistic, rather lurid subject matter, in which a woman reveals to her lover that she is pregnant with another man’s child. The five stanzas are of uneven length, the silence between the third and fourth stanzas marking the moment in which the woman’s lover decides whether or not to forgive her (he does).
In order to distance his work from its source, Schoenberg, in his liner notes for a 1932 recording of Transfigured Night, offered not a translation of the Dehmel poem, which now embarrassed him, but a description of the musical ideas it contained. He listed nine instances of what he called the “unconscious” relationships between the themes and one instance of “conscious” invention: the chorale-like passage in D major that marks the moment the heroine is forgiven her crime of passion.
In the opinion of Schoenberg’s devoted student Anton Webern, the first theme, which represents the couple walking in the moonlight, was “suggestive of deep sorrow.” The beginning of the second section offers “the passionate plaint of the woman, full of remorse. There follows an episode evocative of the “longing for maternal happiness” and a return of the opening moonlight music. The fourth section “begins with the comforting reply of the man.” The piece ends as “the first tragic motif now relieved of its melancholy, sounds as if removed from the earthly plane.”
In schematic terms, the form of Transfigured Night can be likened to a rondo, with the narrative material of the opening section (A) recurring in ethereal variation halfway through at the end. The music of the B section is associated with the woman’s speech; that of the C section with the man’s response. The actual unfolding of the music is more complex than this simple description suggests, of course. Rather than describing what the characters in the poem themselves experience, Schoenberg sought to convey his own intense and troubled personal reaction to their plight. Subjective experience translated directly into compositional practice, without regard for the rules of harmony and tonality. The technique became known as Expressionism, an aesthetic related to the emerging theories of Sigmund Freud and concerned with the inner life of the mind. Its musical style melded the formal harmonies and variation structure of Brahms with the uninhibited sensual sonorities of Wagner, and thus reconciled the two poles of late 19th century musical aesthetics.
Cast in a single movement, and lasting just under half an hour, Verklärte Nacht is the most extensive, ambitious instrumental structure completed by Schoenberg up to this point. Its formal disposition has prompted divergent analytical perspectives. Webern, probably the earliest commentator, described Verklärte Nacht as simply "frei phantasierend" (Webern 1912, 23). Schoenberg's own discussion, written for record liner notes in 1950, seems to take a similar tack in that he does not explicitly treat the larger form, but rather associates certain specific musical themes with portions of the poem.[6] In 1921, Wellesz proposed a more intimate relationship between the overall structure of the sextet and the Dehmel poem: “The structure of Verklärte Nacht, in accordance with the poem, is made up of five sections, in which the first, third, and fifth are of more epic nature and so portray the deep feelings of the people wandering about in the cold moonlit night. The second contains the passionate plaint of the woman, the fourth the sustained answer of the man, which shows much depth and warmth of understanding.” (WELLESZ 1925, 67)
Rejected by the cultural gatekeepers of the time for its bold harmonies and "forbidden chords," Verklärte Nacht sounds far more comfortable and comforting to modern ears. Structured as a long arch from the cold despair of d minor to the resolve of D major, it's colored by intense chromaticism, full of accidentals and often traveling the long way around the circle of fifths (once switching abruptly from six sharps to five flats). Schoenberg was especially proud of an extreme transition (at measures 225-230) from e-flat minor to D major, linked only by a sustained b-flat. Its first performance came in 1903 by Arnold Rosé, leader of the Vienna Philharmonic, whose rehearsals attracted the admiration of its conductor Gustav Mahler, who, to his credit, championed Schoenberg in his few remaining years, even though he admitted that he didn't fully understand the music. (Schoenberg, in turn, admired Mahler for baring his soul in his art.)
Verklärte Nacht can more accurately be said to be shaped by thematic processes and large-scale harmonic procedures lying largely outside the sonata tradition. The thematic material in Verklärte Nacht is unfolded by continuous transformation that is more malleable and subtle than anything we have seen in Schoenberg's earlier works.
Dehmel’s Poem and English Translation:
Zwei Menschen gehn durch kahlen, kalten Hain; der Mond läuft mit, sie schaun hinein.
Der Mond läuft über hohe Eichen, kein Wölkchen trübt das Himmelslicht, in das die schwarzen Zacken reichen.
Die Stimme eines Weibes spricht:
Ich trag ein Kind, und nit von dir, ich geh in Sünde neben dir.
Ich hab mich schwer an mir vergangen; ich glaubte nicht mehr an ein Glück und hatte doch ein schwer Verlangen nach Lebensfrucht, nach Mutterglück und Pflicht—da hab ich mich erfrecht, da ließ ich schauernd mein Geschlecht von einem fremden Mann umfangen und hab mich noch dafür gesegnet.
Nun hat das Leben sich gerächt, nun bin ich dir, o dir begegnet.
Sie geht mit ungelenkem Schritt, sie schaut empor, der Mond läuft mit; ihr dunkler Blick ertrinkt in Licht.
Die Stimme eines Mannes spricht:
Das Kind, das du empfangen hast, sei deiner Seele keine Last, o sieh, wie klar das Weltall schimmert!
Es ist ein Glanz um Alles her, du treibst mit mir auf kaltem Meer, doch eine eigne Wärme flimmert von dir in mich, von mir in dich; dir wird das fremde Kind verklären, du wirst es mir, von mir gebären, du hast den Glanz in mich gebracht, du hast mich selbst zum Kind gemacht.
Er faßt sie um die starken Hüften, ihr Atem mischt sich in den Lüften, zwei Menschen gehn durch hohe, helle Nacht.[5]

Two people walk through the bare, cold woods; the moon runs along, they gaze at it. The moon runs over tall oaks, no little cloud dulls the heavenly light, into which the black points reach. A woman's voice speaks:
I bear a child, and not by you. I walk in sin alongside you. I have gone seriously astray. I believed no longer in good fortune, yet still had a great longing for a full life, for a mother's happiness and duty; then I became reckless; horror-stricken, I let myself be taken by a stranger and even blessed myself for it. Now life has taken its revenge: now have I met you, oh, you.
She walks with clumsy gait. She gazes upward; the moon runs along.
Her somber glance drowns in the light.
A man's voice speaks:
The child that you conceived, let it be no burden to your soul; oh, look, how clear the universe glitters! There is a radiance about everything; you drift along with me on a cold sea, yet a special warmth glimmers from you in me, from me in you.
It will transfigure the strange child, you will bear it me, from me; you have brought the radiance into me, you have made me a child myself.
He holds her around her strong hips. Their breath mingles in the air. Two people walk through the high, clear night.

Verklärte Nacht, key areas and dominant preparations in part II. Verklärte Nacht, op. 4, principal themes