{"itemData":[{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":6.03,"ASIN":"B000MRP1S2","isPreorder":0},{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":5.99,"ASIN":"B0015DM3EM","isPreorder":0},{"priceBreaksMAP":null,"buyingPrice":7,"ASIN":"B000VIFLYQ","isPreorder":0}],"shippingId":"B000MRP1S2::sgbzIsInq9zBgHGQIJGEjnFabvvJQaj8dC%2BNnHThTqKDxMtWnfi66wLS%2FpUEBzxxNffJP3qFsT7iiKe%2Fzs6GEqcElESBBQuf,B0015DM3EM::Bcwx8rIMqEX025sG9cOU7xMmLw2BjYmBZT5XcXyfo2XZxky7tbhC1dGOOd%2FY9lCqf%2BpWFCQU%2Bxl5v9uCNW2sN8DYhf0tyqNqKJQAOzTh8W3md0eGyNGQa6xxqJQ7lbR8FeKU6hSSlgiIc%2Bsf53poxQ%3D%3D,B000VIFLYQ::TTgtPbvooNhGCb2Pvj7fdTNROU6Y6B%2BDVZ2wMaWfi8ZXc9VywUAg05%2FPOc0h8vgN%2Bts%2FjlkYqGhWUEOK1Fdu8rPdR2MAPYRj","sprites":{"addToWishlist":["wl_one","wl_two","wl_three"],"addToCart":["s_addToCart","s_addBothToCart","s_add3ToCart"],"preorder":["s_preorderThis","s_preorderBoth","s_preorderAll3"]},"currenyCode":"GBP","shippingDetails":{"xz":"same","yz":"same","xy":"same","xyz":"same"},"tags":["x","y","z"],"strings":{"addToWishlist":[null,null,null],"addToCart":["Add to Basket","Add both to Basket","Add all three to Cart"],"showDetailsDefault":"Show availability and delivery details","shippingError":"An error occurred, please try again","hideDetailsDefault":"Hide availability and delivery details","priceLabel":["Price:","Price For Both:","Price For All Three:"],"preorder":["Pre-order this item","Pre-order both items","Pre-order all three items"]}}
Arnold Schoenberg (1874 - 1951) remains a difficult composer even in his more accessible styles. Yet, his music rewards effort and repeated hearings. Some years ago, the scholar-conductor Robert Craft recorded a great deal of Schoenberg on the Koch International Classics label, and these recordings have been reissued on the budget priced Naxos label. I am finding these recordings an excellent way to focus on Schoenberg.
There are four works on this CD, including three works for voice and orchestra and an instrumental piece, the "Chamber Symphony No. 1" opus 9. The works were composed between 1906 and 1916 and each has its own character. They show a good deal of Schoenberg's development.
The Chamber Symphony No. 1 (1906), performed with Craft and the Twentieth Century Classics Ensemble in a 1998 recording, is the earliest work on this CD. It is a taut, compact work of about 20 minutes in a single movement with five subsections that Schoenberg marked sonata-allegro, scherzo, development, adagio, and recapitulation. The piece is scored for an ensemble of ten winds and five strings. The small ensemble contrasts markedly with the large orchestra used by Strauss, Mahler, and Schoenberg himself in other compositions of the day. The predominance of the winds gives the work a distinctive texture. The work is based throughout on the same thematic material, which is subject to great variation and development in terms of harmony, rhythm, and instrumentation. The tempo changes constantly, and the work has a propulsive feel. Regarded as one of Schoenberg's masterworks, the Chamber Symphony No. 1 combines late romanticism and Schoenberg's developing original style in a most challenging way. The work requires concentrated listening....
The next work chronologically is the short song "Herzgewachse" (foliage of the heart) opus 20 (1911) in which Schoenberg set a poem by Maurice Maetterlink. The work is for the combination of soprano, harmonium, celesta and harp. This seldom-heard short work has a demanding vocal line, sung here by coloratura soprano Eileen Hulse in a recording dating from 1994. The work is characterized by its unusual instrumention which Schoenberg uses to the utmost and by the repeated and passionate outbursts late in the piece at the highest ranges of the soprano's register.
One of the most frequently played of Schoenberg's compositions, Pierrot Lunaire (1912) is a setting of 21 poems in three parts scored for voice, piano, flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin/viola, and cello. The poems were written in French by Albert Giraud but Schoenberg set the German translation by Eric Harleben. It was his first work in a distinctly atonal style. The vocal line is marked Sprecstimme. The line between speech in accordance with notes and singing remains highly ambiguous, with this performance by soprano Anja Silja more on the singing side of the continuum. The recording dates from 1997. The work is declaimed by a Harlequin-like character in three sections which speak of the moon and romance, violence and crime, and a nostalgic journey home. Pierrot Lunaire is a cabaret piece in modernistic, decadent style. There should be no illusion that this music is accessible or easy. Listeners tend to either love or hate this work, and I find myself of the former view.
The final work on the CD is another rarity, the Four Orchestral Songs, opus 22 (1916) scored for soprano and varying collections of instruments featuring the clarinet. The recording with mezzo-soprano Catherine Wyn-Rogers dates from 1993. The first and longest song, "Seraphita" sets a poem by the English writer Ernest Dowson (best-known for his poem "Cynara") in a German translation by Stephan George. It features a long elaborate introduction played by six clarinets followed by a floridly romantic vocal line. The work comes to a lengthy, elaborate orchestral close with a wide collage of instrumentation and varying timbres. The remaining three songs are settings of poetry by Rilke. This seldom-held music is lyrical in character with romantic vocal lines.
Unfortunately this CD includes neither texts nor translations. Texts only are available on the Naxos website. Schoenberg wanted listeners to concentrate on the music rather than on the poems he set, but the texts would still have added a great deal to this release. Listeners wanting to expand their knowledge of a great but still controversial 20th Century composer will enjoy this CD and its companions by Robert Craft.
When discussing the music of Schoenberg it is customary for commentators to focus on the technicalities of his various musical systems, with the emotional and psychological aspects left as an afterthought, if considered at all. Perhaps this is because the content of his music is so darned uncomfortable, it being easier to explain our unease in terms of systems of dissonance rather than those of frank psycho-spiritual pathology. There are many for whom Schoenberg is the bête noire who signalled the end of music worth listening to. I do not happen to agree, but within the rigid parameters of the pre-Freudian psyche they have a valid point. For the Romantics Beauty was Truth, and Will could triumph over pain and despair to win through to it. But for the modernists, and arguably as most explicitly pioneered by Schoenberg, all is relativised. Beauty may have to be sought in ugliness, and what might appear beautiful at first sight might become ugly when examined too closely. Will does not always, indeed frequently does not triumph, and pain and despair are real enemies that can break people irrevocably, and do so with recurrent banality and without any trace of it mattering in a spiritual vacuum. To hear beyond the dissonant syntax of Schoenberg's music, through to its emotional semantic kernel, one must turn to face it on these terms. One must acknowledge that it is full of real pain and real torment that the meagre soul may not be adequate to, and that it really does hurt to listen to, not just because of the technical means chosen, but because of the meaning it is intended to convey. Being great art the message is so much more than just the medium.
The first work on the disc is the three minute wonder, Herzgewäsche of 1911.... This work combines harp, celeste and various stops of the harmonium to create an ethereal, almost sinister backdrop against which a soprano performs a hugely demanding part, that takes her to the very extremes of her range of both pitch and artistry. This serves as a superb scene setter for the main course to follow, the radiantly psychotic Pierrot Lunaire completed in the following year.
Pierror Lunaire is a Sprechstimme, the soprano part being musically notated but with the instruction that it be spoken not sung, thus placing the emphasis on the syllabic structure of the text. To be clear, this is music and not spoken word, and if it were not made explicit that this was not straightforward song I would probably have been none the wiser. Three groups of seven poems, a freely translated selection into German by Erich Hartleben from the original fifty by the Belgian port Albert Giraud. The poems are grotesque and surreal, with more than a little resonance with the Baudelaire of Fleurs du mal, and to which spirit the music is entirely faithful. The text is not provided in the notes but an English translation can be found on the net which is well worth googling. In Pierrot we hear most clearly music that is not just avant garde, not just iconoclastic. It is music that is constructed from hysterical panics, howls of pain and groans of despair. Above all it is music that is in love with madness. Along the way beauty is encountered, frequently. Sometimes desperate, sometimes furtive, often poisonous, at times even deathly. It is a beauty made all the more precious for the knowledge of its transience and illusory nature. The ensemble that accompanies the soprano for Pierrot is an intriguing combination from which Schoenberg manages to extract all sorts of strange colours and sonorities. Piano, flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin/viola and cello. I should point out here that some of the scoring requires fantastic precision from the players that those on this release deliver with tremendous panache.
We next have Four Orchestral Songs from 1916. Written in the depths of the war, four short songs, all listless and forlorn, brimful with quiet disappointment. This is the music of one who has made some kind of recovery from madness, from which all glamour has now faded, but who knows that they will never be the same. That something has been irretrievably lost, and for whom life is now a more or less dignified waiting for death. The beauty of these songs is to be found in the poignance of the acceptance of their condition. There is no struggle in these songs, and they all, even the last, fade to silence without fanfare.
The final work on the disc, the extremely accomplished Chamber Symphony No.1 of 1906, which evidently caused a few punch ups in its early performances, significantly predates the preceding works on the disc. Interestingly, the musical language is much the same as that of the later works, but the emotional content anticipates them in that it is the music of a spirit that is not yet broken. No, there are no outright triumphs over adversity. There are incidences of hysterical panic fled from or brazened out. Breath is then regained before moving on to confront the next nameless terror. We hear desperate yearning and searching for something to fill an aching void, but between times there are still opportunities for repose. A love of life is still a feasible option. There is still enough hope to summon the occasional brief but optimistic fanfare. Death has not yet infected everything. The work ends on a note of confidence, but not one that is justified by the logic of the preceding material.
There has been much acclaim for the Naxos complete Schoenberg project, under the direction of Robert Craft, and deservedly so if the superb performances and recordings on this disc are representative of the rest of the series. I certainly will be looking at more of these discs. One might even dare to hope that they can win a little more acceptance for this key 20th Century composer, who remains so controversial despite his obvious genius. In his favour I would only argue that one doesn't have to be mad to understand these extraordinary works, but it probably helps.Read more ›
The first striking element is that the text is long and not at all sung: a rich poetic text dramatically spoken along several totally innovative lines. Three dimensions of the language are used to create vocal music. First the rhythm created with syllables, making them long or short. This is a basic musical element of the language and many poets have used it, even in languages that do not have such a characteristic, very often it is true in songs but also in the stage directions of a play. But such a trait was essential in Shakespeare and was basic in Purcell and Handel. The second element is intonation: Schoenberg uses something that is going to become extremely common later on with the radio. He widely uses high dives and high jumps and all variations in between to create another type of music that is amplified by the first element making the tips of the intonation lines long and thus multiplying the effect. The third element is the force and intensity of each syllable from very weak to very powerful, and this trait is a very common dramatic way to emphasize one's discourse in everyday life. Even without listening to the words we are able to hear that music that is extremely expressive. The instrumental music is then nothing but an accompaniment that also plays on the same outer aspect. It is not a melodious line, certainly not the music of a song since the text is not sung. It is a real accompaniment as it existed for example in the Middle Ages, in the Gregorian and even late Gregorian traditions and polyphonies, with variations in the balance between text and music. At times the music takes over, at other times the text is dominant.... The music does not really create an atmosphere but sustains, supports and increases the atmosphere created by the voice, the diction, though a longer musical sequence can occur, for instance at the end of the 13th piece, "Enthauptung" as if the text was the beheading itself: the text is cut off from the music at the end and the music alone remains like a head or a body severed from its host. This is new though we cannot know how things were done before the recording technology made it possible to keep a trace of evanescent artistic interpretation. But it is possible to find spoken elements in operas and oratorios of previous periods, at least in the score. Prosody was a tradition in our music, a tradition that goes back to King David's codification and his music school in the Temple. Prosody as opposed to psalmody, two forms of poetry in the Bible and two forms of musical rendition of these two types of poetry (that was to become ternary with Bach's Passions: the Evangelist's prosody, the hymnal psalmody and the arias' virtuoso psalmody. But one can hear another poetical music. It is the regularity of the stanzas. Each piece is composed of three stanzas, two four-lined stanzas and one five-lined stanza. These stanzas are supported by no rhyming of any sort though, at the most some assonances and an obvious play on German feminine and masculine endings. But the pieces are built on a complex musical pattern. The first two lines of the first stanza are repeated at the end of the second stanza and the first line of the first stanza at the end of the third stanza, thus embracing the whole poem. This music of a double fading out echo creates a resonance in the text that also gives some depth to the text itself. The length of the lines is very regular, though the 12th piece "Galgenlied" has very short lines (five syllables instead of eight or nine). Moreover the whole work is divided in three parts, each composed of seven pieces. Some other numerical elements are signifying in this poem. Each piece has 13 lines. The 21 (3 x 7) pieces count 63 stanzas (6 + 3 = 9) and the complete number of lines is 819 (8 + 1 + 9 = 9 + 9 = 18 = 6 + 6 + 6). The beast of John's Book of Revelation is ever present: 666 (Revelation, 13) and three times 9 (idem, Jerusalem Bible's notes on 666). The night is dominant and the main luminary is the moon which is associated to blood and red, and to the dead and death. The negative linguistic elements are overpowering, particles for verbs, negative for nouns and words with negative meanings (blind, mute). This extremely negative vision of the night, the moon and Pierrot, the embodiment of both, is in perfect continuity with the Oscar Wilde's vision in "Salome" and Franck Wedekind's in the Lulu plays. Oscar Wilde's "Salome" was adapted to the operatic stage in 1915 by Richard Strauss. We can note that Wedekind's Lulu plays will be adapted to the operatic stage by Alban Berg in the 1930s. We could also think of the morbid vision of the moon Apollinaire develops in the same period. This artistic vision can also be found in Picasso's clowns and circus people in his blue period just before his cubist revolution. These artists are producing new forms of art due to the great technical inventions, but also they are conscious of a drama that is going to come soon, starting in 1914 and ending in 1945. The means used are images and semantic references, new forms of music and poetry, numerical rhythms and tempos, both prosody and psalmody, and vast cultural, even anthropologically meaningful references. The moon though seems to be very pregnant in that crucial period when the industrial revolution is shifting from mechanical forms to electrical forms, from machines to knowledge.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID.Read more ›
