(While Schoenberg' final two string quartets inhabit atona...)
While Schoenberg' final two string quartets inhabit atonal sound worlds, the Third draws on Classical forms such as theme-and-variations, minuet and sonata-rondo, its unsettling opening movement recalling a fairytale picture, 'The Ghostship', its Adagio a
(- German pressings of the immense Sony Classical Masters ...)
- German pressings of the immense Sony Classical Masters Catalog in smart, desirable and collectible multi-disc editions - The Sony catalog is replete with legendary artists and many of the greatest recordings of the classical repertoire - Box fronts feature large, prominently displayed photo of the featured artist - Slender, shelf-friendly boxes; CD's housed in space-saving slipsleeves
(Fundamentals of Musical Composition represents the culmin...)
Fundamentals of Musical Composition represents the culmination of more than forty years in Schoenberg's life devoted to the teaching of musical principles to students and composers in Europe and America. For his classes he developed a manner of presentation in which 'every technical matter is discussed in a very fundamental way, so that at the same time it is both simple and thorough'. This book can be used for analysis as well as for composition. On the one hand, it has the practical objective of introducing students to the process of composing in a systematic way, from the smallest to the largest forms; on the other hand, the author analyses in thorough detail and with numerous illustrations those particular sections in the works of the masters which relate to the compositional problem under discussion.
(Following the release of the complete Brahms symphonies (...)
Following the release of the complete Brahms symphonies ("Altogether a marvellous achievement." The Daily Telegraph), Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker have performed and recorded a programme of orchestral works by Arnold Schoenberg, who was a great admirer of Brahms.
In these three contrasting works, the spirits of Modernism, Romanticism and Classicism are invoked by Arnold Schoenberg - a revolutionary whose aesthetic roots lay firmly in tradition. Sir Simon Rattle, who first established his international reputation with masterpieces of the 20th century, explores these musical cross-currents with the Berliner Philharmoniker, long supreme in Austro-German repertoire.
The repertoire, recorded in concert at Berlin's Philharmonie in late October/early November 2009, consists of Schoenberg's orchestration of Brahms's Piano Quartet in G minor, Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene (Accompanying Music to a Film) and the full orchestra version of the Chamber Symphony No. 1.
In these three contrasting works, the spirits of Modernism, Romanticism and Classicism are invoked by Arnold Schoenberg - a revolutionary whose aesthetic roots lay firmly in tradition. Sir Simon Rattle, who first established his international reputation with masterpieces of the 20th century, explores these musical cross-currents with the Berliner Philharmoniker, long supreme in Austro-German repertoire.
Immediately after the recent performances/recordings, Sir Simon and the Orchestra set off on a coast-to-coast U.S. tour performing the Brahms symphonies and this Schoenberg programme at New York's Carnegie Hall and in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and Ann Arbor. Schoenberg said that he had arranged Brahms's Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25 for orchestra in 1937 for several reasons: "1) I like this piece; 2) It is seldom played; 3) It is always played badly, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved." He also stated that he intended to write his orchestration strictly in the style of Brahms, going no further than Brahms would have gone "if he had lived today."
Mark Swed, in The Los Angeles Times, said of the LA performance, "When Schoenberg made the version in 1937, he had recently moved from Berlin to Los Angeles and was clearly entranced by the resplendent light of his new home. He garbs the quartet in garish instrumental colors ... Rattle emphasized everything in the most polystylistic way possible. A horn solo in the solo movement had a raw jazzy quality; a clarinet solo in the Gypsy-inspired last movement was klezmer-like. A xylophone clattered, a bass drum thumped. But within this ruckus was also ravishing ensemble playing and, from Rattle, the inspiration not only for great characterization but also for momentum."
Allan Kozinn in The NY Times wrote of the Carnegie Hall performance, "It can be hard to banish the original sound and texture from your inner ear, however convincing the new interpretation may sound. But it can be worth the effort, as Mr. Rattle and his musicians demonstrated in a vital, shapely account that found levels of drama in Schoenberg's magnification that a performance of the chamber version could not possibly equal." Simon Rattle previously recorded this work with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1985
Arnold Schoenberg, in full Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg, was an Austrian-American composer who created new methods of musical composition involving atonality, namely serialism and the 12-tone row. He was also one of the most-influential teachers of the 20th century; among his most-significant pupils were Alban Berg and Anton Webern.
Background
Arnold Schoenberg was born on 13 September 1874 in Leopoldstadt, a predominantly Jewish district in Vienna. His father, Samuel Schönberg, who ran a small shoe shop, was originally from Bratislava. His mother, Pauline née Nachod, was a piano teacher from Prague. Arnold was born second out of his parents’ four children. His eldest sister, Adele (Feigele) Schönberg, died at the age of two. Younger to him was another sister named Ottilie Kramer Blumauer and a brother named Heinrich. Since the apartment they lived in was too small to house his mother’s piano, it is unlikely that he had piano lessons from her. However, he had violin lessons from a professional teacher from the age of eight. Otherwise, Arnold was mostly autodidact. On New Year’s Eve in 1889, when Arnold Schönberg was just fifteen years old, his father suddenly passed away. Very soon, it became imperative that he start earning.
Education
That he was a genius was evident from the very start. By the age of nine, he could play violin duets of Viotti and Pleye. This was also the time he started composing little pieces for violin. Not much is known about his education except that he was an average student in school. More significant is the fact that it was while studying in the secondary school that he became friendly with Oskar Adler. Very soon, the two developed a close bonding, which lasted throughout their lives. Adler encouraged Schönberg to learn cello so that a group of them could play string quartets. He not only learned the instrument; but also began to compose quartets. Although Adler himself was self-taught, he was also the one who taught Schönberg the rudiments of music, especially in harmony and counterpoint. He also gave him the basic instruction in philosophy and played chamber music with him.
Career
At his mother’s request, Schönberg left school in January 1891 and became an apprentice with Privatbank Werner & Comp, working there until it became bankrupt in 1895. Thereafter, he mainly earned his living by orchestrating operettas.
Except for brief periods, he remained in Vienna until 1925. In this year, he became professor of a master-class at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, holding the post until May 1933. Later that year he came to the United States, teaching for two winters at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston. In 1935 he was appointed professor of music at the University of Southern California, and in 1936 he assumed a similar position at the University of California at Los Angeles. Schönberg became an American citizen in 1941. He died in Brentwood, California, on July 13, 1951. Throughout his life, Schönberg's gifts as a teacher spread his influence widely, and he trained a whole school of composers, among them Anton von Webern, Alban Berg, Ernst Kmenek, Egon Wellesz, Marc Blitzstein, and Hanns Eisler. His celebrated manual of harmony has had more than the usual effect, since it presents the conventional theory of diatonic harmony from the point of view of an active composer, rather than a schoolroom pedagogue. Schönberg's music descends in part from the late Romantic school of Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner, Richard Strauss, and Gustav Mahler. This Romantic connection has been stressed to such an extent that critics have often missed three other characteristics of his music which break with the tradition. The late Romantics tended to overdevelop a musical idea in thick, lush harmonies, whereas Schönberg, except in a few works such as his massive setting of the Gurrelieder for soli, three choruses, and orchestra (1900 - 1911), inclined toward the laconic, with few if any repetitions of the same musical idea and with complete clarity of texture. Secondly, he had such a positive personality that he managed to give even his most Romantic compositions, such as the early Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4, a sense of inherent growth and structural cohesion. Thirdly, his contrapuntal technique had a sureness and virtuosity not found in most Romantic music. In these respects the strongest influence was Johannes Brahms. Although his development showed a steady and consistent inner evolution, it is customary to divide his compositions into three styles or periods. The works of the first period (Op. 1-10, 12-14) constantly increase in complexity and dissonance, but in them he still employed key-signatures and, to some extent at least, harmonies with diatonic functions. With the piano pieces, Op. 11, which were written after Op. 14, he consciously tried to avoid diatonic patterns and to use all twelve tones of the chromatic scale as equals, allowing none of them to take on the character of a tonic. The third period begins with Op. 23. Schönberg's sense for organizing his musical materials demanded a unifying principle more strict than anything he had used during his second period. The full implications of his last method can be appreciated only after lengthy analysis of the works in which it is used, but reduced to its simplest terms, it consists of arranging the twelve tones in an octave into a melodic pattern where each tone is used once. Such a pattern is called a "tone row" or "series. " A new row is usually designed for each composition; it may be submitted to certain variations and transpositions, but every note in that composition must somehow be derived from its basic row.
Achievements
Arnold Schoenberg is best remembered for his invention of the twelve-tone technique, also known as dodecaphony or serialism. It ensures that all the twelve notes of the chromatic scale are given more or less equal importance, thus preventing emphasis on any one note.
He is also known as the proponent of the Second Viennese School, which comprised the composer, his pupils and close associates. Initially characterized by late-Romantic expanded tonality, their music later evolved first into atonality and finality into serial twelve-tone technique.
His celebrated manual of harmony (Harmonielehre, 1911; 3rd ed. , 1922; English translation, 1947) has had more than the usual effect, since it presents the conventional theory of diatonic harmony from the point of view of an active composer, rather than a schoolroom pedagogue. Schö nberg'sSchonberg's music descends in part from the late Romantic school of Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner, Richard Strauss, and Gustav Mahler.
Quotations:
"If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art. "
"Music is only understood when one goes away singing it and only loved when one falls asleep with it in one's head, and finds it still there on waking up the next morning. "
"There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major. "
"I find above all that the expression, atonal music, is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying the art of not falling, or swimming the art of not drowning. "
"I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting. Or vice versa: That I had this way as an outlet. I could renounce expressing something in words. "
"My music is not modern, it is merely badly played. "
"Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas. "
Personality
Schoenberg suffered from triskaidekaphobia or the fear of the number 13.
Interests
He was interested in Hopalong Cassidy films. Schoenberg was a painter of considerable ability, whose works were considered good enough to exhibit alongside those of Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky as fellow members of the expressionist Blue Rider group.
Connections
Arnold Schoenberg married Mathilde Zemlinsky, the sister of his teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky, on 7 October 1901. The couple had two children: a daughter named Gertrud, and a son, Georg.
During the summer of 1908, Mathilde, feeling excluded from her husband’s social circle, ran away with the Austrian painter, Richard Gerstl. However, she returned after a few months and the couple lived together until her death in October 1923.
In August 1924, Schoenberg married Gertrud Bertha Kolisch, a sister of his pupil, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. He had a daughter, Dorothea Nuria and two sons, Ronald and Lawrence, from this marriage.
