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Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) is often portrayed as a composer who began as a heart-on-sleeve late Romantic only to evolve during the First World War into an austere, mathematically-obsessed deviser of musical puzzles. Yet to claim that in his music he replaced tonality with its absolute opposite, atonality, as the twelve-tone method swept away all trace of traditional harmonic and thematic processes, is as misleading as to argue that romantic warmth and humanity morphed into the purest and most austerely modernistic spirituality. This handbook refocuses the wealth of recent research into two of Schoenberg's major compositions; the expressive character of those relatively early works which centre on nocturnal images of darkness and despair is at its most original and powerful in Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung, where the dramatic interplay between stabilising continuities and disorientating fragmentations reveals the elements of a modernist aesthetics that remained fundamental to Schoenberg's musical thought.
Erwartung was not performed until fifteen years after its feverishly speedy composition. By its very nature, it has not become a regular feature of the operatic repertory, yet its importance is not merely that of an interesting object for musicological study. The dramatic force and lyrical eloquence of its music has been widely acknowledged – a compelling and not unsympathetic psychological study of derangement to be placed alongside more traditionally operatic precedents as Strauss’s Salome. Most published commentaries on it have dealt with compositional materials and techniques, and consideration of a range of such studies focuses on what can be reconstructed about the evolution of the text, as well as the various attempts to find consistency and coherence in the thirty-minute score. By and large, a consensus has evolved, especially through the use of post-tonal analytical techniques, which counterbalances the assumption that the score is a repetition-free ‘stream of consciousness’.
Although Pierrot lunaire (1912) is technically more radical than Erwartung in some ways, with its pervasive use of ‘speech-song’ vocal technique, it requires only six performers and complements Night Music features with less expressionistic episodes. Since setting Stefan George’s vision of spiritual aspiration in the finale of the second quartet, then contemplating the musical legacy of Mahler and its exploration of transcendent spiritual states, Schoenberg brought consideration of his own relationship with Judaism into an ambitious plan for an oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter. As part of this characteristically far-seeing exercise in rethinking basic principles, he also moved towards the formulation of what became known in the 1920s as the twelve-tone method. Cultural attitudes changed greatly after World War I, and Schoenberg was not impervious to the neoclassical retreat from expressionism. Yet his motivic techniques (not least the variously ordered pitch-class collections formed from the letters of his own name) survived transformation from the pantonality of his earlier music into more systematically ordered twelve-tone compositions. Often making explicit allusions to tonal principles and traditional formal designs, he retained the textural flexibility and expressive intensity of the Night Music years. Elements of technique and ethos already implicit in Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung found new purpose in compositions that left the post-Wagnerian spirit of Schoenberg’s Viennese years far behind.
Since the death of Pierre Boulez in 2016, the historiography of contemporary music has begun to confront the completion of one of the most remarkable careers affecting the character and context of musical life since 1945. This chapter examines the changing nature of the relationship between Messiaen and his most distinguished student. It examines Boulez’s critiques of Messiaen, and it creates a dialogue between aspects of classicism and modernism in the thinking of both composers, establishing their distinctiveness and relevance to the continuing evolution of compositional practice in the present day.
Schoenberg’s family background might have suggested that he would have a career as a bank clerk or schoolteacher. Yet his early commitment to music, and pursuit of expert contacts who encouraged his ambitions, marked him out as someone determined to take risks and to avoid easy options. Five years after having shown his ability to compose an effective if derivative string quartet, Verklärte Nacht (1899) for string sextet – later arranged for string orchestra – was a decisive leap forward in which respect for tradition was set against the radical perception that chamber music and tone poetry need not be kept apart. Sources considering Verklärte Nacht’s genesis in detail, and exploring its processes in depth, are surveyed. The extent to which the young composer was prepared to challenge conventional boundaries was reinforced by the unfailing resourcefulness with which his music consistently reflects the style and form of its poetic source.
This chapter identifies certain interesting threads of development in Messiaen criticism from a wide range of published sources, as the challenge of responding to the remarkably original and forthright character of Messiaen's compositions was confronted in the highly unstable context of musical life between 1930 and 1990. This chapter acts to confirm perceptions about Messiaen's central position during those decades, within France and beyond it, and to explain the continuing interest in his life and work during the years since his death.
The decade (1899–1909) separating Verklärte Nacht from Schoenberg’s second major contribution to Night Music, the monodrama Erwartung, was typically turbulent and productive. Based mainly in Vienna, he established himself as a competent conductor, and also as the revered teacher of talented young composers such as Berg and Webern. The ambitious scale of Schoenberg’s major compositions from these years confirmed his determination to distance himself technically from admired contemporaries like Strauss, Busoni and Mahler. In pursuit of greater intensity and concentration, romanticism gave way to expressionism, as chordal dissonances were freed from their traditional need to resolve. And although critics were often hostile, Schoenberg retained the admiration and respect of performers as well as of friends such as Zemlinsky and Mahler. The affair between his wife Mathilde and the painter Richard Gerstl (ending in uneasy reconciliation after Gerstl’s suicide) fuelled the fierce musical outbursts of important compositions like the Second String Quartet, as well as of Erwartung.
As titles referring to compositional genres, Nocturne, Notturno and Nachtsmusik had a particular resonance for nineteenth-century composers sensitive to romantic traditions extending from Schubert and Schumann to reach an apogee in Wagner’s celebration of the ‘fabled realm of night’ in Tristan und Isolde. Though placed there in explicit opposition to the mundane reality of daylight, Wagner (notably in Siegfried) also made much of the glorious effects of the rising sun. The tension between darkness and light as reflecting radically different states of mind as well as different effects of nature, was also a favoured topic for late romantic poets and painters active in the Viennese culture in which Schoenberg came to maturity. Nevertheless, the aspect of romantic sensibility that offset nocturnal unease with a heightened sense of the sublime and the supernatural ensured that examples of Night Music could have a special ambivalence in keeping with their exploratory technical resources.
Writing about serialism by its earliest practitioners tended to underline its evolutionary qualities, something made easier by the baroque and classical connections of early examples from the 1920s like Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano op. 25 and Wind Quintet op. 26. Such an emphasis did not prevent more conservative critics from condemning twelve-tone music as ‘mathematical’. But by the early 1950s, there was more cogent criticism from younger composers, claiming that Schoenberg and Berg had failed to understand the innovative implications of twelve-tone methods. Boulez and Stockhausen in Europe and Babbitt in the United States were among those who explored a more systematic, stylistically radical serialism. But in the later Stravinsky, and in Boulez’s music after 1970, this avant-garde spirit gave way to techniques that were able to make productive compromises with more traditional ideas about musical materials and structures; at the same time, writing about serialism turned increasingly pedagogical, offering academic models for analysis and composition.
Guide, advisor, teacher, tutor – the connotations of ‘mentor’ are unambiguous enough, and the relationships that arose between the young and older Britten and more experienced acquaintances outside the immediate family are invariably matters of interest to biographers and critics. Britten first met the composer and conductor Frank Bridge in 1927, and remained in close contact until Britten’s move to America in 1939. He first met W. H. Auden on joining the GPO Film Unit in 1935, and soon encountered several of Auden’s literary associates, including Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender. While in America (1939–42) Britten and Peter Pears lived for a time in Auden’s New York house, after a spell with the Mayer family on Long Island. The Bridges, the Mayers, and Auden and his associates all contributed to the social and aesthetic context within which Britten was able to produce his early compositions, and while a different set of mentors and friends could have had an identical effect, the distinctive qualities of those who actually filled these roles are what matters here. It was in Britten’s nature to resist potentially intrusive mentoring as much as to invite it.
Benjamin Britten died before most of his closest friends and colleagues, so in one important sense his legacy ensured their participation in the continuation of the special contribution to local and national musical life represented by the Aldeburgh Festival. More than forty years after his death, that legacy remains a living force. It was a measure of Britten’s perceived significance in the years that passed between his death and his birth centenary thirty-seven years later that attempts to trace his possible impact on younger composers are often combined with critical perceptions concerning the many substantial publications about him. Collections of letters and diaries, biographies, overviews of the music, and more specialised studies of particular works have flowed in profusion at the same time. Thisexamines Britten’s influence – or lack of influence – on, and his continued intersections with, successive generations of composers.
A range of aesthetic and technical features is explored in two of Adès's large-scale works, the operas The Tempest and The Exterminating Angel, along with aspects of genre involving Stravinsky and Britten. Large-scale focus is offset by brief accounts of The Four Quarters and Dawn, considering their character in light of some recent initiatives in musicology.
The only “dose of theoretical study” swallowed by the young Richard Wagner was “about half-a-year’s formal training in harmony and counterpoint in the ‘strict style,’” administered in 1831–2 by Theodor Weinlig of Leipzig’s Thomaskirche. Earlier, “instruction in the fundamentals of harmony from a member of the Leipzig theatre orchestra. Gottfried Müller, achieved little, as the pupil was too much immersed in the fantastic musical realm of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Kapellmeister Kreisler and the Fantasiestücke to submit to the sober rigors of conventional theory.”
In his 2015 interview with John Palmer, James MacMillan makes a distinction between ‘conviction composers’, and ‘others, like me’ who ‘sometimes struggle with conviction’. It is understandable that giving convincing musical expression to strong religious beliefs might be harder in textless concert works than in liturgical settings, and MacMillan seems to have relished the possible contrasts between concert works that are associated with religious topics and those where any engagement with extra-musical themes is less explicit. Two of the three numbered string quartets have titles, and the second has religious connotations that deal with the ‘drama’ of the Jewish Seder Night rituals. The first quartet can also be interpreted as dramatic, and it could well have been an impatience with this aspect that led MacMillan, in a reference to his third quartet, to declare that he was conscious of ‘leaving the extra-musical starting points behind’, writing music that ‘was just the notes and nothing but the notes’. My analysis of all three quartets explores the possibilities of narrative and characterisation in the light of stylistic and expressive qualities that seem to resist any aspirations to pure abstraction, even when direct connections with MacMillan’s more ‘mainstream’ texted compositions are less obvious.