Arnold Schönberg

Arnold Schönberg is a Compositeur and Austrian Théoricien born the September 13rd 1874 with Vienna, and dead the July 13rd 1951 with Los Angeles (the United States). Its influence on the music of the 20th century was considerable.

To note that the orthography of its name was anglicized in Schoenberg , which is besides the orthography retained like forms erudite with international value (according to the National library of France).

Biography

Arnold Schönberg was before a whole autodidact, even if it accepted lessons of sound beautiful brother Alexander von Zemlinsky. It founded with its pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern the Second school of Vienna, before settling in Berlin to teach the music there. Pedagog and theorist of world reputation, Schönberg had for other pupils in particular Hans Eisler, Egon Wellesz, Otto Klemperer, Theodor Adorno, Viktor Ullmann, Winfried Zillig, Rene Leibowitz, Josef Rufer, Roberto Gerhard and John Cage.

After works which proceed of its admiration for Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, of which it assimilated art with an extraordinary control ( the transfigured Night , Sextuor with cords, 1899; Gurrelieder , Cantata layman in two parts for choruses, soloists and large Orchestra, 1900 - 1911; String quartet n° 1 , 1905), it eliminates at the end of a deep evolution (of which the principal stages are the String quartet n° 2 , 1908, with its revolutionist left for Soprano in the last movement, on a suitable poem of affirming Stefan George “I feel the another planet air”; five parts for orchestra, 1909; the six small parts for Piano, 1911) the tonal relations and works out the mode of declamation of the “  Sprechgesang  ” (“  song parlé  ”) with Lunar Pierrot for Soprano and eight instruments soloists in 1912. This composition establishes it definitively at the head the most influential type-setters of its time. Igor Stravinski ( Three poetries of the lyric Japanese woman ) and Maurice Ravel ( Three poems of Mallarmé ) imitates it, Darius Milhaud the fact of playing Paris and Ernest Ansermet with Zurich, while musical Europe is divided into atonalists and anti-atonalistes, the latter not hesitating to disturb concerts and to ask for the reference of Schönberg of its pulpit of professor.

Patriot Austrian in the heart (and later nostalgic of the empire of the Habsbourg), this last goes voluntary during the First World War, where it is used for the back, in spite of his relatively advanced age. That will be worth to him the animosity of Claude Debussy, quite as chauvinistic as him, but of the opposite edge.

Seeking more and more the systematism of musical construction in the spirit of the classicism of the 18th century as synthesized by Johannes Brahms, but in a modern expression - it is thus about a double transcendence of the bacho-mozartien spirit, because it is finally in the “conservative” Brahms that Schönberg recognizes the true innovator - he inaugurates in 1923 a technique of composition based on the concept of series which places it at the avant-garde of the movement musical : Continuation for piano (1923), String quartet n° 3 (1927), Variations for orchestra (1928), Brace and Aron (unfinished opera, 1930 - 1932).

Fleeing the Nazism, it is established with the the United States in 1933, where it develops a Dodécaphonisme “  classique  ”  : Concerto for violin (1936), Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte for Baritone, string quartet and piano (1942), Concerto for piano (idem), Trio for cords (1946), a Survivor of Warsaw (oratorio dramatic, 1947). In parallel, he writes works which show its interest for a return to a controlled tonality: completion of the second " symphony of chambre" ( Kammersinfonie ) (started in 1906, finished in 1939); composition of vocal works of Jewish religious inspiration ( Kol Nidre 1938, Psalm 130 and modern Psalm - moderner Psalm - (1950).

Living in a certain destitution, Schönberg continues to teach until its death. It is with patrons like Elizabeth Sprague-Coolidge and with musicians like Leopold Stokowski, the pianist Eduard Steuermann and the violonist and brother-in-law of the type-setter Rudolf Kolisch whom we owe the orders of the majority of his works of the American period.

Although installed with only some blocks of houses of Stravinski, Schönberg, which hated it because he considered it futile, obstinately refused to see it or to even hear of him. Stravinski returned to him well, but was not opposed any more to its theories after its death, and could pay homage to him.

Schönberg had five children of two marriages: Gertrud, Georg, (Deborah) Nuria, Ronald (Ronny) and Lawrence (Larry), this last conceived at the age of sixty-six years. Nuria will become the wife of the Italian type-setter (and Marxist) Luigi Nono. Randol Schönberg, one of its grandsons (let us note the anagram which form its first name! ) is, as for him, an important American lawyer, specialist in the death tax and particularly in the restitutions of goods despoiled by the Nazis.

The system of Schönberg

It is the musicologist and leader Rene Leibowitz which made the most to introduce into France ravélienne and debussyste the system known as (Schönberg refused the " term; atonal") " of composition with twelve sons". We will try to summarize the principles and the genesis of it.

At the beginning of its career, Schönberg is an extremely romantic type-setter, agent of a primarily Germanic musical tradition. It is an unconditional admiror of Wagner and Brahms, of course, but also of Mozart, Beethoven, and obviously of large among the large ones, Bach. Perhaps nobody included/understood Brahms and Wagner better that him, two predecessors whose it manages to reconcile the influences what seems at the time contradictory.

Schönberg managed from there to create its system at the end of a very personal analysis of the evolution of the harmony at the end of the romanticism, where he saw with the work of the irrepressible forces of disintegration of the tonality. According to Schönberg, the accumulation of the modulations following one another more and more quickly, the use growing of the appoggiaturas, the passing notes, the escapes, the embroideries and other notes foreign with the agreement accustom the listener “to support” increasingly daring dissonances. And in fact the first works of Schönberg, namely its first Lieder, evoking Hugo Wolf; poignant the, worrying one and “Tristanienne” “Night Transfigured”, gigantic “the Gurrelieder” and the already ambiguous “Pelleas und Melisande” comprise very chromatic passages where the tonality seems already more or less suspended.

The process continues with the first quartet (1905), already “atonal” with the not exerted ear. The suspension of the tonal functions is complete in the second quartet, COp 10 (1908).

It seems that Schönberg then was at that time vis-a-vis a frightening artistic problem. The suspension of the tonality had already been tried (even if Schönberg were unaware of it) by other type-setters (“Trifle without tonality”, of Franz Liszt (1885) is only semi-atonal), but Schönberg had arrived at this stage not by gropings but by a very progressive process compositionnel and very controlled. It could not move back any more but, at the same time, abolishing all the writing rules, it had just destroyed at the same time the counterpoint, the harmony and the melody, without system “organisor” alternate. What to make? Without tonality, the twelve sounds which constitute our Western musical system do not have any more a definite function: more degrees, therefore more the dominant one, of under dominant, etc Schönberg thus developed a system that he baptized “Reihenkomposition”, or “serial composition”, intended, in fact, to organize the sound chaos which he feared to see replacing the tonality. He issued as any piece should be based on a “series” of twelve sounds, the twelve sounds of the chromatic scale: C, C sharp, D, D sharp, etc, until if. One can thus make follow one another these twelve sounds in the order which one wants (with the liking of the “serial” inspiration), and one should not repeat the same sound twice. The series can then be used by opposite movement, then by mirror, be transposed, then by fragment, and finally in the form of aggregation. All the piece thus rises from a beforehand established series, which thus gives a substitute formal framework of the tonality.

The first work of Schönberg rigorously written according to this principle is the waltz of the COp 23. The series was: C sharp, if, ground, F sharp, B flat, D, semi, E flat, C, F.

Schönberg and Hauer

The question of the paternity of the dodécaphonie as a composition with twelve let us tons was the subject of rough arguments a long time. A contemporary and compatriot Viennese of Schönberg, the type-setter Josef Matthias Hauer (1883 - 1959), had indeed developed, at the same time as him, a system of which the basic rigorism and concept seemed in all points similar. Schönberg and Hauer knew themselves, were attended and, with the beginning, were estimated enough to try to reconcile their two methods which were characterized all the same by certain aspects (the dodecaphony of Schönberg more flexible than that of Hauer, which, allows him the repetition of the basic series only in the direction where this one is written, and to back - out of crab ( Krebs ) -, is not also transposed of a tone, etc) But little by little, the methodological intransigence of Hauer, combined with the lack of recognition which it tried out compared to its rival and with the pupils of this one, made it rather bitter so that the two men separated. Hauer a long time asserted for itself the role of the guarantor of a really orthodoxe serialism. Whereas Schönberg had never ceased being turned, in the image which it was made of the role of the type-setter, towards a past that it idealized, Hauer announces in its innovative radicalism certain schools " anti-Schönbergiennes" years 1970, in particular the Minimalisme.

Schönberg and Judaism

Convert with Protestantism in 1898 like many Jews " arrivés" having chosen at the time the assimilation, guarantees of a certain respectability, Schönberg had nevertheless to be concerned with anti-semitism, which led it to reconsider its own religion. A priori, the origin of Schoenberg, type-setter one cannot Germanic any more of tradition, does not have musical interest. However it is clear that works like the unfinished oratorio Die Jakobsleiter (the Jacob's ladder), the unfinished opera (coincidence?) Moses und Aron (also superstitious, Schönberg eliminated the second has of has (A) ron in order not to be found with a title of thirteen letters) and the play DER biblische Weg (the biblical way) mark the evolution and the deepening of its interrogation. Vis-a-vis the rise of the Anti-semitism, which appears even in his/her friends, as Wassily Kandinsky (see will infra, Citations ), it becomes, especially as from 1923, increasingly bitter and virulent. In 1933, he reconverts himself with the Judaism with the Synagog of the street Copernic, in Paris. During last decade of its life, it will try to propose new type of liturgy Jewish, and even reformulation complete of certain prayers (the Kol Nidré , prayer which opens the Yom Kippour), however without success.

Other centers of interest

In addition to its works and tests relating to the social situation and history of the Jewish people, Schönberg wrote many ouvrages : plays, poetry, theoretical works on the music (celebrates it Traité of Harmony ). It also maintained an abundant correspondence, of which the tone désarçonne sometimes by its mistrust or its virulence.

Schönberg was also a sufficiently accomplished painter so that his works are presented to the sides of paintings of Franz Marc and of Kandinsky. It painted in particular many self-portraits, including one, rather astonishing, back.

Lastly, Schönberg was a tennis player impassioned amateur. Neighbor of George Gershwin, it liked to go to defy it on his court. Gershwin will require of him, in exchange, to teach the rudiments of the dodecaphonic technique to him, which Schönberg refused while pleading that was likely to destroy the melody genius of the young American.

For the anecdote, Ronny Schönberg was a time tempted to become professional tennis player.

Doctor Faustus

Besides the method of composition developed by Schönberg served, by the means of Adorno, of inspiration to that invented by Adrian Leverkühn, the hero of the novel Doctor Faustus of Thomas Mann, writes at the time where all the three lived in relative vicinity in the Californian exile. The type-setter will continue the novelist and the philosopher of his vindication, showing one like the other to have it " pillé" , of " to be itself monopolized indûment" its invention. The attempts at conciliation of Mann, in particular an explicit dedication as of the second pulling, proved to be unfruitful. With the question why it had also not credited Hauer of the invention of the method of composition with twelve let us tons, Mann will answer in substance: “One did not have to make die the old man coleric”.

Other notable works

  • Pelléas and Mélisande , Symphonic poem
  • Symphony of room n° 1
  • Erwartung , opera in an act
  • Die glückliche Hand , opera in an act
  • String quartet n° 4
  • the Jacob's ladder , oratorio for soloists, chorus and orchestra

Works for piano

  • Three parts (op.11) comp. February-August 1909. Pub. 1910; n°3 revised in 1924
  • Six small parts (op.19) comp. 1911. Pub. 1913
  • Five parts (op.23) comp. 1920-1923. Pub. 1923
  • Continuation (op.25) comp. 1924. Pub 1925
  • Two parts (COp 33a and 33b) comp. 1928-1929 and 1931. Pub. 1929 and 1932

Quotations

  • (in connection with the Dodecaphony): “My invention will ensure the supremacy of the German music for the hundred years to come”.
  • (in connection with the anti-semitism, letter with Kandinsky dated April 20th, 1923): “What I was forced to learn last year, I have it finally measuring rod, and I will never forget it. Namely that I am not a German, nor an European, not even human perhaps (in any case, Europeans prefer me worst their races), but who I am Juif… I intended to say that even Kandinsky saw in the actions of the Jews only what there is the bad one, and in their ill deeds that what there is of Jew, and there, I give up any hope of comprehension. It was a dream. We are two types of men. Forever! ”
  • (in connection with its return to a controlled tonality): “There are still so many beautiful things to write in C. ”
  • “If it is art, it is not for everyone. If it is not for everyone, it is not Article”

Selective discography

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