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The ‘True Relationship’: Schoenberg's Analysis of ‘Unity’ in the Op. 9 Kammersymphonie
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 November 2009
Extract
Composers, so the conventional wisdom has it, tend to be bad analysts – too ready to find things that aren't there (and to overlook or undervalue things that are), if the result will help to make their own creative preoccupations seem legitimate, important or necessary. Nor is conventional wisdom inevitably wrong on this point: as a trawl through half-a-century's worth of certain journals will speedily affirm, consciously or unconsciously self-serving 'analysis' has in some composing circles been more the rule than the exception.
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References
1 In both the original sextet version (see, for example, Series A, Vol.22 of Schönberg, Arnold: Sämtliche Werke [Wien, 1999])Google Scholar and the string orchestra arrangement (1917, rev. 1943; see UE 14486), Verklärte Nacht is actually 418 bars long. Schoenberg's mistaken total is erroneously adopted by Whittall, Arnold in Schoenberg Chamber Music (London, 1972), p.12 Google Scholar.
2 The first published version of the essay has ‘manner’ at this point; see The Works of the Mind, ed. Heywood, R. B. (Chicago, 1947 [4th impression; 1966]), p.71 Google Scholar.
3 See Schoenberg, Arnold: Style and Idea, ed. Stein, L. (London, 1975), p.55–56 Google Scholar.
4 See Tlie Works of the Mind, ed. Heywood, R. B. (Chicago, 1947 [4th impression: 1966])Google Scholar, Schoenberg, Arnold: Style and Idea, ed. Newlin, D. (New York, 1950 [London, 1951])Google Scholar, and Schoenberg, Arnold: Style and Idea, ed. Stein, L. (London, 1975)Google Scholar.
5 According to Stuckenschmidt, Schoenberg had had trouble with his eyes ‘For a long time’; by early 1946 (when the composer was 71) it was ‘hardly possible for him to use normal music paper. So he used music sheets with much increased spaces between the lines’. The typescripts of his three 1946 University of Chicago lectures (of which ‘Heart and Brain in Music’ was one) had to be produced using ‘a typewriter with extra large letters’ (H. H.Stuckenschmidt: Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work, trans. Searle, Humphrey [London, 1977]), p.475 Google Scholar.
6 One ventures to suggest that Schoenberg's erroneous statement regarding the length of the piece might be explained in the same terms: a ‘418’ written above the final bar of his score could easily have been misread as ‘415’.
7 Similarly, in ‘My Evolution’ they are ‘1st main theme’ and ‘2nd main theme’ (see Style and Idea, ed. Stein, L. [London, 1975], p.85)Google Scholar; in ‘Heart and Brain in Music’ (1946), on the other hand, they are referred to both as ‘the first two main ideas’ and as ‘Principal Theme 3’ and ‘Principal Theme 5’ (see Style and Idea, ed. Stein, L. [London, 1975], p.58–59)Google Scholar.
8 Schoenberg, Arnold: Style and Idea ed. Stein, L. (London, 1975), p.222–223 Google Scholar.
9 This music example from the earlier, fuller discussion. The corresponding example in the later essay represents the same relationship in a more condensed fashion.
10 ‘Composition with Twelve Tones (1)’, in Style and Idea, ed. Stein, L. (London, 1975), p.223 Google Scholar.
11 Rufer, Josef, Composition with Twelve Tones, trans. Searle, Humphrey (London, 1954)Google Scholar.
12 Leibowitz, Rene, Schoenberg and His School, trans. Newlin, Dika (New York, 1949)Google Scholar.
13 See, for example, Whittall, Arnold, Schoenberg Chamber Music (London, 1972), pp.16–17 Google Scholar; Dale, Catherine, Schoenberg's Chamber Symphonies: The Crystallization and Rediscovery of a Style (Hants, 2000), pp.85–86 Google Scholar.
14 See Cook, Nicholas, A Guide to Musical Analysis (London, 1987)Google Scholar. Given, however, that Cook uses the word ‘chaos’ (p.288) to characterize the Kammersinfonie's large-scale unfolding, the loss in terms of insightful commentary was probably not great.
15 See Dunsby, Jonathan and Whittall, Arnold: Music Analysis in Tlieory and Practice (London, 1988), p. 76–77 Google Scholar. The ‘Gedanke’ materials have since been published; see The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of its Presentation ed. and trans. Carpenter, Patricia and Neff, Severine(New York, 1994)Google Scholar.
16 The only positive mention known to me is the exceedingly brief one found in Walker's, Alan A Study in Musical Analysis (London, 1962), p. 132 Google Scholar.
17 Frisch, Walter: Tlie Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg (California, 1993), p. 243 Google Scholar; the reference is of course to Reti's The Thematic Process in Music (New York, 1951 [London, 1961])Google ScholarPubMed.
18 Dahlhaus, Carl: ‘Schoenberg's Aesthetic Theology’, in Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Puffett, Derrick and Clayton, Alfred (Cambridge, 1987), p. 81 Google Scholar.
19 Thomson, William: Schoenberg's Error (Philadelphia, 1991 Google Scholar; 1993 repr.), p. 32.
20 ibid., p.33.
21 ibid., p.33.
22 In so doing, of course, we are also operating in accordance with two principles outlined by that outstanding analyst of ‘latent’ unification, Hans Keller: first, by recognising that it is not single-line extracts that ought to be studied, but ‘the passages and sections and total contexts to which they direct the reader's attention’ (see Keller, Hans: ‘The Chamber Music’, in Tlie Mozart Companion, ed. Landon, H.C. Robbins and Mitchell, Donald [London, 1956], p. 94)Google Scholar; and secondly by making sure that we ‘keep the harmonic aspect of any passage or motif in mind throughout its discussion’; ibid., p.92.
23 It may not be supererogatory to point out that the music thus presents each of these fundamental motivic shapes as emerging from the other: prior to the appearance of the theme, x arises as if an embellishment and expansion of q but within the theme, q1 appears to derive from x” and x — and thus, by way of x', from x.
24 Once again one has to draw attention to a never-corrected error whose perpetuation probably owes much to the composer's eye-trouble: Schoenberg's own example misrepresents the second harmony of the second bar by placing a ‘natural’ before the C#. One's guess is that this arose through the failure to discern that a ‘precautionary’ sharp sign had been miscopied (see The Works of the Mind, ed. Heywood, R. B. (Chicago, 1947 [4th impression: 1966]), p. 74 Google Scholar; Schoenberg, Arnold: Style and Idea, ed. Newlin, D. (New York, 1950 [London, 1951]), p.159 Google Scholar; and Schoenberg, Arnold: Style and Idea, ed. Stein, L. (London, 1975), p.59 Google Scholar. My example's parenthetical ‘upbeat’ harmony and its Roman figurings derive from Schoenberg's Ex.121c in Structural Functions of Harmony (London, rev. 2/1969 by L Stein), p. 111 Google ScholarPubMed.
25 Familiar though 1 am with the bulk of Keller's (volumi-nous) published output, I have yet to find a single occasion on which he comments upon any aspect of Schoenberg's Kanimersitifonie analysis.
26 Keller, Hans: ‘The Chamber Music’, in The Mozart Companion, ed. Landon, H.C. Robbins and Mitchell, Donald (London, 1956), pp.lO4ffGoogle Scholar; see also pp.98, 112, 126.
27 ibid., p. 106.
28 Not for nothing, one submits, does the work begin with a unison, unaccompanied A flat!
29 The concepts were, however, adopted by Keller's analytic pupil Alan Walker; see, for example, his A Study in Musical Analysis (London, 1962), pp.78–83 Google ScholarPubMed.
30 Keller, Hans: ‘The Chamber Music’, in The Mozart Companion ed. Landon, H.C. Robbins and Mitchell, Donald (London, 1956), p.98 Google Scholar. One is intrigued, incidentally, to recall in this connexion Schoenberg's claim that his teachers were ‘primarily Bach and Mozart'’; see ‘National Music (2)’, in Schoenberg, Arnold: Style and Idea, ed. Stein, L. (London, 1975), p.173 Google Scholar.
33 Hans Keller, ibid., p.97.
34 Several other thematic and sub-thematic connexions – not all of them convincing, in my submission — are proposed by Andrew Porter; see his ‘Modern German Chamber Music’, in Chamber Music ed. Robertson, Alec (Hannondsworth, 1957), p.397 Google Scholar.