Drei Klavierstücke (Schoenberg)

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Drei Klavierstücke
by
Free atonality
Composed1909
MovementsThree

Drei Klavierstücke ("Three Piano Pieces"), Op. 11, is a set of pieces for solo piano written by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in 1909. They represent an early example of atonality in the composer's work.

Music

2016 performance by Irakly Avaliani

The tempo markings of the three pieces are:

  1. Mässige quarter note (at a moderate speed)
  2. Mässige eighth note (very slowly)
  3. Bewegte eighth note (with motion)

The first two pieces, dating from February 1909, are often cited as marking the point at which Schoenberg abandoned the last vestiges of traditional tonality, implying the language of common-practice harmony that had been inherent in Western music, in one way or another, for centuries. The functionality of this language, to Schoenberg at least, had by this time become stretched to bursting point in some of the more chromatically-saturated works of Wagner, Mahler, Richard Strauss and indeed some of Schoenberg's own earlier tonal works such as the string sextet Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4, of 1899.[citation needed]

Although there are vestigial, superficial remnants of tonal writing, such as lyrical melody, expressive appoggiaturas, and chordal accompaniment, tonal hearing, and tonal analysis are difficult to sustain. Nevertheless, at least three attempts at tonal analysis of the first piece have been made, by three respected authorities. One of them says it is in E,[1] another says it is a prolongation of F♯ as the dominant of B,[2] and the third concludes that it is in G.[3] While all three are persuasive in their own way, other keys may also be heard here, but all are insubstantial. Any complete analysis must take these ghostly remnants of tonality into account, but no one key reliably shapes the structure.[4] Atonal analyses of this first piece are also divided in opinion. Allen Forte describes its pitch organisation as "straightforward" and based on hexachords.[5] George Perle is equally certain that it is constructed instead from three-note "intervallic cells".[6]

The three pieces are given a unity of atonal musical space through the projection of material from the first piece into the other two, including recurring use of motivic material. The first of the three motivic cells of the first piece is used throughout the second, and the first and third cells are found in the third.[7]

The third piece is the most innovative of the three. In its atomisation of the material and its agglomeration of the motivic cells through multiple connections, it isolates its musical parameters (mode of attack, rhythm, texture, register, and agogics) and employs them in a structural though unsystematic manner that foreshadows the

integral serialism of the 1950s.[8]

Characteristic of these pieces is a lack of motivic repetition or

visual art (Schoenberg was himself a painter), notably Kandinsky's, with whom he had contact, the composer tellingly describes painting "without architecture ... an ever-changing, unbroken succession of colours, rhythms and moods".[9]

The violence and suddenness of this emancipation from tradition was influenced by turbulent events in Schoenberg's life at the time: his wife Mathilde had recently eloped with the painter

Wagnerian Gurre-Lieder
(completed in 1911).

References

  1. ^ Brinkmann 1969.
  2. ^ Benjamin 1984.
  3. ^ Ogdon 1982.
  4. ^ Straus 2000, pp. 116, 131–132.
  5. ^ Forte 1972, p. 45.
  6. ^ Perle 1977, pp. 10–15.
  7. ^ Malhomme 1997, pp. 84–85, 89–90.
  8. ^ Malhomme 1997, pp. 90–91, 93–94.
  9. ^ MacDonald 2008, p. 9.

Sources

  • Benjamin, William (1984). "Harmony in Radical European Music, 1905–20", paper presented to the Society for Music Theory, 1984.
  • Brinkmann, Reinhold (1969). Arnold Schönberg: Drei Klavierstücke Op. 11: Studien zur frühen Atonalität bei Schönberg. Supplement to the Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 7. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.
  • JSTOR 832462
    .
  • ISBN 978-0-19-517201-0
    .
  • Malhomme, Florence (1997). "Les Trois pièces pour piano op. 11 de Schoenberg: principes d'organisation de l'espace musical atonal". Musurgia (Dossiers d'analyse). 4 (1): 84–95.
    JSTOR 40591075
    .
  • Ogdon, Will (1982). "How Tonality Functions in Schoenberg's Opus 11, No. 1." Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 5:169–181.
  • ISBN 0-520-03395-7
    .
  • Straus, Joseph N. (2000). Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, second edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
    ISBN 0-13-014331-6
    .

Further reading

External links
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