Schoenberg the Romantic

The outcomes of this research project are currently under embargo pending publication. Click the link above for the audio recordings made in the context of this research project.

Schoenberg is nowadays seen as one of the great innovators of twentieth-century Western art music. His twelve-tone technique was a key influence to the development of serialism by the composers of the Darmstadt circle. In this light, Schoenberg’s earlier free atonal (or, as he preferred, ‘pantonal’) music – such as the Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 (1909) and the Sechs kleine Klavierstücke op. 19 (1911) - may come across as a ‘not yet’: a preliminary stage in the development towards dodecaphony. However, these compositions form a world in their own right and appeared in a context. Just like Schoenberg himself, pianists of his time were trained in the nineteenth-century performance tradition. His music was written for such contemporaries in the first place. How would they, shaped by works of composers such as Liszt, Brahms and Reger on the one hand, and by the pianos of their days on the other hand, read the scores of op. 11 and 19?

In my article (under embargo), I have formulated an answer to this question. I argue that the freedom of timing that we know from early recordings formed an integral part of the ‘horizon’ of these compositions. Schoenberg’s scores, no matter how innovative or even incomprehensible they may have seemed to contemporaries, are based upon loci communes (shared musical conventions) that link them even to tonal music of that time.

The article is accompanied by a recording of op. 11 and 19 on an 1894 Blüthner grand piano in which nineteenth-century performance habits serve as a source of inspiration. On this recording, the Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 are preceded by improvised tonal preludes that are based on some of the loci I found in the compositions they precede. The focus was on ‘Viennese’ loci such as waltz gestures. This resulted in three tonal preludes, each one of them in turn introducing the three pieces of op. 11; each prelude suggests a musical locus communis that appears in the subsequent composition of Schoenberg. The third one, introducing op. 11 no. 3, also plays with an evergreen from opera repertoire: the Dance of the Hours from Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda.