Pierrot Art

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AN ANALYSIS OF A SCHOENBERG’S PIECE OP. 08, AS IT RELATES TO THE 20TH CENTURY

          In the Twentieth century, music is being said to help even to cure human illnesses (soul and body), and the effects it provokes in animals and plants are already proved with evidences. So, the importance of music nowadays does not need to be commented here, in terms of importance, but observed. Preferences are and if one wants to observe those musicians who made contemporary music, his/her aim has to be more specific.

           Maybe the choice of one of the presented musicians in Rowell’s rential work Thinking about Music (246), is a good starting point. What criteria should be used to select only one of them? Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was chosen mainly because his material is avaluable, and his selected piece to be commented is Op. 08 (Schoenberg’s acceleration away from post-Wagnerian tonal orbits is most evident (Fanning 1981)).

          Arnold Schoenberg has exercised very considerable influence over the course of music in the 20th century, particularly through his development and promulgation of theories of composition in which unity in a work is provided by the use of a determined series, usually consisting of the twelve possible different semitones, their order also inverted or taken in retrograde form, and in transposed versions.                            

           As Rowell comments, “...The teleological world of linear time, in which music is conceived and perceived as direct motion, is our most familiar model, as in most music of Bartók, Berg, Britten, Copland, Hindemith, Prokofiev, and Shoenberg. Many of the traditional assumptions about time remain valid for this repertoire, particularly so for those works organized by the principle of tonality”(246).

           In this sense, one has to concentrate his/her attention to Arnold Schoenberg’s life and career to better understand his music in contemporary context. In 1933, shortly before his 60th birthday, Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most important composers in history, was forced to flee his native Europe due to the increasing Nazi terror. Also composed in America, but perhaps more recognizably Schoenbergian in style are his String Quartet No. 4 (1936), Violin Concerto (1935-36), and Piano Concerto (1942).  But Op.08, is said to be finished in 1909, in a manuscript which contains a note of Schoenberg: “I completed the half-hour music of my opera Erwartung in 14(sic) days.” And his reasons can be understood because at this time he was going through emotional crisis, which could be observed, in his music (Fanning1981).“Schoenberg was a late Wagnerian, persecutor of Mahler and Richard Strauss. The name Shoenberg is inextricably linked in most people's minds with serialism and The Second Viennese School. However, a number of the works he wrote during his "American" period are quite different in flavor. They embrace a return, in varying degrees, to "tonality," for they use within their serial structures triadic elements and tonal implications. The Chamber Symphony No. 2 (1939) integrates the warm, rich harmonies of late Romanticism with transparent textures and a rhythmically lively, almost neo-classic spirit.”

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           Fanning explains that “just as the Expressionist ethos in drama and painting stripped away convention to reveal undreamt-of naked passions, and distortions caused by imposed patterns of behavior and thought, so in music at a time when atonality was still a direct analogue and symbol for heightened emotion” (1981). Nothing is more contemporary than these feelings! And Fanning ends his comments in the introduction to the notebook of the record Erwartung 6 lieder Op. 08, by saying that Schoenberg was on the point of following those new paths which would lead him far beyond late Romanticism (Verklärte Nacht (1899). It became saturated because of decadence of German culture in 1920 and 1930.

            Schoenberg can be considered an exception of this context, not only because of the clarity of texture and depth of expression, getting his music more comprehensible, with unusual substance and distinction (Beazlei 809), but also because he is transformed from late-romantic into expressionist. The recent American immigrant looks back to his romantic roots, forging a new almost classical style, and Chamber Symphonies became a landmark in recordings of twentieth-century music. (Beazlei 810).

            Once his origins were exposed, a concentration on Opus no. 08 should be more proper. “Erwartung (Ger), as it was called, means Expectation). It is a monodrama (i.e. stage piece for one character), composed by Schoenberg in 1909, but not performed until 1924. In it a woman going to meet her lover finds his dead body.”

            One can be curious about the lyrics of “Expectation”, and a presentation of the final content let one observes the obvious romantic features as the following lines demonstrate: “... Love floats through the air, to catch up with my beloved, far away, go forth, beyond mountain and chasm! And she shall yet again be mine!”  

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           Expectation provokes exactly what the name suggests. It has an extraordinary interpretation of a singer (not nominated in the record), and nice music, but a little bit controvert. It starts and ends calmly, but it goes up and down in the middle. The impression that death is part of the story, besides the depressive way the lyrics are interpreted is really felt. “Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung is perhaps less ambitious than his (unfinished) “Moses und Aron”. This short one act work (the running time is considerably less than one hour) packs a greater dramatic punch than many of its more famous (and longer) rivals. An unnamed woman wanders alone in a wood, stumbles over a dead body at night, and gradually discovers the corpse is her deserted lover. Who was the murderer? Was it the woman herself? A work of the German expressionist movement, it is both.”

           Júlio Medaglia explains in his article “Even Freud doesn’t explain” printed in the newspaper “Folha de S. Paulo-BR from 07/12//2001, E-8,” Schoenberg’s greatest conquest was his non-conventional music. Hitler did not like him. Schoenberg was Jewish. He also contributed with some concepts about unconscious. Freud has brought a dark universe of unconscious to clarity (the cure). Schoenberg has developed the romantic idea of emotional representation and subjectivity of his last pieces in Arts to the last consequences. He had the power to make all human anxieties come through anyone’s mouth with melodramas like Erwartung, and Pierrot Lunaire, by the use of atonal dissonance, which did not have relations with the linear and sweet harmony of Romanticism. But after experimenting expressionism, he projects himself to constructivism based on inexistence of the occasional. He is the inventor of a new language, which was called dodecaphony. Sounds and/or non-sounds, are like words said and/or non-said, cultural symbol produced or being produced, which reception and interpretation is conditioned because they correspond and/or not to the conscious and/or unconscious of the listener/reader. This is the context in which dodecaphonic musical expression is revealed with the psychological narrative of a dream or nightmare in which the patient writes/speak and/or does not write/speak about cultural symbols that are and/or will be meaningful for his/her personality.  

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           In accordance with Lauro Machado Coelho, in his article “The Dodecaphonic Revolution of Arnold Schoenberg”  (Folha de São Paulo-BR, 07/08/2001),
 Schoenberg has opened new ways to musical aesthetics, but he did not want to be a revolutionary. Schoenberg demanded creativity and imagination from his pupils especially two talented ones, called Berg and Webern. From 1907-1908, and in “Buch der hängenden Gärten op. 15,” with poems of Stefan George, he completely abandoned the concept of tonality. One year after this “Erwartung” became a milestone in music expressionist influence. His wife Mathilde got involved with Richard Gerstl, his painting teacher, who committed suicide after Mathilde, agreed to Come Back home. She died in 1923, and Schoenberg got married with Gertrude.

            The ideas about “extensive tonality” and  “emancipation of dissonance”, that Schoenberg has expressed in his pieces, like style and idea, weren’t very accepted by the audience and inspired violent reactions like those ones of Julius Korngold, being his declared enemy. Schoenberg also got irritated with regents like Wilhelm Furtwängler because there was no program for his plays. Nazi authorities were also against him because his music was considered degenerated. And they wanted to banish them from Germany.

           It is time now to remember the importance of Arnold Schoenberg in the history of music - not to evaluate the future of his inheritance. One can observe that like the shadow of Wagner stays on until the end of Nineteenth century, and the consecration of Stravinsky is a milestone of the revolution right at the beginning of Twentieth century. Until the 50s/60s,one can name the Schoenberg’s New Era and dodecaphony.

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            Music has been presented as a manifestation of feelings, represented in notes, combined with voice(s), but over everything, it sums up the deep necessity to enrich humans’ existence, and sublimate many other features of one’s identity, cultural background, emotions, and mainly the artistic devotion, which is not common to all of us. Contemplation also demands sensibility to recognize the effort of those who interpret this art.  And preferences and social pression are considered normal in humans’ society.

      Dodecaphonic music and logical consequence that is a “serial” music - written from chosen series in accordance with twelve notes of a chromatic scale, so that none of them could be observed over anyone – only became firmly imposed during the 50s, becoming a starting point for music totally organized of other composers like Olivier Messiaen, Milton Babbit or Pierre Boulez, in which the dynamism, instrumental color, and pauses are seriously established. But the beginning was turbulent.

            Schoenberg resisted to all these pression and the triumph of his music got up to the top, after his death, when the new generation of the Twentieth century could find his music. “Schoenberg considered the aim of art and music as a manifestation and expression of human’s personality. It would be better understood if one reads his own words: “... having seen that arts mean the helping shout of those who experiment their self experiences of the destiny of the humanity... in their insights the movement of the world is, and outside is thenecessary echo of final arts.”  Schoenberg means innovation, transition, and turn-taken in the context of XXth century music. Op 08, is just an example of reluctant acceptance of a musical genial creation that remained notorious resisting to time, space, and Criticism.

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Works Cited

Beazley Mitchell, Gramophone Classical, Good CD Guide, B&W,UK, 1997.

Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, New York:

       Modern Language Association, USA, 1988.

Rowell,  Lewis. Thinking about Music, The University of Massachusetts Press, USA, 1983.

Fanning, David. Schoenberg Erwartung, 6 lieder Op. 08, The Decca Record Company,

       London, England, 1981.

Appendix

Schoenberg’s words translated from Spanish to English by Antônio Cunha (11/06/2002).

“...«puesto que el arte es el grito de socorro de quienes experimentan en sí mismos el destino de la humanidad... interiormente, en ellos está contenido el movimiento del mundo; hacia afuera se abre paso sólo el eco: la obra de arte» Arnold Schoenberg. (See  MSN. Schoenberg, October 01st, 2002. http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/1577/schonb.html)

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