If any composer is guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of concertgoers, it’s Arnold Schoenberg. He’s been dead more than 50 years and still he epitomizes, for many, the essence of “modern music.” It’s true that – exactly 100 years ago – he shocked the musical world with a new style of composing that undermined all the existing principles of harmony (all of them). But it’s also true that he regarded what he was doing with atonality and his 12-note serial technique as a natural and inevitable extension of the increasingly complex and extravagant harmonies that had emerged from the pens of composers such as Wagner. He admired Brahms and, as a true Viennese, he adored the music of Johann Strauss II. Schoenberg was a Romantic at heart.
Listening to Transfigured Night is a little like discovering the missing link: it was written in 1899 and it sits on the path that Schoenberg took from 19th-century Romanticism to his own new language of the 20th century. And by today’s standards it isn’t fearsome at all: we respond to its lushness and emotive power, and its “strange” puzzling harmonies have since been taken up by so many other composers and made their way into so many movie scores that they are positively familiar.
But Schoenberg certainly shocked his listeners in 1902, when the original string sextet version of Transfigured Night was premiered. Apparently the conservative Viennese audience was agitated: applauding, hissing, shouting. “It took,” wrote one observer, “a beautiful performance of the Brahms Quintet in F major to calm them down.” This music really was remarkable; it contained a “non-existent” chord(!), an unexplained and unresolved dissonance. And according to one much-quoted critic, the harmony sounded as if someone had smeared the score of Wagner’s Tristan while the ink was still wet. If Wagner could blur and smudge and tease out his harmonies, so could Schoenberg – and then some.
But was a single chord and some bold chromaticism really the problem? There was something even more disturbing about Transfigured Night. It was chamber music (in its sextet version), which was considered to be the purest and most abstract kind of music of all – it’s still thought of that way. But it was also program music, music with an underlying narrative, based on a poem by Richard Dehmel. Sullying the purity of chamber music with a story – especially such decadent story – bordered on travesty. Schoenberg had, in effect, composed a tone poem: a single-movement chamber work that was practically symphonic in its design and richness of color, that was unprecedented in its harmonic richness, and that was based on a text. And what a text – at once attractive and repulsive in its emotional content and lurid subject.
Adding insult to injury, Schoenberg quite deliberately omitted to provide his listeners with the text, much to the ire of one critic: “Since some of those present were so ‘uncivilised’ as to be unfamiliar with the poem, this programmatic chamber music (God protect us in future from this species) was probably misunderstood by all listeners…” Later, Schoenberg’s publisher had to request a copy of the poem when the work was submitted for publication, and the only program note Schoenberg ever wrote for it included just a synopsis with musical examples.
As far as Schoenberg was concerned the poem had played its role in the compositional process and was superfluous for appreciation of the finished music. He believed that we, the listeners, didn’t (shouldn’t!) need it. He aimed to express the human feelings behind the poem ¬– the anxiety, oppressiveness, longing and sorrow of love – without necessarily reflecting every detail of the poet’s scenario. And Dehmel discovered this for himself at a performance, writing to Schoenberg: “I had intended to follow the motives of my text in your composition; but I soon forgot to do so, I was so enthralled by the music.”
A subversive soul like Schoenberg can hardly complain if we in turn subvert his wishes and include Dehmel’s poem in the program book. And even if, like Dehmel, you find yourself too enthralled to follow its details, appreciating the poem’s powerful expression is central to appreciating Schoenberg’s music.
The music mirrors the shape of the poem. It is in five unfolding sections, which alternate between the lovers walking in a woodland setting (the first, third and fifth stanzas) and the lovers’ own voices, first a confession from the woman then a declaration from the man. But there is also a dramatic thread that builds throughout, as simple motifs are quite literally transformed – transfigured.
Despite shocking those first audiences, Transfigured Night became quite popular in the repertoire – there was sufficient demand for Schoenberg to make a string orchestra version (with added double basses) in 1917 and to refine the arrangement further in 1943. With more than one player to each part, Schoenberg’s deeply emotional music acquires even more power and intensity.
