Posted on by tjphilbrick

Octet #4 – Schoenberg

Hello all,

We are wrapping up our series on the octet with Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht, performed by two of the world’s best string quartets.

Schoenberg is one of the most pivotal and polarizing characters in the story of music. His early career include works like Verklarte Nacht, which reveal his unbelievable talent and his complete mastery of tonal harmony. However, later in his career, he came under the influence of the Marxist philosopher Theodore Adorno, a member of the Frankfurt School. Soon afterward, Schoenberg began advocating for the “liberation of dissonance,” and his music devolved into unplayable 12-tone serialism. Today, the only Schoenberg compositions that are performed are those from his early years; audiences have made it clear to musicians that the unintelligibility of Schoenberg’s later works do not interest them.

Schoenberg’s early works are in a league of their own, and Verklarte Nacht may be at the top of that league. It bridges the gap between Romantic and 20th-century music like nothing else. You will hear lush, almost Mendelssohn-esque passages, but you will also hear forecasts to the modernism of Prokofiev and Ives. A critic from the Los Angeles Philharmonic said it best: “Lush, dense, highly chromatic yet still just within the bounds of tonality, [Verklarte Nacht] can be regarded as a very late example of 19th century German Romanticism, a natural product of the trajectory from Beethoven and Schubert to Brahms, Wagner, and Strauss.”

Enjoy!

T

Posted on by tjphilbrick

Frank Bridge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z55LcEN40aE

Hello all,

Our music for this week is “Variations on the theme of Frank Bridge” by Benjamin Britten.

British composer Frank Bridge was Britten’s childhood teacher and lifelong musical mentor. Britten wrote that he would often spend entire days in composition lessons with Bridge, who was an unrelenting perfectionist. Yet he also credited Bridge as the most formative influence on his musical development. Britten wrote the variations you will hear today as a musical tribute to his teacher.

This composition is written for string orchestra and contains one introductory theme followed by nine variations on the theme. Each movement depicts a different aspect of Bridge’s character. Britten even wrote in the score which personality trait he wanted each variation to reflect: “his integrity…his energy…his charm…his wit.” The original theme, as the title suggests, is taken from one of Bridge’s string quartets, titled Three Idylls for String Quartet.

Listen for the different musical influences in this music. If you listen closely, you can hear a bit of Schoenberg’s experimentation, a bit of Elgar’s grandeur, a bit of a Rossini opera, a bit of a Viennese waltz, and a bit of Ravel’s harmonic genius. Perhaps Britten had taken to heart T.S. Eliot’s notion that true art is the result of an arduous, lifelong process of synthesizing the art that has come before you. It is in this sense that a truly great work of art may be, as Eliot says, one in which “the dead poets . . . assert their immortality most vigorously.” 

Enjoy!

T