CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
The MET Chamber Ensemble

Zankel Hall
Sunday, January 27th, 2008 at 5:00 PM

The MET Chamber Ensemble
James Levine, Artistic Director, Conductor, and Pianist
Anja Silja, Soprano
Gil Shaham, Violin
Yefim Bronfman, Piano

WEBERN Four Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op. 7
WEBERN Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24
BERG Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 5
BERG Chamber Concerto for Piano, Violin, and 13 Winds

SCHOENBERG Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19
SCHOENBERG Pierrot lunaire

Perspectives: Yefim Bronfman

Perspectives concerts are made possible, in part, by a generous grant from The Alice Tully Foundation.

Program Notes:

By David Hamilton

ANTON WEBERN Four Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op. 7
Born December 3, 1883, in Vienna; died September 15, 1945, in Mittersill, Austria.

Initially composed in June 1910, the Four Pieces, Op. 7, were later revised; the final version is dated “Summer 1914.” The first performance (in an earlier version) was given on April 24, 1911, in Vienna, by violinist Fritz Brunner and pianist Etta Jonas-Wendorff. The Four Pieces received their Carnegie Hall premiere on January 14, 1958, with violinist Julian Olevsky and pianist Wolfgang Rose.

Between 1908 and 1913, when Alban Berg and Anton Webern began the study of composition with Arnold Schoenberg, both the teacher and his pupils explored new directions in musical composition, radically reconsidering and redefining many traditional elements of the art. Webern, in particular, developed an apostrophizes style that—at least among his published works)—reached a pinnacle of brevity in the Four Pieces for violin and piano of Op. 7 and the almost contemporaneous set of three pieces for cello-and-piano, Op. 11.

The violin pieces alternate between slow and still (Nos. 1 and 3, with the violin’s strings muted) and fast, vigorous, highly and rapidly contrasted (Nos. 2 and 4, without mute). As further resources for internal contrast, Webern exploits various special effects available on string instruments: harmonics, playing with the wood of the bow (col legno), bowing the strings at the bridge (am Steg) or at the fingerboard (am Griffbrett), and also the more familiar plucking (pizzicato). Particularly striking examples include the violin’s rocking ostinato in No. 1 (played col legno) and the crescendo of repeated notes alternating between pizzicato and am Steg at the start of No. 2. The piano most frequently carries the melodic thread, except in No. 2, where the types of gesture are more evenly distributed.


ANTON WEBERN Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24
Webern began work on the Concerto in January 1931, completing it on September 4, 1934, at his home in the Vienna suburb of Maria Enzersdorf. It was first performed in Prague on September 4, 1935, at the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music, with Heinrich Jalowetz conducting, and received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weil Recital Hall) on January 17, 1964, with Gunther Schuller conducting an unnamed chamber ensemble.

The score calls for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, trombone, violin, viola, and piano.

On Arnold Schoenberg’s 60th birthday, September 13, 1934, the composer was an exile in America, spending the summer in Chatauqua, New York; in the fall he would move to southern California in search of a more hospitable climate than that of the Northeast. Although he and his music were not welcome in Germany, his pupils Berg and Webern, and his publisher, Universal Edition, were based in Vienna (not yet annexed into Hitler’s “Greater Germany”. Universal prepared a special publication to honor the birthday, with contributions from many friends and disciples, including Berg and Webern. Each of the latter also earmarked a work in honor of the occasion: Berg, his still unfinished opera Lulu, and Webern, his Concerto, Op. 24, completed in draft just days before the birthday.

1934 became a fruitful year for Webern’s compositional activity, in part due to an undesired reduction in his conducting engagements and performances of his music, a consequence of Hitler’s ascendancy. (The Nazi ban on Mahler’s music probably also contributed to Webern’s thinner concert calendar.) The work that became the Concerto for Nine Instruments originated in January 1931 as a sketchbook project labeled “Orchestra Piece (Overture),” and Webern’s initial notes indicate fascination with a classic Latin “magic square,” which, when read either horizontally or vertically, from either the upper left or lower right corner, yields the identical result:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

Schoenberg’s 12-tone method, involving transformations of a basic shape by symmetrical operations of inversion, retrograde, and a combination of both, is in some ways akin to this kind of structure, and Webern sought a 12-tone series yielding a comparably restricted result. He didn’t find a perfect analogy, but he came up with a set based on a three-note segment that, with its three transformations, would yield all 12 tones. His colleague Ernst Krenek would later describe it as “an apex of constructive density . . . a perfect case of total symmetry, wheels in wheels, tight as a Chinese puzzle.” Over the next two years, Webern considered various forms for the piece using this set: at one point a piano concerto, later a divertimento, in 1934 finally returning to the original title, three-movement layout, ensemble (three brass, two strings, and piano), and opus number he had planned in July 1931.

The Concerto’s sound and content are basically determined by that division of the tone row into three-note segments with identical intervallic content (semitone and minor third). This “threeness” is continuously manifest, though composed out in different ways, with infinite resource. The four three-note segments that launch the first movement (Etwas lebhaft) have similar contours but different note values. Soon the segments overlap more closely, becoming chords in the piano, linked motives in the other instruments, under variations of tempo and articulation.

In the slow movement (Sehr langsam), the piano is a constant presence with its two-note chords, while the other instruments offer groups that variously combine with the piano to complete the “palindromic” sonorities. The third movement (Sehr rasch) begins with threes again, slower in the brass, shaped into a dotted rhythm in the other instruments. (Perception of the individual groups of three is no prerequisite for enjoyment of the work; their presence merely accounts for the consistency of the sonorities; the ever-shifting dance of rhythms and shape, and the pellucid texture, are surely more apt focuses for listening.)


ALBAN BERG Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 5
Born February 9, 1885, in Vienna; died there December 24, 1935.

Composed in 1913, the Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 5, were first performed on October 17, 1919, in Vienna, at a concert of the Society for Private Musical Performances; they received their Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on September 9, 1954, with Philip Fatt, clarinet, and Marya Slelska, piano.

At his first meeting with Alban Berg, in 1904, Arnold Schoenberg encountered “a very tall youngster . . . But when I saw the compositions he showed me—songs in a style between Hugo Wolf and Brahms—I recognized at once that he had real talent.” At the end of seven years’ apprenticeship with Schoenberg, Berg had produced a piano sonata, a set of four songs, and a string quartet that amply justified that judgment and remain in the repertory today. (Schoenberg couldn’t resist pointing out that they also constituted “really extraordinary testimony to my teaching ability.”)

The Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 5, composed in 1913, marked Berg’s official emergence as a composer on his own, and only once later, in his Altenberg Lieder, did he so closely approach the concision of his teacher’s Six Little Piano Pieces. (However, the repeated thirds in the piano part of Op. 4’s second piece surely allude to the ostinato in Schoenberg’s second piece.) But Berg’s group projects more of a narrative character, and a larger scale. His friend Theodor Adorno even suggested that the set as a whole emerges “from the liquidation of the sonata. The four movements of a sonata appear in rudimentary, shriveled form; granted, the tripartite form of each movement is transformed in new and surprising ways.” (Adorno’s proposed sequence is: sonata form, slow movement, scherzo, rondo finale.)

Yet the underlying genre remains the Romantic “character piece,” and the most immediate access to Op. 5 is via implicit dramatic content and gestural qualities, rather than form. The clarinet writing masterfully exploits the instrument’s dynamic range and distinctive registers, not to mention trills, quasi-flutter-tonguing, and the so-called “echo tone” (in which the player’s tongue represses the reed’s vibrations). The expressive gamut runs from allusion and ambiguity to evident catastrophe, at tempos as elastic as those in the symphonies of Berg’s revered Mahler.


ALBAN BERG Chamber Concerto for Piano and Violin with Thirteen Wind Instruments
Begun early in 1923 and completed on February 8, 1925, Berg’s Chamber Concerto was first performed in Berlin on March 19, 1927, with wind players of the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Hermann Scalar; the soloists were Walter Frey, piano, and Steffi Meyer, violin. The work received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on February 11, 1964, with an ensemble consisting of Paul Jacobs, piano; Matthew Raimondi, violin; Andrew Loyla and Gerard Levy, flute; Ronald Roseman, oboe; Philip West, English horn; Jack Kreiselman, E-flat clarinet; Charles Russo, clarinet; Paul Howland, bass clarinet; Arthur Weisberg, bassoon; Donald MacCourt, contrabassoon; Robert Nagel, trumpet; Paul Ingraham and Lawrence Wechsler, French horn; John Swallow, trombone; and Gunther Schuller, conductor.

Scoring: solo piano, solo violin, piccolo (doubling flute), flute, oboe, English horn, soprano clarinet, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, trumpet, 2 horns, and tenor-bass trombone.

Although Berg’s formal lessons with Schoenberg ended when the older composer moved to Berlin in 1911, the relationship continued, often through letters, until Berg’s death in 1935. The publication of their correspondence, in 1987, revealed the complex mixture of loyalty and dependence binding the younger composer to his autocratic mentor.

In January 1923, the score of Berg’s opera Wozzeck was published privately, with the financial assistance of Alma Mahler; it would be performed for the first time in December 1924. With time for a new project, Berg undertook a chamber concerto, initially conceived for piano, violin, and six winds. On March 29, he wrote his wife that he “woke at seven, had breakfast, and worked in my head on my Chamber Concerto.” His account of a visit later that day to Schoenberg (now again living in Vienna) is typical of their relationship. The older composer “kept on finding fault with my Chamber Concerto. He doesn’t like the piano in this combination. Only he doesn’t know, of course, that it is a concerto, not an ordinary octet. And yet he wants me to tell him how the piece is shaping, what sort of thing it will be, and all the time with advice, admonitions, warning, in fact generally pouring cold water. I am rather scared of Easter Sunday, when I’m invited for lunch and the afternoon.”

By summer, Berg’s plan had changed: the work would be scored for “piano and violin with the accompaniment of ten wind instruments.” During the spring, Schoenberg had showed Berg his recent works exploring the nascent “method of composition “with twelve tones related only to one another.” Although Berg did not adopt the 12-tone aspect of the technique in his new score, he did use its central operations (inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion—long familiar in traditional contrapuntal contexts) on a large scale.

The day after the Chamber Concerto was finished, Berg wrote an open letter to Schoenberg (later published in a music magazine), beginning:

Dear esteemed friend, Arnold Schoenberg!

Composition of this concerto, which I dedicated to you on your fiftieth birthday [September 13, 1924], was finished only today, on my fortieth. Overdue though it is, I ask that you nonetheless accept it kindly, all the more so as—dedicated to you since its inception—it is also a small monument to a friendship now numbering 20 years; in a musical motto preceding the first movement, three themes (or rather motives), which play an important role in the melodic development of the piece, contain the letters of your name as well as Anton Webern’s and mine, so far as musical notation permits.

That in itself already suggests a trinity of events, and as a matter of fact—for it concerns your birthday, after all, and all good things that I wish for you come in threes—it also applies to the work as a whole.

Berg than enumerates at length the “trinities” present in the Concerto: three movements (played without pause), three types of instrument (keyboard, strings, and winds), and three “sonorous qualities” (piano with winds in the first movement, violin with winds in the second, and both soloists with winds in the third). The totality of instruments is 15, “a sacred number for this type of scoring since your Opus 9 [Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony].” And he explains how the triples continue further, reaching down into the structural details of the individual movements. Above and beyond the formal intricacies, Berg’s letter alludes to “human-spiritual references” he has “smuggled into these three movements of friendship, love, and world.” These private allusions to persons and events are far too extensive for the confines of a program note, though the respective correspondence of the movements to the realms of “friendship, love, and world” may offer clues to the expressive intent.

Before the first movement is played, the musical motto is heard, in which the names “Arnold Schoenberg,” Anton Webern,” and Alban Berg” are spelled out in a manner practiced by German composers over many centuries. (In German musical orthography, the letter B refers to B-flat, H to B-natural, and—since E-flat is spelled “Es” in German—S is allowed to stand for that note.) In the motto, the piano begins with Schoenberg’s name, the violin follows with the four playable letters of Webern’s name, and the horn presents Berg’s.

The first movement (for piano and winds) is a theme and five variations. The lengthy theme, involving several tempo modifications, is played by the winds. Each variation is based on a transformation of the theme: (1) the original form, for piano solo; (2) the retrograde, beginning as a slow waltz—a meter often prominent in this movement; (3) the inversion, more forceful; (4) the retrograde inversion, very fast; (5) the initial (prime) form, returning to the original tempo.

As transition to the Adagio (violin and winds), a climax involving the piano cuts off, revealing the solo violin floating above soft brass sonorities. This movement is palindromic, reversing itself at the midpoint, an eerie moment during which the piano sounds a low note 12 times. (Operagoers may recall the palindromic passages in Berg’s operas Wozzeck and Lulu, notably the film music at the midpoint of the latter.) Each half is internally an A-B-A structure, with the second A an inversion of the first.

The finale, in which both soloists join the winds, is a rondo, with an introductory cadenza for the two soloists. Its six sections (including the introduction and coda) paraphrase the corresponding formal divisions of the previous movements; the central four sections (between introduction and coda) are literally repeated. The coda appears to be heading for a forceful conclusion, but instead evaporates into silence.


ARNOLD SCHOENBERG Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19
Born in September 13, 1874, in Vienna; died July 13, 1951, in Los Angeles.

Schoenberg completed the first five of these pieces in February 1909; later drafts were completed on February 22 and August 7, 1909.

In the years after completing his Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, in 1906, confronted with what he then regarded as the erosion of traditional tonal bases for organizing musical works, Schoenberg concentrated on setting verbal texts, which provided their own structural frameworks (Pierrot lunaire, Erwartung). But he briefly explored an alternative possibility: composing works so concise as to require no “structure” in the conventional sense—the path eventually taken by his pupil Anton Webern. In February 1910, Schoenberg composed two brief pieces for chamber ensemble and left a third unfinished (they were published only after his death). A year later came the “Little Piano Pieces”: the first five in February 1909; Schoenberg later said that the final piece, unnumbered in the manuscript and date June 17, 1911, was written in memory of Mahler, who had died the preceding month.

For all their historical novelty, these pieces are usefully heard as more expressionistic successors to the character pieces of Schumann and Brahms. Ranging in duration from about 20 to 90 seconds, they are intensely concentrated, yet the often irregular phrases are usually well demarcated, the texture consistent within each piece, the character often volatile. Nearly all have a basic melodic thread, and Schoenberg devised effective stand-ins for traditional cadences (as at the end of the first piece). An exception is the second piece, in which a rhythmic ostinato gradually disintegrates in the presence of other, constantly varied gestures. The initial sonority of the concisely whispered final piece evokes harmonically the concluding melodic gesture of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.


ARNOLD SCHOENBERG Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, for speaker and chamber ensemble
Pierrot lunaire, a setting of “three times seven poems” by the French poet Albert Guiraud, in the German translation by Otto Erich Hartleben, was composed between March and July, 1912, and first performed on October 16, 1912, in Berlin, under the composer’s direction; the speaker was the actress Albertine Zehme. The Carnegie Hall premiere of Pierrot lunaire took place in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on November 8, 1960, with mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani and the Gramercy Chamber Ensemble conducted by Robert Cole.

Scoring: speaker, piano, flute (doubling piccolo), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), violin (doubling viola), and cello.

Pierrot lunaire is one of the major landmarks of 20th-century music. From the Berlin premiere on October 16, 1912, its pervasive influence spread, initially via a Central European tour before World War I, subsequently through many local premieres stimulated by adventurous composers and performers. After Schoenberg was forced to leave Germany, he settled in Los Angeles, where in 1940 he conducted a recording with skilled local musicians. By that time, the work’s instrumentation (piano, two winds, and two strings) had become a model for the “modern-music” chamber ensemble. As early as 1913, Ravel, who declared that Pierrot “left me with the most delightful yet terrible and painful feelings,” based the instrumentation of his Three Mallarmé Poems upon it, and Stravinsky, after hearing Schoenberg’s work, scored his Three Japanese Lyrics for a similar combination. Later composers would often add percussion and more, such as the guitar, vibraphone, and marimba of Le marteau sans maître, Pierre Boulez’s hommage to Schoenberg’s masterpiece.

The Pierrot lunaire poems, by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud (1860–1929), products of late-19th-century fascination with clowns, masks, and the figures of commedia dell’arte as metaphors for the creative artist, were published in 1884. En route to the concert hall, they would be twice transformed—first in 1891–92 when Otto Erich Hartleben (1864–1905) translated them from French into more intensely Angst-laden German. Giraud used an old French “fixed form,” the rondel: two stanzas of four lines each, followed by one of five; the first two lines are repeated as lines 7–8, and the first line again as line 13. Hartleben preserved this form, although relaxing the original tight rhyme scheme of only two rhymes per poem.

Schoenberg’s contribution to the dissemination of Pierrot lunaire arose through a commission from an actress, Albertine Zehme, who had been reciting the Hartleben versions to piano accompaniments by one Otto Vrieslander but felt the need for stronger music. Schoenberg responded immediately to the poetry, and began composition shortly after the contract was signed on March 9, 1912. Three days later, he wrote in his diary:

I am going, absolutely, toward a new expression, I can sense it. The sounds are here becoming practically animal-like in the direct expression of sensuous and spiritual emotions.

From the original 50 poems, he chose 21, though the final order was determined only after the music’s completion in July 1912; the resulting sequence, in three groups of seven poems, has little relation to that of the original.

Pierrot was the work that spread most widely Schoenberg’s device of Sprechstimme (literally, “speech-song”): rhythmic spoken delivery of the text, touching on specified pitches without sustaining them. (He had earlier used this in his oratorio Gurrelieder.) Its “correct” execution will always remain an enigma, for the contradictions among Schoenberg’s instructions in the score and his subsequent comments are magnified by his 1940 recording, while changing fashions in the delivery of theatrical speech have further complicated the picture. Despite the resulting uncertainty, imaginative performers of Pierrot have found a variety of original, often convincing realizations.

For all of its status as an historical turning point, Pierrot belongs to a well-established genre: the narrative song cycle, most familiar from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, and Schumann’s Dichterliebe. Despite the obvious differences—spoken more than sung, accompanied by the various colors of a chamber ensemble rather than the uniform piano—Pierrot carries on that basic tradition: a narrative of an adventure (and, often, of an obsession), unfolding in a series of short poems.

Part I explores the poetic power of moonlight and introduces some of the commedia dell’arte characters. (Among the work’s ambiguities is the identity of the reciter: the poet? Pierrot? Columbine, whose traditional costume Zehme wore at the premiere?—or simply herself?) With the fall of night at the beginning of Part II, darkness, terror, sacrilege, and death take center stage, until nostalgia awakens Pierrot (Part III) and he begins his journey homeward to Bergamo and daylight. Unlike the protagonist of Schubert’s winter journey, this voyager returns from his nightmare, though surely not unchanged—nor are we, the listeners.

Copyright © 2007 by David Hamilton