Sechs kleine Klavierstücke
Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 (or Six Little Piano Pieces) is a set of pieces for solo piano written by the Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg, published in 1913. (
Listen to this work.)
It is a collection of 6 pieces, each aphoristically short, and unique in character. This kind of writing would be a huge influence on Schönberg's pupil, Anton Webern, whose works are well known for their brevity. The work is atonal, or at least any resemblance to tonality is fleeting, but it predates Schönberg's later dodecaphonic development.
- Leicht, zart (Light, delicate)
- Langsam (Slow)
- Sehr langsame (Very slow)
- Rasch, aber leicht (Brisk, but light)
- Etwas rasch (Somewhat brisk)
- Sehr langsam (Very slow)
The first five movements were written in a single day, February 11, 1911. Shortly after Gustav Mahler died later that year in May, Schönberg wrote the mournful sixth movement to conclude the work. It was first performed on February 4, 1912 in Berlin, by Louis Closson.
After having written large, dense works such as Pelleas und Melisande, up until 1907, Schönberg decided to turn away from this style, beginning with his second string quartet of 1908. The following excerpt, translated from a letter [1] written to Ferruccio Busoni in 1909, well expresses his reaction against the excess of the Romantic period:
My goal: complete liberation from form and symbols, context and logic.
Away with motivic work!
Away with harmony as the cement of my architecture!
Harmony is expression and nothing more.
Away with pathos!
Away with 24 pound protracted scores!
My music must be short.
Lean! In two notes, not built, but "expressed".
And the result is, I hope, without stylized and sterilized drawn-out sentiment.
That is not how man feels; it is impossible to feel only one emotion.
Man has many feelings, thousands at a time, and these feelings add up no more than apples and pears add up. Each goes its own way.
This multicoloured, polymorphic, unlogical nature of our feelings, and their associations, a rush of blood, reactions in our senses, in our nerves; I must have this in my music.
It should be an expression of feeling, as if really were the feeling, full of unconscious connections, not some perception of "conscious logic".
Now I have said it, and they may burn me.
Interestingly, this work was composed at the same time that Schönberg was working on his orchestration of his massive Gurre-Lieder. While he maintained a lifelong love of Romantic music, the extreme contrast between his Klavierstücke and his more romantic works comes from his modernist desire to find a new means of expression. For him, works like the Gurre-Lieder or Verklärte Nacht fulfilled the tradition he loved, but it was works like these Klavierstücke, or the Fünf Orchesterstücke that attempted to reach beyond it.
References
- Schoenberg, Arnold. Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke, Opus 19, score. Universal Edition. Vienna, 1913.
- Schoenberg, Arnold. Style and Idea. University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1984. ISBN 0-520-05294-3