1st Chamber Symphony (Schönberg)

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"Watschenkonzert" , caricature in Die Zeit of April 6, 1913

The Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E major, Op. 9, is a work by the Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg that points the way for modern music . The first of the two versions, op.9a, for 15 solo instruments, was completed on July 25, 1906 in Rottach-Egern and premiered on February 8, 1907 in the Great Hall of the Wiener Musikverein by the Rosé Quartet and members of the Vienna Court Opera Orchestra. Another performance on March 31, 1913 together with other works by the “ Second Viennese School ” caused a scandal (scandal concert 1913 ).

The first chamber symphony stands at the end of Schönberg's early, late romantic and tonal creative phase and, with its free tonality , prepares the later transition to free atonality . The piece deviates from the conventional classical-romantic symphony in several ways . With this work, Schönberg quickly turned away from the large orchestra and towards smaller ensembles. The chamber symphony is now one of the classics of modernism and has inspired various composers in the 20th century.

The second version, op. 9b, for large orchestra was first performed in Los Angeles in 1935 under Schönberg's direction. For this purpose, Schönberg tried in several revisions to adapt his work to standard orchestral operations in order to allow more performances.

Instrumentation and arrangement of the orchestra

In contrast to the classical instrumentation, the original version op.9a requires 15 solo instruments. The string parts as well as the flute, oboe and cor anglais are single, the horns double and the clarinets triple. Together with the bassoon , which is reinforced in the bass by the contrabassoon , this creates a hard, metallic and nasal sound in the wind section. Their sometimes deep, dark sound is reinforced by the string section, which is proportionately more heavily occupied by lower-lying instruments compared to a normal chamber ensemble.

In a way that was unusual at the time, Schönberg prescribed the exact spatial arrangement of the instrument groups. The strings have to stand in front to the left and right of the conductor, behind them the woodwinds (including the cor anglais ) positioned in a row , and at the very back are the two horns in the middle.

Structure, melody, harmony

While the traditional symphony is usually laid out in four movements and ever larger forms have developed since Beethoven up to Gustav Mahler's works lasting several hours, the chamber symphony is limited to a single 22-minute movement. Schoenberg all thematic functions that occur in a symphony ( exposure , carrying out , recapitulation , different tempos and rhythms counterpoint concentrated entanglement of different threads) in a sentence.

The piece has two main motifs . On the one hand, a “ fanfare ” made up of ascending fourths introduced by the horn right at the beginning (later called the “fanfare of new music ”). Here a five-step fourth chord is built up by successive occurrences of the notes C - F - B - E flat - A flat in the various instruments. The composer then resolves this vertical fourth harmony into a triad harmony with the horizontal sequence of fourths C - F - B - E flat - A flat - D flat in the horns . Second, a whole-tone scale melody, which first occurs in the cello part . Both are structures that are largely foreign to major - minor tonal listening. It is true that the basic key of the work is E major , but the traditional functional harmony has already been dissolved in parts.

The musical events in the Chamber Symphony are extremely condensed. Several themes develop in parallel, dissonances are resolved imperceptibly or are masked by newly emerging dissonances. The tonal references (i.e. the fact that melodies and harmonies can be related to an underlying central harmony) seem to be tense. The piece is formally in E major, but over certain stretches you lose all key consciousness. The overall impression is nervous, very "expressive" and extremely colorful in the wealth of timbres.

meaning

In 1937 Schönberg said in retrospect about the importance of the 1st Chamber Symphony with regard to the development of his own musical language:

“After I finished composing the Chamber Symphony, it wasn't just the expectation of success that made me happy. It was something different and more important. I believed that I had now found my own personal compositional style and expected that all problems […] would be solved, thus showing a way out of the confusing problems we young composers face through the harmonic, formal, orchestral and emotional Richard Wagner's innovations were involved ”.

Schönberg's further development finally led him to abandon the major-minor tonality and to free-atonal , expressionist works.

With op. 9, Schönberg introduced a tendency to be observed in many composers from the 1920s onwards, instead of writing works for a large orchestra, for smaller, situation-dependent, individually composed ensembles, for example Paul Hindemith's chamber music op.36 or Stravinski's Histoire du soldat .

Fourth chords and melodies as well as whole-tone scales and chords, already known from musical impressionism (e.g. Claude Debussy ), later became a common stylistic device of expressionism and subsequently of jazz harmony .

Schoenberg began working on the 2nd Chamber Symphony , a sister work, shortly after completing the first. However, it was not completed until much later in October 1939 in American exile.

Web links

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Manuel Gervink: Arnold Schönberg und seine Zeit , Laaber-Verlag, 2000, page 120
  2. ^ Hermann Erpf : Handbuch der Instrumentation und Instrumentenkunde , B. Schott`s Sons, Mainz, 1959, pp. 276–280
  3. ↑ http://www.schoenberg.at/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=178&Itemid=353&lang=de
  4. ↑ Hermann Erpf: Textbook of Instrumentation and Instrumentation, Schott, Mainz, 1959, p. 276