During my undergraduate years in the early Sixties, I discovered that, while there were any number of brilliant academics skilled at talking about the Second Viennese School composers (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern), there were almost no opportunities to listen to the music being performed; and recordings tended to be in short supply. Such a situation reminds me of what I have long felt was the ultimate joke behind Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. The narrative is primarily about a monastic order formed not around religious conviction but the playing of a highly complex game. (I liked to think that Hesse had been inspired by the Japanese game of Go.) As the novel evolves, the reader discovers that this order is so devoted to analyzing the strategies of games played in the past that no one has time to play the game any more.
So it was that time spent poring over the scores of the Second Viennese School composers occupied far more attention than listening to the music or preparing a performance of that music. Schoenberg himself recognized that a preoccupation with “systems” had, for all intents and purposes, nothing to do with the music itself. In a caustic letter to René Leibowitz concerning his obsessions with such “systems,” Schoenberg wrote:
I do not compose principles, but music.
Like those monks obsessed with analyzing the games in Hesse’s narratives, Leibowitz had detached himself from anything having to do with composing or performing music.
In that context I approached the four CDs of Second Viennese School music in the new Sony Classical anthology, Juilliard String Quartet: The Early Columbia Recordings 1949–56 with some trepidation. The recordings account for the four numbered string quartets by Schoenberg, the two quartets by Berg (the Opus 3 quartet and the Lyric Suite), and Webern’s Opus 5 collection of five short “movements.” These were, without a doubt, performances of music. If the making of that music had been guided by “principles,” then that was strictly a matter of how the performers chose to interpret the complexities encountered on the score pages. Nevertheless, listening to that music was not without its challenges.
The succession of the four Schoenberg quartets provides the attentive listener with a path that basically traverses his departure from nineteenth century traditions to a world of “luft von anderem planeten” (air from another planet). That phrase comes from a poem entitled “Entrückung” (rapture) by Stefan George, which is sung by a soprano in the last movement of the Opus 10 (second) quartet in F-sharp minor. Indeed, the very structure of that quartet’s four movements is so remote from the structural foundations encountered in the quartets of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that Schoenberg had camped out on that “other planet” long before George’s words are sung.
In many respects the very idea of a four-movement structure seems to have provided Schoenberg with a framework that looks back on the eighteenth century while forging a new path through the immediate present. The Opus 7 (first) quartet in D minor consists of a single movement about 45 minutes in duration. However, there are a variety of ways to “parse” it into a sequence of four episodes, which amount to movements, even if there are no breaks separating them. The third (Opus 30) and fourth (Opus 37) quartets, on the other hand, are built on four-movement foundations; but both of them show Schoenberg advancing confidently on that “other planet,” having rejected the need for a tonal center.
The fact is that, whatever insights Heinrich Schenker may have brought to the analysis of tonal music, attentive listening has more to do with links between the recent past and the future-about-to-happen than with some grand design for the passing of 30 or more minutes of active listening. This past March I cited an observation by Virgil Thomson to the effect that “for all of Schoenberg’s efforts to transcend tonality, the rhythms of his music always seemed to revert to the late nineteenth-century traditions of Vienna.” Put another way, the phenomenology of listening to music is more likely to guided by rhythmic patterns than by progressions of pitch classes.
The “first generation” Juilliard Quartet musicians seemed to understand how to approach all four of the Schoenberg quartets through such rhythmic patterns. I would also conjecture that such an approach also guided them through their recording of Berg’s Opus 3 quartet. The Lyric Suite, on the other hand, poses a rather unique challenge in its approach to tempo. It has a six-movement structure consisting of three fast-slow pairings. However, in the overall architecture, the fast movements get progressively faster; and the slow movements get progressively slower. As a result, from a rhetorical point of view, the entire journey seems to expire with a “last gasp.”
Even if the listener is not explicitly aware of that interleaved structure, the desolation of the final movement (the tempo marking is Largo desolato) tends to be felt as an intense rhetoric of loss. That rhetoric can also be found in Berg’s preferences for opera narratives. As a result one can approach the overall architecture of the Lyric Suite in the context of the multilayered structural architecture for the unfolding of the narrative behind Berg’s Opus 7 Wozzeck opera. At the same time the Lyric Suite may have initiated similar multilayered techniques for the unfolding (and symmetries) of the Lulu narrative.
Webern is represented only by his Opus 5. In the context of Schoenberg and Berg, his scope of expression is uncannily microscopic. Indeed, his very approach to structure is in a class by itself. If Schoenberg could evoke rhythm to guide the ear through the absence of tonal progression, Webern’s abstractions of rhythm are as opaque as those of “harmonic progression.” Nevertheless, like Berg he has his own thoughts about overall design. These involve duration: The outer movements are the longest, and the movements get short as they converge on a center that is less than in minute in length.
In many respects the listener is left to contend with “it’s over before you know it” episodes. Nevertheless, since the entire composition is so short, one can benefit from multiple listening experiences. (There have been recital performances in which the entire piece is played a second time, right after listening to the first iteration has “sunk in.”) Personally, I spent a lot of time as a student listening to the Juilliard recording I had purchased; and the impact of that experience remains with me. Indeed, not too long ago I was delighted to encounter this music again in the repertoire of the Telegraph Quartet, first listening to them in recital and then through the recorded performance on their Into the Light album. I could not think of a better source of light to cast on those Juilliard recordings made back in the early Fifties.
