The culture of the art song, of the Lied, represents much more than a genre among others in the German-speaking world. It was a practice rather than a genre; a cultural habit which united different social classes at various times (throughout the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth), and which encompassed the sublime and the kitsch, the unsurpassable heights of some masterpieces and the comical or the sentimental (or the sentimentally comical). Lied-singing could take place on the concert scene, particularly thanks to some iconic figures of the German-speaking area, but also in the homes; whereas in the former case a higher degree of perfection could be expected, in the latter the informal, confidential and intimate nature of the Lied was ideally rendered.
And while many individual songs were set to music, some of the most ambitious masterpieces of the genre constitute cycles, which may imply a composer’s setting of a poet’s complete cycle, a setting of excerpts from a larger poetic sylloge, or a cycle unified by the composer’s style and musical idea, but comprising lyrics by different authors. The idea of a cycle of sung poetry might therefore narrate a story, in more or less open terms, or suggest a mood, or depict a series of verbal/musical images constituting a mosaic of meaning. Virtually all of these possibilities are found in the greatest song cycles of the German Romanticism, and Arnold Schoenberg was keenly aware of the options at hand. Moreover, and different from opera, the vocal style of the Lied was more tightly bound to the natural inflection and pronunciation of the verbal text; it both admitted and required a more shaded declamation, and normally aimed less at displaying the singer’s vocal qualities than his or her deep understanding of the text and of its implications.
The itinerary narrated in a song cycle frequently mirrors themes and moods which are close to a composer’s heart. In the case of Arnold Schoenberg, the selection of three song cycles presented in this Da Vinci Classics album literally traces the “story” of Schoenberg’s own development as an artist, and of his crafting of his musical language.
After his first compositions in this genre, Schoenberg’s op. 2 represents his first attempt to establish his personality in the field of the art song. The turning point was represented by his encounter with the poetry of Richard Dehmel (1863-1920), a modernist poet whose multifaceted style drew inspiration from a variety of styles. Over the years, Schoenberg would turn his attention to Dehmel on numerous occasions, and even one of his greatest masterpieces, Verklärte Nacht, is inspired by the poetry of this author. The moving power of Dehmel’s lyrics was clearly acknowledged by Schoenberg himself, who wrote to the poet: “Your poems have had a decisive influence on my development as a composer. They were what first made me try to find a new tone in the lyrical mode. Or rather, I found it without even looking, simply by reflecting in music what your poems stirred up in me”. In particular, Dehmel was attracted by synesthetic juxtapositions, and abundantly drew from the fields of visual arts and music for his images and metaphors. This is very evident in Erwartung, the first Lied in this cycle, where Dehmel employs many references to colours (particularly primary colours and in binary oppositions), whose effect is mirrored by Schoenberg through the use of “coloured” harmonies. Even though the musical language is still recognizably tonal, Schoenberg introduced several unexpected harmonic solutions, possibly encouraged precisely by the “visual” imagery suggested by the artist: when harmony started to lose some of its functional value, it progressively ceased to narrate a story in a consequential fashion, and instead began to represent a series of impressions whose meaning is revealed by their combination.
For this song cycle (which was actually not conceived as such from the outset), Schoenberg drew from Dehmel’s Weib und Welt, and he significantly dedicated his op. 2 to Alexander von Zemlinsky, his mentor (and later his brother-in-law), the one “to whom I owe most of my knowledge of the technique and the problems of composing”, as Schoenberg would later affirm. The poetry is intensely evocative, with a deep and intense eroticism, but it also reveals, through the image of human love, a more spiritual longing, which possibly expresses the questions, problems and sufferings of the fin-de-siècle years.
If in this cycle the days of tonal language, in Schoenberg’s hands, were ostensibly numbered, the other two cycles recorded here display respectively the eventual crumbling of this reassuring language and the eventual adoption of atonality.
The Eight Songs op. 6 were written between 1903 and 1905, and their gestation occurred in parallel with that of the First Quartet, op. 7. A string quartet, just as an a cappella choral work, is one of the genres where composers may display their contrapuntal and polyphonic skills at their highest, and Schoenberg made no exception to the rule. At the same time, the polyphonic idiom allows the compresence of much harsher dissonances than those permitted in (or deemed agreeable within) the language of traditional harmony.
One of the most impressive songs of the cycle is No. 4, Verlassen (“Forsaken”), where the voice utters this same word “moaning”: the abandonment felt by the protagonist, who seems out of place within the surrounding splendour of nature, is very similar to the abandonment of the “comfort zone” of traditional tonality, whose territory was being left by Schoenberg (and by many others after him).
Here too Schoenberg employs polyphony to unhinge the dogmas of tonal harmony, while also structuring the discourse through the systematic use of motifs: these micro segments of tunes have mostly lost the fascination of melody, but have been transformed into the foundational bricks of the musical form.
This process is so strong and powerful that Schoenberg was able to renounce the unity afforded by the use of texts from a single poetic work, and to juxtapose a series of lyrics with different provenances without losing the internal consistence of the musical speech.
In the following two years, Schoenberg did not compose other similarly groundbreaking song cycles, but, in 1907, the musician was deeply affected by the poetry of Stefan George. This charismatic figure, with mystical traits and with a very individual style, had gathered a number of followers and admirers who revered him with an almost religious zeal, and his style was veined by symbolism but also marked by the beginnings of the expressionism. In 1908, Schoenberg began setting to music some of George’s poems, selecting fifteen of them excerpted from The Book of the Hanging Gardens. George’s collection recounts the birth and destruction of an idyll of love, set within the luxuriant and exotic atmosphere of a Babylonian garden. The flowering and thriving vegetation, observed in its various moments, symbolizes the growth and ripening of a feeling of love tinged by eroticism; similarly, however, the end of the young protagonist’s experience is marked by the looming desolation of the garden.
If Schoenberg’s choice of this set of poems may have partly been determined by the particular moment of life he was experiencing (his wife had in fact left him, though eventually the two spouses would be reunited again), the symbolism of the garden is much more strictly connected to the musical language. The tonal language, this ordered and properly cultivated garden which had domesticated the art of sounds, now seems to be overgrown; it is definitively abandoned and left behind, as a fond memory but also, possibly, as an illusion.
In this itinerary, Schoenberg was inspired and supported by the poetry he had chosen. In his own words, “surprisingly, without any expectation on my part, these songs showed a style quite different from what I had written before… New sounds were produced, a new kind of melody appeared, a new approach to expression of moods and characters was discovered”. When the cycle was published, Schoenberg boldly reaffirmed his experience and itinerary by making it explicit in the preface to the published edition: “I am conscious of having broken through every restriction of a bygone aesthetic. I am being forced in this direction not because my invention or technique is inadequate, nor because I am uninformed about all the other things the prevailing aesthetics demand, but because I am obeying an inner compulsion, which is stronger than any up-bringing: I am obeying the formative process which, being the one natural to me, is stronger than my artistic education”.
In other words, the natural forces propelling the garden to blossom, grow and flourish are the same which will ultimately destroy it as a garden, though without destroying the life it contains. Ultimately, the strength of life will overcome the boundaries of a “civilized” cultivation; in musical terms, the dissonances will break through the limits imposed to them by the harmonic language. But even though the “garden” of tonality will seem to be a prey of disorder and chaos, this will only prove the vitality of music itself.
Through these Lieder, therefore, we are able to follow Schoenberg’s steps, leading him to the discovery of his own, unique language; the language of words proved inspirational in driving him to the creation of atonality and to the establishment of a new aesthetics – that of modernity.
Album Notes by Chiara Bertoglio