Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) composed Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) for string sextet (pairs of violins, violas, and cellos), Op. 4, in 1899, at the age of 25. It caused something of a scandal when it premiered three years later, but went on to become his most famous and frequently performed composition. Schoenberg based this programmatic chamber piece on a poem by Richard Dehmel that tells the story of a woman’s nocturnal confession to her lover: she is pregnant, but the child is not his. The man’s forgiveness brings luminous transfiguration at the end.

The lush beauty of Verklärte Nacht accounts for its continued popularity—the features that initially sparked controversy are no longer of any concern.

Introduction

Schoenberg was not just a transformative composer, but also an influential teacher (first in Europe, then the US), prominent theorist, prolific writer, and provocative polemicist. His controversial place in music history initially came from the pivotal role he played in the transition from late Romanticism—exemplified by Verklärte Nacht—to modernism. Unlike many celebrated composers, Schoenberg was not a prodigy or a virtuoso performer, and was largely self-taught. He started as a cellist, took some composition lessons from Alexander Zemlinsky (his brother-in-law), and composed in a late Romantic style comparable, in some ways, to the still-living Johannes Brahms (1833–97). Indeed, Brahms’s two string sextets are the most often performed pieces for this instrumentation, alongside Verklärte Nacht and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence, Op. 70 (1890).

History

Schoenberg allegedly composed Verklärte Nacht in just three weeks, during the late summer of 1899. The date he affixed to the completed work is nicely symbolic: December 1, 1899, the end of a century and, in a sense, of musical Romanticism (but not really, of course: many composers continued to write, as some still do, in a Romantic style that would be immediately recognizable to Brahms and other late 19th-century composers).

Verklärte Nacht was the first instrumental work which Schoenberg gave an opus number—he had already written other instrumental pieces, including a fine, unnumbered string quartet reminiscent of Antonín Dvořák. For some years, he continued composing lushly tonal music, but then, beginning around 1908, disrupted centuries of harmonic convention by “emancipating dissonance” with his atonal music. In the 1920s, he developed this emancipation by pioneering the twelve-tone, or serial, technique, which further rocked musical tradition.

Schoenberg courted controversy throughout his career. Even the now-normal Verklärte Nacht had a troubled premiere—in March 1902, at Vienna’s Musikverein, when performed by the Rosé Quartet, with Franz Jelinek as second violist and the composer Franz Schmidt as the additional cellist. Schoenberg was in Berlin at the time and could not attend, but he later reported that it “ended in a riot and in actual fights.” Indeed, there was criticism of certain chords Schoenberg used unconventionally, and consternation that he was taking program music into the realm of chamber music. While such storytelling was long a familiar feature in Romantic orchestral music, chamber music had, for the most part, remained pure (nonnarrative). Schoenberg helped change this. As he wrote nearly 50 years later, “My composition differs somewhat from other illustrative compositions, firstly, in that it is not for orchestra but for chamber ensemble, and secondly, because it does not depict any action or drama, but limits itself to portraying nature and expressing human emotions.”

Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Two Cellos, Op. 4

Schoenberg turned for inspiration to the German poet Richard Dehmel (1863–1920). He had already set some songs to his texts, and he decided to use the “Verklärte Nacht” poem from Dehmel’s collection Weib und Welt (Woman and the World; 1896) as the sextet’s program. The words were printed in the published score and distributed to the critics at the premiere, but not to the audience. Schoenberg wrote to Dehmel in 1912: “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 mood. Or rather, I found it even without looking, simply by reflecting in music what your poems stirred up in me.”

Form and Analysis

Dehmel’s "Verklärte Nacht" is a largely autobiographical poem that concerns an unnamed woman and an unnamed man walking through moonlit woods. She informs him that she is pregnant with another man’s child, and he responds with forgiveness, acceptance, and love. The piece opens with bare lower strings, and then we hear a slow walking pace of repeated, descending scales. The music becomes more agitated as it wordlessly depicts the woman’s confession: “I carry a child, and not yours; I walk in sin beside you.”

The work unfolds continuously for nearly 30 minutes. Egon Wellesz, a one-time student of Schoenberg’s, commented that “the structure of Verklärte Nacht, in accordance with the [five-stanza] poem, is made up of five sections, in which the first, third, and fifth are of more epic nature and so portray the deep feelings of the people wandering about in the cold moonlit night. The second contains the passionate plaint of the woman, the fourth the sustained answer of the man, which shows much depth and warmth of understanding.”

The man’s promise to accept the child as his own transforms the anguished mood of the D-minor opening into a radiant D major that gleams at the end, conveying the final lines of the poem: “He grasps her around her strong hips. Their breath kisses in the air. Two people walk through the high, bright night.” Schoenberg’s program note relates that “a long coda concludes the work. Its material consists of themes from the preceding parts. All are transformed anew, as in glorifying the wonders of nature that transform this night of tragedy into a glorified transformed night.”

Critical Thoughts

It may be difficult to muster much sympathy for Schoenberg, who seemed to revel in throwing artistic stink bombs, and whose arrogance concerning his place in music history knew few bounds. He forever felt misunderstood and ill-appreciated, and was testy even about the popular Verklärte Nacht. 38 years after its composition, by then internationally famous (and infamous), he looked back at his youthful work in a fascinating essay “How One Becomes Lonely”: “My Verklärte Nacht, written before the beginning of this century—hence a work of my first period, has made me a kind of reputation. From it I can enjoy (even among my opponents) some appreciation which the works of my later periods would not have procured for me so soon... nobody has heard it as often as I have heard this complaint: ‘If only he had continued to compose in this style!’” To this charge Schoenberg gave a response he said surprised people: “I have not discontinued composing in the same style and in the same way as at the very beginning. The difference is only that I do it better now than before; it is more concentrated, more mature.”

One can understand both positions. For audiences frightened by the composer’s later music, the extravagant lyricism, broad melodies, and luxurious harmonies of Verklärte Nacht are a welcome balm. Yet, from a purely compositional perspective, many of Schoenberg’s concerns remained consistent throughout his long career, especially in regard to the development and transformation of motives (short series of notes). What he does in this early work is often similar to what he did decades later in a thorny string quartet—even though the surface features that most immediately strike the ear in Verklärte Nacht are written according to long-established rules of tonality, while later works use atonal or twelve-tone procedures.

Legacy

Schoenberg’s attraction to Dehmel’s poetry reflected the fin-de-siècle (“end-of-century”) Vienna that produced the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, and the stories of Arthur Schnitzler. Schoenberg and the 14-years-older Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) led the musical revolution. The immediate influence of Verklärte Nacht was perhaps most profound on Schoenberg’s own students, especially Anton Webern and Alban Berg, whose early works were also songs, solo piano music, chamber music, and some orchestral pieces.

Because Schoenberg made an arrangement of his sextet for string orchestra—which Zemlinsky premiered in Prague in November 1916—Verklärte Nacht went on to enjoy an unusually large concert presence. (To keep the work in copyright, Schoenberg made a second string-orchestra arrangement in 1943.) Schoenberg’s student, the brilliant pianist Eduard Steuermann, also arranged Verklärte Nacht for piano trio.

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Article by Christopher H. Gibbs