Music at the Turn of the Century

Music at the Turn of Century

California Studies in 19th-Century Music

Joseph Kerman, General Editor

1. Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century, by Carl Dahlhaus, translated by Mary Whittall

2. Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation, by Walter Frisch

3. Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After, by Lawrence Kramer

4. The Beethoven Sketchbooks: History, Reconstruction, Inventory, by Douglas Johnson, Alan Tyson, and Robert Winter

5. Nineteenth-Century Music, by Carl Dahlhaus, translated by J. Bradford Robinson

6. Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner, edited by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker

7. Music at the Turn of Century: A 19th-Century Music Reader, edited by Joseph Kerman

A 19th-Century Music Reader

Edited by Joseph Kerman

Music

at the

Turn

of Century

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles • Oxford

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England

© 1990 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Music at the turn of century: a 19th-century music reader / edited by Joseph Kerman.

p. cm. — (California studies in 19th century music; 7) ISBN 0-520-06854-8 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-520-06855-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

I. Music — 19th century —History and criticism. 2. Music —20th century —History and criticism. 1. Kerman, Joseph, 1924-

II. 19th century music. III. Series.

ML 196.M85 1990

780’.9'034 —dc20 89-28022

CIP

MN

Printed in the United States of America 123456789

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences —Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. G

Contents 1

Contents 1

Preface

1-XII-99: Tonal Rlations in Schoenberg s Verklarte Nacht

Mirrors and Metaphors: On Schoenberg and Nineteenth-Century Tonality

Quotation and Paraphrase in Ives’s Second Symphony

Parallel Voice-Leading in Debussy

Chez Petrouchka: Harmony and Tonality chez Stravinsky

Liszt’s Experimental Idiom and Twentieth-Ce tury Music

Decadence and D sire: The Wilhelm Meister Songs of Wolf and Schubert

Pelleas and Power: The Reception of D bussy’s Opera

Le Soleil des morts: Alurn-of-the-Century Portrait Gallery

Wagner and Our Century

Nineteenth-Century Ideas Developed in Bartoks Piano Notation, 1907—14

Index

Preface

Most of the essays in this book were solicited for the tenth anniversary of the journal 19th- Century Music, which has sought to encourage innovative writing about music—musicologi- cal, theoretical, and/or critical writing—since its founding in 1977. We invited former contributors and some others to submit articles on the general question of the relations between nineteenth-century music and music of the early twentieth century. Responses to our invitation were published in two special issues in the spring and summer of 1987. The breadth and scope of these articles, and their collective cogency, sparked the idea of reissuing them under a single cover, as a book.

To them has been added the opening essay in the very first issue of 19th-Century Music, in July 1977, "1-XII-99: Tonal Relations in Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht" by Richard Swift. Swift’s stylish pre-colon text encapsulates our theme, and does so with an appropriate sense of urgency: music of the late nineteenth century on the count-down to modernism. The substance of his study—like that of only a few others published in the journal’s first decade — contributes directly and handsomely to that theme.

Music in the period prior to Europe’s first World War has always held a strong interest for musicians, musicologists, and listeners, an interest that is perhaps even stronger today than in the recent past. For comprehensive brilliance, this period is unsurpassed in the history of Western music. The decades from 1894 to 1914 saw the composition—and the frequently unruly first performances — of Verklarte Nacht, Pierrot lunaire, and the early works of Alban Berg, Anton von Webern, and Bela Bartok; of the three most famous operas by Richard Strauss and the three famous ballets by Igor Stravinsky; and of practically the whole major output of Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, and Charles Ives. Busoni published his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music in 1907, and Russolo is sued his Futurist Manifesto in 1913. Recording technology began to make its impact during this period, as we know from a memorable chapter in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

It was also the period of Madam Butterfly, The Merry Widow, Pomp and Circumstance, and Maple-Leaf Rag, though nothing about these works or their like appears in the present collection. The anniversary project of inviting contributions on music at the turn of century under a broad, general charge was scarcely calculated to produce a balanced history of music at the time, even if one supposes that history in this sense is an achievable goal. What the project did achieve was something else: a crosssection of the best writing now being devoted to those aspects of turn-of-the-century music that particularly interest scholars today. The music of modernism, rather than the more conservative music of the time, or popular music, remains the focus of this interest.

And modernism, of course, defined itself by contrast with music of the previous century. Rejection of the values of late Romantic music was part of the new rationale. In its stance toward the past, turn-of-the-century modernism was very different from what may be called the second phase of musical modernism, the phase initiated by Boulez, Stockhausen, and others directly after World War II. It is not that composers of this second phase cut themselves off from tradition. But they selected with some care the past that they wanted: Webern, Debussy, Varese. This luxury of choice was not available to turn-of-the-century modernists, who were involved, implicated, and often locked in a struggle with all the formidable legions of nineteenth-century music.

The focus of these studies, then, is upon modernism in relation to its immediate heritage. Given that focus, the cross-section will be seen to be reasonably comprehensive after all. Thus major modernist composers whose reflections upon the past come under consideration here include Debussy, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, and Ives, while older composers such as Franz Liszt and Hugo Wolf figure as precursors of modernist harmony and modernist sensibility.

There is considerable range, too, in approach. Several of the authors work to explicate the new musical languages which evolved in that era, and which are still not well understood. But if this scholarly goal may seem familiar enough, its pursuit here takes some very different and novel forms. Other authors deal with reception —directly, in the case of Pelleas et Melisande, and indirectly, in the case of Bartok’s copious (and copiously glossed) editions of earlier piano classics. In the academic jargon that has grown up around music, some of the essays would be described as musicolog- ical in orientation, others theoretical, others analytical. Most bring together historical, theoretical, and analytical insights to achieve a richer kind of composite scholarship than is available to traditional musical studies.

19th-Century Music has tried to encourage composite scholarship of this kind; there will be time for a few words about the journal and its role later in this preface. But first it will be appropriate to present a somewhat more detailed survey of the contents of the present volume.

For the purposes of book publication the essays have been rearranged into two groups. Under the part title Transformations of Musical Language and Rhetoric I have assembled studies on the evolution of—or revolutions within — traditional musical materials and modes of expression. Central here is the classic problem of dissolving tonality, associated with Schoenberg’s emancipation of dissonance and his rethinking of structural processes, though our writers are also concerned with issues of texture, tone, and intertextuality.

Several essays in this group can be described as critical studies, or close readings, of modernist classics. If any one work deserves to be called the musical standard-bearer of modernism, Verklarte Nacht of December 1899 is that work. "As he transcended program music in Verklarte Nacht, so Schoenberg also transformed many compositional techniques of the immediate past," writes Richard Swift, who dwells especially on that knitting together of the linear and the vertical, the local and the long-range, that he sees as a model for the hierarchical apprehension of art so characteristic of the twentieth century. Verklarte Nacht as a whole mirrors the psychological motion of its literary subject matter, by the fugendstil poet Richard Dehmel, by means of a duplicating, interlocking transformation of sonata form—the formal principle that in endless earlier metamorphoses had occupied the nineteenth century.

The other critical studies address works hardly less famous than Verklarte Nacht. In ‘Quotation⁷ and Paraphrase in Ives’s Second Symphony," J. Peter Burkholder describes a typically ambivalent modernist struggle with paradigms of the past: in this case, both the American past of popular music, which Ives extolled, and the tradition of European art music, which he did not. Richard Taruskin demonstrates how the structure of an entire scene from Petrushka can be understood as the projection of a non-tonal practice that has been much discussed recently, derived from the octatonic scale. Descended from the St. Petersburg common practice of the Rimsky- Korsakov school, in Stravinsky’s hands this scale can fairly be said to have founded a coherent modernist musical language.

David Lewin’s essay can also be read for its striking critical insights into the work with which his discourse culminates, Debussy’s Prelude Canope of 1912. His study extends further, however, adumbrating a more general investigation of that well-known, even notorious, practice, Parallel Voice-Leading in Debussy. Debussy’s parallel chords have sometimes been seen as a product of fin-de- siecle antiquarianism, but Lewin shows that their interpretation as a sort of organum—that is, as essentially sonorous thickenings of melodic lines —is only sometimes right. In some instances such an interpretation can take one down unsuspected paths into the niceties of medieval sonority; in others linear analysis may be more persuasive —a kind of analysis that rests on more familiar nineteenth-century models.

Issues of critical methodology, implicitly raised by Lewin, serve as the explicit impetus for Christopher Lewis in Mirrors and Metaphors: On Schoenberg and NineteenthCentury Tonality. Like a number of younger musical scholars today, Lewis urges that musical analysis should be conceived of as metaphor rather than model. He extends Robert Bailey’s influential concept of dual tonality in Wagner—which ranks with Peter van den Toom’s explication of octatonicism as one of the seminal musical-theoretical ideas of recent years —to music that Schoenberg wrote soon after Verklarte Nacht. In Liszt’s Experimental Idiom and Twentieth-Century Music, the immediate results of Allen Forte’s investigation are perhaps hardly more formidable than the author’s implicit methodological claims. Identifying an experimental idiom in Liszt’s work, Forte traces dissonant chord-forms characteristic of the turn-of-the-century modernists in a long series of Liszt compositions going back to the 1850s. The underlying premise is that modern analysis —in particular, Forte’s well-known pitch-class set theory—can be used to underpin broad-ranging historical studies.

Under the admittedly broad rubric Engagements of Modernism: Personality, Politics, Perceptions, I have grouped several other essays, addressing issues of musical engagement with the nonmusical world. In an essay that is especially alert to intertextual nuance, Lawrence Kramer uses Goethe settings by Schubert and Wolf to reveal the response of one late nineteenth-century composer to the new image of personality emerging under modernism. Jann Pasler in "Pelleas and Power: The Reception of Debussy’s Opera" examines the press notices of the opera to uncover the impact upon them of politics, both musical (academicism versus modernism) and nonmusical (the Dreyfus case). Detailed reception studies are still rare enough in musicology, at least in this country, so that Pasler’s piece remains suggestive as a model.

Discussing Wagner and Our Century, Leon Botstein finds himself revisiting the theme of Wagner as a cultural, national, and ideological force —a theme that has occupied thinkers from Nietzsche to Thomas Mann to the eminent contemporary Israeli historian Jacob Katz. (Has this discussion already been revisited often enough? It will not be laid to rest finally, I believe, until the Wagner operas themselves are.) And in HLe Soleil des morts: A Turn-of-the-Century Portrait Gallery," Susan Youens draws attention to a roman a clefot the 1890s —itself an enervated symptom of its times —that encodes significant, skeptical perceptions of major actors in the drama of modernist music during its early days in Paris.

Only one of the twelve essays in this book addresses musical performance, rather than musical texts by themselves or in extramusical engagement. As Laszlo Somfai’s contribution counts as one of the most unusual ever to have appeared in 19th-Century Music, an editor may be forgiven for not finding a category for it. Somfai examines the details of musical notation by which Bartok sought to fix nuances of performance such as touch, phrasing, and so on. To this problem the author brings information from Bartok’s recordings of his own music, the editions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century piano classics that he prepared around 1910, and contemporaneous editions of his own works — notably those that appeared in more than one version, differing in notational detail. Like Pasler’s, this essay is of significant methodological interest.

As has been said above, these studies were assembled for an anniversary; and anniversaries are times to look back.

Founded in the late 1970s, 19th-Century Music took as its manifest charge the promotion of serious studies of nineteenth-century music. At that time such studies figured hardly at all in this country’s music-academic agenda. Just how invisible nineteenth-century work was in the postwar decades, observers of today will find hard to believe; but those interested need only get hold of old volumes of The Musical Quarterly and the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and scan the tables of contents. The nineteenth was a missing century in the main musicological periodicals, in seminars at major universities, and in job advertisements. The question was put to the editors on more than one occasion: could we hope to fill three issues a year with high-level contributions on nineteenth-century topics?

Today the situation is nearly reversed. Nineteenth-century studies are now among the strongest, most fashionable holdings of American musicology. The turnaround happened so fast —our issues were filled so easily and so excellently —that we have never been able to pretend that our project played a truly functional role in the disciplinary development. It seems clear that the field was already well into the process of change, and that the most 19th- Century Music can take credit for is being there at the right time, as a catalyst. Being there, it was in a good position to publish a number of exceptionally strong and influential articles in the years following 1977.

We can take a little more credit for another of the journal’s planks, one that was less manifest: to further a loosening-up of traditional scholarly discourse about music. This tended at that time to be positivistic and confined, even rigid. Thus while 19th-Century Music has always been mainly historical in orientation, as its title attests, and welcomes archival, bibliographical, and biographical essays, among others, its pages are also open to practically all types of analytical, structural studies. Authors have been free to try out critical methodologies that would be less appreciated elsewhere. As a result, the journal has never developed a monolithic style,- rather, it is marked by variety, flexibility, and experiment. These qualities are well demonstrated by the essays collected in this volume, as has already been suggested above.

To return to the neglect of the nineteenth century that characterized institutional musicology until recently: the scandal lay, of course, in what it was that came along after that particular century. Scholarly attention to nineteenth-century music may have been minimal; to twentieth-century music it was minuscule, and to late twentieth-century virtually nil. American musicology in the 1970s seemed to have cut itself off from current music. Work was proceeding under the tacit definition of music history as the study of a circumscribed past rather than as the study of the past running into the present. If, as some say, a major task of musicology is to show how music of the past continues to affect and impress music and reception in the present, this was not a task musicologists were addressing.

Nor, admittedly, was this the immediate task that 19th-Century Music was founded to address. If closing the time gap between the music of the present and the music of musicology had been the journal’s main impetus, it would have been called (with a nod to a distinguished contemporary) Music: Past and Present, or something of the sort. But while such closure was not our primary impetus, it was always at the back of the editors’ minds. It still is. Operating some way behind the line of battle, we still hope that by publishing serious work on the nineteenth century, and by encouraging freer as well as broader kinds of writing about music, the journal may be accomplishing useful support work.

And in the special tenth anniversary issues, by soliciting essays at the very tip of our stated preserve, it was possible to present sustained inquiry into the music of, if not our time, at least our century (as it will be for another ten years). Perhaps the present book, growing out of those anniversary issues, can be said to make a contribution to closing musicology’s notorious time gap.

While the responsibility for editing this book, in the trivial sense of reordering and introducing the articles, rests with the undersigned, launching the anniversary project and editing (as well as formatting) its outcome was the joint work of the three masthead co-editors, Walter Frisch, D. Kern Holoman, and Joseph Kerman. We should like to acknowledge here the invaluable cooperation of Robert Winter and Richard Swift, who served as co-editors in 1977-83 and 1983-84 respectively, and to editorial assistants Christina Acosta, Michael Rogan, and Janna Saslaw.

The history of the journal is somewhat complicated, but it must be at least outlined here so that we can thank the many institutions that helped make 19th-Century Music a reality. Founded as an intercampus venture of the University of California, 19th-Century Music was edited by a troika from the Berkeley, Davis, and Los Angeles campuses, with support (both financial and editorial) from Irvine and Santa Barbara. After the first few years the operation was run mainly out of Berkeley and Davis, and in 1984 an East Coast office was added at Columbia University in New York. A final, special word of thanks is due to the University of California Press, which after reviewing our original prospectus deliberately — even conservatively — in 1975, has ever since thrown caution to the winds and provided unstinting support and encouragement.

Joseph Kerman

for the Editors of 19th-Century Music Berkeley, October 1988

Transformations of Musical Language and Rhetoric

1-XII-99: Tonal Rlations in

Schoenberg s Verklarte Nacht

RICHARD SWIFT

December 1899, emotionally if not legally the end of the old century, was the month in which two compositions were completed that would point the direction for much of the dawning century’s music: Claude Debussy’s Nocturnes, almost ten years in the process of composition, and Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht, composed during that autumn of 1899. Each of these compositions has been said to be indebted to Wagner, the headiest musical force of the nineteenth century: Nocturnes to Parsifal, Verklarte Nacht to Tristan und Isolde. Even as received opinions go, this falls far short of the mark; it serves here as a reminder of the muffled critical attitudes typically applied to much turn-of-the-century music. With its subtle, luminous and subversive evasions of conventional late nineteenth-century tonal and structural processes, Nocturnes—especially Nuages and Sirenes—would seem to be the more drastic of the two works. In Verklarte Nacht, however, nineteenth-century compositional practice is confronted, embraced, and resolved: transformed by its twenty-five-year-old autodidact composer with an astonishing power and virtuosity of compositional thinking. And yet, despite its popularity in the concert hall—a fact often regretted by Schoenberg—the compositional ordering of the internal relations of Verklarte Nacht has remained almost uncharted territory.1 While clinging to the bounds and expectations of triadic tonality and tonal structure, it suggests, through its paradoxical combination of rigor and ambiguity, the air of other planets that would await its composer, as well as the art and craft of music, in the awakening twentieth century.

Schoenberg’s obeisance to the nineteenth century’s treasured notion of program music in Verklarte Nacht, and later in Pelleas und Melisande, is far more subtle than that of most of his predecessors or contemporaries. The symphonic poems of Liszt and his epigones are often makeshift affairs, the texts an effort to plaster over the seams of the music with literary vinegar-and-brown-paper. Often texts purporting to have some connection with the music were added later. Naturally enough, composers of such program music offered other, rather nobler, reasons for their reliance upon texts or upon literary and historical references: the new music of the mid-century had believed such programs were enough to guarantee its novelty, its estrangement from the classical past, its adherence to imagined precepts of Berlioz, Schumann, and the Beethoven of the Pastoral Symphony. For many composers, though, programmatic texts remained an easy means of assembling otherwise unrelated musical materials. Tchaikovsky, at work on Romeo and Juliet in 1869, received this advice from Balakirev: Determine your plan. Do not worry about the actual musical ideas.2 Such a coldblooded dismissal of the musical generation of a composition would have repelled Schoenberg; for his sextet, he chose a poem with internal structural relations that could be correlated with purely musical processes. The music is not a meandering fantasy or loose improvisation illustrating an anterior verbal plan, but a determined manifestation of the tonal principles of sonata structure. If the music does suggest the action of the poem and its psychological motion, it does so because the structural processes of both the poem and the music, considered abstractly, are similar. Egon Wellesz, in his book on Schoenberg,3 tried to make point-to- point identifications between the poem and the music in the approved nineteenth-century fashion, and Schoenberg himself, despite his fixed disavowal of such equivalences, wrote program notes as late as 1950 that attempt a similar set of connections.4 Much earlier, in a 1912 essay in Die Blaue Reiter, he had stated unequivocally his opposition to program music of the common variety: The assumption that a piece of music must summon up images of one sort or another … is as widespread as only the false and banal can be.5

As he transcended program music in Verklarte Nacht, so Schoenberg also transformed many compositional techniques of the immediate past. The music of the sextet does not slavishly imitate models, but it does owe much to the music of Brahms and Wagner, to which a flavor of Liszt, Bruckner, and perhaps also Hugo Wolf was added.6 Having confronted and having mastered those techniques—including modes of thematic construction and combination, of development and extension (Brahms’s technique of developing variation⁷)—the youthful composer achieved an intensely personal style. Gone were the times of blind partisanship for either Brahms or Wagner, for what in 1883 seemed an impassable gulf was in 1897 no longer a problem.⁸ The stylistic and technical accomplishments of those masters could now be blended without hesitation, for there was no longer any incongruity in their propinquity. Later, in Brahms the Progressive, Schoenberg analyzed types of thematic construction to be found in Brahms’s music. Many of these—such as model and sequence, incomplete sequence, the extension and expansion of thematic contours by diminution or augmentation of temporal patterns—are similar to the essential thematic unfoldings, continuations and developments of Verklarte Nacht.

To cite a specific case, the melody in example I unfolds downward-leaping fourths that expand to fifths and sixths in a sequence (mm. 259-61) whose half measure is a diminution of m. 255. The climax of the melody (mm. 262-64) combines upward fourths and downward fifths in a rhythmic structure that includes both the previous eighth-note pattern and an irregular diminution of m. 256. The final descending scale in even eighths smooths out the linear and rhythmic angularities of the melody (ex. 1):

Schoenberg was to dub Grundgestalt, or basic shape, that rationalization of the materials of music made to create relational connections at every level, to make richly congruent compositional contexts. Hierarchical reduction as a critical tool was deduced from this fundamental and universal aspect of compositional thinking; in the twentieth century, reduction becomes a primary mode of apprehending works of art (in music, from Schenker onward) and, in an extended interpretation, a mode of comprehending the relations of human nature in the world (from Husserl onward). When applied to the music of Ver- klarte Nacht, reduction reveals the interrelationships of one diatonic scale segment (ut- re-mi-fa) nested in the perfect fourth. The profound effects of this scale segment in shaping the musical structure and its textures can be traced both in relations among strands of primary and subsidiary motivic material and in large-scale tonal relations, while local tonal connections unfold a network of parallel inter- vallic relations.

To have begun by emphasizing the purely musical aspects of Verklarte Nacht is not to minimize the importance to Schoenberg of the poetry of Richard Dehmel. At the end of the 19th century, the foremost representatives of the ‘Zeitgeist’ in poetry were Detlev von Lilien- cron, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Richard Dehmel7 Between 1897 and 1907, according to Jan Maegaard’s brilliant reconstruction of the chronology of Schoenberg’s music,8 Schoenberg completed or sketched fourteen settings of Dehmel’s poems, in addition to sketching two uncompleted orchestral works and composing the sextet. Three of these settings were completed shortly before or during the composition of Verklarte Nacht: Warnung, op. 3, no. 3; Er- wartung, op. 2, no. 1; and Erhebung, op. 2, no. 3. In 1912, Schoenberg replied to a letter from Dehmel, who had expressed the pleasure given him by a recent performance of the sextet:

Your poems 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. People who know my music can bear witness to the fact that my first attempts to compose settings for your poems contain more of what subsequently developed in my work than there is in many a much later composition.9

The estimate of the importance of Schoenberg’s Dehmel settings in the development of his style contained in the last sentence quoted above has not been surpassed by later critics. Richly worked-out contrapuntal textures and a dense allusiveness of pitch and interval relations make the settings of the Dehmel poems in opera 2, 3 and 6 far superior to the settings of other texts in the same collections, admirable as these may be on their own terms.

Despite the present low ebb of his literary reputation, Dehmel’s poems enjoyed considerable vogue in pre-World War I Germany and Austria. Their mildly erotic tone combined with striking post-Baudelairean and post- Nietzschean sensuousness of imagery and language to give an impression of sexual candor so typical of Jugendstil. The poem that serves as point of departure for Schoenberg’s sextet was published with the title Verklarte Nacht in the first edition of Dehmel’s collection Weib und Welt (1896), and later was incorporated into his verse novel Zwei Menschen (1903).10 Although the novel postdates the composition of the sextet, it exhibits a pre-compositional planning that must have appealed to the composer. It consists of three parts, each containing thirty- six poems (Vorgange) of thirty-six lines each. A twelve-line Eingang precedes each part; there is an eight-line Leitlied at the beginning, and a four-line Ausgang at the end of the novel. Allusions and resonances among words and themes abound among the poems in the three parts of the novel. For example, the first poem in each part has beginning and ending lines that echo back and forth, like a transformed refrain:

I. 1 Zwei Menschen gehn durch kahlen, kalten Hain.

Zwei Menschen gehn durch hohe, helle Nacht.

II. 1 Zwei Menschen reiten durch maihellen Hain

Zwei Menschen reiten in die Welt.

III. 1 Zwei Menschen gehn durch nebelnassen Hain

Zwei Menschen stehn, als sei ein Schwur ge- fallen.

Similar constructional ingenuities are shared by the other poems in the novel; they are typical of Dehmel’s poetry.

The Verklarte Nacht poem, printed in the score of the string orchestra arrangement, has irregular line groupings—six lines for the opening description of the physical scene, twelve lines for the woman’s confession, four more lines of description, eleven lines for the man’s avowal, and a final three lines affirming their union—and a rhyme scheme which illuminates line structure with pairs of rhymes at the beginning of each division, intricately unfolding rhymes for the woman’s speech, and tightly enfolding rhymes for the man’s. The double exposition of the poem, with direct speech of the woman and the man, must have provided an impetus for Schoenberg’s novel structure—a pair of sonatas with contrasting, although closely related, motivic materials and tonal relationships. It must also have suggested the combining and blending of motives from the first sonata with those in the second. The great, if simple, shift of mode from predominantly minor in the first sonata to predominantly major in the second serves to emphasize the relative rhythmic and melodic incompleteness of the first and the relative rhythmic and melodic completeness of the second. The development of these contrasts is resolved in the tonal serenity of the coda.

Although usually described as being in five sections, Verklarte Nacht consists of the two intimately related sonata movements, the first of which has a truncated—if not to say impacted—recapitulation of first group materials only. The two sonata structures are preceded by an Introduction, and they are linked by a Transition in which the materials of the Introduction return in a tonal area made important in the Introduction (bvi) and are provided with a new cadence. Sonata II has a normal recapitulation. (References are to the sextet; measure numbers are the same in the string orchestra arrangement.)

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty/’ Algernon remarks in The Importance of Being Earnest—a principle those composers commonly called Romantic were quick to discover. Algernon would have been the first to recognize the pleasures of uncertainty in the tonal ambiguity of the first movement of Schumann’s Fantasy, or in the tensions of the open structure of the first song of Dichterliebe; he might have been slower to perceive the clouded whole-step progression from the beginning to the end of Tristan. For Schoenberg in the sextet, the shaping of rhythms, motive contours, and local tonal relationships are contingent upon uncertainty and its capacity for ambiguity. In Verklarte Nacht, the first of his one-movement sonata compositions—Pelleas und Melisande, the First Quartet, and the First Chamber Symphony are prominent among its successors—Schoenberg was to transcend by such means the tonal principles of sonata exemplified by the neo-classicism of Brahms, Bruckner, and Strauss.

In its simplest form, the global tonal scaffolding of Verklarte Nacht can be reduced to: i-II-(i)-III-iv-I, or ut-re-mi-fa. This scale segment permeates the fundamental linear and vertical progressions of the entire sextet. It is the primary element of the Introduction, whose falling scale motive ranges over the tonic hexachord (the sixth to first scale degrees), initiating a contour that is at once incomplete—its many repetitions arouse anticipation for completion of the scale pattern—and static. At m. 13, completion seems near, for the motive moves to the dominant hexachord (third downward to fifth scale degrees); but the shift involves a conflict over the raised and lowered forms of the sixth and seventh scale degrees, a conflict that serves to extend the sense of scalar, as well as motivic, incompleteness. Rhythmic fragmentation, arising from the amassing of one-measure units, creates a temporal breathlessness that will not be dispelled fully until the broader and rhythmically more stable expanses of Sonata II are reached.

While it is in the nature of introductions to expose weakly shaped contours and immediately unresolved harmonic contexts, the motives and progressions that occur in Sonata I itself are scarcely more complete, giving rise to the uncertainty that is so prominent a part of the character of this music. The first group sentence begins with a continuation of the one- measure unit inherited from the Introduction, and the sentence motive is repeated rather than transposed. The bass line is formed from an inversion of the chief Introduction motive; its ascending diatonic scale pattern in—at first— one-measure units serves to emphasize the ambiguous nature of the sentence itself. The cadence of the first group (end of m. 57-m. 62) presents the whole step in the melody with thirds in the opposing bass; the whole step is then used as the basis for the sequence of augmented chords and chromatic motives that concludes the exposition, a sequence proceeding by whole steps in each of the voices (mm. 128-31).

The most remote tonal relations, the most complicated chromatic inflections, the lengthiest of delays in resolving non-chord tones in the sextet are rooted firmly in the plainness of diatonic reduction. Certainly the passage that begins the development of Sonata I (mm. 135-52) is the furthest removed from an encompassing triadic tonal area of any in Ver- klarte Nacht. In How One Becomes Lonely, Schoenberg compared this passage with a similar passage in the Fourth Quartet as an instance of more violent expression.11 In the sextet, its expressive role is clear because its structural function as the commencement of the development—the area of a sonata in which wide-ranging tonal movement is expected—is clear. The section consists of a complex segment of music that is repeated a whole step higher. Each of the elements of the segment functions within the framework