Verklaerte Nacht, Op.4
Half a century before "Capriccio", "the world was deeply and frivolously at peace" and dark emotions were still things with which a young composer might play. "Verklaerte Nacht" ("Transfigured Night"), the 25-year old Schoenberg’s symphonic poem for string sextet, was written in three weeks in September 1899 and was immediately thrown into the middle of one of those trivial but biting public controversies for which Vienna is famous. The Vienna Tonkünstlerverein, having premiered Schoenberg’s Dvorák-like first String Quartet, now rejected the new piece on the basis of a chord in bar 42 that offended academic propriety. "Evidently," commented Schoenberg, "an inverted ninth does not exist; and so there was no performance, for after all one can’t perform something which doesn’t exist." There was no Vienna premiere until March 1902, by which time the musical battle lines had been well and truly established and, while the likes of Gustav Mahler applauded the new work, the opposing faction weighed in with denunciations of "cacophony", and, more originally, "it sounds as if someone had smeared the score of Tristan while it was still wet".
The composer’s later arrangements of the piece for full string orchestra have certainly helped blunt its harsher edges, and hearing its original version for string sextet we can rediscover something of what original listeners found (or claimed to find) shocking. The highly chromatic, post-Wagnerian musical language was not unknown in late 19th century chamber music, but in "Verklaerte Nacht" Schoenberg takes it to unprecedented extremes. The way in which he uses the sextet’s colours is also highly original, with tremolandi, harmonics and fortissimo pizzicati – not in themselves radical in orchestral music, but unusually forceful in the confined space of a chamber ensemble. And, of course, the string sextet’s most distinguished practitioner up to 1899 had been Johannes Brahms, whose fanatical supporters (the "Brahmins") were the most vociferous advocates of everything which "Verklaerte Nacht" seemed to oppose - classicism, "absolute" music and conventional harmony. The piece actually shows a real debt to Brahms - it is constructed with symphonic rigour and opens and closes, unmistakably, in the key of D - but it is, without doubt, an impassioned and utterly candid response to a poem which, Schoenberg confessed to its author, "churned him up". In the enclosed, intimate world of chamber music, many early listeners may simply have found that too much to bear.
"Verklaerte Nacht" is in five parts, played as one continuous movement – closely following the form and narrative of Richard Dehmel’s poem:
Two people walk through the bare, cold wood,
The moon accompanies them, they gaze at it
The moon passes above the high oaks –
no cloud obscures the light of heaven
pierced by black branches.
The voice of a woman is heard:
(D minor "walking" music, building in tension and volume to echo the woman’s rising emotion)
I bear a child which is not yours
In sin I am walking beside you.
I have defiled myself gravely;
I no longer believe in happiness
and yet I had a great longing
for life, for the joy of motherhood
and duty; and so I dared,
and, shuddering, yielded myself
to the embraces of a strange man,
and thought myself blessed for doing so.
Now life has taken its revenge,
For now I have met you, oh you.
(A climactic outpouring, initially in a glowing E major, but increasingly anguished and dissonant, finally fading to pianissimo)
She goes on with clumsy steps;
She looks up, the moon follows her,
Her dark glance is drowned in light
The voice of a man is heard:
(The "walking" music again, at first thickly scored, then becoming more delicate)
The child that you have conceived,
Let it be no burden to your soul;
O see, how brightly the universe is shimmering!
There is a glory on everything here,
You are drifting with me on a cold ocean
But a mutual warmth flickers
From you to me ,from me to you.
That will transfigure the strange child;
You will bear it for me, and from me,
You have brought glory to me,
You have made me a child myself.
(A firm D major chord, the voice of the man as a cello melody, the "shimmering universe" depicted with muted strings and harmonics)
He takes her by the strong hips.
Their breath kisses in the gentle breeze,
Two people walk through the high, clear night.
(The coda; the "walking" music in dolcissimo D major and pppp oscillations and stratospheric harmonics evoking "Transfigured Night").
R. G. Bratby 2002
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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