Suite for Piano (Schoenberg)
Arnold Schoenberg's Suite for Piano (German: Suite für Klavier), Op. 25, is a twelve tone piece for piano composed between 1921 and 1923.
The work is the earliest in which Schoenberg employs a row of "12 tones related only to one another" in every movement: the earlier 5 Stücke, Op. 23 (1920–23) employs a 12-tone row only in the final Waltz movement, and the Serenade, Op. 24 uses a single row in its central Sonnet.
The Basic Set of the Suite for Piano consists of the following succession: E–F–G–D♭–G♭–E♭–A♭–D–B–C–A–B♭.
In form and style the work echoes many features of the Baroque suite.
Schoenberg's Suite has six movements:
- Präludium (1921)
- Gavotte (1923)
- Musette (1923)
- Intermezzo (1921–1923)
- Menuett. Trio (1923)
- Gigue (1923)
A performance of the entire Suite für Klavier takes around 16 minutes.
In this work Schoenberg employs transpositions and inversions of the row for the first time: the sets employed are P-0, I-0, P-6, I-6 and their retrogrades. Arnold Whittall has suggested that '[t]he choice of transpositions at the sixth semitone—the tritone—may seem the consequence of a desire to hint at 'tonic-dominant' relationships, and the occurrence of the tritone G-D♭ in all four sets is a hierarchical feature which Schoenberg exploits in several places'[1]
The Suite for Piano was first performed by Schoenberg's pupil Eduard Steuermann in Vienna on 25 February 1924. Steuermann made a commercial recording of the work in 1957.[2] The first recording of the Suite for Piano to be released was made by Niels Viggo Bentzon some time before 1950.[2]
The Gavotte movement contains, "a parody of a baroque keyboard suite that involves the cryptogram of Bach's name as an important harmonic and melodic device (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 108; Lewin 1982–83, n.9)" and a related quotation of Schoenberg's op. 19/vi.[3]
Edward T. Cone (1972) has catalogued what he believes to be a number of mistakes in Reinhold Brinkmann's 1968 revised edition of Schoenberg's piano music, one of which is in measure number five of the Suite's "Gavotte", G♭ instead of G♮.[4] Henry Klumpenhouwer invokes Sigmund Freud's concept of parapraxes (i.e., mental slips) to suggest a psychological context explaining the deviation from the note predicted from the tone row.[5]
References
Notes
Sources
- Cone, Edward T. 1972. "Editorial Responsibility and Schoenberg's Troublesome 'Misprints'". Perspectives of New Music 11, no. 1, Tenth Anniversary Issue (Fall–Winter): 65–75.
- Klumpenhouwer, Henry. 1994. "An Instance of Parapraxis in the Gavotte of Schoenberg's Opus 25". Journal of Music Theory 38, no. 2 (Autumn): 217–248.
- Lewin, David. 1982–83. "Transformational Techniques in Atonal and Other Music." Perspectives of New Music 21, nos. 1–2:312–71.
- Stuckenschmidt, H. H. 1977. Schoenberg: His Life, World, and Work, translated by Humphrey Searle. London: Calder.
- University of Southern California Libraries (n.d.) "Arnold Schoenberg Recordings: List of Works: Suite Op. 23 (1923/25)" (Accessed 6 April 2014).
- Whittall, Arnold. 1977. Music Since the First World War. London: Dent.
- Whittall, Arnold. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Serialism. Cambridge Introductions to Music. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-68200-8 (pbk).
External links
| Orchestral |
|
|---|---|
| Concertante |
|
| Chamber |
|
| Instrumental |
|
| Opera |
|
| Oratorio |
|
| Vocal |
|
| Other pages | |
