Schoenberg Tchaikovsky

SCHOENBERG: VARIATIONS FOR ORCHESTRA, OP.
31
TCHAIKOVSKY: SYMPHONY NO. 6
In the West-Eastern Divan the universal metaphysical language of music becomes the link that
these young people have with each other; it is a language of continuous dialogue. Music is the
common framework; it is an abstract language of harmony. In music, nothing is independent. It
requires a perfect balance between intellect, emotion and temperament.
Daniel Barenboim
(in a speech in Brussels in January 2007 in the Discourses on Europe series)
On 2 December 1928, Arnold Schoenbergs Variations for orchestra received their first performance in Berlin, with Wilhelm Furtwngler conducting the citys Philharmonic Orchestra.
Furtwngler was the most high-profile conductor to take charge of a Schoenberg premiere: it
was not a success. Wind the clock on to the summer of 1954 and an eleven-year-old boy of Russian-Jewish descent, born and raised in Buenos Aires, played the piano to Furtwngler in Salzburg: it moved and impressed the conductor enormously. The boys name was Daniel Barenboim. Wind the clock on yet again, to the summer of 2007, and Barenboim, now one of the
worlds leading conductors and pianists, was touring that same Schoenberg work with an orchestra hed formed with his friend, the writer and teacher Edward Said. The West-Eastern Divan
Orchestra is an ensemble that, uniquely, sits young Jewish players alongside those from Arab
countries.
This programme is criss-crossed with connections and associations: an homage to Furtwngler
perhaps, but also to the father of a new musical language, one with which, even all these years
later, were still coming to terms: Arnold Schoenberg.
Its a celebration too of musics power to transcend political divides and unite traditional enemies. And, in Tchaikovskys last symphony, its a celebration of tonality which Schoenberg
was so fascinated with dismantling in its glorious, autumnal richness. And as such its a celebration of pure emotion: the Pathtique cant fail to connect and leave you both moved and
changed.
Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna, at the time possibly the most intellectually vibrant city
in the world, and, with his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern, he became for music what his
fellow Viennese Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler were for psychoanalysis, what Secession artists like Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann and others were for painting and design, or what Stefan Zweig, Josef Roth, Franz Kafka,
Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Peter Altenberg were
for literature. It was a city where no-one looked back.
At much the same time as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, musical language
had, Schoenberg felt, reached an impasse. Wagner, in Tristan und Isolde, and Schoenberg himself in his epic oratorio Gurrelieder, had pushed expression as far as it could go within the limitations of the traditional scale-based system. For Schoenberg, the twelve notes of the traditional
scale (on a piano, all the keys both black and white from C up to the next C) could operate
on an equal footing. The traditional pull of the scales home key could be dispensed with,
and the music could achieve a new freedom, a freedom where heart, perhaps, surrendered to
head. His theory and practice was called dodecaphony, the twelve-tone system or serialism,
and the melodies, comprised of the twelve notes of the scale, were called tone-rows.
Dismantling centuries of musical wisdom and practice was never going to be easy, and Schoenbergs music met with strong resistance, but gradually his theories attracted both respect and a
small but powerful following. In 1926 Schoenberg took up the post, vacated by Busonis death,
of Director of a masterclass in composition at the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin and
the Variations op. 31 were his first large-scale work written under the security of a job that
greatly improved his quality of life. The work comprises an introduction and original theme,
nine variations and a finale, and despite the rigid adherence to the twelve-tone system, it has a
power that still elicits a strong emotional response: Schoenbergs ear for orchestral colour was
remarkably fine. In fact its hard to resist assigning emotions to the rather beautiful theme as it
unfolds in the first section. Thereafter each variation is distinct. Some, like Variations 3 and 8,
last less than a minute and some, like Variations 4 and 5, almost allow melody to bubble up and
break the surface, cleverly achieved by solo instruments plucking particular notes from the
tone-row (and this is how the motto B-A-C-H emerges).
Schoenberg opined that his Op. 31 was not excessively difficult in terms of ensemble playing,
though he did qualify the comment by pointing out that the individual parts are by and large
very difficult so the quality of the performance will depend on how well the parts are learned.
The point is worth noting when confronted with a performance like the West-Eastern Divans,
because these young players achieve their extraordinarily high standards of playing during an
intensive period that lasts just a few weeks each year.
Tchaikovskys Sixth Symphony, known as the Pathtique, presents something of an enigma,
one created by the still-unresolved mystery surrounding the composers death on 6 November
1893, which took place just nine days after he conducted the works premiere. Did he know he
was going to die, indeed was his death intentional, or is the work conceived on a larger, more
elemental scale? What we do know is that he drank a glass of unpurified water during a cholera
epidemic, laughed off the risks, but succumbed to its deathly power very quickly. Suicide to
avoid the scandal of a homosexual liaison is a theory that has been advanced. At its next performance, now shrouded in memorial garb, the Pathtique assumed its autobiographical status,
one it has never shrugged off. But Tchaikovsky had apparently been in high spirits as he wrote
the symphony, and it flowed easily from his pen. He showed immense pride in the finished work,
but he did comment that while composing it in my mind, I wept frequently. It is a work that
swings dramatically between introspective gloom (the outer movements) and devil-may-care
triumphalism (the third movement Allegro molto vivace). Yet its the gloom that audiences respond to and which, in a great performance, leaves us shattered but uplifted.
Theres no denying the Pathtiques power and emotional pull. If the Schoenberg speaks from
the head, the Tchaikovsky speaks from the heart and, together, both bear witness to the remarkable achievement of the young West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, caught live here in only their
eighth anniversary season.
James Jolly
4/2011

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