Schoenberg, Nono and Beethoven:
three composers and five works present a coherent programme that denies, even
scorns, sentimental distinction between emotion and intellect. Dialectics of the
conscious and unconscious, of struggle and serenity play out within and
between, leading us not only back but also forward to Beethoven. All these
works, moreover, have classic Pollini performances and recordings to their
name. That does not mean we should know what to expect: both in themselves and
in combination, there will always remain more to be said, played, and heard.
Illogic
of the Unconscious
In 1908, Schoenberg had written
his Second String Quartet op. 10, first freely breathing Stefan George’s ‘air
of another planet’ – or what we, Schoenberg’s dislike notwithstanding, have
come to know as ‘free atonality’. The following year proved a veritable Wunderjahr, the Drei Klavierstucke, op.11, initiating
a white-heat outpouring of music: Das
Buch der hängenden Gärten op. 15, the Fünf
Orchesterstücke op. 16 and Schoenberg’s first completed opera, Erwartung op. 17 quickly followed.
Brahms’s ghost often looms large
in Schoenberg’s piano writing – and not only in his piano writing; the
instrument had never really been Schoenberg’s ‘own’. By contrast, however, with
Schoenberg’s earlier, (then) unpublished piano pieces, ‘influence’ had now been
thoroughly absorbed. Crashing Romantic chords, liable to fragment horizontally
and vertically at any moment, are part of the picture; so are remnants of the
idea, even the form, of Brahms’s late piano works: ‘pieces’, intermezzos,
rhapsodies and so on. The first piece’s ternary form (ABA) invites comparison with
Brahms, as do aspects of motivic progression, though any Classicism is swiftly
and, later, savagely eroded. Energy lies in a very 1909 (for Schoenberg) state
of permanent flux, form and tonality dynamically annihilated almost before it
can come into being: Mephistophelian or Lisztian, we might say with equal
justice. That ‘almost’, though, remains.
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| Arnold Schönberg Center |
D minor, always a favourite ‘Second
Viennese School’ key, haunts the left-hand, minor-third (D–F) ostinato of the
second piece, playing with thirds itself a favourite procedure of Brahms. It is
nonetheless a ghost suspended and, in the third, flayed alive. ‘For a human
being’, Schoenberg wrote to Busoni in 1909, ‘it is impossible to feel but one
sensation at a time. One has thousands at once. […T]his variegation, this
illogicality […] set forth by a soaring wave of blood, by some sense- or
nerve-reaction, this I should like to have in my music.’ Schoenberg here comes
close to that very ‘expression of feeling […] which connects us with our
unconscious’. Ruthless deletion of all hints of repetition in manuscript emendations
had him come closer still
Distilled
Drama
Schoenberg’s musical thought,
then, was ever dialectical, without that precluding great variety of
expression, whether within and between works. In Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op.19, we hear Schoenberg at close to
his most aphoristic, each piece of a brevity courting comparison with Webern.
That, however, is the only point truly held in common – and places excessive
emphasis on duration. Beethoven’s late bagatelles perhaps offer more meaningful kinship: apparently simpler than
much of his piano writing in their distillation of drama, expression and
technique, yet at least as enigmatic as the sonatas. The hyper-expressivity of
op. 11 is taken less to its logical – recall Schoenberg’s insistence on illogic
– than to another, different conclusion. A line, a harmony, a poetic suggestion
is voiced in purest essence: continuation of and escape from Schoenberg’s earlier self. Preoccupation with
intervallic relationships characterizes many of these utterances, heard as if
spoken epigrams, rich in both Brahmsian homage and serial anticipation. Obstinacy
of the repeated major third (G–B) in the second piece is both generative of
conflict and yet serenely unchallenged by it. Violence in the fourth likewise recalls
op.11, yet stands also beyond that invitation to the abyss, on the cusp of
Schoenberg’s later neoclassicism. In the final piece, inspired by the bells of
Mahler’s funeral, we feel the graveyard’s chill breath: ‘wie ein Hauch’. Simultaneity
of subsidence and climax offers further ‘nerve-reaction’ and an unusual degree
of final peace.
Suffering
Serenity
Such serenity provides both starting point and goal for the poetic idea of Luigi Nono’s 1976 …sofferte onde serene…. The waves are Venetian, so too is the tolling of bells, almost as if transposed from the Vienna of Schoenberg’s op.19 no.6. Heard, felt and answered from Nono’s home on the Giudecca, those sounds seem, as with Schoenberg’s, not only to say farewell to earlier, angrier compositional and aesthetic tendencies – tendencies that had culminated for Nono in the high-watermark of his politically committed art, the opera Al gran sole carico d’amore – but also to sustain them in distillation, in further development. ‘I could say’, Nono remarked, ‘as Schoenberg did, that, at the conclusion of each work, I wish more than ever to breathe the air of new planets’. It also continued Nono’s artistic collaboration with Pollini, initiated by Como un ola de fuerza y luz (1971–2), although the two leftist musicians had known each other since the mid-1960s. …sofferte onde serene… displayed, as Nono averred, a reduction in the multiplicity of musical material: a new path taken following a period of compositional silence.
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| Claudio Abbado, Luigi Nono, Maurizio Pollini |
That apparent simplification in
itself inspired further ‘waves’ – lagoonal and sonic – in collaboration
enshrined at the work’s heart, Nono’s purpose amplification rather than counterpoint.
Dedicated to Maurizio and Marilisa Pollini, it operates on two acoustic planes:
Pollini live and on tape. They merge, realized in the air through artistry of
sound direction – first Nono himself; tonight, André Richard. Vibrations,
shadows and resonances sustain and transform memories of loss suffered by
composer and pianist. Ghosts of other sounds and works in Pollini’s repertoire
are honoured and transformed. (Late, Venetian-themed works by Liszt, La lugubre gondola and R.W. Venezia, were performed at the 1977 premiere.) The moment of Schoenbergian
hyper-expressivity – sometimes stark, sometimes on the edge of audibility,
sometimes even falling into silence –compels active listening. Nono’s politics
have not drowned; they are revealed anew in the waters. So as not to confuse
the political ‘provocations’ for earlier works with their substance, we must
listen, suffering to break musical silence as the composer did, inspired by his
pianist and friend as much as by the instrument. Counterpoint and conflict seem
conspicuous by their absence, certainly by comparison to Nono’s preceding
works. Whether we feel that absence as an integral aspect of the work is an impossible
yet necessary question.
Fracture
and enigma
Beethoven’s final two piano
sonatas, opp.110 and 111, foreshadow – or in this programme, echo – the
co-dependent anger and serenity of Schoenberg’s piano pieces; we might also hear
them in this context heroically responding to, retrospectively inciting, the
kindred humanism of Nono’s suffering waves. There are dialectics aplenty. Furious
counterpoint already strains at the bounds of tonality, even the bounds of the
sonata principle. By contrast, in apparently necessary response, we find music of
a doubtless illusory simplicity that comes just as close to Beethovenian rage to
defining our notions of the Romantic sublime.
The A-flat major sonata, though in
three movements, hardly conforms to Classical expectations, the first two far
shorter together than the expansive, complex finale. The serene first movement’s
songfulness extends even to typically ‘late’ trills. It is marked sanft – probably at Beethoven’s
dictation, for the manuscript reveals another hand – in an attempt to render con amabilità into the language not only of Goethe but also of
Romantics such as Novalis. For
Donald Tovey, that did not ‘mean “soft” but, as nearly as may be, “gentle” in
the most ethical sense of the word.’ A sonata form that seems almost to
preclude conflict, yet cannot quite, offers in its way as great a challenge as
more overtly ‘heroic’ struggle. In its final bars, a prominent third
interval, C to A-flat, prepares the way for re-harmonised restatement in the
second movement’s new key of F minor. A scherzo in all but name, this flash of
gruff, humorous brilliance proves once more, like its composer, very much its
own beast, resistant to categories that would pin down rather than liberate. It
culminates in a coda of sforzando cries
and whispered intimacies that here may recall Schoenberg.
Highly
expressive instrumental recitative prepares the way for the finale’s Klagender Gesang (‘lamenting
song’), opening out a chord of A-flat minor as if a musical version
of the Romanticism’s proverbial blue flower against a wintry landscape. Beethoven
alternates between arioso of great sadness and fugue in constructive chain of
fourths. The latter emerges in almost conciliatory fashion, in turn rendering the
arioso’s Neapolitan-hued return all the greater in tragedy. Hope is restored by
fugue-in-inversion, so confident in its play as to tempt one to consider it
divine, beyond those mere mortals who must listen and – perhaps – even perform
it. Una corda pedal extends a twin
sense of mystery and certainty: the realm, perhaps, of religious faith. Through enigmas and fractures alike, Beethoven’s
humanity shines through in all its contrapuntal – and other – obstinacy. Perhaps
there is something, then, of the still later Missa solemnis to Beethoven’s plan. Bach’s lessons are Romanticised
in music defiantly strange and strangely defiant, played out in a tonal arena
that can only make sense, and then only just, in the age of the sonata.
Exorcising
the daemon
The C minor sonata stands in two,
highly contrasted movements, in tonic minor and tonic major respectively,
symbolic in themselves of struggle and reconciliation. The
diminished seventh chord, as in Beethoven’s own C minor Pathétique Sonata (op.13) and Fifth Symphony, offers both vertical
and horizontal impetus from the opening melodic interval onwards: a lesson well
learned later by Wagner, leading to the threshold of Schoenberg’s Klavierstücke. Fugal methods again feature
strongly, heightening the sonata form struggle. The exposition’s move to the
submediant, to A-flat major, rather than to the expected relative major,
E-flat, helps prepare the surprise, hushed tierce
di Picardie conclusion in C major, presaging the finale’s tonality.
It is a set of
variations on a hymn-like ‘Arietta’, caught in the balance and dialectic – no
more than with Mozart is this a case of either/or – between sublime simplicity
and necessary complexity. Beethoven’s metrical shifts can hardly fail to
register, nowhere more so than in the celebrated ‘boogie-woogie’ variation – in
reality, nothing of the sort. Nevertheless, harmonic
rhythm, as always with Beethoven, proves the true engine of progress. Asked by
Anton Schindler why he had written no traditional third movement, Beethoven,
should we trust his interlocutor’s account, contemptuously responded that there
had been no time to do so. For there can be no doubting the transcending
finality of these variations: nor the profound quality of resolution Beethoven
here offers to the violent conflicts enunciated in the preceding Allegro. White-key C major, possessed
once more of but a very few inflections, spins a trilling gossamer path towards
a quietly intoned, serenely unanswerable Amen. This, then, is truly music that breathes
the air of another planet.
(This essay was originally published in a 2019 Salzburg Festival programme for a recital by Maurizio Pollini.)
