'The violinist is really playing "fiddle" music': Schoenberg's Violin Concerto

From my biography, Arnold Schoenberg (US/Americas edition here), chapter 7, pp.167-72

First draft. With kind permission of the Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna

Schoenberg, row chart
(Arnold Schönberg Center)

... In between the Suite and the Kol nidre, however, Schoenberg had shown that emigration in no sense entailed turning his back on the ‘poison of atonality’, nor indeed upon the twelve-note method. If anything, his willingness on occasion to return to his first planet – however much it might have changed in the meantime – betokened greater self-assurance. The new world of New Music would always be there, even in the New World. The Violin Concerto, op.36 and the Fourth String Quartet, op.37, were his two twelve-note masterpieces from this period. Schoenberg had entertained thoughts of a violin concerto during the twenties, and had made a few sketches in 1922 and again in 1927, the latter for a chamber concerto in the wake of Berg’s, for piano with ‘accompaniment’ from piano, three clarinets – that wind-band sound again – trumpet, horn, trombone, violin, viola, cello, and double bass. It was only in 1934, though, that he began work on material for this concerto, and then broke off quickly, composing the rest – as so often, at great speed – during the summer of 1936. Unlike the proposed work from 1927, moreover, it is written for full orchestra, very much placed in and attempting to extend the grand Austro-German tradition of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms in this particular genre. Perhaps with slight defensiveness, he wrote to Webern in January 1936 that he had conceived of the work at the same time as Berg had of his. It is perhaps worth reminding ourselves that it is the first of only two completed concertos of his ‘own’. One might be tempted to consider the Monn and Handel reworkings from 1932-3 as preparation, but Schoenberg did not tend to work like that; he had, after all, composed Gurrelieder with little experience of orchestral writing and none whatsoever on that scale.

Jascha Heifetz in his dressing room, 1936
(University of Michigan Music Society)

Like Liszt for the piano, albeit without personal transcendental mastery of the instrument, Schoenberg out-virtuosoed the virtuosi with a work declared unplayable: all of which added to its mystique – and also to the downright fear it seems to have inspired in potential performers. Schoenberg told the Los Angeles concert organiser, Peter Yates, that since Jascha Heifetz had declared it unplayable, there was no one alive who would be able to perform it. Schoenberg had approached Heifetz, yet another émigré, when Kolisch, over-extended with other work commitments, had regretfully declined. Moreover, a music critic, José Rodriguez, informed Schoenberg that ‘a virtuoso’ had said it would remain unplayed until violinists acquired new fourth fingers. Schoenberg, Rodriguez reported, had laughed ‘like a pleased child’ at that, saying: ‘Yes, yes. That will be fine. The concerto is extremely difficult, just as much for the head as for the hands. I am delighted to add another unplayable work to the repertoire. I want the concerto to be difficult and I want the little finger to become longer. I can wait.’ However, the greatest difficulty seems to have been musical rather than technical. If the concertos of Beethoven and Brahms had proved notably ‘symphonic’ when compared with ‘easier’ works in the repertoire, they nevertheless made some play of conformity to tradition, as of course did Berg’s. Schoenberg seems to have rejoiced – at the very least, the score rejoices – in making mischievous play with apparently contesting demands between an extension of traditional virtuosity and the present polyphonic and motivic demands of his dodecaphonic method. Interestingly, there are a good few notes that would have to be struck out as ‘wrong’, were one to consider the method as a ‘system’. They will always be confirmed, however, as ‘correct’ by a player who experiments with altering them. The fury of inspiration, to employ a Romantic category of which he would unquestionably and unquestioningly have approved, is palpable when one consults the autograph score, corrections and all: more legible than Beethoven, say, yet evincing the white heat demanded of a successful performance. The Latvian-Canadian violinist and composer, Louis Gesensway, playing in the orchestra for the first performance, was so incensed by its reception that he wrote to a newspaper extolling its ‘utmost perfection’, its lack of a single ‘trite or hackneyed phrase’, declaring moreover: ‘The violinist is really playing “fiddle” music.’

(Illustration from Berry, Arnold Schoenberg)

Louis Krasner
Photograph: Max Fenichel (1936),
public domain

In the end, the piece, dedicated to Webern, fell to Louis Krasner. Krasner, who had also commissioned and premiered Berg’s concerto, learned that Schoenberg was at work on the piece when he found himself on the same ocean liner as Kolisch in 1936. He practised the part for a year prior to its 1940 premiere with Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. In a relatively unusual echo of Vienna, elements in the audience resorted to ‘tradition’, hissing, laughing, calling out. So too, it seems did the orchestral management, which had refused to offer the customary publicity and even the necessary funding for so unwelcome an interloper. Stokowski actually had to pay for the performing resources and Krasner’s fee out of his own pocket, for which noble deed Schoenberg, unable to attend, praised the conductor’s ‘brave stand toward my work and against illiterate snobs’. Having reported that ‘most critics seem to agree’ the work ‘sounds like an exaggerated version of the testing room at an abrasive plant,’ the Philadelphia Inquirer continued its account of this new Skandalkonzert. Krasner had received a meed of applause from the listeners when the hissing of the music itself began’. Stokowski stepped to the front of the stage and said: ‘Shall we forever make the same foolish, narrow-minded, unsportsmanlike blunders, upon only hearing a thing once? … Certainly Schoenberg is one of the greatest musicians alive today. His music is extremely difficult to understand. We don’t ask you to like it or dislike it, but to give it a fair chance. That’s American. But to condemn it after one hearing – that simply cannot be done.’

… ‘if Philadelphia is to grow culturally, we must give every kind of art a chance.’

‘If Schoenberg writes any more works, and you are willing, I would like to conduct more of them.’ A shrill feminine voice from the balcony cried: ‘Funny!’ … None of the audience walked out during the Concerto – but it was noted that several of the audience didn’t walk in until it was ended. 

Leopold Stokowski, c.1936

The work’s difficulties, of whatever nature, will speak for themselves. As ever, though, with Schoenberg, the best thing is probably to let them do so and, however clichéd this may sound, simply listen to the music ‘as music’, to let it take one where it will. I may not have helped here by myself talking up the difficulty, but in a biographical study, it would arguably be misleading not to do so. In any case, tales of scandal often prove a spur to listen. The three movements are traditional both in number and in type: sonata form-Andante grazioso-marching finale. There is more than a hint, once again, of that ‘special’ key, D minor. Within a more disciplined, quasi-Classical framework, the riot of colouristic imagination is clearly the same work as the composer of the op.16 Orchestral Pieces. Cadenza writing offers ample opportunity display from the ‘new’ fourth finger, as elsewhere do treacherous harmonics and double stopping, often combining pizzicato and arco (bowed) playing. If there is a better instantiation of the lyrical slow movement in a twentieth-century concerto, a better example of such a movement’s principal theme as an heir to the lyrical, Mozartian past, then I know of neither. Needless to say, in this new understanding of the instrumental aria, there is no ‘mere’ ornamentation; every note counts, as it must for any fervent disciple of Loos. The work in its entirety stands as oriented to the blazing, fortissimo conclusion of its finale as any by Beethoven.

Sketch: Arnold Schönberg Center

Coote/Britten Sinfonia - Purcell, Tippett, Handel, and Britten, 22 November 2012

Wigmore Hall

Purcell – Abdelazer, Z570: ‘Rondeau’

Purcell-Muhly – Let the night perish (Job’s Curse), Z191
Purcell-Stokowski – Dido’s Lament
Tippett – A Lament from Divertimento on ‘Sellinger’s Round’
Handel – Alcina: arias
Britten – Prelude and Fugue for eighteen-part string orchestra, op.29
Purcell-Britten – Chacony in G minor
Tippett – Little Music for Strings
Britten – Phaedra, op.93

Alice Coote (mezzo-soprano)

Britten Sinfonia

Jacqueline Shave (director/violin)

Richard Hetherington (conductor).

I was a little puzzled to start with when I noticed that this concert was announced as celebrating Britten’s ninety-ninth birthday. Any excuse for a party, I supposed, but it might not have made sense to wait a year? Then I read a little further, to discover that it was launching a year’s events at the Wigmore Hall, to culminate in the centenary itself – also St Cecilia’s Day, by the way. As something less than a paid-up Brittenophile – some works I respond to far more readily than others: The Turn of the Screw I find a masterpiece, whereas Peter Grimes I obstinately continue to find grossly overrated – I suspect that I shall be more selective than some. Next year, after all, is Wagner’s, for better or worse, though in many respects I fear the worst. However, if any of the Britten performances I hear next year are at this level of distinction, I shall be fortunate indeed. (The Turn of the Screw from Sir Colin Davis and the LSO looks a good bet already...)

 

This programme played into an aspect of Britten’s career for which I have almost unbounded admiration, namely Britten as performer. Though I certainly do not share his antipathies – Brahms most notoriously, Beethoven too – I cannot help but admire so ardent a Purcellian, especially when his conducted performances of Purcell were, without exception in my experience, outstanding. The Rondeau from Abdelazar, famously chosen by Britten as the theme for the Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, set the tone impeccably. Spirited, robust even, without a hint of carping, inhumane ‘authenticity’, this performance from the Britten Sinfonia, led by Jacqueline Shave, managed also to convey a hint of melancholy that stands at the heart of so much great English music from Byrd to Birtwistle.

 

There followed three pieces offering different sides of creation, re-creation, and thematic inspiration. Alice Coote joined the strings for Nico Muhly’s ‘realisation’ of Let the night perish, or Job’s Curse.  If truth be told, Muhly’s part in proceedings pertained more to ‘effect’ than anything more substantial. (How unlike Britten’s own Purcell realisations!) Techniques employed – sudden high violin notes, cello tremolandi, etc. – might sound ‘clever’, but they are easily accomplished enough and seemed strangely unmotivated by text or music. Performances, however, were first-class, Coote’s part in proceedings exquisitely shaded – and what a way with words she has! There seemed more kinship with the Sorceress than with Dido, which, given the subject matter, makes sense. And the chilling diminuendo upon the final ‘grave’, would have implied the word even if her diction had been less impeccable than it was. Stokowski’s arrangement for strings – I say arrangement, but it verges at times upon transcription, though subtly so – of Dido’s Lament came next. Following on from Coote, one expected words, but one that loss was dealt with – very quickly in practice – we heard a deeply felt rendition of a deeply felt tribute, both when the richly expressive strings were heard orchestrally and in the poignant solo spots: violin ‘Remember me’-s especially.

 

Then came Tippett’s contribution to a composite work commissioned for the 1953 Aldeburgh Festival, each movement of which was to include a reference to Sellinger’s Round. Tippett’s piece is preoccupied at least as much with Dido’s ‘Ah Belinda’ as with the traditional dance tune. Purcell’s aria emerges fantazia-like, though with a sense of compositional refraction not so very different in principle from Berio’s orchestration of a Purcell hornpipe, though with an ineffable Englishness quite foreign to the Italian composer. Ornamentation, if that be the word, is expressive, not merely decorative, still less ‘effect’. One senses a pull already towards the Tippett of the symphonies. Once again, the Britten Sinfonia’s performance was compelling indeed.

 

Three Handel arias – there is a wonderful, indeed the most wonderful, recording of Handel Ode for Saint Cecilia’s Day by Britten – completed the first half. Alcina is one of his finest operas; these arias were certainly gems even within that context. The warmth of the orchestral playing struck me immediately; this was not at all unlike the English Chamber Orchestra of old, Britten or Raymond Leppard at the helm. What a life-enhancing change from current fashion, in which so much as to utter the word ‘vibrato’ is to be discounted by the ayatollahs of authenticity! The Britten Sinfonia players, led as throughout by Shave, showed keen understanding of harmonic rhythm, above which Coote offered an imploring performance of ‘Mi lusinga il dolce affetto’. Careful attention to words never detracted from roundness of phrasing. The B section was allotted to single strings (and harpsichord from Maggie Cole), reverting to fuller forces for the da capo, a similar practice being followed in the repeated lines of ‘Verdi prati’, which received a dignified, moving performance. ‘Stà nell’Ircana’ fairly brought the house down. The change of pace brought alert, exciting and thoroughly musical performances – again, no silly ‘effects’ – from all concerned. Coloratura was brilliantly but also meaningfully despatched, owing to Coote’s keen command of the words and their implications. There was welcome flexibility in the middle section. And what glorious horn playing from Stephen Bell and Chris Davies! I am not sure that I have heard a more ecstatic response from a clearly exhilarated Wigmore Hall audience.

 

Britten’s Prelude and Fugue, op.29, opened the second half. Written for the Boyd Neel Orchestra’s tenth anniversary, it is very much a Wigmore Hall work, having been premiered there on 23 June 1943. I wish I could say it convinced me as a piece. The Prelude works better, and received once again a rich-toned performance, thanks both to the fine acoustic and to the players. A sweet-toned violin solo from Shave found itself set against Shostakovich-like harmonies. Perhaps inevitably, given the forces, the fugue sometimes sounds like watered-down Bartók. It nevertheless received a committed, vigorous performance. I am not sure that it hangs together very well in formal terms though.

 

Britten’s realisation – call it what you will – of Purcell’s great G minor Chacony is an example to all who would follow. The players clearly understood and – just as important – communicated the nature of the form and its implications, in a performance that was as finely shaded as it was unfussy. This is a masterpiece and sounded like it, even if nothing, not even BernardHaitink’s recent LSO performance, can quite match Britten’s own with the ECO. Tippett’s well-nigh neo-Classical Little Music for Strings, if not a masterpiece, is certainly a handy addition to the string orchestral repertoire. None of its four movements outstays its welcome; indeed, the finale wittily leaves one wanting more. The Prelude oddly seems determined to launch into the National Anthem, but never does. Counterpoint was throughout, not just in the Fugue, clearly and vigorously handled in a performance of great energy.

 

Finally came the real Britten, in his late cantata for Dame Janet Baker, Phaedra. This performance, conducted by Richard Hetherington, immediately thrust one into a sound-world which, unlike the earlier Prelude and Fugue, was unmistakeably Britten’s own – a sound-world, moreover, of the opera house. This is clearly the composer of The Rape of Lucretia, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, most darkly, of Death in Venice. Performances once again were exceptional; I really could not, even if so inclined, find anything to fault. From the alert cello and harpsichord continuo of the first recitative through the savagery of the drums, to what sounds very much like a ghost of the Berg Violin Concerto in the interlude between the Recitative to Oenone and the Adagio to Theseus, the players of the Britten Sinfonia played as if their lives depended on it. Coote’s performance was simply outstanding. An early highlight was the colouring of ‘murderer’ in the first recitative (referring to Aphrodite and Phaedra’s mother), so as to impart a sense of a grey veil being cast over proceedings. There was a magnificently hieratic quality to the performance of the Presto to Hippolytus. And the final Adagio told us that, whilst we might be helpless in the face of the gods, we can evince a humanist pride too, one that belongs as much to Phaedra as to Prometheus. Whilst quite unlike Dame Janet’s recording, Coote had nothing to fear with that most demanding of comparisons.

For Guy Fawkes...