Variation through Commitment, Commitment in Variation: Works by Schoenberg, Beethoven, and Rzewski

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG  Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (Byron) for speaker, piano and string quartet, Op. 41

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN  Fifteen Variations with a Fugue in E-flat major, op. 35 – “Eroica Variations”
FREDERIC RZEWSKI  The People United Will Never Be Defeated!
                        

‘Why write?’

‘What Jean-Paul Sartre says in his essay, What is Literature?, about the problem “why write?”, is witnessed in utterly authentic fashion in Schoenberg’s creative necessity.’ Luigi Nono’s Darmstadt lecture, from which those words are taken, focused on Schoenberg’s post-war cantata, A Survivor from Warsaw, but those words were intended more broadly. Schoenberg’s wartime Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte is as overt a work of ‘political ‘commitment’ as A Survivor or any of his posthumous son-in-law’s works, indeed as any work by Beethoven or Frederic Rzewski. In the words of Sartre, as quoted by Nono (himself transcribed by the young Helmut Lachenmann, another composer very much of this ilk): ‘If I am presented with this world and its injustices, then I should not look at it coldly, but ... with indignation, that I might expose it and create it in its nature as injustice and abuse.’

Luigi Nono, Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Bruno Maderna (?)

Denunciation and developing variation

The day following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in Californian exile from the National Socialism whose genocidal tendencies he had long feared, Schoenberg heard on the wireless Roosevelt’s ‘day of infamy’ address. A month later, in January 1942, the League of Composers, which had previously sponsored the American premiere (under Stokowski) of Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand, offered him a commission, for its twentieth anniversary, for a ‘short chamber work’, which Schoenberg composed between March and June of that year, although, concerned that it might not be well enough performed by the commissioning forces, Schoenberg withheld it until 1944, when it received its premiere in New York.

The words and their meaning were of great importance to Schoenberg. He hoped, alas vainly, that Orson Welles, whose radio work had greatly impressed him might act as speaker: one of those great musical might-have-beens. Byron’s excoriating ode, allegedly to, yet unmistakeably against, Napoleon, offered a clear contemporary parallel to Hitler. ‘I knew,’ the composer said with specific reference to this work, that ‘it was the moral duty of intelligentsia to take a stand against tyranny.’ Unlike, say, in Pierrot lunaire, there is no straightforward cabaret, no sense of recitation as artfulness. The words are to be heard as words, but the mode of their expression is crucial. Schoenberg insisted to another pupil, Heinrich Jalowetz, who was preparing a recording, on the requirement for a large number of ‘shades, essential to express one hundred and seventy kinds of derision, sarcasm, hatred, ridicule, contempt, condemnation, etc., which I tried to portray in my music.’ In that vein, not only might Bonaparte become Hitler, not only might Byron’s reference to the Emperor’s Habsburg bride, ‘proud Austria’s mournful flower’, evoke Schoenberg’s post-Anschluss homeland, but also Byron’s ‘Cincinnatus of the West … bequeath’d the name of Washington’ might yet inspire Roosevelt, whose speech had so inspired Schoenberg at the outset.

Allusions to the Marseillaise and to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – its Morse Code, ‘V for Victory’ connotations especially popular at this time – nevertheless make their musico-dramatic points amongst ‘The triumph and the vanity, the rapture of the strife – the earthquake voice of Victory,’ and the countervailing ‘Dark spirit! what must be the madness of thy memory!’ And yet, for all the post-Wagnerism of Schoenberg’s conception here of the artist and his role in society, of the artistic work and its angry, political standing, it is with a motivic working born of neo-Brahmsian musical integrity, every note and its placing crucial to the composer’s idea of ‘developing variation’, that the score leads shatteringly to a conclusion both encompassing and negating E-flat major. That Schoenbergian struggle between Brahms and Wagner which we can trace back at least as far as the programmatic string sextet, Verklärte Nacht, continues to develop, to take on new meaning. We can argue endlessly about when our ears may first lay claim to detect that tonal reference, for there are various ‘traditional’ triads, even major and minor ones, which are derived from the work’s determining hexachord. There can be no doubt, however, which masterwork stands before those ears, its humanism honoured and deconstructed; it is Beethoven’s Sinfonia eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire d'un grand'uomo. Its tonality clearly troubled Schoenberg, and yet it clearly mattered. He responded somewhat defensively: ‘It is true that the Ode at the end sounds like E-flat. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe I was wrong, but at present you cannot make me feel like this.’

‘A new style’: preparing the way for the Eroica

Beethoven’s so-called Eroica Variations make a playful, complicating backward step in Igor Levit’s programming tonight. Variation form has sometimes, erroneously considered an ugly sister amongst earlier Classical forms, as if Mozart, Haydn, and others had written nothing of worth. Nevertheless, Beethoven certainly seems to have considered his work in this genre in 1802, an F major set, op.34, immediately preceding this E-flat major work, to have offered something of a new departure. ‘‘I have made two sets of variations,’ he wrote to Breitkopf & Härtel; ‘both are written in quite a new style and each in an entirely different way … you will never regret the two works. … I myself can assure you that in both works the style is completely new for me.’ Leaving aside special pleading to a publisher, an art at which Beethoven was no amateur, the scope and scale of these works is indeed new for the composer, just as his Third, Eroica Symphony would mark a significant development from his first two essays in the genre.

Whereas, in the op.34 set, Beethoven had startlingly composed each variation in a different key, taking us through a pattern of falling thirds, the tonal plan of the E-flat Variations adheres to tradition, each variation written in the tonic, until a turn to the minore, followed by a slow, ornate Largo movement, prior to a brilliant, barnstorming finale. There is more than one way to be radical, though, and what could be more radical than to open with an Introduction that presents only the bass of the theme, presented in ghostly octaves, with a rudely jesting wake-up call a little after half the way through (itself following a bar’s silence)? The first three variations treat, with ever more complicated texture, with that bass – and then, at last, the theme!

Taken from his ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus, op.43 (do not be misled by the later opus number) as well as a little Contredanse, that sixteen-bar theme proceeds to be ‘varied’, the importance, even primacy, of melody reinstated, if nevertheless far from uncontested. (How could it be, following those introductory variations?) The melody and its variations are now dependent on the bass, and perhaps vice versa too: a typically Beethovenian dialectic.  Many typical variational devices are revisited: crossing of hands, syncopation between those hands, canonical play, introduction of triplets and other note values. Prophetically for Beethoven, the finale, now on the grandest of scales, is fugal; here the subject is not the melody but again the bass.

When Beethoven next employed this theme and bass, in his Eroica Symphony, it would be in a work whose political frame of reference was more overt, Bonaparte’s name furiously scribbled out upon his self-proclamation as Emperor, replaced with a generic, universal tribute to the ‘memory of a great man’. Much, although far from all, of Beethoven’s method had been outlined here.

The People United: the musician as ‘organiser and redistributor of energies’

Rzewski is a fine pianist in his own right; he gave, in 1962, the first performance of Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X, and performed works by, amongst others, Boulez, Cage, Bussotti, and Kagel. Not entirely unlike Schoenberg and Beethoven, he would turn to more overtly political writing and other activity – if again like them, far from unequivocally – in his case, in the wake of the turmoil of the late 1960s. Perhaps not entirely unlike Eisler, whose work Rzewski has also performed, he had developed a wariness of avant-gardism, concerned that it might unwittingly divorce itself from urgent political matters. These words from 1968 were to prove indicative of one important tendency within his subsequent work.

We are all ‘musicians’. We are all ‘creators’. Music is a creative process in which we can all share, and the closer we can come to each other in this process, abandoning esoteric categories and professional elitism, the closer we can all come to the ancient idea of music as a universal language … The musician takes on a new function: he is no longer the mythical star, elevated to a sham glory and authority, but rather an unseen worker, using his skill to help others less prepared than he to experience the miracle, to become great artists in a few minutes ... His role is that of organiser and redistributor of energies; he draws upon the raw human resources at hand and reshapes them ...

Whilst it is perhaps all too easy to draw a contrast between Boulezian ghosts of an imaginary ‘Darmstadt’ and such words, Rzewski’s growing interest in socialist ideas of collective improvisation, in use of popular and folk melodies, would have been anathema to many of the composers whose work he had previously, enthusiastically been performing.

Such interest may certainly be seen – and heard – in his set of thirty-six variations on a theme by Sergio Ortega: ¡El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido! Initially intended as an anthem for Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition, it gained further revolutionary currency as a symbol of resistance both within Chile and without, following Allende’s overthrow and murder. The theme, as one might expect, is presented in forthright fashion: a focus of revolutionary inspiration, one might think. (Might we also hear a kinship with Beethoven’s bass?) Yet there is no sense of presenting music that all could play, far from it; its variations are unabashedly, heroically virtuosic. From Webern-like pointillism of the first variation, ‘Weaving, delicate but firm’ – a tribute to, or distancing from, Boulez and Stockhausen? – through something not so far from shellshock in the face of repression in the third variation, we traverse an almost incredible array of styles and procedures. We may not find them all to our taste, as they range from Rachmaninov-like grand pianism to minimalism, from Ravel back – or forward – to Webern. That, however, is surely part of the point. The people are diverse yet united: musically and politically.

Let us conclude, then, by returning to Nono, a composer who might well have appeared in a variation upon this programme – his first acknowledged work, his orchestral Variazoni canoniche sulla serie dell’op.41 di Arnold Schönberg, could hardly have been more explicit in its tribute – and his claim: ‘The genesis of any of my works is always to be found in a human “provocation”: an event, an experience, a test in our lives, which provokes my instinct and my consciousness, as man and musician, to bear witness.’ Such a claim is rich in possibility not only for the works heard this evening, yet equally, and in one case, still more so, for works and performances inspired by them.



(This essay was first published in a 2017 Salzburg Festival programme to accompany a recital given by Igor Levit and friends.)

Ode to Napoleon and Il Prigioniero, Opéra National de Paris, 15 April 2008

Palais Garnier

Schoenberg: Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op.41

Dale Duesing (reciter)
Frédéric Laroque, Vanessa Jean (violins)
Laurent Verney (viola)
Martine Bailly (’cello)
Christine Lagniel (piano)

Dallapiccola: Il prigioniero

La Madre – Rosalind Plowright
Il Prigoniero – Evgeny Nikitin
Il Carciere, Il Grande Inquisitore – Chris Merritt
Due Sacerdoti – Johan Weigel and Bartlomiej Mlaluda

Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris
Alessandro di Stefano (chorus-master)
Lothar Zagrosek (conductor)

Llula Pasqual (director)
Paco Azorin (designs)
Isidre Prunés (costumes)
Albert Faura (lighting)

It was an excellent idea to preface Il prigioniero, Dallapiccola’s one-act opera – strictly, ‘un prologo e un atto’ – with Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon. The last time I had seen Il prigioniero it had represented almost the only adventurous selection for the English National Opera’s 2000 ‘Italian season’, combined with Berio’s Folk songs – which just about worked and absolved ENO from having to stage a Berio opera – and, bizarrely, Nino Rota’s film score, La strada. Paris made far more sense, offering two fiercely immediate responses to European fascism (assuming that we count National Socialism as such).

It has generally been considered, although I do not think the composer ever explicitly made the connection, that Schoenberg had Hitler in mind as he set Byron’s sardonic ‘ode’ from his American exile in 1942. Many on the English side of the Channel, whilst they would not go so far as to identity Napoleon and Hitler, would still consider the former to have been and certainly to have become a monstrous dictator. Yet such a reaction is far less common in France, where Bonapartism dies hard. This Anglo-Austrian onslaught therefore gained an extra frisson, to which an additional layer of historical meaning was lent by the location: not the Opéra Bastille, but the old house, the Palais Garnier, ‘in the style of Napoleon III’. The production, however, dwelled upon the era of Schoenberg rather than that of Byron. I have heard Schoenberg’s Ode taken to task for hectoring, which seems rather like criticising Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ for rejoicing. The combination of subject matter and Sprechgesang more or less guarantees such a characterisation, should one be so inclined. (Incidentally, it has much in common with Schoenberg’s psalm settings and, indeed, with his Moses.)

Llula Pasqual’s production created an illuminating context for such hectoring – ‘ranting’ has been the word more often employed – by introducing the element of cabaret. As the curtain rose, I could not imagine why reciter Dale Duesing was in drag, but the penny soon dropped, not least since the instrumentalists, male and female, of the onstage piano quintet were dressed in black tie à la Weimar. I wondered how far Duesing’s striptease would progress, until it became clear that not only would he perform his dressing-room ablutions, but he would also don pyjamas in preparation for the concentration camp. There was also the suggestion – if only from me – that Napoleon and Hitler were, as Nietzsche would have understood only too well, essentially ‘actors’ themselves. Intriguingly, Duesing appeared to have something of a German accent to begin with. It worked rather well, although was rather puzzling since he is American; perhaps it was more of a response to Schoenberg’s word-setting, or perhaps it was just ‘staged’. In any case, Duesing’s vocal contribution was impressive, although there were just a couple of instances where he seemed to fall very briefly out of sync with the players. Their musicianship was manifest from the opening bars, surely some of the most immediately memorable music Schoenberg ever wrote. (If it is too ‘busy’ quite to be hummable, one can certainly hear it in one’s head after a single audition.) Conducted by Lothar Zagrosek, they expressed not only the fury of Schoenberg’s admonitions, but also the neo-Brahmsian musical integrity of this astonishing score, leading inexorably and shatteringly to the unforgettable E-flat major reference to Beethoven’s Sinfonia eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire d'un grand'uomo. In this performance, ‘hero dust’ was indeed as ‘vile as vulgar clay’.

Il prigioniero was composed at much the same time, although it was not completed until 1948, after the full horrors of wartime experience were known to all. Equally dodecaphonic, and rejoicing in its homage to each member of the Second Viennese School, the score is also undeniably Italian. The opening motif, redolent of a distorted fanfare, is equally suggestive of twelve-note Puccini, and its recurrences are every bit as memorable as one of his melodies. So was the almost unbearable false hope of the three-note ‘fratello’ motif, as we follow the Prisoner in the hope engendered by his gaoler having called him ‘brother’, only to have it dashed by the startling revelation of his would-be-friend as the Inquisitor himself. I was in two minds about the production identifying the two, if indeed this were the intention. It was certainly the effect and in practice the two roles are often sung by the same tenor. It sealed the hopelessness in hope of the Prisoner’s fate and identified, as does the score, the Inquisitor’s ‘fratello’ with the terrible ‘sogno’ (dream) of the Prisoner’s mother, but it made it more difficult for us to hope, through prayer, of freedom (each of these three concepts being symbolically associated with one of the opera’s three note-rows). Either way, this is the ultimate anti-Fidelio. Where Beethoven could still dream of bourgeois freedom in noble fashion, this is now impossible; hope is itself the worst form of torture.

The production certainly scored in its depiction of the prison in which a variety of torture takes place. Paco Azarin’s designs, with their Piranesi staircases, created a suitably labyrinthine setting. Likewise the treadmill effect as the Prisoner edged towards ‘freedom’. Moreover, whilst it might seem wearisome in the abstract retelling, this was an instance of Guantanamo on stage that worked. The parallels between sixteenth-century Europe, torn apart through ‘religious’ strife and our own time are clear, as are those of the responses. Truly shocking was the choral intermezzo between the Prologue and Scene One, in which the chorus was directed on stage to sing the words, ‘Fiat misericordia tua, Domine, super nos,’ as a hanging and other behaviour of ‘our’ troops proceeded. Having witnessed similar scenes very recently in the Komische Oper Berlin’s Iphigénie en Tauride, I noted how immediately relevant they were to two such very different dramas. This was not the shock of épater les bourgeois; this was confronting our world with crimes indistinguishable from those of sixty or more than four hundred years earlier. It is worth adding that the choral singing was superb, both here and later, when its Latin was heard from behind and above, adding a powerful spatial dimension to the drama. The songs of praise when freedom is apparently attained were overwhelmingly chilling.

So too was Evgeny Nikitin as the Inquisitor – and, owing to their identity, as the Gaoler. He exhibited majesty as the former and an horrific ‘compassion’ as the latter. I thought his final deed, administering a lethal injection to the Prisoner, a melodramatic miscalculation, but that was not Nikitin’s fault. Otherwise, he succeeded in projecting the absolute evil so unsparingly depicted in the drama (a rarer accomplishment in terms of artist and work than one might imagine). Hagen came to mind during the final scene. Chris Merritt sang well for the most part as the Prisoner, and certainly gave a powerful stage performance. He appeared to tire somewhat at one point, although in fact this actually worked in terms of the drama. Rosalind Plowright was close to perfect as the Mother. The twin emotion and clarity of her performance precisely mirrored the role and the text. It is a wonderful role, and she was wonderful in it. It would be excessively faint praise to say that the singers were well supported by the orchestra, although they were. For much of the drama lies within the orchestra, not least in the Bergian ricercares, in which that powerful dialectic between expression and precision, both aspects gaining power from the interplay, was searingly brought to the fore. Lothar Zagrosek, who in my experience has always been at his best in twentieth-century music, should be credited for steering a clear line through the score. Lyricism was not overlooked, far from it. Equally crucially, the power of the musical work’s structure and construction was permitted to stand as a sign of resistance. There may not be hope in an administered world, yet, as Adorno signalled, twelve-note music, for all the complexity of its relationship with that world, somehow continues to resist. Now will someone stage Dallapiccola’s Ulisse?

It was, then, certainly worth making a special trip to Paris for an extremely powerful and provocative theatrical experience. Afterwards, having found a restaurant in Montparnasse, I was heartened that the waiter, spying my programme, declared, ‘Le prisonnier – c’est magnifique!’ and proceeded enthusiastically to discuss his experience of the first night with me. I suppose something similar could have happened in London, but suspect that any such hope would be without foundation.

Luigi Nono: Fragments of Venice - opening concert, 1 October 2007

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Nono - Incontri
Schoenberg - Chamber Symphony no.1, Op.9
Nono - Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell' op.41 di Arnold Schoenberg
Nono - 'No hay caminos hay que caminar ... Andrej Tarkowskij'

London Sinfonietta
Diego Masson (conductor)

How wonderful for the Southbank Centre to be celebrating Luigi Nono! It is about time someone did, the only other major retrospective of his work in this country of which I am aware having been at Huddersfield in 1995. This series will reach its climax next May with the British premiere of Prometeo, his 'tragedy of listening'. For this concert, we were treated to three varied works, plus a masterpiece from his posthumous father-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg. Proceedings had commenced even before the concert, with a conversation between Christopher Cook and Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, the composer's widow (and Schoenberg's daughter). She provided an informative and at time moving insight into her late husband's beliefs and methods, not least his instruction from Bruno Maderna, who had encouraged him to compare responses compositional problems in composers old and new, for instance Gabrieli and Webern, Ockeghem and Schoenberg. Hermann Scherchen also emerged as a hero of the tale. We also heard a most sympathetic account of the heady days of 1950s Darmstadt, not as some quasi-totalitarian Ministry of Serialist Truth but as a place of openness, experimentation, and - perhaps most interestingly - as a meeting-place for those who had survived the horrors of fascism with the post-war avant garde. Tradition and its development played a much greater role than myths of a 'year zero' have allowed.

The concert began with a few words from the pianist John Constable concerning the recently deceased London Sinfonietta flautist, Sebastian Bell, to whom the concert was dedicated. Berio's brief Autre fois, composed for flute, harp, and clarinet, in memory of Stravinsky, was performed - most beautifully - in Bell's honour.

We then proceeded to the 'encounters' of Nono's 1955 Incontri, for twenty-four instruments. The two independent structures of which Nono wrote, emerged independently of one another, through differentiation of rhythm, melody, harmony, and timbre. And yet they came together too, unable to escape each other, and producing something more through their encounters. Post-Webernian lines and combinations, and extreme dynamic contrasts were well judged by Diego Masson and his expert players, both in terms of individual clarity and a whole that was more than the sum of its parts. This is partly a matter of mathematics - what music is not? - in terms of the ratios between the two structures, but also of development, of sympathy, of a refusal to repeat oneself which Nono shared with Schoenberg. One felt a true sense of musical and political unity, of the hope in social solidarity which Nuria Schoenberg-Nono had already spoken as a hallmark of Nono's oeuvre.

Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony has long been a Sinfonietta speciality. This was a performance which evinced long familiarity with a work that is for these players 'standard repertoire'. The confidence with which the string soloists projected their lines meant that there was no chance of one of this work's greatest pitfalls presenting itself, namely the strings being overshadowed by the piquant wind. (The opposite pitfall tends to occur in the later, inferior version for full orchestra.) In its contrapuntal clarity and the propulsion of its harmonic progression, this was a model performance, expertly guided by Masson. My taste often tends to veer towards Schoenberg performances that emphasise a little more his Romantic inheritance, but the bracing, relentless modernism of this reading afforded an equally valid perspective and, given the circumstances, was perhaps more apt. My sole cavil was that the 'slow movement' did not really emerge as distinctly as it might. If one thinks of the Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor, whose form Schoenberg's work so closely resembles, one realises what is gained by a stronger sense of four distinct movements within the one-movement sonata form of the whole. The conclusion, however, was duly thrilling, without ever degenerating into a headlong rush, as can often be its fate.

The interval afforded an opportunity to observe the progress of work from Kingston University students on a wall of protest in the foyer, inspired by the final work on the programme. We too were encouraged to offer reactions to the music in the guise of postcards for colouring, which would then be displayed. This certainly contributed to the buzz of the occasion, to a genuine rather than manufactures sense of the excitement of an event - which the beginning of this festival certainly should have been - so different from the often dreary conventionality of more 'mainstream' concerts.

Nono's greatest homage to Schoenberg, his Canonical Variations on a note row from the Ode to Napoleon, received an extremely fine reading. All the virtues of the Incontri performance were once again present, as was a definite sense of narrative progression, of moving towards and then beyond the final variation's statement of the row. Where 'Darmstadt', as we somewhat misleadingly and monolithically have come to call it, has tended to be portrayed as tolerating Schoenberg mostly for having prepared the way for Webern, here we heard an avowedly post-Webernian serialist employing the Webern inheritance - the sighs of instrumental fragments, the constructivist tension between certain intervallic relations - of earlier variations to build up to a more or less explicit tribute to one of Schoenberg's most unambiguously 'political' works. The almost Romantic beauty of the orchestra, albeit never without a necessary astringency - reminded us of Nuria Schoenberg-Nono's conception of Darmstadt as a continuation of European tradition. (Failure of many of the participants thus to root themselves, rather than outright antipathy towards Cage, was why Nono had eventually left, she explained.)

'No hay caminos, hay que caminar ... Andrej Tarkovskij' represented late Nono (1987). Inspired by a mediaeval wall inscription from a Toledo monastery - 'Traveller, there is no pathway, only travelling itself' - this work triumphantly refuted claims that Nono's later work lost its political edge. There was still here the humanist emphasis upon creation and the utopian hope of a better society, no matter what difficulties life and this world might present, which had marked Nono's earliest works. What was new was the spatial experimentation, a product of practices old (consider Gabrieli) and new (think Stockhausen), with additional instrumentalists positioned around and in between the audience, responding to and furthering the 'main' orchestra on the stage. The slow, still Webern-like beauty of so much of this work received the fullest contrasts with the sudden eruptions from beyond. This was an unpredictable procession, for there are no paths, only travelling. The audience was compelled by the extremes of expression to listen more closely, and thus the smallest variations in timbre and pitch registered with the utmost forcefulness: violent and beguiling, the two attributes gaining in intensity through collision with one another (rather like the two structures of Incontri). This was tribute indeed to a truly committed performance from Masson and the London Sinfonietta. Their belief in Nono was truly infectious, in the best sense, and bodes well for the festivities to come.