Selected and Reviewed by Andrew Eales
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When music publisher Universal Edition was founded in Vienna in 1901, its goal was to provide core classical and educational works to an enthusiastic Austrian market, but the company soon became associated with some of the most radical modernist composers of the age.
Within ten years, UE had signed contracts to publish new music by Mahler, Bartók, Schönberg, Webern, Zemlinsky, and in subsequent decades the company became the publishers of Kurtág, Ligetti, Stockhausen, Berio and Boulez among many others.
Austrian copyright ownership lasts for 70 years after a composer’s death, and since Bartók’s music came out of copyright in 2015, leading publisher G. Henle Verlag have been quick to produce new urtext editions which significantly improve on the scores previously available.
Now the turn of Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951), Henle bring us his complete piano works in a major new volume, the four most important sets of pieces also available to purchase individually, all additionally available digitally within the Henle app.
Pivotal Moments in Music
Schönberg’s solo piano music forms a small but perfectly formed body of work within his larger output; each opus notable for its radical and compact musical substance, the pieces here all mark significant developments in the composer’s work, and hence in the progress of revolutionary modernism in the early twentieth century repertoire.
His earliest piano works date from 1894, when the composer had just turned 20, and are in the late romantic style of the time. Though unremarkable, the three surviving pieces are pleasant to play and show Schönberg’s indebtedness to Brahms and others. Unpublished in his lifetime, Henle include these in the complete edition as an appendix.
Jumping to 1909 we encounter the Three Piano Pieces Op.11, his first masterpiece for the instrument. And in common with all the sets of piano works Schönberg published, they are very difficult to play.
These pieces represent a pivotal moment in the composer’s mission to “emancipate the dissonance”, which he had recently begun in his Second String Quartet Op.10 and Das Buch der hängenden Gärten Op.15. It was in these works that Schönberg decisively launched “atonal” music, meaning music in which major and minor keys, chords and melodies (the “tonal” system) play no part.
For three centuries prior to this turning point, expression existed in music in no small part due to the use of dissonant (clashing) notes which then resolved. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, composers had increasingly used chromaticism to stretch the bounds of the tonal system. Schönberg’s innovation was to deliberately reject all sense of resolution, thereby freeing notes from their functional harmonic relationships.
Depending on taste, the results are perhaps as disconcerting today as they were a century ago. Make up you own mind: here’s a performance by Di Wu which highlights both the virtuosic technical demands of Schönberg’s writing and its innate lyrical potential:
The Six Little Piano Pieces Op.19 followed in 1911, and are written in the “expressionist” style that Schönberg further championed in his unsettling masterpieces Erwartung Op.17 and Pierrot lunaire Op.21.
Notwithstanding their stark modernism, these pieces offer the most accessible starting point for exploring Schönberg’s piano music.
The longest of these musical aphorisms is the first, which extends to 17 bars of music (and is the only of the six to have two pages in the Henle edition). As editor Norbert Müllemann explains in his introduction:
“Op.19 stands for the extreme reduction of form, the condensed miniature – a creative concept that was to be of central importance for Schönberg’s pupil Anton Webern.”
If Op.11 and Op.19 sets of pieces had truly been “game changers” in music history, how much more so his piano music of the 1920’s, comprising the Five Piano Pieces Op.23 and the Suite Op.25.
With these compositions Schönberg finally arrived at the breakthrough which would define not only the future of his own composing, but the history of art music for the next half century: the Twelve Tone Method that has come to be known as serialism.
Here, the dissonance has not simply been emancipated, but the tonal system has been replaced by an entirely new conception in which all notes once again have functional relationships, now based on exact equality of use in a piece, and combined using techniques which echo the counterpoint of previous generations.
Schönberg’s final piano pieces date from the late 1920’s. And while the Op.11, 19, 23 and 25 sets are available separately, the Piano Pieces Op.33a and 33b now appear only in the complete volume. Though less frequently performed, these two significant works are fascinating examples of Schönberg’s mature style.
Henle’s New Urtext Editions
Henle’s new editions of these works are exemplary in their scholarship; their editors have returned to original sources, researched the composer’s letters and manuscripts, and compiled scores truer to his intentions than ever.
Those editors are Marte Auer (Op.25), Ulrich Krämer (Op.23), Norbert Müllemann (Op.19, 33a, Klavierstücke 1894) and Ullrich Scheideler (Op.11, 33b). Fingering is provided by Emanuel Ax (Op.11, 19, Klavierstücke 1894) and Shai Wosner (Op.23, 25, 33a, 33b).
The notation engraving has, as expected, Henle’s industry-leading precision and clarity, and are presented on luxury cream paper. Interestingly, and in common with a growing number of publications I am seeing for players at all levels, the notation seems generously larger than is typical for this publisher’s urtext scores, further enhancing their clarity and accessibility.
The individual volumes each benefit from a useful Preface at the start, and extensive critical commentary at the rear.
In the case of the complete edition, these introductions are combined, together with introductions for the Klavierstücke 1894 and Op.33 pieces, the overall German and English texts taking up 30 pages. The scores that follow occupy 90 pages, while the critical commentaries take 60 pages, 30 in each of the two languages.
As always from this publisher, the score is also available digitally within the cross-platform Henle Library app.
Closing Thoughts
Schönberg’s piano pieces have an extraordinary historical significance that extends far beyond their immediate intrinsic value, being the laboratory in which the composer reassembled the elements of music to create an entirely new language, and in a way which had a seminal influence on composers for more than a generation.
For the pianist, these are works that reward effort, and are of more than simply academic importance. Many musicians find themselves absorbed by the radical sound world that Schönberg opens up in these pieces, and it is no wonder that they exerted such a compelling impact.
The Six Little Piano Pieces Op.19 offer a natural starting point for discovering this repertoire, and presently appear on the ARSM and DipLCM diploma syllabi, offering prospective candidates another impetus for exploring this music from the inside out. And musicians with a high-level interest or intent on a career should certainly acquaint themselves with this important repertoire.
These new editions of the scores from Henle immediately jump to the top of the pile as the edition to own, and can be recommended as such without any reservation.
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