| String Quartet, Op. 3 |
| In 1909, Arnold Schoenberg created four works that marked the beginning of a new era in the history of music. These included the Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16, and Erwartung, Op. 17. In these works, traditional harmony is completely dispensed with and the "liberation of the dissonance" is accomplished. Anton Webern and Alban Berg were soon to join their teacher at the vangaurd of music, Webern in 1909 with his Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5, and Berg in 1910 with his own String Quartet. Berg's Op. 3 would be the last composed under the guidance of Schoenberg. It is also the first work in which the apprentice outdoes the sorcerer. "At a time when Schoenberg and Webern had been deferring the question of the larger instrumental forms...Berg followed the impulse of his own creative drive, which he himself felt to be architechtonic" (Adorno:54). All on-line dictionaries should have Berg's Op. 3 serving as the definition of this last word. Every detail of it is constructed with an eye to the entire piece. As with any work of art, there are details in the String Quartet that are reminiscent of earlier work; Schoenberg's Second Quartet is the earlier work in this case. However, "the invention and execution [of the Op. 3] are entirely Berg's: no model can be found" (ibid.:54). Berg, in his attempt at creating large scale modern music, did not simply take old musical forms of this type and refurbish them with modern harmony. "From the very beginning he displays the resolve to produce large forms rigourously and with originality out of the motivic principles of construction worked out by Schoenberg" (ibid.). The String Quartet does not have any "themes" in the classical sense: "permanent transition softens every consolidated shape, opening it to what precedes and follows...subordinating it to the supremacy of the whole" (ibid., 55). Thus someone listening to the Quartet will profit not by attempting to track themes in the piece but by becoming a part of the process of the music. "Every bar, indeed every note, is equidistant from the center" (ibid.). Not only is every musical event related to a single musical event, but the events are continuously supplied to all four voices of the quartet (the two violins, the viola, and the cello). That is to say, Berg's Op. 3 is a heavily contrapuntal work. The work therefore has vertical unity, that of simultaneous events, and horizontal unity, that of consecutive events. For the listener, this means that everything that happens must be comprehended and that the one's attention must be absolutely thorough. This is one of the major characteristics of modern music; it is unlike older music, where only the leading voice requires rapt attention. Adorno remarks that Berg's String Quartet strongly anticipates twelve tone music. Its melodic fragments are treated as twelve tone rows would later be. They are "so thoroughly varied that they scarcely appear as "themes" but merely supply raw material" (59). The above-mentioned vertical and horizontal unity of the work would come to full acceptance in twelve tone music, where every melodic fragment and every chord in every voice must be derived from a single twelve note sequence. Schoenberg first heard Berg's String Quartet in Vienna on 24 April, 1911, at a concert of music by Schoenberg's pupils; this concert was also the premier of the Piano Sonata. Schoenberg later wrote that the Quartet "surprised me in the most unbelievable way by the fulness and unconstraint of its musical language, the strength and sureness of its presentation, its careful working and significant originality" (quoted in Perle 1980:7). The musical community was not so impressed with Berg's music, however; the Piano Sonata was turned down by music publishers. This led Berg to publish both the Sonata and his Four Songs at his own expense. The Op. 3 is the first of Berg's two string quartets; the second is the Lyric Suite, composed in 1926. The first quartet anticipates the second in its timbral aspects and in the "lyric-dramatic" character that sets it apart from the customary "symphonic-epic" character of the string quartet. The Lyric Suite, though the work of a more experienced and masterful composer, is not more than equal in quality to the Op. 3 and unfairly overshadows it (this paragraph: Perle 1980:6). next...............Altenberg Lieder |