program - SVIZ

theme itself remains somewhat concealed, which prompted Brahms’s good
friend, music critic Eduard Hanslick, to write that the movement comprised
of “variations without a theme”. The five variations are followed by a coda
in the ethereal E Major. The last movement is more dynamic, containing an
exchange of lively episodes with fugal sections and expansive melody. Is
it necessary to be familiar with the events surrounding Agatha in order to
understand this music? Perhaps the answer to this question lies in the fact
that the composer began to plan the sextet before the brief love affair and
finished it some five years after it.
PROGRAM / PROGRAM
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Arnold Schoenberg gave Johannes Brahms an exalted position amongst
his artistic sources. Above all, he valued his type of ‘developing variation’, a
principle we can also discover in Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique. But
before Schoenberg developed his new technique of composing with twelve
interdependent tones in the 1920s, he modelled himself after the musical
modern. He was attracted to the world of the enormously expanded Wagnerian
harmony and poeticism, which in music could be poured into the form
of the symphonic poem. It is precisely in his most popular work, Verklärte
Nacht (Transfigured Night), that he combined the ideal of Wagnerian music
(chromatic harmony, the idea of musical poeticism) and Brahmsian economy
(working with constantly changing motivic cells, the chamber ensemble).
Together with his mentor and friend Alexander Zemlinsky, who had led him
to the secrets of both Wagner and Brahms, Schoenberg set off in the summer
of 1899 for a short break in Payerbach, south of Vienna. The emergence of
Schoenberg’s early work is also connected with a love story: it was in Payerbach
that Schoenberg fell in love with Matilda, Zemlinsky’s sister. Schoenberg
was immediately seized by a creative fever and in just three weeks composed
a symphonic poem based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, a poet who had
an explicit influence on Schoenberg’s aesthetic outlook. Dehmel’s poetry is
clearly located in a time of decadence, which the poet tries to overcome with
numerous less than credible moral prejudices. This is also true of the selected
poem, which is conceived as a conversation between a man and a woman
walking through the forest in the moonlight. The woman confesses to the
man that she is carrying a child, but that it is not his. In his loving reply the
man declares his preparedness to accept a child as his own as a mark of his
great love for the foreign child.
Today, Verklärte Nacht counts amongst the composer’s most frequently performed
works, but on its premiere performance in 1902 critics were not well
disposed towards it. Some even reproached Schoenberg saying that it was as
if his score had come about by the composer smudging a damp manuscript
of Wagner’s music drama Tristan and Isolde. Many critics were also disturbed
by the selection of apparently inappropriate material: the symphonic poem
did not have an external programme, but instead was more a picture of the
psychological conflicts and the atmosphere of the natural environment.
Furthermore, the Majority of critics could not accept that the composer had
been able to combine two worlds in his musical language that until then