Drei Klavierstücke

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article does not cite any references or sources. (June 2008)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 (or Three Piano Pieces) is a set of pieces for solo piano written by the Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg, written in 1909. They represent an early example of ‘atonality’ in the composer’s work.

  1. Mässig (at a moderate speed)
  2. Mässige (at a moderate speed)
  3. Bewegt (with motion)

The Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11 of 1909 form an important milestone in the evolution of Schoenberg’s compositional idiom. The first two, dating from February 1909, are amongst the earliest examples of decisively ‘atonal’ music and are often cited as marking the point of Schoenberg’s abandonment of the last vestiges of traditional ‘tonality’, implying the language of common practice harmony that had been inherent in western music in one way or another for centuries. The functionality of this language, to Schoenberg at least, had by this time become stretched to bursting point in some of the more chromatically saturated works of Wagner, Mahler, Richard Strauss and indeed some of his own earlier works such as the characteristically late-romantic Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 written in 1899. In a famous letter to Busoni from the same year as the Three Piano Pieces he is quoted:

“Away with harmony as the cement of my architecture! Harmony is expression and nothing more.”

This use of the term ‘expression’ is especially pertinent in looking at the third of the Three Pieces, written in August 1909, whose violent emotional language, juxtaposing extremes of mood and dynamic, can be seen in the context of Schoenberg’s other ‘expressionist’ works of that year such as the fifth of the Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16 and most revealingly the monodrama Erwartung. Characteristic of the language of these pieces is a lack of motivic repetition or development of any kind and a rejection of traditional notions of balance and cadential, goal-oriented movement, supposedly deferring the musical discourse to a kind of stream of consciousness, subjective emotional expression. Probably because of this radical abandonment of traditional parameters, Busoni found the third piece rather harder to digest than the first two, and indeed its language does set it apart from its companions somewhat. In likening these developments to contemporary styles in visual art (Schoenberg was himself a painter), notably Kandinsky’s, with whom he had contact, the composer tellingly describes painting “without architecture…an ever-changing, unbroken succession of colours, rhythms and moods.”

It has often been speculated whether the violence and suddenness of this emancipation from tradition was influenced by turbulent events in Schoenberg’s life at the time. His wife Mathilde had recently eloped with the painter Richard Gerstl (who later committed suicide), and in his professional sphere his work was increasingly being met with hostility or incomprehension, as at the premiere of the Second String Quartet in 1908. However, Schoenberg at this time still pursued more traditional projects, including the orchestration of his hyper-Wagnerian Gurrelieder.