The Book of the Hanging Gardens

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Composed between 1908 and 1909, Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, or The Book of the Hanging Gardens is a fifteen-part song cycle composed by Arnold Schoenberg, setting poems of Stefan George. George’s poems, also under the same title, track the failed love affair of two adolescent youths in a garden, ending with the woman’s departure and the disintegration of the garden. Schoenberg attempted to keep the same themes in his musical translation of the work through his use of atonality, or lack of key.^{[citation needed]} The song cycle is set for solo voice and piano. The Book of the Hanging Gardens breaks away from conventional musical order through its usage of atonality. Schoenberg supplants musical cacophony with traditional melodic meter when setting George’s texts.^{[citation needed]}

1 Biographical and cultural context
2 Critical Reception
3 Critical Analysis
4 The Garden as a Metaphor
5 References
6 Footnotes

[edit] Biographical and cultural context

The Book of the Hanging Gardens served as the start to the atonal period in Schoenberg’s music. Atonal compositions, referred to as “pantonal” by Schoenberg in an effort to give the title a more positive connotation,^{[citation needed]} typically contain features such as a lack of central tonality, pervading harmonic dissonance rather than consonance, and/or a general absence of traditional melodic progressions. This period of atonality became commonly associated with the expressionist movement, which could also be described as “out of tune” with traditional artistic aesthetics,^{[citation needed]} despite the fact that Schoenberg rarely referred to the term "expressionism" in his writings. Whether or not he wanted to be associated with the movement, Schoenberg expresses an unambiguous positivity with his discovery of this new style in a program note for the 1910 first performance of The Book of the Hanging Gardens:

With the [Stefan] George songs I have for the first time succeeded in approaching an ideal of expression and form which has been in my mind for many years. Until now I lacked the strength and confidence to make it a reality… I am being forced in this direction not because my invention or technique is inadequate, but…[because] I am obeying an inner compulsion, which is stronger than any upbringing. I am obeying the formative process which, being the one natural to me, is stronger than my artistic education.^{[citation needed]}

Schoenberg’s libretto transcends the tragic love poems of George and become a deeper reflection of Schoenberg’s mood during this period when viewing his personal life. The poems tell of a love affair gone awry without explicitly stating the cause of its demise. In 1907 Schoenberg’s wife Mathilde left him and their two children for Richard Gerstl, a painter with whom Schoenberg was a close friend and for whom Mathilde often modeled. She returned to the family from her flight with Gerstl eventually, but not before Schoenberg discovered the poems of George and began drawing inspiration from them. Schoenberg’s rather sudden and baffling marital interlude gives listeners a better understanding of why he found such inner solace with the work(s) of Stefan George.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Critical Reception

Upon its initial debut in 1910, The Book of the Hanging Gardens was not critically acclaimed or accepted in mainstream culture. Hanging Gardens' complete lack of tonality was initially disdained. Although it had been played in Paris since 1910, there was little attention from the press^[1]. The reviews it did receive were usually scarring. One New York Times reviewer in 1913 went so far as to call Schoenberg “A musical anarchist who upset all of Europe."^[2] The shock of Hanging Gardens produced social rejection.^{[citation needed]} Already a recluse,^{[citation needed]} this rejection reinforced Schoenberg’s alienation. Alienation, however, allowed Schoenberg the freedom to explore new musical grounds and attract supporters and students who also broke away from the traditional norm.^{[citation needed]}

Deemed as the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg and his students Anton Webern and Alan Berg helped to make Hanging Gardens and works like it more acceptable.^[3] By the 1920s a radical shift had occurred in the reception of Schoenberg, his Hanging Gardens, and atonality in general. “For progressives, he became an important composer whose atonal works constituted a legitimate form of artistic expression."^[4] As the years went on, Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School as a whole became grouped with the expressionism movement in music, although this was never the intent of the composers.^{[citation needed]} Critiques of Hanging Gardens henceforth became riddled with references to the movement’s terminology.^{[citation needed]} Although widely acclaimed, the Book of Hanging Gardens and atonality in general has never become largely popular in mainstream culture.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Critical Analysis

Alan Lessem in his Music and Text in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg forms what is considered to be the authoritarian analysis of the music of the Book of the Hanging Gardens. However, how to interpret the work remains debated. Lessem maintained that the meaning of the song cycles lay in the words. Lessen treats each interval as a symbol.

“Cell A provides material for the expression of poignant anticipations of love, cell B of frustrated yearnings…the structure of [the] cycle may, viewed as a whole, give the impression of progression through time, but this is only an illusion. The various songs give only related aspects of a total, irredeemable present” ^[5]

Lessem’s analysis has been called dated because of his reliance on the words of the song cycle seems overly simplistic. Scholars have instead viewed Hanging Gardens from an expressionist lens. Schoenberg himself held that the body or form of the music had little to do with the inner meaning. Instead moods are conveyed though harmony, texture, tempo, and declamation. The ‘inner meaning,’ if in fact there is to be found, is the music itself, which Lessen already described in great detail.^[6]

[edit] The Garden as a Metaphor

As argued in Knopt’s groundbreaking study of Viennese society, the Book of the Hanging Gardens uses the image of the garden as a metaphor of the destruction of traditional musical form. The garden portrayed in George’s poem, which Schoenberg puts to music, represent the highly organized traditional music Schoenberg broke away from. Baroque geometric gardens made popular during the Renaissance were seen as an “extension of architecture over nature.” So too did the old order of music represent all that was authority and stable. The destruction of the garden parallels the use of rationality to break away from the old forms of music.^[7]

[edit] References

Huneker, James (1913). "Schoenberg, Musical Anarchist Who Has Upset Europe". New York Times (January 19): magazine section part 5, page SM9, 4055 words
Médicis, François de (2005). "Darius Milhaud and the Debate on Polytonality in the French Press of the 1920s". Music and Letters 86 (4)
Puffett, Derrick (1981). "Music and Text in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg: The Critical Years, 1908–1922". Music and Letters 62 (3)
Schorske, Carl E (1979). Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1st ed.). New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House. ISBN 0394505964