Homage
I must pay my dues to a piece of music that turned my ears on and transformed my artistic sense of expression.
Transfigured Night is a representation of the cultural aesthetic transfiguration that Schoenberg undoubtedly caused within the world of music. Savoring for something more than that which has been, salivating over a method of expressing the deepest aspects of the human condition in a way unpaved, with Verklärte Nacht, Schoenberg took after Strauss’ trend of writing program music, but marked it with his own indelible fingerprint. Not only was the piece written for sextet instead of full orchestra, Schoenberg decided not to focus on any particular action or drama, but instead restricted himself to the expression of nature and the experience of human feelings. Schoenberg himself noted in the program notes of its premier: “It seems that due to this attitude my composition has gained qualities which can also satisfy if one does not know what it illustrates, or in other words, it offers the possibility to be appreciated as ‘pure’ music.”
From its origin, there is evident a desire to express the actual experience of nature’s beauty and what it means to be human by examining a particularly difficult human situation and the atypically distinguished moral attitude towards it. This runs against the traditional manner of describing a narrative that surrounds such a situation, a method that usually fails to penetrate its meaning.
But Schoenberg’s choice to focus on Dehmel’s poem as a phenomenological investigation into the human condition is, even more importantly, a critique of the musical trends and traditions in Vienna in the late 19th century. His choice to focus on relatively subversive subject matter in a completely original context was his way of questioning the extent to which expression was possible in the art form as a whole. Notes had been chained to the ear of yesteryear; to Schoenberg, it was time to liberate them as equal entities, mutually defined by their relation to all others. But he knew he couldn’t unchain them all at once; he had to transition his audience by utilizing the given in a subtle new way. The choice of Dehmel’s poem was a perfect compliment to Schoenberg’s decision, for its content, the spirit of its times, and the mood it evoked were all emblematic of his desire to understand the entirety of music in an entirely new light. This can be heard as he marries interestingly dissonant passages with wonderfully sweeping tonal motifs, as he mirrors the experience of Dehmel’s poem without isolating his content to the narrative. Throughout the piece he attempts to find “a tonally defensible way to employ nearly ‘atonal’ harmonies, ways modeled after the more bizarre moments in the works of the masters, when extreme chromatic harmonies defying conventional analysis resulted from smoothly logical voice leadings.”
The piece begins at night; a hollow sky allows the glimmer of a moon afar to cast silver shadows on two figures who walk the woods at dark. A woman and a man, young at heart, stroll arm in arm along a path in the deep, dank, dark wood. The mood is eager, and intense, pregnant with a sense of mourning. The woman must confess a tragedy to the man: she had married a man whom she felt no love for. Unhappy, lonely, forced to remain faithful in the marriage, and ultimately subject to her own maternal instincts, she is now tainted with another’s seed of which she feels nothing. She loves the man by her side, but is torn; she fears his condemnation of her situation will be enough to destroy forever her hope of lasting love. A climactic ascension, complimenting the theme, expresses her regret and self-blame for her eminent sin.
Instead of a heralding denunciation, we hear the voice of a man whose munificence is as transcendent as his love. At this point, the beauty of the cascading moonlight is expressed through a variety of thematic developments. An almost glittering accompaniment between the violin and cello sparkles through a section that reflects the mood of the man who, on one hand emanates with a love in complete harmony with the beauty and luminance of nature, and on the other is fully capable of reinterpreting the tragic situation: “The child you bear must not be a burden to you soul.” Thus we reach a climactic new theme whose melody, articulating the “warmth that flows from one of us into the other,” the warmth of harmonious love, is succeeded by rippling elaborations and reinterpretations of preceding themes, which ultimately tune the listener to the man’s dignified resolution: their united warmth will transfigure the child so as to become his own. The close of the piece is anchored by a prolonged coda section, consisting of themes of the preceding parts, all of them adapted anew, “so as to glorify the miracles of nature that have changed this night of tragedy into a transfigured night.”
Schoenberg self-reflectively redefines the context of music, nature, and human drama throughout the entire piece; he deliberately uses subject matter that is a direct commentary on the musical vocabulary that he will eventually dissemble, but does so in a pseudo-ironic way. For instance, he conveys the woman’s angst in the form of typically dissonant sounding themes; he uses a typical method for conveying fear and anxiety, though he is aware that her problem cannot be expressed in such a way. And, perhaps most importantly, the man’s final resolution of the night comments on the relation between musical notes and the structural integrity of the western canon. Schoenberg conveys the man’s emotions using typically tonal motifs; we feel secure, comfortable, and satisfied under the warmth of the music that mirrors the man’s own understanding of his love for the troubled woman and his dismissal of her fears and anxieties.
We are cascaded through the night in a fearful and intolerant way, uneasy and subject to typically uncomfortable musical gestures; we wake to the dawn of an unexpected light expressed in a traditionally tonal manner. But we are aware both musically and dramatically that the night has transfigured itself, just as the musical world is doing to itself through the work of Schoenberg, or so he is convinced is possible. If the man can look on such a situation with absolute freedom and gauge the situation according to his own standards, without confusing them with social taboo and cultural negativities, then Schoenberg hopes he can express his commentary on musical relativity within a context yet unused to express the inexplicable. If all notes are equal, then the dissonant is resonant, and the resonant is dissonant. Though his efforts to defend all twelve tones equally shall prove anything but simple, and until the time comes when atonality can be embraced as musical heritage, Schoenberg will have to rely on ears that know some “pieces will only be understood by those who share the faith that music can say things which can only be expressed by music.”
But recall the conditions for the dissolution of the established system are inherent in its foundation: “It has never been the purpose and effect of new art to suppress the old, its predecessor, certainly not to destroy it…The appearance of the new can far better be compared with the flowering of a tree: it is the natural growth of the tree of life. But if there were trees that had an interest in preventing the flowering, then they would surely call it revolution. And conservatives of winter would fight against each spring…Short memory and meager insight suffice to confuse growth with overthrow.”
Looking to the period when Schoenberg first published his most original musical contributions can offer further elucidation on themes that he began in here. For instance, what does he mean when he calls his new procedure for musical construction a “Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Which Are Related Only with One Another?”
Instead of accepting with eager jowls the tonal world of his forbearers, Schoenberg presents his own method as a way to freely establish a tonal universe, within which the drama of life itself, expressed in music, is to play out. Each note, symbolic of the human form, is drawn from the same pool of freedom. Each note is mutually recognized within the context that the composer creates, identified by its relation with all other notes in the chromatic scale, and is no longer confined to traditional dynamics of power and dominance inherited from the eardrums of the past. “What relates tones that succeed one another, whether or not they are in a certain scale or mode, are the intervals between them,” not dead laws. By deconstructing the notions of tradition, dismissing the rules of expression, and hammering out this vital new realization, Schoenberg achieves an illustration of a musical world parallel to the profound illuminations within Hegel’s Phenomenology, with subtle emulations of disseminated deconstructionism. Life is free within the context of the self-reflective I, contextually situated within the bedrock of all other mutually recognized agents. Yet, just as Hegel initially exposes such a universe and its vastly complex dynamics, and subsequentially solidifies what it is to be a social subject by laying out the foundations of ethical action and socio-cultural integrity, Schoenberg liberates all notes, but still shows their inherent law-like relation to each other is actually a structure that gathers its meaning from the context the composer creates. And he steers clear of replicating the chains that he unlocked; he re-establishes order, but does so with the self-conscious awareness that the meaning of such an order is derived and defined by the interrelation of all twelve notes, as arranged by the composer. Meaning is no longer inherited from arbitrary forms of past knowledge within the context of unquestioned and antiquated standards for right belief and action defined by a socio-historical stage of Spirit that does not yet know itself.
