Brownbag Concerts | Program Notes

Program Notes

October 8, 2003

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), like many composers, struggled to find a viable personal style at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

One particular problem for the musical modernists who formed the next generation was that of establishing venues in which new music could be experienced by audiences who truly wanted to hear it. Thus Schoenberg and his colleagues set up the Society for Private Musical Performances in 1919:

For one class of seat members paid only according to their means. The press was excluded. Details of programmes were not available in advance, and many works were repeated as a point of policy. Orchestral works were given in arrangements for piano or chamber ensemble. In the three years between February 1919 and the end of 1921, when inflation put an end to the society's activities, 353 performances of 154 works were given in 117 concerts.¹

Obviously, the performing forces were reduced from symphonic dimensions to chamber versions for economic reasons, but as a consequence of distillation, the real essence of the musical materials remained for the listener to discover in very direct ways.

Today's program features two arrangements from the Society's repertoire: Benno Sach's arrangement of Claude Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun (performed through sheer coincidence last weekend by the Cleveland Orchestra!), and Schoenberg's reduction of Gustav Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer. We'll add as a third piece Schoenberg's interesting arrangement of Johann Strauss's Kaiserwalzer, op. 437, completed in April of 1925.

Debussy's Prelude a l'Après-midi d'un faune dates from 1892. Based on a pastoral poem by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) written almost twenty years earlier, the ten-minute work conjures up the state we have all experienced between consciousness and dreaming. The mythical faun, half-man and half-goat, plays a Pan pipe, represented by the flute, in this impressionistic work, which was later choreographed by Nijinsky and first performed at the Theatre du Châtelet in Paris on May 29, 1912.

Mahler wrote his 'Wayfarer' songs in the mid-1880's, probably on texts by himself after models in Das Knaben Wunderhorn (Youth's Magic Horn), which are intentionally folksy in nature rather than literary. Schoenberg was a devoté of Mahler's music, and took the opportunity to reduce Mahler's large orchestration to that of a chamber ensemble for a concert of the Association on February 6, 1920. Mahler lovers will recognize the second song as the basis for the first movement of his Symphony No. 1 in D (without words).

The second Joseph Strauss (1925-1899) wrote his first waltz music at the age of six and came to symbolize the charm, vivacity and general prosperity of the Habsburg dynasty in Vienna. Composer of countless waltzes and operettas (including Fledermaus and the Gypsy Baron), Strauss Jr. expanded his father's legacy of waltz music. The Emperor or Kaiser walz, written for Franz Josef in 1888, begins with a march and leads on to a succession of waltzes with a lovely denouement. It seems to encapsulate a whole dress ball during the golden age of Austria's capital within a few pages of music. If you'd like to dance in the aisles, please feel free!

And please give an extra warm hand to our dozen players who are today doing the work usually performed by an orchestra of 90-100!

¹Arnold Schoenberg in Grove's Dictionary of Music & Musicians