SERIAL EXPRESSION IN SCHOENBERG'S VIOLIN CONCERTO, OP. 36

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SERIAL EXPRESSION IN SCHOENBERG'S VIOLINCONCERTO, OP. 36

Hugh Collins Rice

Tempo / Volume 63 / Issue 247 / January 2009, pp 38 - 44DOI: 10.1017/S0040298209000047, Published online: 29 January 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0040298209000047

How to cite this article:Hugh Collins Rice (2009). SERIAL EXPRESSION IN SCHOENBERG'S VIOLIN CONCERTO, OP. 36.Tempo, 63, pp 38-44 doi:10.1017/S0040298209000047

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38 Tempo 63 (247) 38 –44 © 2009 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0040298209000047 Printed in the United Kingdom

serial expression in schoenberg’sviolin concerto, op. 36

Hugh Collins Rice

This article is, in many ways, a direct response to the more or less simul-taneous publication of Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise1 and the release of Hilary Hahn’s recording of the Schoenberg Violin Concerto.2

Ross’s elegantly-written narrative effectively presents the many intertwining strands of 20th-century music and its wider cultural sig-nificance. But, as Rodney Lister in his review of the book for Tempo states, ‘It leaves the general impression … that Schoenberg’s music is, at best, somehow unwholesome’.3 There is a growing tendency, as Lister explains, to see serialism as ‘an enormous mistake’,4 and while there will clearly always be difficult critical issues in Schoenberg’s serial music, performances like Hahn’s serve as a timely reminder that Schoenberg regarded his works as ‘twelve-note compositions, not twelve-note compo-sitions’.5 In this sense it is important to engage with Schoenberg’s music, and not regard it solely in terms of a modernist technical experiment the musical public wish had never happened. Hahn’s performance, above all, reminds us of the expressive powers of Schoenberg’s music and its audible structural narrative.

It is not my intention to provide a detailed demonstration of how Schoenberg’s techniques of serial manipulation achieve his expressive and dramatic results. While the Violin Concerto exhibits many of his characteristic techniques – hexachordal semi-combinatoriality, invari-ance, serial partitioning to generate a multiplicity of unified material – the literature is full of detailed accounts of his serial procedures6 and they will not be added to here. Serial manipulation is crucial to the way the piece works, but histories like those of Ross, which focus on a wider cultural and musical context, serve as a reminder that Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto relates to both the modernist and 19th-century tradi-tions, something which the modernist tradition has at times found difficult to accept.7

Comparisons with that other great Second Viennese violin concerto – the Alban Berg – are instructive; Berg’s concerto has entered the rep-ertoire to an extent that no other Second Viennese work for the concert hall has, and yet as Hahn comments in the liner notes for her record-ing, ‘On listening, the Schoenberg seemed to me to be fairly accessible, to show limitless interpretive potential, and to be far from impossible to play’. She also talks of the ‘almost visual’ impact of its ‘grace, wit,

1 Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise, (London: HarperCollins, 2008). 2 Deutsche Grammophon 00289 477 7346. 3 Tempo Vol.62, No. 244 (April 2008), p. 52. 4 Ibid., p.51. 5 Letter to Rudolf Kolish 1932, in Arnold Schoenberg, Letters: selected and ed. L. Stein, trans.

E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser (London: Faber, 1964) pp. 164–5. 6 These include, among many others, articles by Milton Babbitt, Martha Hyde and mono-

graphs by Ethan Haimo and Silvina Milstein. 7 E.g. Boulez’s notorious obituary of Schoenberg, ‘Schoenberg is Dead’, The Score 12 (1955),

pp. 53–61.

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serial expression in schoenberg’s violin concerto, op. 36 39

lyricism, romanticism and drama’.8 These are qualities often associated with the Berg concerto, but much less frequently with the Schoenberg!

Berg’s Violin Concerto begins its extraordinary musical journey from the (thematically neutral) open strings of the soloist, and moves to the nostalgia-tinged world of the Bach chorale Es ist Genug; Schoenberg’s concerto begins from a similarly provisional opening, but one which is far from neutral. The whole world of the concerto emerges directly out of this opening and its expressive, thematic and serial potential. It is a world of great expressive diversity, full of growth and change, but without recourse to the allusions and quotations of the Berg. It cre-ates and inhabits its own, albeit Viennese, musical world. The forms of Schoenberg’s three movements perhaps suggest a more conventional approach to concerto form than Berg’s structure, but while Schoenberg is certainly invoking the tradition more referentially than Berg, there is no sense of a dry neo-classicism. Indeed the balance between the formal need for thematic return and the expressive impulse for change and transformation creates a significant dialogue between material and form.

Schoenberg’s opening initiates both the structural and expressive nar-ratives. The first movement begins with a clear semitone motif derived from order numbers 1,2,7,8 of the series (Ex.1). This motif operates on three different levels – as motif for development and variation, as a serial partitioning of the row, and as an explicitly expressive figure, which makes reference to the convention of chromatic sighs and appoggiatu-ras in much tonal repertoire.

It is an almost inevitable consequence of Schoenberg’s method and style that motivic references saturate the whole texture, as can be seen in Ex.1; partitionings of the series which generate semitone motifs and scale segments are used frequently in the piece and contribute to much of the voice-leading.

The first movement has a form with recognizable origins in sonata form,9 but it follows its own trajectory in terms of both its thematic and expressive structure. There is, in addition, a real tension between the

8 Op. cit. 9 It can perhaps be most appropriately seen as what Hepokoski and Darcy describe as a ‘Type

2’ sonata: see James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 353–387.

Example 1: Schoenberg Violin Concerto, opening.



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centripetal force of the developments and the centrifugal force of unity. This is not simply a matter of serial unity but of gestural and thematic identity. The resulting shape suggests an arch, and perhaps even relates to the sort of sonata in Schubert’s Quartettsatz in C minor, D.703. But whereas the Schubert has a significant sense of return and closure when it eventually makes its way back to the tonic, Schoenberg tempers any sense of return with the feeling that the initial material has changed – that it can’t go back to its original state – and thus a real sense of musi-cal journey emerges. This can be seen at the very end of the movement: while the opening motif and the opening pitches for the soloist return very clearly, the original balanced phrase pairing, in which the soloist moved from B� to D� and back, is replaced with a gesture which builds up an unstable eight-note chord around the soloist’s B� (Ex.2). The effect is that of something familiar returning but with a different character and meaning: the symmetrical shape of the opening with its motivic dialogue between soloist and low strings, becomes something much more open-ended. Schoenberg seems in this instance to be relishing the possibilities of formal logic without cadential closure.

The soloist’s initial semitone motif moves swiftly to a statement of the complete row (as shown in Ex.3), but there is not in this the same level of thematic identity as in the very clear 12-note themes which occur at or near the beginning of the Variations, op.31, the Fourth Quartet, op.37, or perhaps most extraordinarily the Piano Concerto, op.42. The path taken by this first melodic paragraph winds over 20 bars towards a clear peak and a more thematically focused statement of the first hexachord rising to E�. This hexachordal figure is used (transposed) in two other significant contexts in the movement, first at the orchestral climax (b.175 using the P10 form of the series) where its true nature as a stirring horn-call is revealed; and second, brooding, at a much slower tempo (Adagio) in the low strings (b.230 and using P5) just before the cadenza.10 While the identity of this material remains clear, its character changes as its formal role changes.

Such processes are entirely characteristic of the movement and con-tribute to the sense of diversity of material achieved from the unity of the series; the music opens out from its initial premise in many dimen-sions, both structural and expressive. Thus the recapitulation has no clearly articulated sense of return – it seems more like a progression. Much of the material returns in a changed context; for example the material which seems to function as a second subject (b.61) retains an identity on recapitulation but is effectively transformed both textur-ally and through a different partitioning of the series to generate the material. 10 This figure also occurs inverted within the cadenza and is more obliquely alluded to else-

where in the movement.

Example 2: Closing bars of first movement.




Similarly, a material using 1,2,4,7,8,11 partitioning to produce a rhythmically charged and accented 3+3+2 rhythm (b.45) recapitulates (b.205) tranquillo, transformed in mood and in a 5+5+4 rhythm, which negates the bar line.

The Vivace section, which takes the place of a more conventional development section, begins with a strong sense of contrast11 through its change to triple metre, its more energetic rhythmic profile and its intervallic emphasis on minor thirds rather than the semitones which dominate the exposition. It moves towards a cantus, shared between and decorated by the soloist and the flute. This makes extensive use of the opening semitones and refers to the opening serial partitioning (1,2,7,8), but nevertheless presents the material in an essentially new guise: a line, but one which is fractured and disjointed (see Ex.4). This example of the cantus demonstrates one of the most significant characteristics of the first movement. It teems with melodic and motivic material but always avoids a more extended melodic statement; the opening material con-stantly changes in the course of the movement, and the opening motif is not just developed but challenged in its topic and changed within a clear and expressive structural trajectory.

A different, but related, challenge to thematic material occurs in the second movement. After the more kaleidoscopic thematic process of the first movement, the second movement develops a more sustained sense of melodic line. The main thematic material is a statement of the row (P7) and the identification of the row with a fully-formed melody is a significant step in the overall journey of the work. Schoenberg seems to have had a special regard for this melody,12 and some of its expressive quality comes from reshaping the semitonal sighs of the first movement into a falling seventh. The theme’s beauty gives the movement the char-acter of a romanza, but it is a character which, like the theme itself, is

Example 3: Evolution of solo violin line, bars 1–21

11 Such episodic strategies are however are common procedure in sonata form, see Hepokoski and Darcy (2006) pp. 212–215.

12 It is one of the ones he quotes, as an example of ‘melodies of my later period’ that refute the charge that ‘these compositions are produced exclusively by the brain without the slightest participation of something like a human heart’, in ‘Heart and Brain in Music’, Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black, (Faber: London, 1984), pp. 69–71, 73–75.



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challenged as the music unfolds. This principal theme (there are others using R, I and RI forms of the series) is explicitly associated with the soloist and appears three times – at the beginning, middle and end of the movement. The final statement transposes the theme down a fifth (and thus the series form from P7 to P), and in an analogous way to the end of the first movement the effect of thematic return is counterbalanced by the sense of change; the music now has a much darker hue.

This sense of change is very much part of what seems to be a dialogue not only between soloist and orchestra but also between the referential possibilities of thematic statement and restatement and the variational and serial manipulations of the material. Typically for Schoenberg the expressive structure unfolds on a number of different levels. This can be seen, for example, in the way that each of the three appearances of the principal theme has a different accompanying counterpoint. The first seems to play the role of an accompanimental – though motivically sig-nificant – backdrop for the expressive melody. But by the final statement at the end of the movement the accompanying figures seem to work both with and against the melodic field of the soloist; there is no longer the same distinction between melody and accompaniment.

This is in many ways a consequence of what happens in the middle of the movement; not only is the melodic line fragmented and also inter-rupted by chordal interjections, but a poco piú mosso section emerges (using the 1,2,7,8 partitioning of the first movement opening) which initiates a more dance-like topic. Later in the movement this material becomes a more urgent poco allegro, at which point the whole generic character of the slow movement appears threatened; the movement seems to be on the verge of spinning out of control, perhaps in the man-ner of the third movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. This is a clear example of the way Schoenberg uses serialism not only to generate the-matic material – the expressive theme in this case – but also to challenge and overwhelm it, to transform it and its meaning.

The architecture of the movement revolves around these thematic statements but is punctuated by quasi-cadential moments when the final pitch of the soloist’s melodic line is extended and decorated, acting as a harmonic focal point. The most extended of these cadential pitches – C

Example 4: Flute/solo violin cantus, bars 145–160




C# A� C D – form the first four pitch classes of I5, and the final D, which is the most extended, serves as a link with the opening pitch class of the finale. If the opening melody suggests something recreative of the past, by the end of the movement it is clear that this is not a straightforward harking back to tradition; it is something which reflects the 1930s and the biographical, political and cultural themes of the time are expressed as urgently here as in any other music written at the time.

While the third movement has a shape which has strong echoes of both sonata and rondo forms, in many ways it feels less like a self-contained movement and rather takes its place in the narrative of the work as a whole. Similarly to the second movement, it begins by using the series (now I5) as a theme, but here the thematic statement is less expressively rounded (Ex.5). It begins allegro but at its first significant return its true nature is revealed by the marking alla marcia. The square rhythms and repetition of the opening semitone seem almost to trivi-alise the more conventionally expressive motif of both the first and second movements. Even the typically Schoenbergian (out of Brahms) metrical development via displacement seems calculatedly awkward rather than the sort of elegant metrical development which character-izes the first movement of the Fourth Quartet (which begins with a very similar theme).

The awkwardness of the march stands comparison with Shostakovich, and the topic becomes one of incipient brutality when at the following poco piu mosso military drum and low strings col legno battuto initiate a passage full of the flickering intensity of Schoenberg’s pre-serial work. This almost militaristic episode and the developing vir-tuosity of the solo writing, full of multiple stops, harmonics and rapid alternations between pizzicato and arco, again seems to challenge the basic thematic material. The opening semitone motif provides a direct link from the rondo theme to the beginning of an extended cadenza, which is not only highly virtuosic but refers to the material of both the first two movements. Although the soloist makes clear reference to the material of the earlier movements, the music never recaptures their spirit. This is another passage where Schoenberg creates a clear dialogue between materials, which are intervallically unified but of disparate topic. The weight of the cadenza is extraordinary, and after it the march theme returns poco meno mosso, becoming allargando, and fails to reas-sert itself. The final attempts of the soloist to present the march theme are overwhelmed by the orchestra. What happens to the material at the end is every bit as powerful as the Berg concerto, though very different.

The expressive language of the work should not come as a surprise given the expressionist tendencies of Schoenberg’s pre-serial works. But whereas the expressivity of a score like Erwartung is a significant con-tributory factor to the notoriously unanalysable nature of that work, Schoenberg’s serial music is, at one level, all too easy to analyse – per-haps to the detriment of understanding of a broader nature. The Violin Concerto is a work which is by turns beguiling and exhilarating, and Hahn is surely right about its ‘limitless interpretive potential’. It needs performances of the quality of Hahn’s to reveal its true nature. While its

Example 5: Finale, opening theme.



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language is, in many ways, extremely complex because of its relation to both modernist and romantic traditions, at another level it is as simple and immediate as any other violin concerto in the repertoire.

Music Examples from Violin Concerto, op. 36Music by Arnold Schoenberg© Copyright 1939 (Renewed) by G. Schirmer, Inc. (ASCAP).All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.Used by Permission.



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SERIAL EXPRESSION IN SCHOENBERG'S VIOLIN CONCERTO, OP. 36