You might say that Arnold Schoenberg was a man of contradictions. In him, the radical and conservative existed in perpetual tension. He may have started out by preaching revolution, but he ended up insisting he was a traditionalist. He labeled Brahms a progressive, and claimed he owed very much to Mozart.
On this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” a chamber symphony by one of music’s least charismatic figures will be heard side-by-side with one of the 18th century’s most congenial works.
Mozart and Schoenberg, two seemingly disparate composers, pushed boundaries at the opposite ends of a grand tradition. Mozart conveyed his understanding of the complexities of human nature through the all-pervasive beauty of an artist formed during the Enlightenment. Schoenberg, divided from Mozart by more than a century, was the product of a world slipping into chaos. The Romantic Era raised music to the heights of ecstasy, even as it plunged it into the depths of highly subjective darkness. Tonality dissolved right alongside the decay of balance and moderation. Schoenberg’s development of a dodecaphonic or twelve-tone method in the early 1920s might be viewed as an aftershock of the First World War. More accurately, both – the music and the war – were likely symptoms of an overall downward trajectory.
In Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 of 1906, harmony is pushed to the brink. We’ll hear Leon Kirchner direct an ensemble of fifteen players at the 1982 Marlboro Music Festival.
Then we’ll unwind with Mozart’s gentle giant, the Clarinet Quintet in A major of 1789. The 1968 performance will feature clarinetist Harold Wright, violinists Alexander Schneider and Isadore Cohen, violist Samuel Rhodes, and cellist Leslie Parnas.
I hope you’ll join me for music of decadence and regeneration, on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page
