Harmonielehre
Sometimes a work comes along that ranks in the column of must hear because it is a rare opportunity. This symphony season has been a season of "rare hear" opportunities.
First, we had the opportunity to hear Schoenburg's Kammersymphonie expertly executed by the Hunstville Symphony, not once but twice! The first time with virgin ears that had never heard so many notes played in so many different ways at once - but then after Maestro Vadja deconstructed the work, allowed the work to settle in and our ears were opened to the conversation of melodic lines competing to be heard, such a sound the second time around!
And now, another evening with Schoenburg and a composer John Adams, who has so much to say about Schoenburg. This evening promises to be intense and wonderful and we have groups of OrchDorks going both nights.
Schoenburg's "Survivor of Warsaw" and John Adam's "Harmonielehre" are must hear works. Scored for a large orchestra, is a strong, overt, if at times, minimalist work that moves with an impatience. It is confident and reminiscent the SSMF OrchDorks who played Sibelieus, "it has the same tension and color struggling to break free" said one. And another said, "It struggles back and forth and seems like it is about to burst with joy". I could not agree more. This joy, while tempered by impatience, is compelled to burst out of the confined walls of structure Adams has set in place in the first two movements.
It is a work not to be missed.
First performed March 21, 1985 by the San Francisco Symphony, Edo de Waart, conductor, Davies Hall, San Francisco and scored for:
4 flutes (2,3,&4=piccolos), 3 oboes (3=English horn), 3
clarinets (3=bass clarinet 2), bass clarinet, 3 bassoons,
contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, timpani,
percussion (4 players) 2 harps, piano, celesta, strings
Duration: 40 minutes
Publisher: Associated Music Publishers (G. Schirmer, Inc.)
From the blog of John Adams 1/14/12
John Adams on Harmonielehre:
Harmonielehre is roughly translated as "the book
of harmony" or "treatise on harmony." It is the title of a huge study of
tonal harmony, part textbook, part philosophical rumination, that
Arnold Schoenberg published in 1911 just as he was embarking on a voyage
into unknown waters, one in which he would more or less permanently
renounce the laws of tonality. My own relationship to Schoenberg needs
some explanation. Leon Kirchner, with whom I studied at Harvard, had
himself been a student of Schoenberg in Los Angeles during the 1940s.
Kirchner had no interest in the serial system that Schoenberg had
invented, but he shared a sense of high seriousness and an intensely
critical view of the legacy of the past. Through Kirchner I became
highly sensitized to what Schoenberg and his art represented. He was a
"master" in the same sense that Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms were
masters. That notion in itself appealed to me then and continues to do
so.
But Schoenberg also represented to me something twisted and
contorted. He was the first composer to assume the role of high-priest, a
creative mind whose entire life ran unfailingly against the grain of
society, almost as if he had chosen the role of irritant. Despite my
respect for and even intimdation by the persona of Schoenberg, I felt it
only honest to acknowledge that I profoundly disliked the sound of
twelve-tone music. His aesthetic was to me an overripening of 19th
century Individualism, one in which the composer was a god of sorts, to
which the listener would come as if to a sacramental altar. It was with
Schoenberg that the "agony of modern music" had been born, and it was no
secret that the audience classical music during the twentieth century
was rapidly shrinking, in no small part because of the aural ugliness of
so much of the new work being written.
It is difficult to understand why the Schoenbergian model
became so profoundly influential for classical composers. Composers like
Pierre Boulez and Gyorgy Ligeti have borne both the ethic and the
aesthetic into our own time, and its immanence in present day university
life and European musical festivals is still potent.
Rejecting
Schoenberg was like siding with the Philistines, and freeing myself from
the model he represented was an act of enormous will power. Not
surprisingly, my rejection took the form of parody…not a single parody,
but several extremely different ones. In my Chamber Symphony the busy,
hyperactive style of Schoenberg’s own early work is placed in a salad
spinner with Hollywood cartoon music. In The Death of Klinghoffer the
priggish, disdainful Austrian Woman describes how she spent the entire
hijacking hiding under her bed by singing in a Sprechstimme to the
accompaniment of a Pierrot-like ensemble in the pit.
My own Harmonielehre is parody of a different sort in that
it bears a "subsidiary relation" to a model (in this case a number of
signal works from the turn of the century like Gurrelieder and the
Sibelius Fourth Symphony), but it does so without the intent to
ridicule. It is a large, three-movement work for orchestra that marries
the developmental techniques of Minimalism with the harmonic and
expressive world of fin de siècle late Romanticism. It was a conceit
that could only be attempted once. The shades of Mahler, Sibelius,
Debussy, and the young Schoenberg are everywhere in this strange piece.
This is a work that looks at the past in what I suspect is
"postmodernist" spirit, but, unlike Grand Pianola Music or Nixon in
China, it does so entirely without irony.
The first part is a seventeen-minute inverted arch form:
high energy at the beginning and end, with a long, roaming "Sehnsucht"
section in between. The pounding e minor chords at the beginning and end
of the movement are the musical counterparts of a dream image I’d
shortly before starting the piece. In the dream I’d watched a gigantic
supertanker take off from the surface of San Francisco Bay and thrust
itself into the sky like a Saturn rocket. At the time (1984—85) I was
still deeply involved in the study of C. G. Jung’s writings,
particularly his examination of Medieval mythology. I was deeply
affected by Jung’s discussion of the character of Anfortas, the king
whose wounds could never be healed. As a critical archetype, Anfortas
symbolized a condition of sickness of the soul that curses it with a
feeling of impotence and depression. In this slow, moody movement
entitled "The Anfortas Wound" a long, elegiac trumpet solo floats over a
delicately shifting screen of minor triads that pass like spectral
shapes from one family of instruments to the other. Two enormous
climaxes rise up out of the otherwise melancholy landscape, the second
one being an obvious homage to Mahler’s last, unfinished symphony.
The final part, "Meister Eckhardt and Quackie" begins with a
simple berceuse (cradlesong) that is as airy, serene and blissful as
"The Anfortas Wound" is earthbound, shadowy and bleak. The Zappaesque
title refers to a dream I’d had shortly after the birth of our daughter,
Emily, who was briefly dubbed "Quackie" during her infancy. In the
dream, she rides perched on the shoulder of the Medieval mystic, Meister
Eckhardt, as they hover among the heavenly bodies like figures painted
on the high ceilings of old cathedrals. The tender berceuse gradually
picks up speed and mass (not unlike "The Negative Love" movement of
Harmonium) and culminates in a tidal wave of brass and percussion over a
pedal point on E-flat major.
The recording by Edo de Waart and the San Francisco
Symphony was made only three days after the world premiere in March of
1985. (I have since revised the ending.) Despite the daunting length and
rhythmic complexity of the piece, both conductor and orchestra made a
totally convincing representation of it, and the recording can testify
to the rare instances when a composer, a conductor, and an orchestra
create an inexplicable bond among each other. "
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