Boulez Ensemble XXIII

Schoenberg—Bartók—Crumb

Harry Haskell

At first glance, the three iconic 20th-century works on tonight’s program might seem to have little in common. Arnold Schoenberg’s urgent, densely packed Chamber Symphony Op. 9 (1906) stands at several stylistic removes from Béla Bartók’s bravura, folk-inspired Contrasts (1938) and the ethereal, richly evocative sound world of George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children (1970). Yet this apparent dissimilarity masks an underlying affinity among the three composers. In the first decade of the century, Bartók and Schoenberg approached atonality on parallel tracks, even if their paths ultimately diverged. Although Schoenberg didn’t share Bartók’s fascination with folksong and nature, he nonetheless counted the Hungarian among his closest musical soulmates. Bartók, for his part, admired Schoenberg’s harmonic innovations but couldn’t resist a gentle dig: “His complete alienation to Nature, which of course I do not regard as a blemish, is no doubt the reason why many find his work so difficult.” Crumb drew sustenance from both of his predecessors: his poetic imagery and atmospheric “night music” owe a debt to Bartók, while his penchant for concision and subtly nuanced timbres and dynamics reflects the influence of Schoenberg’s pupil Anton Webern.

Bridging the Old and New Worlds

The late 1930s were a heady and productive period for Bartók. Relieved of his onerous teaching duties at the Budapest Academy of Music, he was finally free to immerse himself in the study of Hungarian folk music. Its endlessly varied store of melodies and rhythms combined with the composer’s mastery of contrapuntal procedures to produce a string of innovatory masterpieces, including the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, the Second Violin Concerto, and the Sixth String Quartet. Contrasts, written in 1938, anticipated the composer’s leap from the Old World to the New: it was written in Budapest and premiered in New York City, where Bartók arrived as a wartime refugee in October 1940. Contrasts was commissioned by violinist Joseph Szigeti, Bartók’s longtime recital partner, and clarinetist Benny Goodman. The reigning “King of Swing” was looking to leave his mark on the world of classical music. He and Szigeti asked Bartók to write a piece consisting of “two independent parts” (which Goodman figured would fill a single 78-rpm disc) and featuring “brilliant clarinet and violin cadenzas.” Szigeti, Goodman, and pianist Endre Petri premiered the first and third movements at Carnegie Hall on January 9, 1939. When Bartók belatedly presented them with a middle movement, he wrote apologetically: “Generally the salesman delivers less than he is supposed to. There are exceptions, however, as for example if you order a suit for a two-year-old baby and an adult’s suit is sent instead—when the generosity is not particularly welcome!” The work was first performed in its entirety in a New York recording studio in April 1940, this time with Bartók at the keyboard.

Bartók trains the spotlight squarely on the violin and clarinet, relegating the piano to a supporting role. The opening “Verbunkos”— based on a traditional recruiting dance used by the Hungarian army—struts along jauntily and climaxes in a swirling cadenza for the clarinet. This solo is balanced by the violin’s equally acrobatic cadenza in the third movement. The title of the intervening “Pihenő” translates as “relaxation,” but there is nothing particularly restful about this ghostly interlude, in which the violin and clarinet mirror each other’s lines in contrary motion. The finale opens in the manner of a hoedown, with the violin’s top and bottom strings “mistuned” by a half-step. A fast, slightly manic dance, the “Sebes” is characterized by Bartók’s trademark melodic cells and ostinato rhythms.

“And I will go very far…to ask Christ the Lord to give me back my ancient soul of a child.” These lines from Federico García Lorca’s 1919 poem Balada de la placeta (Ballad of the Little Plaza), in which the poet-narrator seeks to recover the lost innocence of his childhood in a place “close to the stars,” provided the original creative spark for Ancient Voices of Children. George Crumb had long been entranced by what he calls “the powerful, yet strangely haunting imagery of Lorca’s poetry.” A composer as well as a poet, the Spaniard saturated his verses with music, at both the sonic and semantic levels. Crumb, by the same token, answers to the German description of a composer as a “tone poet.” Unlike many of his fellow university-based composers in the United States, he never subscribed to serialism, aleatorism, minimalism, or any of the other isms associated with the late–20th century academic avant-garde. Instead, Crumb borrowed freely from a wide range of styles to create a notably accessible body of poetic, image-laden, and hauntingly atmospheric works such as Vox balaenae, inspired by the song of the then-endangered humpback whale; Black Angels, an electric string quartet written in protest of the Vietnam War; and Four Nocturnes (Night Music II), which seem to emanate from a surreal, Webernesque world in which both the passage of time and the traditional rules of musical syntax are suspended. So too in the fourth section of Ancient Voices of Children the soprano’s hushed, incantatory chanting of Lorca’s lines “Todas las tardes en Granada, todas las tardes se muere un niño” (Each afternoon in Granada, a child dies each afternoon), accompanied by tremulous marimbas, is marked “with a sense of suspended time.” A ghostly, flat-toned harmonica, three singers wordlessly vocalizing in tightly knit harmonies, and a toy piano playing a snippet from the Notebook of Anna Magdalena Bach enhance the sense of phantasmagoric ritual that gives Crumb’s music much of its expressive, quasi-theatrical allure. Few composers have a keener ear for timbre: Crumb’s instrumentarium features an array of Eastern percussion—Japanese temple bells, tuned tom-toms, Tibetan prayer stones—as well as harp, oboe, and mandolin, the latter with one set of strings tuned a quartertone low “in order to give a special pungency to its tone.” Both singer and instrumentalists are called upon to “bend” their pitches, a technique analogous to the microtonal inflections of the Andalusian cante jondo (“deep song”) that inspired much of Lorca’s poetry.

“I feel that the essential meaning of this poetry is concerned with the most primary things: life, death, love, the smell of the earth, the sounds of the wind and the sea,” Crumb writes in a prefatory note to the published score of Ancient Voices of Children. “These ‘ur-concepts’ are embodied in a language which is primitive and stark, but which is capable of infinitely subtle nuance.” Like Lorca, Crumb rings variations on the theme of duende, an untranslatable term that the poet defined as “the spirit of the earth,” a dark, mysterious power that “burns the blood like powdered glass.” In the third movement of Ancient Voices—drawn from Lorca’s Yerma, a verse-tragedy about a barren woman trapped in a loveless marriage—the soprano’s frenzied, dithyrambic ululations are charged “with dark, primitive energy.” “De dónde vienes, amor, mi niño?” (From where do you come, my love, my child?), she asks, to which an offstage boy soprano enigmatically replies, “De la cresta del duro frío” (From the ridge of hard frost). The word niño recurs throughout Crumb’s work as a kind of musico-poetic leitmotif, uniting the little boy at the beginning who is “looking for his voice” with the poet seeking the “ancient soul of a child” at the end. A disembodied voice in the first four movements, the boy soprano becomes a corporeal presence when he joins the soprano in the luminous concluding vocalise.

The five texted movements of Ancient Voices of Children are punctuated by a pair of instrumental interludes titled “Dances of the Ancient Earth” and “Ghost Dance,” based largely on recurring rhythmic and melodic patterns that reinforce the sense of ritualistic timelessness. Given the prominence of the dance impulse, it is not surprising that Crumb envisions the possibility of adapting his work “to theater presentation involving dance and, perhaps, mime.” The third movement likewise centers around a “Dance of the Sacred Life-Cycle,” characterized by a relentless bolero pulse that governs the meticulously choreographed musical gestures. Other aspects of Ancient Voices—Crumb’s fondness for spectral reverberations, for strains with a “dying fall,” and his aversion to clear-cut cadences— may be grounded in the landscape of his native Appalachia. By the composer’s own account, the experience of growing up in Charleston, West Virginia, a city “located in a river valley with sizable hills around,” left a lasting imprint on his creative psyche. “An echoing quality, or an interest in very long sounds, haunting sounds, sounds that don’t want to die; this is all part of an inherited acoustic, I think.”

Like Crumb, Arnold Schoenberg gives detailed instructions for positioning the 15 instrumentalists in the first of his two Chamber Symphonies: the performers are to be ranged in three rows, strings in front, woodwinds in the middle, and the two horns in the rear, but all on the same level, to ensure that the ten wind instruments don’t cover the five strings. Schoenberg’s expressive indications are similarly precise, including metronome markings—in some cases more aspirational than practical—that enhance the music’s characteristically frenetic energy. The compactness of the Chamber Symphony marked a sharp break from Schoenberg’s earlier, more expansive works, such as Verklärte Nacht, Pelleas und Melisande, and the First String Quartet. “I had become tired—not as a listener—as a composer of writing music of such a length,” he explained. “Students of my works will recognize how in my career the tendency to condense has gradually changed my entire style of compositions; how, by renouncing repetitions, sequences, and elaborations, I finally arrived at a style of concision and brevity, in which every technical or structural necessity was carried out without unnecessary extension, in which every single unit is supposed to be functional.” The transparent chamber scoring of Op. 9 set it apart from the lush, Mahlerian orchestrations of his tone poems, although he later arranged it (twice) for full orchestra.

In a series of seminal works starting with the Chamber Symphony in mid-1906, Schoenberg boldly cast himself adrift from the moorings of late Romantic tonality. “I had the feeling,” he later recalled, “as if I had fallen into an ocean of boiling water, and not knowing how to swim or to get out in another manner. I tried with my legs and arms as best I could. I do not know what saved me; why I was not drowned or cooked alive.” A life preserver would ultimately materialize in 1908, when Schoenberg definitively embraced atonality in his Second String Quartet. Yet even the comparatively traditional First String Quartet of 1905 had flummoxed listeners with its densely contrapuntal language. When Schoenberg showed the music to Mahler—the eminent conductor of the Vienna Court Opera was one of his early champions—the older composer threw up his hands and declared: “I have conducted the most difficult scores of Wagner; I have written complicated music myself in scores of up to thirty staves and more; yet here is a score of not more than four staves, and I am unable to read them.” The reactions of Viennese audiences and critics were equally uncomprehending, if not downright hostile. After members of the Court Opera orchestra premiered the Chamber Symphony in early 1907, Mahler was reportedly spotted “standing in one of the boxes, pale and with his lips tightly pressed together.”

Schoenberg considered Op. 9 a turning point in his career, a milestone on the path toward the “emancipation of the dissonance” that eventually led to his revolutionary method of composing with all twelve tones of the chromatic scale. Cast in a single, uninterrupted movement, the Chamber Symphony takes roughly half as long to perform as the First String Quartet, largely because Schoenberg had discovered a new and more economical way of articulating musical structure. The broad expressive strokes that had characterized his early large-scale works meant, in his words, “that every idea had to be developed and elaborated by derivatives and repetitions which were mostly bare of variation—in order not to hide the connection.” By the time he wrote the Chamber Symphony, Schoenberg had abandoned this time-honored concept of thematic development in favor of more concentrated motivic construction. In a process that he later referred to as “developing variation,” a theme is subjected to continual, incremental variation, in a way that often does “hide the connection” with the original for the average listener. Such protean transformations abound in Op. 9 and help give the work a sense of organic unity despite its profusion of themes (Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg counted no fewer than 23) and variegated polyphonic complexity.

Schoenberg felt a special affection for his “ewe lamb,” identifying the early Chamber Symphony as the work in which he discovered his “own personal style of composing.” In later years, he often referred to it as a kind of touchstone imbued with more than purely musical significance. From the vantage point of 1949, he reflected on the subliminal (and far from self-evident) kinship between two of the Chamber Symphony’s principal themes, each of which, in his retrospective analysis, comprised three segments respectively spanning the intervals of a minor sixth, a second, and a third. Attributing the resemblance to “the miraculous contributions of our subconscious,” Schoenberg—a Jew of deep but decidedly unorthodox faith—declared that “if there is a composer capable of inventing themes on the basis of such a remote relationship—I am not one of them… What I believe, in fact, is that if you have done your duty with the utmost sincerity and have worked out everything as near to perfection as you are capable of doing—then the Almighty presents you with a gift, with additional features of beauty such as you never could have produced by your talent alone.”

A former music editor for Yale University Press, Harry Haskell is a program annotator for Carnegie Hall in New York, the Edinburgh Festival, and other venues, and the author of several books, including The Early Music Revival: A History, winner of the 2014 Prix des Muses awarded by the Fondation Singer-Polignac.