Schoenberg String Quartet no 3

 Day 23

Schoenberg String quartet no 3 op 30

LaSalle Quartet

Even after 100 years Schoenberg is a tough nut to crack. I listened to a fair amount of his music as a student and have heard Pierrot Lunaire and the 5 Orchestral pieces live. I don't think that I have ever played any of the music as an orchestral player but have tried to play at least some of the simpler piano pieces. And I love Verkläte Nacht.

I knew the second quartet, which is in all the text books as the moment where Schoenberg finally left all traces of tonality behind, but as far as I recall I had not heard the third quartet - which dates from 1927 - before.

I have to say that I found it very hard going and at the end really wanted to play a C major chord. I've no problem listening to Webern or Boulez - they in their different ways created a new musical language in which to exploit atonality. The problem with Schoenberg, at least in this relative later phase of his development is that is still using all of the gestures of late romanic music but without the harmonic foundations that go with it. If you look at the score and ignore the actual notes but retain the rhythms phrasing and structure much of the music could almost pass for Brahms. But  for example, gestures towards climaxes make little sense without the underpinning of an impetus towards the tonic.  The effect is nothing like, say, the 'wrong note' harmony in Stravinsky's Neo classical style where the dissonant chords give a piquancy. It, to my ears at least, is unrelenting and has not real sense of direction.   

I don't quite know what led Schoenberg to write in this style - his more expressionistic earlier music has much more invention and does create its own sound world. But in the end this just seemed rather sterile. I've generally liked most of the pieces that I have heard so far in this project and even when I haven't particularly enjoyed them I could see what they were trying to do. But this one just left me cold.

I remember at university one of my lecturers saying in a rather sotto voce tone that she didn't think that Schoenberg was actually very musical! Yes he was a theorist and a teacher but ultimately there was some spark of musicality lacking in him.  It seems rather a shocking thing for a musical academic to say in the 1970s, where serialism still held sway in many places, but I do now see exactly what she meant.