From Joe, on Schoenberg (part 2)

Hello again,

This is Joe Bricker, writing to you with the second pre-concert newsletter in anticipation of concertnova’s performance on January 30th at Memorial Hall.  I’m writing this letter to you from Essen, Germany, a suitable place to discuss the nightlife scene of Berlin around the turn of the 20th century! How wunderbar is that! (My German has not gotten any better, need more Schnappi).

Returning to the life of Arnold Schoenberg, in this letter I’ll look into some of the context around his “Cabaret Songs”, which were composed in different sets/different opus numbers (an opus number is just a way of cataloging a composer's output) between 1899 and 1903.  After marrying Mathilde Zemlinsky (the sister of Alexander von Zemlinsky, a highly influential composer of this time period), Schoenberg left his day job (working in a bank) and began conducting/teaching full-time through a collection of small gigs.  

In 1901, he was called to step in last minute at the Überbrettl, a “literary cabaret” in Berlin, at which younger poets/musicians would regularly perform some of their edgier work as a sort of social criticism of the way well-established society consumed art (it’s worth noting that the theater the Überbrettl was housed at was across the street from a police station).  This tradition grew directly from Le Chat-Noir in Paris, and quickly became the hip thing to do across Europe.  Social anxiety was at an all-time high due to the rapid changing industrial landscape and quickly growing class disparity, and Schoenberg reflected that anxiety/uncertainty in his Cabaret Songs (a good example of meeting the demands of the market, I suppose?). 

Schoenberg set texts by several poets who appeared at these cabarets, including Richard Dehmel, who would become one of the key influences on Schoenberg’s music through his life, because of the intensity with which he depicted color (also influencing Kandinsky! Quite a social circle, eh?).  In the poem “Erwartung”, which Schoenberg uses for his Cabaret Song op. 2 no. 1, Dehmel depicts a woman who, in the darkness of night, cannot necessarily discern between colors, finding the sea to be red, the grass to be sea-green, and mistakes a dead oak tree for her dead lover.  In this expressionistic text, Schoenberg manages to prepare the music as simple but never settled, much like it feels to walk alone in a quiet park at night and hearing a sound from over your shoulder.  It’s probably nothing, but you never know… 

These songs are a testament to Schoenberg’s commitment to experimentation with new forms of expression.  They’re full of wit, energy, musical inventiveness, creepiness, charm, all of the qualities we love about later Schoenberg before he got too into the math-iness of it all.  Compared to Pelleas und Melisande, these songs feel like they are from a different planet of composition, when they were written at nearly the exact same time (shortly after the financial failure of the Überbrettl, Schoenberg returned to Vienna).  The sheer searching of fin-de-siècle artists is constantly inspiring for me, and the pairing of these works on one performance doesn’t guarantee we’ll find answers, but you can bet we’ll be searching right alongside you.

As with my previous newsletter, my recommendation for this week is a song from the 1930 musical-comedy Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel).  The film (here presented in the long lost English version) tells the story of a professor who becomes romantically involved with a cabaret performer, eventually becoming a cabaret clown and going insane.  I can’t help but think about some of the similarities between this and Schoenberg’s early compositional career… this should get us all in the spirit of the Berlin cabaret (whether we like it or not!)!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANqGm-MiqQs 

All the best,

Joe Bricker and the team at concertnova