Schoenberg: The Hanging Gardens – Joo Cho

The culture of the art song, of the Lied, represents much more than a genre among others in the German-speaking world. It was a practice rather than a genre; a cultural habit which united different social classes at various times (throughout the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth), and which encompassed the sublime and the kitsch, the unsurpassable heights of some masterpieces and the comical or the sentimental (or the sentimentally comical). Lied-singing could take place on the concert scene, particularly thanks to some iconic figures of the German-speaking area, but also in the homes; whereas in the former case a higher degree of perfection could be expected, in the latter the informal, confidential and intimate nature of the Lied was ideally rendered.
And while many individual songs were set to music, some of the most ambitious masterpieces of the genre constitute cycles, which may imply a composer’s setting of a poet’s complete cycle, a setting of excerpts from a larger poetic sylloge, or a cycle unified by the composer’s style and musical idea, but comprising lyrics by different authors. The idea of a cycle of sung poetry might therefore narrate a story, in more or less open terms, or suggest a mood, or depict a series of verbal/musical images constituting a mosaic of meaning. Virtually all of these possibilities are found in the greatest song cycles of the German Romanticism, and Arnold Schoenberg was keenly aware of the options at hand. Moreover, and different from opera, the vocal style of the Lied was more tightly bound to the natural inflection and pronunciation of the verbal text; it both admitted and required a more shaded declamation, and normally aimed less at displaying the singer’s vocal qualities than his or her deep understanding of the text and of its implications.
The itinerary narrated in a song cycle frequently mirrors themes and moods which are close to a composer’s heart. In the case of Arnold Schoenberg, the selection of three song cycles presented in this Da Vinci Classics album literally traces the “story” of Schoenberg’s own development as an artist, and of his crafting of his musical language.
After his first compositions in this genre, Schoenberg’s op. 2 represents his first attempt to establish his personality in the field of the art song. The turning point was represented by his encounter with the poetry of Richard Dehmel (1863-1920), a modernist poet whose multifaceted style drew inspiration from a variety of styles. Over the years, Schoenberg would turn his attention to Dehmel on numerous occasions, and even one of his greatest masterpieces, Verklärte Nacht, is inspired by the poetry of this author. The moving power of Dehmel’s lyrics was clearly acknowledged by Schoenberg himself, who wrote to the poet: “Your poems have had a decisive influence on my development as a composer. They were what first made me try to find a new tone in the lyrical mode. Or rather, I found it without even looking, simply by reflecting in music what your poems stirred up in me”. In particular, Dehmel was attracted by synesthetic juxtapositions, and abundantly drew from the fields of visual arts and music for his images and metaphors. This is very evident in Erwartung, the first Lied in this cycle, where Dehmel employs many references to colours (particularly primary colours and in binary oppositions), whose effect is mirrored by Schoenberg through the use of “coloured” harmonies. Even though the musical language is still recognizably tonal, Schoenberg introduced several unexpected harmonic solutions, possibly encouraged precisely by the “visual” imagery suggested by the artist: when harmony started to lose some of its functional value, it progressively ceased to narrate a story in a consequential fashion, and instead began to represent a series of impressions whose meaning is revealed by their combination.