Part 1 of this article appeared in the March, 1999 issue, pp. 16-18.
The four orchestral transcriptions cited above share the following trait: a sharp delineation both of the works' counterpoint and of the phrases and motifs which constitute the works' often long, soaring contrapuntal lines. This delineation occurs through the juxtaposition of contrasting colors--colors garishly brilliant and psychedilicly beautiful! Schoenberg noted, "today's organists cannot [achieve this delineation]"49 and that, indeed, such clarity "seems to be impossible on the organ."50
Schoenberg's avoidance of octaves in atonal composition influenced his thinking in regard to organ registration. Concerning the registration of his op. 40, he writes,
I am not very fond of unnecessary doublings in octaves. I realize that the organ can become louder only by the addition of upper or-and lower octaves. I realize that one must allow an organist to do this if there is no better way of balancing the voices according to their structural importance. But I would like to have such doubling avoided if clearness and transparency can be achieved without addition of octaves.51
Schoenberg particularly advises caution about using manual 16' stops. Referring to a specific, now unknown place in the organ variations, Schoenberg writes,
It is one of the basic principles of my instrumentation to give every voice or group a space where it can be--if possible undisturbed by the other voices. But here the lower octave (16') would interfere with the harmonies of the left hand and obscure both.52
Speaking of his oeuvre, however, Schoenberg states,
you find in all the works between 1906 and 1921 occasional doubling in octaves . . . The fear that it might produce similarity to tonal treatment proved to be an exaggeration, because very soon it became evident that it had--as a mere device of instrumentation--no influence upon the purposes of construction.53
Later, Schoenberg became even more lenient about octaves:
avoiding doubling of octaves was certainly a kind of exaggeration because if the composes did it, nature denied it. Every single tone contains octave doubling. Curiously, I still do it not all too frequently, though I am today conscious that it is a question merely of dynamics: to emphasize one part more distinctly.54
In regard to the organ, Marilyn Mason reports that Schoenberg did not care for a forte sound, except in certain dramatic, intense spots which demanded it. He especially liked the brilliance of the reed choruses. To the flutes and strings he was partial, saying that these sounds were pleasing to the ear. "Whatever you do," he would remind me, "choose a sound that is pleasing to the hearer." . . . He was highly conscious of the 8' tone, always urging the use of a strong basic tonal line, and preferring it to the brighter mixtures.55
Schoenberg realized that
a powerful forte cannot be attained [on the organ] by stronger wind pressure, not by adding more pipes of the same kind, but only by adding heterogeneous sounds. Also, for the main part to stand out, a more piercing colour is needed, since there are no individual dynamics [as in an orchestra].56
Schoenberg stated, however:
I am little interested in . . . [the organ's] colors--for me, colors have in general only the one meaning to make the idea clear--the motivic and thematic ideas are eventually its expressions and character.57
Thus, Schoenberg implores the organist to use all the color resources at his command ("the organist . . . must use all registers and change them frequently") to clarify motivic and thematic ideas,58 but absolutely prohibits the use of color as an end in itself. Schoenberg was "concerned that [his organ variations] . . . be played simply."59
Schoenberg wished for each performer to have freedom to choose his (or her) own tone colors. Referring to the unedited manuscript of his op. 40, he says, "my version was so that every organist could make his own registrations."60
What sort of instrument did Schoenberg envision? He writes in 1949:
I have set down my views about the organ more than forty years ago . . . Among other things, I demanded that such a huge instrument should be playable by at least two to four players at once. That eventually a second, third or fourth set of manuals could be added. Above all, the dynamics of the instrument was something very important to me, for only dynamics make for clarity and this indeed cannot be achieved on most organs.61
Schoenberg knew of and was interested in double touch.62 He continues,
If one did not remember the splendid organ literature and the wonderful effect of this music in churches, one would have to say that the organ is an obsolete instrument today. No one--no musician and no layman--needs so many colors (in other words, so many registers) as the organ has. On the other hand, it would be very important to have the instrument capable of dynamically altering each single tone by itself (not just the entire octave coupling)--from the softest pianissimo to the greatest forte.
Thus, I believe too that the instrument of the future will be constructed as follows: there will not be 60 or 70 different colors, but only a very small number (perhaps 2 to 6 would certainly be enough for me) which however would have to include the entire range of 7 to 8 octaves and a range of dynamic expression from the softest pianissimo to the greatest fortissimo, each for itself alone.
The instrument of the future must not be essentially more than, say 11/2 times as large as a portable typewriter. For one should not strike too many wrong keys on a typewriter either. Why should it not be possible for a musician, also, to type so accurately that no mistakes occur?
I can imagine that, with such a portable instrument, musicians and music lovers will get together in an evening in someone's home and play duos, trios, and quartets; they will really be in a position to reproduce the idea-content of all symphonies. This is, naturally, a fantasy of the future, but who knows if we are all so far away from it now? If tone can be transmitted quite freely into one's home (such as the radio transmits tone now) all that will probably be possible. . . .
Please do not consider that what I say about the organ is an unfriendliness. I would certainly not have written an organ piece if I didn't imagine that I could myself derive some pleasure from it, but I believe the instrument is in need of some improvements.63
Schoenberg thought of the organ as a large orchestra controlled by a console--or as a synthesizer capable of realizing complex polyphony.
Schoenberg's ideal led him to write a work which some commentators find unsuited for its instrument. Jan Maegaard writes,
when I began to study [Schoenberg's op. 40] . . . a question immediately came to mind: how can this texture, so dense, so rich in contrapuntal implications be rendered faithfully by one player with ten fingers and two feet at the organ? This question still remains open to me although, meanwhile, I have heard five or six performances of the work, some of then by brilliant performers, and each time I have observed that I could see more in the score than I could hear. Such observations can be made about many fine pieces of music. What is unique in this instance is the great discrepancy between the music read and the music heard. That led me to the conclusion that, however the performance is organized and carried out--and the ones I have heard differ significantly--it is not possible for one player to convey to the listener the wealth of counterpoint which the composer has poured into his score. The rhythmical shaping and contrapuntal intricacies obscure one another, and the voice leading is blurred. Quite often the result is a massive sound which may be rich enough in itself, but in which one cannot follow the composer's musical thought as he wanted the listener to follow it, and the way it appears to the eye in the score.64
Robert Nelson concurs:
the particular mark of [the organ variations] . . . is the fashioning of a motivic counterpoint so intricate that the thematic succession all but disappears as an audible element. In spite of the musical and technical merits of the Organ Variations, its style is not always well suited to the organ; the score demands nuances of color and dynamics beyond the instrument's capacity to provide. One wishes for the impossible: an orchestral version by Schoenberg's own hand.65
Schoenberg may have realized his op. 40 was unidiomatic. He writes, "I considered the possibility of making one or perhaps two transcriptions of this piece: (1) for two pianos (2) for orchestra."66
The purpose of this article has been to address--through primary sources--the issues of edition choice, articulation and phrasing, tempo and rhythm, registration, and instrument choice as they apply to Schoenberg's Variations on a Recitative, op. 40. These sources provide the following information: 1) Schoenberg found fault with the H. W. Gray edition and preferred an edition such as the Belmont edition; 2) he expected the articulation and phrasings in his score to be rendered exactly--with clarity, artistic intelligence, and creativity; 3) he paradoxically suggested through exact rhythmic indications (which may specify tempos faster than he intended) the inspired, spontaneous performance of a great artist; 4) he implored the organist to use all the colors at his command (preferring unison tone) to clarify motivic, thematic, and contrapuntal aspects of the composition, while absolutely forbidding the use of color as an end in itself; and 5) he envisioned an instrument which would have keyboards of at least modern compass,67 would offer a wealth of unison tone, and would embody the virtue of clarity coupled to enormous flexibility of timbre and dynamics.
Schoenberg viewed his op. 40 as a return--epitomized by the work's D minor tonality--to an outmoded, archaic style:
The organ piece represents my "French and English Suites," or, if you want, my Meistersinger-Quintet, my Tristan-Duet, my Beethoven and Mozart Fugues (who were homophonic-melodic composers): my pieces in Old Style, like the Hungarian influence in Brahms. In other words, as I have stated often, almost every composer in a new style has a longing back to the old style (with Beethoven, Fugues). The harmony of the Organ Variations fills out the gap between my Kammersymphonies and the "dissonant" music. There are many unused possibilities to be found therein.68
Nevertheless, Schoenberg's op. 40 is cerebral and often inaccessible to human aural perception.69
Written in 1941, the piece stands as a grim testament to the unfolding events of World War II, and to the anxious dread Schoenberg felt:
[Schoenberg's] distress at the course of events was as deep as that of many other Austrian and German exiles (including Alma Mahler, her husband Franz Werfel and the novelist Thomas Mann) who were gathering in California. Though he assumed American citizenship in 1941, Germany's corruption and subsequent long, bitterly fought defeat could not fail to arouse his fascinated sorrow, quite apart from the blows he received through the loss of friends and relatives. His brother Heinrich, long an opera-singer under Zemlinsky in Prague, was killed by a poison injection in a Nazi hospital; his cousin, Arthur, died in a concentration camp; several of his pupils met violent deaths, including the gifted Hannenheim, killed in an air-raid, the Pole Josef Koffler, murdered by the Gestapo in Warsaw, and Viktor Ullman, who perished in Auschwitz. Just after the war came the tragic death of Webern, shot by mistake by an American sentry. And Zemlinsky, a shadow of his former self, died in New York in 1942, never having attained the recognition Schoenberg felt was his due. His reaction to events can doubtless be sensed in the upheavals which wrack the Variations on a Recitative . . . 70
The work's difficult and often inaccessible idiom invokes the alienation symptomatic of the twentieth century. Addressing mankind in 1955, Erich Fromm writes,
We are not any more in the center of the Universe, we are not any more the purpose of Creation, we are not any more the masters of a manageable and recognizable world--we are a speck of dust, we are a nothing, somewhere in space--without any kind of concrete relatedness to anything. We speak of millions of people being killed, of one third or more of our population being wiped out if a third World War should occur; we speak of billions of dollars piling up as a national debt, of thousands of light years as interplanetary distances, of interspace travel, of artificial satellites. Tens of thousands work in one enterprise, hundreds of thousands live in hundreds of cities.71
Turning to mankind's creative achievements, Fromm observes that
whether we think of our new cosmological picture, or of theoretical physics, or of atonal music, or abstract art--the concreteness and definiteness of our frame of reference is disappearing.72
He concludes:
the dimensions with which we deal are figures and abstractions; they are far beyond the boundaries which would permit of any kind of concrete experience. There is no frame of reference left which is manageable, observable . . . While our eyes and ears receive impressions only in humanly manageable proportions, our . . . world . . . does not any longer correspond to our human dimensions.73
In that much of the cerebral richness of Schoenberg's Variations on a Recitative often does not "correspond to our human dimensions" (i.e., is inaccessible to human aural perception74), the work's effect on the listener represents in microcosm the alienation of contemporary society. Unable to apprehend the work's structure, along with its motivic and thematic development, the listener senses the work's intensity but is unable to partake of it: he is alienated. Cataclysmic and angst-ridden, Schoenberg's variations thus emerge as an expression of the twentieth-century human condition. The performer's challenge is to realize, through the imperturbable tones of the pipe organ, this expression in all of its impotent power.
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REFERENCES
49. July 31, 1930 letter to Fritz Stiedry. Rufer, p. 94.
50. February 8, 1949 letter to Josef Rufer. Hesselink: 177.
51. May 16, 1944 letter to Carl Weinrich. Hesselink: 161.
52. Undated (c. 1945) letter to Carl Weinrich. Hesselink: 163.
53. October 1, 1945 letter to René Leibowitz. Stein, p. 236.
54. July 4, 1947 letter to René Leibowitz. Stein, pp. 247-48.
55. Mason: 19.
56. Schoenberg, pp. 323-24.
57. May 19, 1949 letter to Dr. Werner David. Hesselink: 178.
58. See the July 31, 1930 letter to Fritz Stiedry, quoted above (Rufer, p. 94).
59. December 28, 1983 letter of Max Miller to Paul Hesselink. Hesselink: 196.
60. February 10, 1949 Letter to Donald Gray. Hesselink: 177.
61. May 19, 1949 letter to Dr. Werner David. Hesselink: 179-80
62. Hesselink: 179.
63. May 19, 1949 letter to Dr. Werner David. Hesselink: 179-80.
. 64. Jan Maegaard "Orchestrating Schoenberg's Organ Variations," Journal of Arnold Schoenberg Institute 3 (March 1979): 83.
65. Nelson: 160.
66. March 28, 1942 letter to the H. W. Gray Co. Hesselink: 152.
67. Schoenberg writes a manual C#4 in m. 92 of his variations.
68. July 4, 1947 letter to René Leibowitz. Hesselink: 248.
69. For a penetrating discussion of twentieth-century music idioms as they relate to human perception, see Ray Jackendorff and Fred Lerdahl, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985), pp. 296-301.
70. MacDonald, p. 47.
71. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1955), p. 119.
72. Fromm, p. 119.
73. Fromm, p. 119. Italics have been added by the author.
74. See Jackendorff and Lerdahl, pp. 296-301.
