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Friday afternoon and Saturday night in Symphony Hall, the Boston Symphony Orchestra will perform Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht" ("Transfigured Night"). Those familiar with the work will need no coaxing to hear it again. But those who do not know it, or have not yet been persuaded by James Levine's ardent and ongoing tour of this challenging composer's music, must hear this piece at least once before dismissing Schoenberg as someone they could never love.
"Verklärte Nacht" is a soul-shakingly beautiful late-Romantic work, a magical sound world all its own. It is also a poignant reminder of everything that Schoenberg left behind when he chose to abandon this earlier style of writing, to open the floodgates of dissonance, and to usher in a new age of modern music. Plenty of listeners have never forgiven him for it.
Written in 1899 and originally scored as a string sextet, "Verklärte Nacht" perfectly distills the dream-intoxicated world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. It was inspired by a Richard Dehmel poem about two lovers walking through a moon-drenched grove on a cold night, but the sheer vividness of the composer's music renders the poetic text irrelevant. Schoenberg captures its delirious mood, the surging emotions of the two lovers, the feel of half-lit spaces and of wind rustling in trees. He paints in lush, opalescent colors, with nods to both Brahms and Wagner but with a confidence and vision that were his alone.
The work's harmonic language was progressive for its time, but in light of the radical revolution Schoenberg later embraced, it is far more tempting to view this piece as a warm glance backward to the Romantic era, a lingering farewell issued from the threshold of a century. It certainly makes Schoenberg's choice to abandon tonal writing seem like a Herculean act of self-renunciation. It also proves he did not embrace the new, as plenty of second-rate composers did, because he could not master the old.
He embraced the new because he believed in it, and in the ideal of musical progress, with an almost mystical fervor. Look at any picture of Schoenberg, or even better, at one of the self-portraits he painted. His sense of knowing burned in his eyes.
As Schoenberg's only work that enjoyed the true appreciation of a wide public, "Verklärte Nacht" was a source of both joy and occasional frustration. In later years, he created a string orchestra version that the BSO is performing now and will bring to Carnegie Hall on Monday night. As the piece's popularity grew, Schoenberg was routinely asked why he did not write more music in that style. He usually responded that his newer music was not in fact so different, once you came to understand it. But few among his audience ever made that leap, and Schoenberg grew old and embittered in his Southern California exile, feeling his life's work was underappreciated, and writing essays with titles such as "How One Becomes Lonely."
Perhaps surprisingly, despite his revolutionary zeal, Schoenberg never resigned himself to the admiration of a small elite; he dreamed of a much wider fame. "There is nothing I long for more intensely," he once wrote, "than to be taken for a better sort of Tchaikovsky - for heaven's sake: a bit better, but really that's all. Or ... that people should know my tunes and whistle them."
Few people ever whistle his tunes even today, but Schoenberg's son Lawrence once told me a very moving story about a summer afternoon in 1946, when for one brief and glorious moment, Arnold Schoenberg's music seemed to take center stage beneath the bright California sun, as he had dreamed it would.
According to Lawrence, the composer was driving with his young children outside of Santa Barbara when he pulled off the road into a small orange juice stand. Lawrence and his siblings adored this stand for its giant inflatable Santa Claus, and for the Christmas carols that were piped out to visitors all year long.
On this one particular day, however, someone was apparently tipped off that the great prophet of 20th-century music would be emerging from the wilderness for some orange juice. As the family got out of the car, the music pouring from the tinny speakers into the parking lot was neither "Jingle Bells" nor "Deck the Halls," nor was it one of Schoenberg's later atonal works. It was the luminous, otherworldly chords of "Verklärte Nacht."
Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichlerglobe.com.
c.2006 The Boston Globe
