Drei Satiren

Arnold Schoenberg’s name is remembered today for his profoundly influential system of pitch organization that replaced the sense of key with an atonal and more precisely twelve-tone method of composition, whereby all the unique pitches of the musical octave are given equal prominence. The choral works heard this evening work upon the twelve-tone system and may be studied in that light. But there is also a greater, more “scandalous” dimension to the Satires which helps explain their musical features.
The direct motivation for the Drei Satiren seems to be a serious professional and personal rival, breaking out into animosity, between Schoenberg and Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. Both Schoenberg and Stravinsky premiered new works at a festival sponsored by the International Society of New Music in 1925. The German composer was clearly aggravated by the warm reception accorded Stravinsky’s neoclassic Piano Sonata and also by derogatory remarks Stravinsky made about “modernism”—often regarded as a euphemism for Schoenberg’s mathematical, expressionist technique. Schoenberg’s response came in the form of Drei Satiren für Gemischten Chor.
The satires, of which the first is heard tonight, are written in complex contrapuntal forms usually associated with J. S. Bach and use Schoenberg’s own poetic texts. The first piece, “Am Scheideweg” (At the Crossroads), refers to the aesthetic and technical debates which emerged in musical circles during the post-World-War-One era. Set as an exact canon, the movement’s twelve-note theme consists of diatonic, whole-tone, and octatonic subsets that emphasize the text’s message. It opens with the question “Tonal oder atonal?”, which Schoenberg depicts with a archetypal tonal gesture (the major triad C–E–G) followed by an atonal continuation.
Schoenberg never intended for the Satires to be performed publicly. However, fearing that his satirical gestures were too subtle, he used the preface to the published score to clarify his intent. I quote only selections, but it’s enough to sense Schoenberg’s bitter, angry mood:

My targets were all those who seek their personal salvation by taking the middle course… It is taken by those who nibble at dissonances, wanting to pass for modern but are too cautious to draw the consequences, consequences resulting not from the dissonances but also and even more so, from the consonances… What attentive listener can believe them?
I aim at those who pretend to strive back to … This regressive rake who, hardly reborn, and having missed a lot in school, has to re-experience the tonic and the dominant. One would gladly help him with a round trip ticket through the styles…
Finally all . . . ists in whom I can see only mannerists. Their music is enjoyed most by people who constantly think of the slogan intended to keep them from thinking of anything else, while they are listening to the music.

The mood of “Dreimal Tausend Jahre” is altogether different. Dealing with a politico-religious theme—the return of the Jews’ to a homeland in Palestine—the piece was written in April 1949 toward the end of Schoenberg’s life. The composer sharpens the focus of Runes’ poem, giving it greater relevance to an issue much on his mind at the time: the newly established State of Israel. Pitch organization is as strictly managed as ever. For instance, Schoenberg’s basic theme is a symmetrical twelve-tone series: invert and transpose the first group of six pitches, and you get the second group of six pitches. But the texture is more even and lyrical, and includes traditional lengthening of note values to indicate phrase endings (something one hears in every Bach chorale, for example).

(c) Jason Stell