Ode to Napoleon

A towering presence in 20th-century music, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is remembered for his profoundly influential system of pitch organization that replaced the sense of key with an atonal method of composition. According to his “method of composing with twelve tones,” all twelve unique pitches in the musical octave are given equal prominence. The piece heard this evening works upon the twelve-tone system and may be studied in that light. But there is also a dramatic angle from which to examine Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon, considering both the message of its text as well as the situation in which he composed the music. Schoenberg’s first entries into the world of avant-garde expressionism—think of Pierrot Lunaire from 1912—were far behind him when, in 1942, he set Lord Byron’s poetic finger-pointing at Napoleon. But he resurrected the melodrama style of Pierrot for this very intense piece, which uses an unpitched narrator alongside a piano quintet. I say the vocal part is unpitched, though Schoenberg does indicate both general contour (rising and falling motion) and precise rhythm. The end result sounds close to recitative, enhances intelligibility of the text, and accords a fair amount of freedom to the performer to carry the “melodic” line as high or low as seems emotionally appropriate.
Byron wrote the Ode to Napoleon in 1814 when the French ruler abdicated. As a British citizen, Byron echoed the general hostility toward Napoleon expressed by countrymen like Wordsworth and Hazlitt. But he also recognized the fascinating mixture of power and corruptibility, which resonated with his own fictional portrayals, including Manfred and Childe Harold. For Arnold Schoenberg, an Austrian Jew who fled Germany in 1933, the condemnation put forward in Byron’s text allowed him to (perhaps not so subtly) impugn Adolf Hitler. When it was written in spring 1942, Schoenberg was miles from the war in Europe, living in sunny southern California. But clearly his mind could not avoid the pressing issue of the day.

(c) Jason Stell