Schoenberg “Peripetie from Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16” (1909)

Analysis

Schoenberg‟s painting became quite prolific during the years 1908-1910, and most of his pictures from this time were portraits, described by Schoenberg as „visions‟. The Five Orchestral Pieces were written in the summer of 1909, and Peripetie is clearly a very tempestuous and emotional movement, with Schoenberg focusing on brief and intense moods, perhaps partly because he no longer has functional harmony available to him to help prolong the movement. Schoenberg also had marital and financial problems at this time, which probably did much to exacerbate his need for emotional expression through his music.

Schoenberg‟s atonal style did not sit well with many leading figures in music of the day. He struggled to get performances and recognition, and preferred to work on music for smaller ensembles. This group of pieces for large orchestra was commissioned by Richard Strauss who then refused to play them.

The lack of tonality throws the spotlight on other important aspects of Schoenberg‟s style at this time. Central to his orchestral music is his use of instruments for their timbre, both individually and in ensembles. His melodic ideas (or motives) are thrown around the orchestra, split between instruments or groups of instruments, so that rarely does one instrument play a motive in its entirety. A glance at the first page of the score for Peripetie reveals a very sporadic approach to orchestration, with each short „clump‟ of music assigned to a different part of the orchestra. This approach to orchestration became known as klangfarbenmelodie or „tone-colour melody‟ and was typical of expressionism and later serialism.

Schoenberg wanted to avoid repeating or returning to thematic ideas, as he felt that this would result in an undesirable emphasis on one particular tonal centre. Therefore his approach was to present a short motive or theme and then immediately develop it. This inevitably meant that Schoenberg‟s compositions were often much shorter than tonal ones.

A number of features strike the listener on first exposure to Peripetie:

Melody

•   Disjunct or angular
•   Large intervals
•   Extremes of pitch
•   Irregular phrases

•   No predictability
•   Many short motives, often played simultaneously

  Harmony/Tonality

•       Dissonant

•   Atonal
•   No sense of key/non functional
•   Harsh/clashes

  Rhythm

•   No pulse or sense of metre
•   Varied – short, fast rhythms and long, slow ones
•   Complex, unpredictable

  Timbre/texture

•   Huge variety of instrumental sounds and timbres in a short time
•   Full sonorous textures and moments of extreme sparse textures
•   Polyphonic
•   Instruments often feature as soloists or in small ensembles

  Use of mutes, pizzicato and other effects

Other key words, which describe the overall style of Peripetie, include:  Extreme

 Intense  Contrast  Motivic  Atonal

Before looking in a little more detail at Peripetie, some important concepts need to be explained. One is the use of the hexachord, which operates as a kind of unifying feature. A hexachord is a group of six different notes played either as a chord or as short motivic ideas. Each hexachord also has a compliment – the name given to the other six notes of the chromatic scale not used in the hexachord. Peripetie has many hexachords and their compliments.

Another is the idea of a principal and secondary voice, referred to in the score (by Schoenberg, when he revised the work) as H (Hauptstimme) and N (Nebenstimme) with brackets like this …………… to show the length of the melodic idea to which the letter refers.

There is some repetition in Peripetie, but not so much of melodic ideas as of moods or timbres. When initial motives return they are changed and developed so much that the listener is unlikely to pick them out. Nevertheless it does allow us to divide Peripetie into a kind of rondo structure:

• A section Bars 1-18 A loud, cacophonous opening, followed by quieter, more sustained chords in the horns and lower wind and ending with an extended clarinet theme, with very sparse accompaniment. These three ideas are developed throughout the piece.
• B section Bars 18-34 Starting with a cello theme, some rhythmic ideas can now be heard with the triplet becoming an important feature. The trumpet and cellos trade thematic ideas, with the cellos moving into a very high register, before the full orchestra enters and the music seems very „edgy‟.
• A1 section Bars 35-43 As I will show below, this section relates to the horn theme of bar 8. The dynamic and rhythmic levels have dropped again and the orchestration is again more chamber-like. At bar 37 we see the six horns once again working together.
• C section Bars 44-58 We are only just over a minute into the movement, but already over half-way through. The bassoon and a solo cello take over from the horns, and the tempo indications alternate between „ruhiger‟ (calmer) and „heftig‟ (passionate). The texture is very empty here, until a sudden triple forte entry by the orchestra in bar 53.
• A2 section Bars 59-66 The final section builds in excited fashion, with complex string and clarinet rhythms and the entry of trumpets and upper woodwind, moving from ppp to fff in 3-4 bars.

What „unifies‟ this movement, and leads us to consider the middle and last sections to be similar to the first? The answer to this question lies in Schoenberg‟s treatment of rhythm and pitch.

•   Rhythmic unity: the final section (bars 59-66) has much in common with the opening section. The rhythms of bar 1 can be found in the third clarinet part for much of the final section, and the trumpets use rhythms found in bars 5 and 6.
•   Unity of pitches: the clue here is the use of the hexachords mentioned earlier. The horns in bar 8 play a hexachord that appears again in the middle section, again in the horns, in bars 37-38. In the final section a fully orchestrated hexachord in bar 64 is exactly one semitone higher than the very first hexachord of the movement, in bar 1. There are a number of other hexachords in the movement.

  Let‟s have a look at some of the questions that may be asked of this piece in the GCSE listening paper.

  Section A questions

  Section A will contain short-answer listening questions on the work. These will fall into a number of areas.

•   Knowledge of the expressionist style and ability to name features of it
•   Knowledge of key vocabulary and ability to define it – for example, hexachords, compliments, atonal, klangfarbenmelodie, H and N, timbre and so on. Ensure that

  you know all the bold words from this article!

•   Ability to name instruments which have important material in this movement – for

  example, the clarinets, horns, cellos and bassoons.

•   Knowledge of the performing techniques used, such as mutes and pizzicato
•   Other important features found in the music, such as the chromatic scale played by

  the trumpets in bar 2.

  Additionally, you may be asked to express your opinion about the music. In these cases, it is not important whether you like or dislike the piece, but it is important that you can justify your opinion with two or three musical reasons (for example: „I like/don‟t like this piece because of the extreme contrasts in dynamics‟).

  Section B questions

Section B asks some fairly broad contextual questions about the work, such as when it was written. However the bulk of section B is an extended answer (in continuous prose) asking you to write about how the elements of music are used in the piece.

You can prepare for this by making notes on the overall features of each element. I have suggested how these notes might start below.

Melody/Pitch

•   The full range of the orchestra and its instruments is used
•   Melodies are short and motivic (developed in a cell-like fashion)
•   Melodies are angular and disjunct (they rarely move in step)

  Harmony/tonality

•   The work is atonal – there is no key or key relationships
•   There is much use of hexachords
•   Harmony is dissonant

  Timbre/Texture

•   Motives are split between instruments („klangfarbenmelodie‟)
•   Loud sections are dominated by brass, whilst the horns and clarinets are used extensively for warmer textures
•   There are huge contrasts in texture

  Rhythm

•   Small rhythmic ideas recur during the movement
•   Rhythms are complex and very quick
•   There is a lack of a sense of regular pulse

  Structure

•   Hexachords and rhythmic ideas come back, giving the sense of a return to the opening idea on two subsequent occasions
•   A kind of rondo structure, but no obvious use of structural reference points (such as cadences)