by Ronald J. Swedlund
Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) began composing his Variations on a Recitative, op. 40 for organ on August 25, 1941 and completed the work forty-eight days later on October 12. The work was premièred by Carl Weinrich at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in New York City on April 10, 1944. It was published by the H. W. Gray Co. in 1947, after six years of quarrelsome negotiations.
Altogether Schoenberg wrote seven sets of variations. Four of these are relatively brief movements in larger works; the other three are self-contained pieces of substantial length. The movements in larger works are the Litanei of String Quartet No. 2, op. 10 (1908); the passacaglia titled “Nacht” in Pierrot Lunaire, op. 21 (1912); the Variationen from Serenade, op. 24 (1923); and the Thema mit Variationen from Suite, op. 29 (1926). The independent pieces are Variations for Orchestra, op. 31 (1928); Variations on a Recitative, op. 40 (1941); and Theme and Variations, op. 43a for band (1943). These sets traverse Schoenberg’s four stylistic periods, moving from the tonality of the second string quartet to atonality (or, as Schoenberg would say, “pantonality”1) in Pierrot Lunaire, to serialism in the serenade and the suite, and finally returning to tonality in the organ variations and the band variations.2 The Variations on a Recitative is Schoenberg’s final and most extensive keyboard work, and his only completed work for organ.
The primary sources for a study of Schoenberg’s organ variations are the composer’s personal correspondence, articles by Robert Nelson and Marilyn Mason, two recordings of the work by Mason, and a letter from Max Miller to Paul Hesselink. The items from Schoenberg’s personal correspondence pertaining to the organ variations are published in an article by Paul Hesselink, which appeared in the Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute; a review and abridged version of this article later appeared in The American Organist. Hesselink’s articles both present a single paragraph from an important letter Schoenberg wrote to René Leibowitz on July 4, 1947—the full text of this letter appears in Arnold Schoenberg Letters, edited by Erwin Stein. The Nelson article summarizes the content of six two-hour lectures presented by Schoenberg early in 1949 (and attended by Nelson) which dealt with Schoenberg’s variation sets. Marilyn Mason writes,
during the summer of 1949 I was privileged to have several lessons with Mr. Schoenberg at his home in Beverly Hills, California. Three lessons, in composition and in an analysis of the Variations, were so inspiring and stimulating! One of his special requests was that he hear the Variations on the organ, so I made arrangements to play them for him at a Los Angeles church. He was transported by car and wheelchair to the church, where he heard, as he told us afterwards, the work performed for the first time on the organ. To my knowledge this was the last time too, for in two summers he had died.3
Mason’s article describes her session with Schoenberg at the Los Angeles church and reports Schoenberg’s wishes regarding the performance of his piece. Mason recorded the variations in 1951 and again around 1968.4 Hesselink’s first article presents an excerpt of a letter to him from Max Miller5 who, as a graduate organ student in the fall of 1950, took a lesson with Schoenberg for “help . . . on interpretation” and “tempi, etc.”6 in the organ variations.
An important secondary source for a study of Schoenberg’s organ variations is an article by Martha Foltz, which presents a detailed analysis of the piece.7 The purpose of the present study is to present data from primary sources relating to the performance of Schoenberg’s Variations on a Recitative, op. 40. This data will address the areas of 1) edition choice, 2) articulation and phrasing, 3) tempo and rhythm, 4) registration, and 5) instrument choice.
Schoenberg’s Variations on a Recitative is available in two editions, the first published by the H. W. Gray Co., Inc. in 1947 and the second published by Belmont Music Publishers in 1975. Edited by Carl Weinrich, the first edition is written in conventional organ music notation and contains copious registration suggestions intended for the large, early 20th-century organ at Princeton University. The second edition is purged of Weinrich’s editorial suggestions and is written in Schoenberg’s original music notation, in which the pedal part is notated at actual (16¢) pitch instead of one octave higher.
Prior to the initial publication of his organ variations by the H. W. Gray Co., Schoenberg wrote the following comments concerning the forthcoming edition:
Now there is another problem: You know probably that since 1917 (when I published my Four Songs for Orchestra, Op. 21 [8]: “Vereinfache [sic] Studier-und Dirigier-Partitur, mit Vorwort”) I have excluded every transposition of my scores, even that of double bass, contra bassoon [sic] and piccolo.
Now I would like to publish also this work in the same manner. That is, writing exactly how it must sound and leaving it to the player to know how it has to be played. But as I do not want to produce this time more difficulties than those produced by the artistic conditions of my style, I am ready to allow this time to use the old fashioned notation. I know, organ players belong to the most conservative group among instrumentalists, and I assume they would not even try to play this.
I leave the decision about the problem to the publisher.9
[Letter to Donald Gray of the H. W. Gray Co.] There are now in my belief two possibilities how you could publish it:
(1) Without editorial additions, exactly as my original manuscript was written, which is quite possible because Mr. Weinrich . . . who has played it recently was able to do it without such remarks.
or
(2) Ask Mr. Weinrich whether he can edit it.10
The H. W. Gray Co. chose to ask Weinrich to edit the score. Upon Weinrich’s acceptance of the task, Schoenberg wrote to him:
I am also glad that you are going to edit the piece for H. W. Gray Co. . . .
I do not know whether my friends, Mr. Steuermann and Mr. Kolisch informed you about the one peculiarity of my writing, which might have seemed unusual to you at first: I write always the pitch which I want to hear: never transpositions are used, also not in the upper or lower octave; not in the manuals, nor in the pedal.11
After the publication of his organ variations in 1947Ï, the tone of Schoenberg’s comments changed:
Through the registration of a Mr. Weinrich, who has an unusually large organ in Princeton, the whole picture of my music is so confused that most people cannot make it out: but Mr. Stein has promised to give me a list which shows my original version. I will send it. The registrations by Weinrich I absolutely cannot judge. They appear to be invented entirely by an “organ churn.”12
[Letter to Donald Gray] . . . Mr. Weinrich’s registration is not understandable for other organists than himself.
I think it was not very good that my work was published in his version. . . . I must ask you to do something in this respect. I don’t want this work to be suppressed by such a mistake. Will you please tell me what you consider doing. I would say the best thing would be to have a second version without any registration and deliver this to the organist.
Complaints which I receive stem from prominent German, French and American organists.13
The registration of my organ variations is apparently perfectly designed for the Princeton University organ. This does not suit me at all and so many people have complained about it. I have also asked my publisher to bring out an unregistered edition so that each player can make his own registration. For me, an edition in which the bass is often higher than the tenor is really unreadable. It seems unmusical to me, and, besides, I believe that a well-educated musician doesn’t need this at all.
In my original draft, I included an occasional indication of sonority. But the point was to say whether something should be played tenderly and contabile [sic], or more roughly and staccato, or energetically—nothing more than that.14
. . . This Mr. Gray seems to be a hard-boiled man and he seems to be also very insolent. . . . . . . he charges so much . . . because he includes the fee which he has probably paid to Mr. Weinrich for his terrible registration . . . I had many complaints from Germany and from England and from France about this registration—all say that it is unuseable [sic], it seems to be made for a special organ and this is the organ of Princeton.
. . . I want . . . absolutely Mr. Weinrich’s registration to be taken out and my own version restored, with a remark that I give only the sound and every organ player might register it according to his own organ.15
[Letter to Donald Gray.] Weinrich made his registration exclusively for his Princeton organ. I have received many complaints about that, and questions whether American organs are different from European. And I have also heard a record made by an organist . . . [whose playing was based] on Weinrich’s ideas, and I tell you, it’s terrible. This fact that this version is not applicable to other organs, might be the reason why Weinrich himself, in an organ recital here in Los Angeles, did not play this piece; he, the editor!16
The 1974 Belmont edition apparently would fulfill Schoenberg’s wishes.17
According to Marilyn Mason, the phrasing indications in the H. W. Gray edition correspond exactly to the original manuscript. She writes that one of Schoenberg’s chief dictums to a performer of his music was “strict adherence to the score, especially regarding phrasing—all phrasing indications were to be strictly observed.”18 She notes that Schoenberg “was especially interested in clarity of performance, and this colored all his remarks to me.”19 During 1936 and 1937, the Kolisch Quartet recorded Schoenberg’s four string quartets under his coaching and supervision. Eugene Lehner, the quartet’s violist, writes that
one word was constantly repeated by . . . [Schoenberg]—clarity, clarity, clarity. For him, that was the alpha and omega of music making. His dictum was that you must play music so that the last person in the hall should be able to write up in the score what you do.20
A letter of Schoenberg to the conductor Fritz Stiedry describes how to achieve clarity in phrasing. Schoenberg writes,
phrasing is not to be used ‘emotionally’ as in the age of pathos. Rather it must
1. distribute the stresses correctly in the line
2. sometimes reveal, sometimes conceal the motivic work
3. take care that all voices are well-balanced dynamically, to achieve transparency in the total sound.21
Schoenberg observes that “an outstanding soloist (Kreisler, Casals, Huberman, among others) has a way of working at his part; he tries to make even the tiniest note sound, and to place it in correct relationship to the whole.”22
Consider for a moment the three soloists cited by Schoenberg. All were string players. Pablo Casals’ playing, compounded equally of fire and tenderness, “was memorable as much for beauty of tone as intellectual strength.”23 Time factors were
consciously chosen, avoiding a robotic pulse. Casals instinctively understood the dramatic value of delay—if only by a millisecond. He would speak of “posing” a note. He would “sculpt” every note dynamically . . . Casals’ playing [was] distinct from the unguency of a cello-playing dedicated to a seamless flow of beguiling sound.24
Bronislaw Huberman’s playing was, according to Flesch,25 “the most remarkable representative of unbridled individualism.”26 Huberman was “a towering personality who could fuse glowing intensity and visionary sensitivity into a grand design. His tone had a haunting quality, particularly in infinite shades of pianissimo.”27
Fritz Kreisler played without exertion, achieving a seemingly effortless perfection without
conscious technical display. The elegance of his bowing, the grace and charm of his phrasing, the vitality and boldness of his rhythm, and above all his tone of indescribable sweetness and expressiveness were marvelled at. Though not very large, his tone had unequalled carrying power because his bow applied just enough pressure without suppressing the natural vibrations of the strings. The matchless color was achieved by vibrato . . . Kreisler applied vibrato not only on sustained notes but also in faster passages which lost all dryness under his magic touch. His methods of bowing and fingering were equally personal.28
Kreisler had an unconventional bow arm: he disregarded the traditional . . . spun-out long bow, considered an important tool in a violinist’s technique; instead, he preferred short, intense bow strokes, changing the bow frequently and holding his right elbow rather high. He also tightened the bow hair far more than customary.29
According to Flesch in the mid-1890’s, Kreisler’s cantilena “was an unrestrained orgy of sinfully seductive sounds, depravedly fascinating, whose sole driving force appeared to be a sensuality intensified to the point of frenzy.30 A photograph also taken about 1895 shows Kreisler and Schoenberg (the latter playing ’cello) as members of a whimsical instrumental ensemble called the “Fröhliches Quintett.”31
Hence, the artists Schoenberg admired, while noted for their clarity, were far from being the faceless automatons one might imagine from a superficial knowledge of Schoenberg’s style and aesthetic. To the contrary, each approached the rhetorical art of articulation and phrasing with blazing originality harnessed to intense communicative power.
These “outstanding”32 performers also played with beguiling rhythm and pronounced, individualistic rubato. Concerning rhythm and tempo, Schoenberg in 1948 wrote that
today’s manner of performing . . . [art] music . . . , suppressing all emotional qualities and all unnotated changes of tempo and expression, derives from the style of playing primitive dance music. This style came to Europe by way of America, where no old culture regulated presentation, but where a certain frigidity of feeling reduced all musical expression. Thus almost everywhere in Europe music is played in a stiff, inflexible metre—not in a tempo, i.e. according to a yardstick of freely measured quantities. Astonishingly enough, almost all European conductors and instrumentalists bowed to this dictate without resistance. All were suddenly afraid to be called romantic, ashamed of being called sentimental. No one recognized the origin of this tendency; all tried rapidly to satisfy the market—which had become American . . .
. . . As an expression of man it [music] is at least subject to such changes of speed as are dictated by our blood. Our pulse beats faster or slower, often without our recognizing it—certainly, however, in accommodation to our emotions. Let the most frigid person be asked a price much higher than she expected and feel her pulse thereafter! And what would become of the lie-detecting machine if we were not afflicted by such emotions? Who is able to say convincingly “I love you” or “I hate you,” without his pulse registering? . . .
Why is music written at all? Is it not a romantic feeling which makes you listen to it? Why do you play the piano when you could show the same skill on a typewriter?33
Schoenberg continues,
Change of speed in pulse-beats corresponds exactly with changes in tempo. When a composer has “warmed up” he may feel the need of harmonic and rhythmic changes. A change of character, a strong contrast, will often require a modification of tempo. But the most important changes are necessary for the distribution of the phrases of which a segment is composed. Over-accentuation of strong beats shows poor musicianship, but to bring out the “centre of gravity” of a phrase is indispensable to an intelligent and intelligible presentation of its contents . . . To people who have never heard those great artists of the past who could venture far-reaching changes of every kind without ever being wrong, without ever losing balance, without ever violating good taste—to such people this may seem romantic.
It must be admitted that in the period around 1900 many artists overdid themselves in exhibiting the power of the emotion they were capable of feeling; artists who considered works of art to have been created only to secure opportunities for them to expose themselves to their audience; artists who believed themselves to be more important than the work—or at least than the composer. Nothing can be more wrong than both these extremes. Natural frigidity or artificial warmth—the one not only subtracts the undesirable additions of the other, but also destroys the vital warmth of creation, and vice versa.
But why no true, well-balanced, sincere and tasteful emotion?34
As one might expect, Schoenberg admired the conductor Furtwängler. Sounding slightly jaded by conductorial egos, Schoenberg writes that Furtwängler “is certainly a better musician than all these Toscaninis, Ormandys, Kussevitzkis [sic], and the whole rest. And he is a real talent, and he loves music.” 35 What sort of musician was Furtwängler?
He has been described
as “an ambassador from another world, a world holding him firmly in its power; he broke free of it only because he had a message to impart” (Kokoschka). “In listening to him, it is the impression of vast, pulsating space which is most overwhelming” (Menuhin). Such language is an attempt to put into words the almost mystical effect that Furtwängler’s conducting had on those who experienced it. He seemed to be searching for music’s essential being at a deeper level than anyone else. As Neville Cardus put it, “he did not regard the printed notes as a final statement but rather as so many symbols in an imaginative conception, ever changing and always to be felt and realized subjectively.”
. . . Furtwängler was a product, perhaps the supreme expression, of the interpretive tradition of Wagner and von Bülow. In Germany his conducting was regarded as the synthesis of Bülow’s spirituality and Nikisch’s improvisatory genius and sense of colour. Furtwängler’s performances combined in an extraordinary way lofty thought and spontaneity, impulsiveness and long meditation. Nothing for him was fixed and laid down. Each performance was a fresh attempt to discover the truth; rarely was one like another, or even like the rehearsal that had just preceded it. He deliberately cultivated an imprecise beat, so as to achieve a large, unforced sonority, growing from the bass. (The improvement of the cello and bass section, with the consequent enrichment of the whole body of string tone, and the introduction of continuous vibrato into German and Austrian orchestras, were among his important contributions to the development of orchestral playing.)
The freedom of tempo that he allowed himself was the opposite pole from Toscanini’s insistence on the sanctity of the printed score as a medium of the composer’s intentions (the interpretative tradition of Berlioz), in the light of which Furtwängler’s fluctuations of tempo struck many as arbitrary and unacceptable. Yet they were an inevitable concomitant of Furtwängler’s method, his constant quest for music’s inner meaning and hidden laws. He aimed at achieving, at the profoundest level, an organic unity which should be the result not of conformity but of a concentration on each particular expressive moment within a deeply considered general idea of the work. He was a master of transition, of the art of moulding musical phrases and periods into a spacious design, varied but grandly coherent . . . [his conducting had] a sweep, an urgency and tragic intensity that silenced objections.36
Schoenberg often paradoxically suggested in his compositions—through note values, changing meters, metronome markings, and tempo indications—the rhythmic freedom of a Furtwängler, Huberman, Kreisler, or Casals. The performer thus creates the impression of such freedom by taking fewer liberties in a Schoenberg work than in the work of an earlier composer.37
In the fall of 1950 Max Miller, then a graduate organ student at the University of Redlands, took a lesson on the performance of Schoenberg’s Variations on a Recitative with the composer. Concerning tempo and rhythm, Miller writes that Schoenberg
was upset by a too prolonged hold on the fermata on page 11 [m. 88] . . . It was clear that he wanted the variations grouped into larger sections as the music itself shows. In general, his whistling of the music was slower than his indicated tempo markings.38
For Schoenberg, as noted above, the most important concern of a performer of his organ variations was clarity. “Regarding actual sounds, he was interested in having clearness and precision above everything.”39 Schoenberg states that
the highest principle for all reproduction of music would have to be that what the composer has written is made to sound in such a way that every note is really heard, and that all the sounds, whether successive or simultaneous, are in such relationship to each other that no part at any moment obscures another, but, on the contrary, makes its contribution towards ensuring that they all stand out clearly from one another. . . . [This clarity] is the precondition of all music making.40
Elsewhere Schoenberg states, “If I was doing the registration [of the organ variations], I should work it out only in such a way that all the voices come out clearly.”41
How does Schoenberg achieve clarity of timbre? To answer this question, one must turn to his orchestration. In 1925, Schoenberg transcribed J. S. Bach’s chorale preludes “Komm, Gott, Schöpfer, heiliger Geist,” BWV 63142 and “Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele,” BWV 65443 for orchestra; in 1929 he transcribed as one piece J. S. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E-flat, BWV 55244 for orchestra. In 1937, Schoenberg transcribed Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G Minor, op. 25 for orchestra. Speaking of the Bach prelude and fugue, Schoenberg writes,
I have, so to speak, modernized the organ, replaced its slow, rarely occurring change of colours with a more richly varied one that established precisely the rendition and the character of the individual passages, and I have given attention to clarity in the web of voices.45
Speaking of Brahms’ op. 25, Schoenberg writes, “I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved.”46 Schoenberg discusses in more detail his reason for transcribing the Bach chorale preludes:
the purpose of the colours is to make the individual lines clearer, and that is very important in the contrapuntal web! . . . Our modern conception of music demanded clarification of the motivic procedures in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. That is, we do not find it sufficient to rely on the imminent effect of a contrapuntal structure that is taken for granted, but we want to be aware of this counterpoint in the form of motivic relationships. . . . [Otherwise] our powers of comprehension will not be satisfied . . . We need transparency, that we may see [the motivic procedures] clearly!47
Thus, Schoenberg achieves clarity of timbre by placing timbre in the service of motivic and contrapuntal delineation. Urging players of Bach’s instrument to strive for such clarity, Schoenberg commands: “The organist must use all registers and change them frequently.”48
