Quartet no. 1 in G minor for piano and strings, op. 25 Orchestration by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) Tradition and novelty in art stand in dialectical tension to each other, as Thomas Mann subsumes through his artist figure Adrian Leverkühn in the novel "Doktor Faustus", inspired by Schoenberg's method of composition with twelve tones related only to each other. Despite the innovation and modernism often related to Schoenberg, this dialectic tension between tradition and novelty is deeply rooted in his music. As he wrote to the philanthropist and patron of composers Werner Reinhart in 1923: "I do not attach so much importance to being a musical terrorist peasant, but rather someone who is correctly understood as naturally continuing good, old tradition." Arnold Schoenberg developed his understanding of compositional technique and form, as well as that of instrumentation, from an early age by arranging works by other composers. For the young musician, the arrangements of operettas and the writing out of piano reductions were what ensured his professional survival. Through the mediation of his brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky (artistic director of the Vienna Carl ca. 43 mins. Theater until 1906), Schoenberg received a number of commissions for instrumentations, and he also wrote arrangements for piano for two or four hands for publishers (including the four-hand piano reductions from Rossini's opera "The Barber of Seville," and Schubert's "Rosamunde" for Universal Edition). While in later times it was primarily the arrangements of large-scale works for smaller ensembles that were created in the circle of the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen, in the 1920s and 1930s Schoenberg created a series of arrangements of works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Friedrich Händel and Johannes Brahms. The musical autodidact Arnold Schoenberg was "exclusively Brahmsian" in his youth before he began to admire Wagner equally through his mentor and friend Alexander Zemlinsky: "That is why compositions from this time, such as 'Verklärte Nacht' (Transfigured Night), on the one hand show Wagnerian technique [...] on the other hand, entities that were formed according to the pattern of Brahms' 'technique of developing variation' - as I called Allegro Intermezzo: Allegro ma non troppo Andante con moto Rondo alla zingarese: presto
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTQ4MDQ5