20th Century Classics

The Significance of Op. 11

The historical and musical significance of Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces Op. 11 can hardly be overstated. The consensus today that they are landmarks, situated as his "earliest consistently atonal opus" (in the words of George Perle), belies a long history of analyses by resistant theorists who attempted to valiantly shoehorn them, however awkwardly, into the syntax of tonal harmony. Where one theorist heard the opening thematic material of the first piece as outlining the Phrygian mode, another heard it as an E major-minor, with F as a lower neighbor note. Another said, amazingly, "Of atonality there is no trace. One might possibly speak, however, of polytonality, of different tonalities heard simultaneously." (Forte)

It is not hard to hear late Romanticism in these opening notes. I have often demonstrated this to classes by beginning with Wagner's Tristan Prelude, following that with some Hugo Wolf, Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht, and finally, Op. 11, no. 1.

Schoenberg saw music history as moving inevitably forward. The introduction of equal temperament made possible chromaticism, modulation techniques, and the tonal system of the eighteenth century. But Schoenberg saw that, carried to its logical conclusion, tonal music contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. As Charles Wuorinen has put it, atonality was the end result of "the tendency within tonal music for an ever-increasing number of foreign, ancillary tones to be introduced into the harmonic fabric." (Wuorinen) These pieces were Schoenberg's first conscious steps on the path toward serialism.

Looking back to 1909, Schoenberg had this to say forty years later: "My technique and style have not been developed by a conscious procedure. Reviewing this development today it seems to me that I have moved in many roundabout ways, sometimes advancing slowly, sometimes speedily, sometimes even falling back several steps. The most decisive steps forward occurred in the Two Songs, Op. 14, and in the Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11." (Schoenberg)

What is clear is that Schoenberg in 1909 was working deliberately to find his own voice, moving consciously to atonality. "That I was the first to venture the decisive step will not be considered universally a merit--a fact I regret but have to ignore." (quoted in Reich) But as David Burge points out, nothing about the form, the phrasing, or the rhythms in Op. 11 are particularly new or innovative. "There is a traditional scheme of melodic and rhythmic relationships. Further, the essential nature of these recurring melodies is quite simple, and their transformations are clearly affected in the manner of Wagner and the postromantic symphonists, Mahler and Strauss...Again one asks, why the fearful reaction? The answer must inevitably lie in the harmony." (Burge) It is not even the dissonances per se, that were so upsetting to listeners, but the fact that Schoenberg never resolved them.

(See Rosen, below, for an unsurpassed explanation of how dissonance works to further expression in both tonal and atonal music.)

If in retrospect we hear the Op. 11 pieces as both a clear break with the past and a foreshadowing of the future, 
Schoenberg nonetheless saw himself as far from radical. In 1949 he wrote, "Most critics of this new style failed to investigate how far the ancient 'eternal' laws of musical aesthetics were observed, spurned, or merely adjusted to changed circumstances. Such superficiality brought about accusations of anarchy and revolution, whereas, on the contrary, this music was distinctly a product of evolution, and no more revolutionary than any other development in the history of music." 

Yet despite Schoenberg's insistence that he proceeded by conservative and careful steps rather than one radical leap, what he achieved in Op. 11 was quite startling, and dramatically new.  In the words of Eric Salzman, "For the first time, every sound, every interval, every event has a unique and independent value, free of the hierarchies of tonal discourse--and equally free of the meanings formerly invested in them. Thematic development remains, but totally abstracted from its old contexts."

This achievement alone earns these pieces a place as important pivotal works of the twentieth century. It is fitting that they will open the 2003 ACS New Music Festival concerts of 20th Century Classics.

Bibliography and further reading:

Burge, David. Twentieth Century Piano Music (New York: Schirmer Books, 1990) pp. 24-32.

Forte, Allen. "The Magical Kaleidoscope: Schoenberg's First Atonal Masterwork, Opus 11, No. 1," Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 5.2 (November 1981): pp. 127-68.

Leibowitz, René. Schoenberg and His School: The Contemporary Stage of the Language of Music (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1949, reprinted by Da Capo Press, 1975)

Reich, Willi. Schoenberg: A Critical Biography (London: Longman Group, 1971) p. 31.

Rosen, Charles. Arnold Schoenberg (University of Chicago Press, 1975, 1996) pp. 23-38 ("Atonality")

Salzman, Eric. Twentieth Century Music: An Introduction (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988) pp. 33-37 and 252.

Schoenberg, Arnold. "My Evolution," in Style and Idea (University of California Press, 1975) p. 86.

Wittlich, Gary. "Interval Set Structures in Schoenberg's op. 11, no. 1." Perspectives of New Music. 13 (1974): pp. 41-56.

Wuorinen, Charles. Simple Composition (New York: C. F. Peters, 1979) p. 5.