Crisis and innovation in song compositions
by Arnold Schoenberg, Robert Schumann and Gustav Mahler
At the opening of Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle "Fünfzehn Gedichte aus 'Das Buch der hängenden Gärten' op.15" ("Fifteen Poems from 'The Book of the Hanging Gardens' op.15"), a low piano voice ventures hesitantly and alone into an open, as of yet uncharted sound space, unmoored from tonality, unsettled by syncopation and reaching for orientation amidst constant changes in direction. At once inhibited and driven, the searching motion of this solitary subject fills the void with tension, expanding until it reaches a provisional point of rest. A glance back towards the distant point of departure, and then, in a low, recitative-like chant, almost whispered, a human voice emerges for the first time: “Unterm schutz von dichten blättergründen..." ("Beneath the shelter of dense leafy bowers ...”) We hear a fractured music of extreme uncertainty, disorientation, and vulnerability, beside which the lost and homesick “Fremd bin ich eingezogen..." ("A stranger I arrived ...”) of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise seems almost robust. Nor, at first, do we find in the poems by Stefan George selected by Schoenberg anything resembling the lyrical “I” introduced so immediately by Schubert’s poet Wilhelm Müller. Only at the end of the second song does it make a veiled appearance: "...doch mein traum verfolgt nur eines." (“... yet my dream pursues one thing alone.”) and it is not until the third song that its arrival is finally recorded: "Als neuling trat ich ein in dein gehege..." (“As a newcomer I entered your enclosure ...”) What extreme situation is being conveyed here in sound? Who is this tentative “I”, where is it, and who is the “you” it addresses? And what relation might it have to the creative “ego” of the composer?
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