The Emancipator of Dissonance

Arnold Schoenberg was a manifestation of a truly globalized world. During the 20th century, music, art, and world events became one and the same. Whereas the Romantic movement depicted the world as it should be, Expressionists such as Schoenberg created art that evoked the same shock and horror as World War 1 and Western imperialism did. Schoenberg himself was a painter and music theorist in addition to being a composer, just as 20th-century music was more eclectic, more intertwined with other forms of expression than ever before.

As someone who listens to classical music to find hope in this flawed world, it is disheartening to think that music is now supposed to represent all that is ugly in the world. Others clearly share my sentiments: prodigy composer Alma Detucher is lauded as a breath of fresh air for defying the idea that music should represent the pandemonium that this world has come to.

I have also wondered how Schoenberg could still create music while defying the fundamental concept of tension and resolution in music. While practicing double stops on my violin, I once noticed that the overtone while playing the notes B and D in tune was a G, and the overtone while playing the notes C and E in tune was a C. The G and C make up the So-Do ending, the most satisfying cadence there is. So if the dominant-tonic relationship is actually built into the physics of playing violin, why would Schoenberg think of doing away with it? How could the human ear possibly be conditioned to enjoy Schoenberg’s music when it practically defies the laws of physics?

In an attempt to understand Schoenberg’s music, I listened to his famous tone poem on Richard Dehmel’s Verklarte Nacht. Verklarte Nacht is one of Schoenberg’s earliest successes, so it reflects the influences of Wagner and Mahler more than it reflects Schoenberg’s “emancipation of dissonance.” Still, many elements of this tone poem remain distinctly Schoenberg’s. By writing in “walls of sound,” Schoenberg writes music so harmonically complex that a sextet manages to sound almost like an orchestra. In fact, Schoenberg later made an arrangement of Verklarte Nacht for string orchestra that is easily his most performed work. This tone poem is more than accessible. It is an unprecedented musical achievement capable of putting the listener into a 30-minute long trance.

I especially love the story of Verklarte Nacht. A woman and her lover are strolling through a dark forest. They can practically feel the tension in the air as the woman ponders revealing her sinful past which she still quite literally carries. In a vain attempt to complete herself through motherhood, the woman conceived the child of a man she never loved - before getting married. She now walks with the man she truly loves but worries that God has now punished her by showing her true love that she can never have. But after she tells her lover, the man says:

“Look at this brilliant, moonlit world. It is like a cold ocean, but there is a flame within each of us that warms the other and which will transfigure the child and make it mine also.”

The “flame within” the lovers is so powerful that it transforms - or transfigures - the cold, menacing night into a warm and radiant one. The stars, the trees, the plants come alive as they look upon these enlightened human beings.

Yet again, Schoenberg already proves that music and drama have now become inescapable from one another. Music had now become a reflection of how rapidly the world was changing during the 20th century, as shocking and intangible as the world itself. Feminism was just starting to establish itself. Before feminism, the concept of being accepted after premarital sex - much less being able to move on with another lover - was completely outrageous. The respect and regard the man showed to the women, the equality in their emotional life, was totally opposite to the submissive nature women were expected to show in relationships. To audiences at the time, the subject was just as shocking as the music.

Gustav Mahler took Schoenberg on as his protegé, even when he could no longer comprehend Schoenberg’s musical language. Indeed, Schoenberg hated Mahler until hearing his third symphony, upon which the young composer finally hailed the established master as a genius. Nowhere is Mahler’s touch upon Schoenberg more evident than in the 4th section of Verklarte Nacht. Especially in the famous Adagietto, Mahler manages to combine the most interesting and unusual pulls of dissonance with ethereally open consonances. He uses the soaring registers of the first violins to evoke the greatest ecstasy, the most delicate textures a string orchestra can produce to evoke the closest intimacy. To illustrate, here is an example from the Adagietto (4:59):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8LZ43LA2nY Similarly, Schoenberg opens this 4th section with a D Major chord played by the entire orchestra.

At this point in the poem, the lovers had transcended their difficulty and the night had begun to transfigure. Nowhere in Verklarte Nacht had there been such an overt and powerful statement of consonance. The preceding music had been riddled with uncertainty, just like the aura of the forest and the anxiety in the woman’s thoughts. Perhaps this D Major chord marks the time when the man accepts her lover, thus relieving the forest of its darkness and the woman of her anxiety. I can’t help but think of Wagner’s famous use of the Tristian Chord. Wagner curated the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” where he sought to fully synthesize music and art. He famously waited to resolve the Tristan chord until the Tristian and Isolde finally were able to meet. Wagner created this harmonic abyss, this impossibly long buildup, only to launch a triumphant consonance at the story’s climax. Arnold Schoenberg revered Wagner very much, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he employed his own take on Gesamtkunstwerk.

It’s strange that the very man who attempted to throw out the fundamental concepts of tension and resolution in harmony, who “emancipated dissonance” so ingeniously used consonance in his work. However, Arnold Schoenberg was absolutely obsessed with consonance. Before completely turning to atonality during his second period, Schoenberg wrote a Theory of Harmony. This comprehensive treatise on the entire history of music theory turned out one of the most influential books of its kind. It is a common misconception that Schoenberg looked down upon tonality, that (as he said himself) he was some kind of “musical bogeyman.” Schoenberg did not turn his back upon his earlier writing; he revised his own string orchestra arrangement of Verklarte Nacht even in 1943. In fact, Schoenberg said of his works:

“For the present, it matters more to me if people understand my older works ... They are the natural forerunners of my later works, and only those who understand and comprehend these will be able to gain an understanding of the later works that goes beyond a fashionable bare minimum.”

So what sort of understanding can we get by listening to Verklarte Nacht? What does Schoenberg mean when he says that it is one of many “natural forerunners of [his] later works.”

I am still yet to explore more of Schoenberg’s music, so the only reference point I have is his violin concerto. Schoenberg doesn’t seem to have changed much in his style throughout his life but rather had intensified the most thrilling aspects of his music. There are moments in Verklarte Nacht that are genuinely terrifying. Music before Schoenberg had shown joy, longing, sorrow, anger, and almost everything in between - but never pure, horror-movie like terror. Schoenberg and his students Berg and Webern (the second Viennese school) Similarly, the violin concerto is filled with those moments. I actually wonder if Schoenberg’s music was ever used in “The Twilight Zone.” Another important aspect of Schoenberg’s music - and modern music in general - is how rhythmically and melodically confusing it is. For me, a reference point is Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge. Igor Stravinsky remarked that “the Great Fugue is, in rhythm alone, more subtle than any music of my own century.” Of course, Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge has dotted rhythms, offbeats, and triplets happening at the same time. In addition, the combination of melodic and disjunct fugal subjects in some of the Grosse Fugue’s double fugues creates strange dissonance in polyphony. Schoenberg takes these compositional techniques to new heights in Verklarte Nacht, using the sextet as a means where he can have even more melodic and rhythmic ideas scrambling the listener’s ear at once. I have heard someone point out another fascinating aspect of Schoenberg’s music: its lack of structure. This scholar goes so far as to argue that it is this lack of coherence - not the freed dissonance - that makes Schoenberg’s music so inaccessible. Listeners want to have something to latch onto, which is why repetition and sonata form exist. Verklarte Nacht uses the Wagnerian method of transforming motifs according to the poem, so this is probably most evident in his later works.

Besides Verklarte Nacht, I don’t think I’ll have any Schoenberg tunes stuck in my head anytime soon. Still, I am a step closer to understanding that he is a musical visionary who dared to pull the very last string that trapped dissonance. We don’t have to fear for the fate of music though: Arnold Schoenberg reminds us all that “there is still much good music to be written in C Major.”