Musik für keinen Film - Deutsche Oper Berlin

Aus dem Programmheft

Foto:

 

When Arnold Schönberg wrote his orchestral piece Accompaniment to a cinematographic scene op. 34 [Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene] in 1929/30, he was a Berliner. He had already lived in the city from 1901 to 1903, when he was the conductor at Ernst von Wolzogen's cabaret Überbrettl for a season, and briefly taught at the Stern Conservatory. This was followed by another period in Berlin from 1911 to 1915. Finally, in 1926, he was appointed the successor of Ferruccio Busoni as director of a master class for composition at the Prussian Academy of the Arts, where he taught until the National Socialists came into power in 1933. In those years he moved a number of times, but he was living in an elegant and modern villa at Nussbaumallee 17 in Neu-Westend when he wrote the Accompaniment. Alexander von Zemlinsky was in Berlin at almost the exact same time. He had ended his long-standing, successful position as musical director of the Neues deutsches Theater in Prague in 1927 following the resignation of his director Leopold Kramer, and had been the conductor at the Berliner Krolloper since the 1927/28 season. He worked there until it closed in 1931, and he, like Schönberg, left Berlin following the National Socialist take-over in 1933, and returned to Vienna. Zemlinsky also moved around in Berlin multiple times and became familiar with numerous boroughs of western Berlin. He lived at In den Zelten 17 in Tiergarten, where the Haus der Kulturen der Welt now stands; at Tile-Wardenberg-Str. 29 in Moabit; at Pariser Str. 19 in Wilmersdorf; and ultimately at Landshuter Str. 26 in Schöneberg.

Schönberg and Zemlinsky were in contact with each other during their shared time in Berlin, although their formerly close relationship had cooled significantly. Zemlinsky had not followed his former composition student down the path of atonality and toward the development of the twelve-tone technique in the early '20s. And after Schönberg had married Zemlinsky's younger sister Mathilde in 1901, the marriage became increasingly unhappy. Mathilde had an affair with the painter Richard Gerstl in 1908, and he committed suicide shortly thereafter. This fissure in the relationship never healed, and Mathilde died young in 1923. Yet not even one year later, on 24 August 1924, Schönberg married Gertrud Kolisch, who was 24 years his junior. But the Krolloper was what bound the two composers together. Here, Zemlinsky worked under musical director Otto Klemperer – who had also conducted the premiere of his opera Der Zwerg in Cologne in 1922 – on the Utopian project of a new musical theatre born from the spirit of republicanism. And it was Klemperer who conducted the public premiere of the Accompaniment to a cinematographic scene in a symphony concert at the Krolloper on 6 November 1930. This performance was long considered the piece's debut, including for the composer. But the piece had in fact been performed once prior, in a radio recording by the Frankfurter Rundfunkorchester under the direction of Hans Rosbaud on 28 April 1930. The piece continued to be performed thereafter, which clearly surprised the composer who had struggled for decades with rejection and antagonism by the public. He wrote to his student Heinrich Jalowetz, who had conducted the piece at a concert in 1931, with a certain amazement: "I'm very pleased by what you said about the performance ... The piece seems to be popular. Should I draw conclusions about its quality from that? I'm inclined to think so, the public obviously likes it!"

The Accompaniment was created as a commission by Heinrichshofen, a publisher specialising in scores for silent films, and which wanted to tap into the genre of talkies following their commercial breakthrough in 1927 with the premiere of The Jazz Singer. Yet Schönberg's orchestral work was not created for a specific film. Nor can it be used for such, as Schönberg, as would be the case once again during his eventual exile in Hollywood, did not want to bind himself to the demands of a director of producer with regard to character relationships or specific situations. Rather, he composed a formally isolated, nearly ten-minute orchestral work. But with the key words, "impending danger – fear – disaster", he created something of a programme for the piece, creating all the more room for association by the listener than individual sections of the piece would allow.

Based on the dating of his drafts, Schönberg began with the composition on 15 October 1929. He finished the clean copy of the score on 14 February 1930. The Accompaniment to a cinematographic scene op. 34 was his second orchestral work in the twelve-tone technique that he developed, the first being the Variations for orchestra op. 31. It was composed for a smaller symphonic orchestra, but also demands relatively sophisticated percussion and a piano, which is intended for a rather exposed part. Underlying the thematic motifs and harmony of the piece is a twelve-tone row that is not fully introduced at the beginning of the piece. Instead, the piece begins with an eight-bar introduction in which the initial mood of "impending threat" is created with quick wind gestures over a sustained third E-G flat with violas and cellos, which evolves from a tremolo to rhythmically nuanced changed notes. Yet the tone material of this introduction has already completely broken rank, and its basic form is then heard in the oboe. The E flat and G flat of the string tremolo are its first two notes, while notes three through six are played parallel on the bassoon as a short, plaintive melody fragment and on the upright basses as a pizzicato as a contrast. The subsequent brass interjection consists of the other six notes in the row. After this exposition of the row, the remainder of the first two minutes or so of the piece is shaped by the contrast between a derailed, broad twelve-note melody and hectic accompaniments. The music rises in multiple waves made up of grand, expressive and extensive ritardandi toward a climax.

This is followed by a section in a significantly faster tempo, shaped by the repetition of complex rhythmic cells and which creates something of a grotesque, "distorted" dance. This section, too, rises in a final concentration toward a climax adjoined by multiple shorter episodes in which Schönberg juxtaposes musical topoi of danger, fear and panic in sharp contrasts. In so doing he processes the material of his base row and their three variants of inversion, retrograde and retrograde inversion with a technical virtuosity of astonishing nuance. The row is spread out over multiple octaves into expressive gestures of sound, their individual sections layered into brass chords. They are shattered into hectic eights and sixteenth figurations, and multiple row cycles overlap within the polyphonic movement. Toward the end of this section, the gesture of the oboe melody at the beginning is resumed, as a singable melody in the high woodwinds with a variant of the base row.

The following section is relatively easy to associate with "disaster". Schönberg draws on familiar sounds with a thickening orchestral movement, the extreme contrast of fortissimo and pianissimo, heavy brass chords and final tutti beats. But the tutti do not mark the end of the piece. Rather, they are followed by a slow adagio, a reverberation and fading of the disaster, an out-composed dying away of the orchestra. From the tutti beats remains, as if cut out, a deep brass chord. In turn, it is made up of the first, overlapping notes of the base row. In a slow, semi-striding pulsation it becomes ever more quiet and thus transitions into the closing section. There is a twelve-tone melody in which the material of the base row is used as a thematic motif. This melody traverses the deep registers of the orchestra, from the bassoon to the deep, muted trumpet, and ultimately to the deep clarinet register, where it is accompanied by the fragile pianissimo sounds of the flutter-tongued flute. The piece fades out as it began, with a viola and cello tremolo in the small E- and G-flat third.