Page 244 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained

242 PIERROT LUNAIRE, OP. 21
IN CONTEXT
FOCUS
Atonality
BEFORE
1865 Richard Wagner’s opera
Tristan und Isolde is first
performed—a turning point in
the move away from tonality.
1894 French composer Claude
Debussy uses ambiguous
harmonies and fluid harmonic
progressions in his Prélude à
l’après-midi d’un faune.
1899 Schoenberg stretches
the bounds of tonality to its
limits in his string sextet
Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4.
AFTER
1917–1922 In his Five Sacred
Songs, Op. 15, Austrian
composer Anton Webern uses
a similar small ensemble to
that of Pierrot lunaire and
develops many of the same
compositional techniques.
1921–1923 The Suite for
Piano, Op. 25, is the first of
Schoenberg’s works to use
his 12-tone serial method
of composition throughout.
1922 French composer Edgard
Varèse’s Offrandes for soprano
and chamber orchestra has its
premiere in New York.
1965 An ensemble, the Pierrot
Players, later known as the
Fires of London, is founded to
perform Pierrot lunaire and
other new works.
US_240-245_Schoenberg.indd 242
ntil the end of the 19th and other composers, including
century, music had been Alexander Scriabin and Béla
U largely dictated by a tonal Bartók, started to experiment
system, in which keys, chords, and further, escaping from traditional
scales complemented each other to harmony, and chords and melodies
create melody and harmony that based on diatonic (major and minor)
were pleasing to the ear. Even scales, instead exploring more
where dissonant, or unsettling, dissonant 12-note chromatic scales.
passages were used in a piece of The Austrian composer and critic
music, it was still resolved onto a Joseph Marx coined the term
consonant, or harmonious, chord. “atonality” for this music, which
The seeds for the unraveling had no recognizable tonality, or key.
of this tonal tradition were sown Schoenberg gave it full rein in the
by Richard Wagner. In his operas, works of his middle period (roughly
especially Tristan und Isolde (1859), 1908–1921), of which Pierrot lunaire
Wagner undermined the concept of is arguably the most influential.
music written in one key by moving
through a range of different, often Tonality taken to the limit
unrelated, keys, without settling on The use of chromatic scales to
any one, and introducing dissonant create new harmonies had become
chords for dramatic effect. A few the norm among composers at the
decades later, Arnold Schoenberg end of the 19th century, especially
in Austria and Germany. But in
the early years of the new century,
Arnold Schoenberg poses with Schoenberg came to realize that
his second wife, Gertrud, and their tonality, the system of major and
children, in 1950. Gertrud wrote the minor scales that had formed the
libretto for Schoenberg’s one-act opera basis of Western music since
Von heute auf morgen (1928–1930).
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