is set up through the equilibrium between the individual harmonically very distant complexes, and how the music also moves rather far away from the static opening, and nothing static returns [plays Gurrelieder] […] strong emphasis on the tonic [plays]. And now on page 40 we have this famous theme,16 which is then developed over the whole of Gurrelieder somewhat in the manner of a second subject in a symphony, and which I will only touch on now because of the large intervals that are used freely for the first time. It is very interesting that Schoenberg’s large intervals, which have a very complex history, were initially derived purely from the individual melodic idea and only a little later, in the op. 6 songs, justified after the fact, as it were, as an adumbration of complicated harmonic relationships to which they refer in the manner of arabesques, such as the famous minor ninths in ‘Traumleben’ from op. 6. But here they are initially introduced as a purely melodic idea, and Schoenberg, who often said that innovations in one area are usually accompanied by a certain conservatism in other areas, did not make an exception here: he evidently found the compulsion to use these large intervals so foreign and unusual that here, precisely in this most melodically exposed of passages, he chose an especially simple harmonic skeleton for it. Incidentally, I would like to add that Webern told me on various occasions that both he and Schoenberg – and they did, after all, somehow carry out the great innovations together – that they kept fluctuating between doing it and not doing it, that they only did it with fear and trembling, as it were, and were always worried and tried to go back on it, but then took the chance after all because there was no other way; and I would almost say that some of this fear and trembling, of this worry and this fear, entered the music itself, and that, the fact that there was no other way, that is what gives these things their true force. So, the passage I mean is on page 40 [plays]; now he quite simply repeats the phrase [plays], and then it even appears a third time [plays]. Now, in later years he would surely not have written that for a third time. But you can sense something in it of the tension in which these intervals, which grew purely from the melody, appeared there. I also think – and we will return to this – that all of us really grew up with the idea, at least I thought it for a long time, that the explanation for Schoenberg’s development lies substantially in his string quartet writing, and that he was really a string quartet composer first and foremost. I noticed some time ago – and this is seemingly very paradoxical – that, in fact, Schoenberg’s instrumental themes almost all have a particular songlike quality; not songlike in the sense of striking melodies one can sing, but in the sense that they breathe in a way that normally only vocal melodies do. And actually, the more intensively I occupy myself with these things, the stronger my feeling grows that one of the emancipatory impulses one finds in Schoenberg is – how shall I put it? – that of a singing out freely. The singing voice was always subject to a form of constraint through its adaptation to the tonal system in general. And, within the framework of these tonal limits and these circumscribed metric limits, one always experiences singing as if – one can reconstruct this experience, at any rate – as if it were bound, as if it actually wanted to become much freer. And, if I am not mistaken – I am really saying this with a degree of caution, but I feel it very strongly – one of the deepest impulses in Schoenberg, and thus in the emancipation of music as such, is that of unleashing the singing voice, to allow the voice to sing out. And this impulse to sing out, perhaps this was subsequently transferred from there to instrumental music. There seems to be a certain confirmation of this in the fact that the real origins of Schoenberg’s polyphony, which is after all the most decisive element in Schoenberg, lie in vocal rather than instrumental music; that is, Schoenberg’s first great canonic structures, which determined the later integral counterpoint in a certain sense, that they are locating precisely in Gurrelieder, and that Gurrelieder even goes much further in its canonic and imitative elements than the subsequent purely instrumental works, and that he then returned to these canonic arts, which are taken incredibly far here, to almost Franco-Flemish levels, that he only returned to these in the transition to twelve-note composition during the time of Pierrot lunaire. And I feel that such an impulse to sing out was a very substantial factor in this passage.
So, I would now like to draw your attention to another phenomenon in Schoenberg. I think we have spoken a number of times about Valéry’s statement that the quality of a work of art can be measured by its refus – that is, by the things it eschews.17 One can very easily gain the impression that this power of this refus, this refus is greater in Western European than Central European music – as if Schoenberg’s school had always wanted to have everything and consequently, through this lack of renunciation, this lack of things one denies oneself, took on a somewhat academic character, shall we say. I think that this assumption is not entirely correct, and that, if one were to put together all the possibilities for other music that are contained in Schoenberg and which he simply cast by the wayside, that this would produce a catalogue of impressive proportions. For now I will show you – and this is connected once again to the topic of art nouveau – I will show you only how the possibilities that were elevated to exclusivity by Schreker, that these possibilities and many others are immanent in Schoenberg too, and that he simply chose not to pursue them. In other words, the formal language of impressionism is very much present in Schoenberg too. And I think I can say that with reference to the lecture by Mr Boulez, who asserted a certain opposition between the Schoenberg school and impressionism18 – whereas Gurrelieder in particular is extremely rich in such very loose elements. I will play you just this one highly characteristic Schrekerlike passage, this is on page 50 [plays], and so forth. That is from King Waldemar’s ‘Midnight Song’.
Now I would like to show you a little something, a very small detail that is connected to the aspect of consistency. That, after all – and I would like to highlight this most emphatically – is the most fundamental principle in Schoenberg, that everything that happens leaves its trace in time, as it were, that it is a music in which nothing is forgotten. And that is the foundation of the peculiar awareness of time at the heart of Schoenberg’s music, something that should really be analysed in detail. If you take other composers who were using variation techniques around 1900, they used, as you all know, what Richard Wagner called ‘psychological variation’.19 That is, the motifs are reshaped according to their characteristics. But despite this reshaping, which is sometimes very extensive in Strauss – just recall the characteristic notes of Salome’s motif, everything that happens to them, that is really a very far-reaching variation, starting from this [plays Strauss, Salome], he does an incredible amount with this – but despite this variation, the motifs are always strung together, I would say. There is really always something strip-like in all this neo-German music, like a film strip, where small shots, small, minimal pictures of motifs are placed next to each other and then connected; whereas the essential thing in Schoenberg is that the variation intervenes, that the theme, every thematic event, has consequences in the sense that it leaves traces in what follows, but also that what follows must never be the same or simply correspond to what has already been; for in music, as a temporal art, there is really no such thing as mathematical equality, because what comes later, simply by virtue of coming later, has a different function from what precedes it, and one must actually elaborate this other function compositionally. And through this technique of intervening variation, the fact that things are not simply strung together, but that everything that follows is both identical to what precedes it and also not identical to it, which results in the far denser thematic fabric that you know from Schoenberg.
Now, let me just give you one example of the idea of the large interval, which, quite aside from the fact that the motif I played you is one of the main motifs, also has a certain bearing on the construction of the other themes. You will recall that the themes from Gurrelieder I demonstrated to you earlier, that they all moved within a relatively narrow intervallic range, that they had a stepwise, diatonic character or even a chromatic character. But after this major event takes place, this wide-interval theme, the idea of the large interval continues to have an effect, one might say. So there is this exceedingly beautiful song on page 58: ‘Du wunderliche Tove’ [How strange you are, Tove]. This song corresponds to the first song, in a sense, because it is also homophonic, also in a flat key, also in 3/4, and it also shares something of its tone. But now the intervals are much wider. So, in other words, after this emancipation of the melodic line in ‘Nun sag ich dir’s
