Vienna Piano Trio Programme Notes
Transfigured Night (Richard Dehmel)
Two people are walking through A bare, cold wood; the moon keeps pace with them and draws their gaze. The moon moves along above tall oak trees, there is no wisp of cloud to obscure the radiance to which the black, jagged tips reach up. A woman's voice speaks.
"I am carrying a child, and not by you, I am walking here with you in a state of sin. I have offended grievously against myself. I despaired of happiness, and yet I still felt a grievous longing for life's fullness, for a mother's joys and duties; and so I sinned, and so I yielded, shuddering, my sex to the embrace of a stranger, and even thought myself blessed. Now life has taken its revenge, and I have met you, met you.
She walks on, stumbling.
She looks up; the moon keeps pace.
Her dark gaze drowns in light.
A man's voice speaks:
"Do not let the child you have conceived
be a burden on your soul.
Look, how brightly the universe shines.
Splendour falls on everything around,
you are voyaging with me on a cold sea,
but there is the glow of an inner warmth
from you in me, from me in you. That warmth will transfigure the stranger's child,
And you will bear it me, begat by me.You have transfused me with splendour,
You have made a child of me."
He puts an arm about her strong hips. Their breath embraces in the air.
Two people walk on through the
high, bright night.
Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951)
Verklärte Nacht (Transcription for piano trio by Eduard Steuermann)
On March 19, 1902, Zemlinsky wrote of the premiere of Arnold Schönberg's Die verklärte Nacht string sextet by the Rosé Quartet on the previous day. "With the exception of a few great lengths and affectations in the middle of the work, I have received a great impression. There are passages of genuine beauty and deepest feeling as well as with a genuine, great, unusual art in them! You must absolutely revise it again, publish it, and seek its dissemination. A great deal of Tristan can still be heard, but you know what I think about it. We, your true friends, were enthused. [.] All in all, I am proud of you - something will come of it, something must come of it! Endeavor to give Rich[ard] Strauss the sextet as soon as possible and to get a performance in B[erlin]. You will unconditionally benefit from it. The time is coming for all or us!"
Schönberg had composed the Sextet after Richard Dehmel's Poem "Die verklärte Nacht" already in 1899. Immediately thereafter Zemlisky arranged for a performance by the Wiener Tonkünstlerverein, which had premiered Schönberg's String Quartet in D major in 1898. But there the work met only with rejection ["it sounds as if one had wiped over the still wet Tristan score!"]. As a result, the premiere was delayed until 1902. At this time no work by Schönberg was yet available in published form; the collections of songs forming his opp. 1 and 2 were not published by the Dreililien-Verlag in Berlin until October 1903, and thus Schönberg had very good need of Zemlinsky's encouraging words after the premiere. The artistic director of this publishing company, Max Marschalk, accepted the sextet for publication in April, 1904, but it did not appear in print until May 1905. In the meantime, however, the sextet had experienced a number of performances and increasingly contributed to Schönberg's renown. The extensive one-movement work is highly expressive and even today numbers among Schönberg's most successful compositions, especially given the fact that he reworked it for string orchestra in 1916.
Moreover, Webern, Berg, and Willi Reich undertook efforts to transfer the sextet to piano, but these remained unfinished or unpublished. The Schönberg pupil Eduard Steuermann (1892 - 1964), who since his collaboration in the premiere of Pierrot lunaire in 1912 had participated in almost all the premieres of chamber works with piano by Schönberg, completed the present version for piano trio in 1932. The arrangement was made as a birthday present for the Viennese maecenas, Alice Möller, who had studied with Schönberg and Steuermann and whose house was an important musical meeting place in Vienna. Steuermann had to emigrate from Vienna in 1936 but Alice Möller saved the manuscript and gave it back to him after the war during a meeting in Israel. Today it is among Steuermann's papers in the Library of Congress in Washington and was published for the first time in 1979.
The transfer of this tonally very nuanced string sextet to an instrumentation with piano is not an easy matter. In 1923, the Düsseldorf music critic and enthusiast Carl Heinzen had a piano transcription of this work sent to Schönberg for his expert evaluation, but it evidently did not convince the composer. He replied to Heinzen, "Perhaps I should also not fail to mention to you that the transcriptions proceeding from my school distinguish themselves stylistically very essentially and precisely fundamentally from those in use until now: we no longer write them 'for reading' but 'for playing,' no longer write parts but fingerings!"
Perhaps nobody was so ideally equipped as was Eduard Steuermann, who as an interpreter was so familiar with Schönberg's chamber music, for transforming the tonality of Die verklärte Nacht into "fingerings" — so that his trio is not only a version "for reading" but also genuinely "for playing".
–Irmlind Capelle
Translated from the German by Susan Marie Praeder