Word: schoenbergs
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...Future. In his present style (Canticum Sacrum, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas), Stravinsky is experimenting with the serial or tone row technique of Arnold Schoenberg (see below), whom he once regarded as the leader of an alien musical camp. Said protean Igor Stravinsky on his 75th birthday: "I simply cannot do without a tonal row, and have come more and more to feel that it is 'the way of the future...
When Arnold Schoenberg was working on Moses and Aaron in the '30s, he predicted that it would take 50 years for his only major opera to be produced. Last week, six years after his death in Los Angeles, the work held the stage at the Zurich June Festival long ahead of the composer's forecast...
...libretto prescribed a cast of hundreds, including 70 elders, four "naked virgins," "dancers, supernumeraries of all kinds," and a golden calf. Vienna-born Composer Schoenberg's preoccupation with the Biblical story of Exodus paralleled his indignation at growing Naziism in Germany, his brooding about the Jews' new exodus. The opera's first and third acts are dominated by a philosophical dialogue between Moses and Aaron; Moses only speaks his part-a sign that, unlike the, glib, singing Aaron, the word fails him. Schoenberg etches the contrast between the hard but true faith of Moses and Aaron...
...opera's climactic moment, Moses causes the golden calf to collapse onstage ("Be gone, you image of powerlessness"). In the third act (not performed in Zurich because Schoenberg never completed the music for it) he denounces Aaron for having used God as a means to human ends. Aaron dies and Moses gives his uncompromising message to his people: "In the desert you shall achieve the goal: unity with...
...most concentrated works (e.g., Five Pieces for orchestra, Six Bagatelles for string quartet, Three Small Pieces for cello and piano), Webern pulverized melody, harmony and rhythm. Schoenberg said that these pieces packed the art of "a whole novel in a single sigh." The result is music that drones at times with shrill insect insistence, rises to jagged, shrieking climaxes, lapses in midphrase into sudden silences that form a weird counterpoint to sound. Most listeners will be more attracted to Webern's songs, based on such idyllic poems as Goethe's The Perfect Match ("A flowerbell blossomed early from...