Revolution

The upcoming concert, Revolution, on March 25th at Woolsey Hall and March 26th at the Quick Center on the campus of Fairfield University, features Beethoven’s masterful Symphony No. 3, “Eroica” and Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). While every classical music aficionado, and many classical music novices know the Eroica, Schoenberg’s work remains unexplored terrain for many. Schoenberg’s upending of traditional harmony with his pioneering of the twelve-tone system of composition has meant that many listeners have rejected Schoenberg outright. This is a shame because Transfigured Night owes far more to Wagner and Brahms than to Schoenberg’s later works. While there are hints of the atonality that he would eventually embrace fully, Schoenberg is romantic, lush and lyrical in this work. Based on the poem of the same name by Richard Dehmel, Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night is in five parts that mirror the five stanzas of the poem. Each part of musical work evokes the same emotional ground as its corresponding stanza.

So why is Eroica paired with Transfigured Night under the moniker Revolution? We know that Schoenberg was a revolutionary figure in 20th Century music. He fundamentally changed, for better or worse, the musical landscape; not just classical music but all western music. Beethoven, too, closed the book on the Classical era and ushered in the Romantic era, fundamentally changing the symphonic form in the process. But again, why these two particular works, especially in light of the fact that Schoenberg’s truly revolutionary work was to come much later with the spiky, and perhaps harsh, strains of atonalism?

The Eroica is revolutionary on several levels. It was penned in homage to the revolutionary Napoleon (when the revolutionary Napoleon became the Emperor Napoleon Beethoven stripped the dedication to his once democratic hero.) More than that, though, is the nature of the work itself.  As Maestro Boughton has pointed out, the Eroica introduced the notion that symphonic music could be the vehicle to express specific ideas and emotions. Thus, 100 years later (and only separated by an intermission on the NHSO program!) Schoenberg took Beethoven’s revolutionary romantic ideal to heart in Transfigured Night, though the emotions and ideas expressed are quite different.  Following is an English translation of the poem and when you come to the concert hall on March 25th or March 26th you can decide how well Schoenberg described the poem in musical terms and how true to Beethoven’s revolutionary ideals he was.

Transfigured Night (Verklärte Nacht) by Richard Dehmel
Translated by Stanley Appelbaum
Reprinted from the website oldpoetry.com

Two people walk through a bare, cold grove;
The moon races along with them, they look into it.
The moon races over tall oaks,
No cloud obscures the light from the sky,
Into which the black points of the boughs reach.
A woman’s voice speaks:

I’m carrying a child, and not yours,
I walk in sin beside you.
I have committed a great offense against myself.
I no longer believed I could be happy
And yet I had a strong yearning
For something to fill my life, for the joys of
Motherhood
And for duty; so I committed an effrontery,
So, shuddering, I allowed my sex
To be embraced by a strange man,
And, on top of that, I blessed myself for it.
Now life has taken its revenge:
Now I have met you, oh, you.

She walks with a clumsy gait,
She looks up; the moon is racing along.
Her dark gaze is drowned in light.
A man’s voice speaks:

May the child you conceived
Be no burden to your soul;
Just see how brightly the universe is gleaming!
There’s a glow around everything;
You are floating with me on a cold ocean,
But a special warmth flickers
From you into me, from me into you.
It will transfigure the strange man’s child.
You will bear the child for me, as if it were mine;
You have brought the glow into me,
You have made me like a child myself.

He grasps her around her ample hips.
Their breath kisses in the breeze.
Two people walk through the lofty, bright night.

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