Can We Go Home Again? Brahms to Schönberg, at Bloomingdale School of Music (Site)

Program Notes

Less than twenty years separates Brahms’s last piano composition and Schönberg’s first venture into free atonality. Brahms was an heir of the tonal language, and dramatic possibilities, of Beethoven. Schönberg proposed to remove that harmonic motivation.

If you remove the musical concept of “home,” what is left? These two works, side by side, illustrate an astonishingly rigorous programme of motivic developments, in which a sensitivity to imitation, distortion, return, and prolongation illuminates a surprisingly similar manner in which Brahms and Schönberg organize the emotional paths of these little piano pieces.

Schönberg’s opus 11 looks ahead, stylistically, to the compositional developments that it succeeded in effecting, but emotionally and dramatically, they feel quite retrospective, as if their gaze is backward at Brahms, the aesthetic precursor, as his pieces inwardly contemplate the end of their own tonal language.