Suite for Piano (Schoenberg)

Music#

In form and style, the work echoes many features of the Baroque suite. There are six movements: The basic tone row of the suite consists of the following pitches: E–F–G–D–G–E–A–D–B–C–A–B. Schoenberg employs transpositions and inversions of the row for the first time: the sets employed are P-0, I-0, P-6, I-6 and their retrogrades. Arnold Whittall suggested that " t he choice of transpositions at the sixth semitone—the tritone—may seem the consequence of a desire to hint at ’tonic-dominant’ relationships, and the occurrence of the tritone G–D in all four sets is a hierarchical feature which Schoenberg exploits in several places". The Gavotte movement contains “a parody of a baroque keyboard suite that involves the cryptogram of Bach’s name as an important harmonic and melodic device” and a related quotation of Schoenberg’s Op. 19/vi. Edward T. Cone (1972) has catalogued what he believes to be a number of mistakes in Reinhold Brinkmann’s 1968 revised edition of Schoenberg’s piano music, one of which is in measure number five of the Suite’s “Gavotte”, G instead of G. Henry Klumpenhouwer invokes Sigmund Freud’s concept of parapraxes (i.e., mental slips) to suggest a psychological context explaining the deviation from the note predicted from the tone row.

References#

Notes Sources * * * * * * *

External links#

• Arnold Schönberg Center’s webpage (with recording) on Op. 25