Air From Another Planet

 I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56.

Arnold Schoenberg: String Quartets #1-4; Berg String Quartet; Webern Five Movements for String Quartet

The Juilliard String Quartet recorded the complete Schoenberg String Quartets over a dozen sessions at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in 1951 and 1952. They were released on three LPs in 1953, with fabulous covers designed by Abstract Expressionist James Brooks. Brooks was a friend of Jackson Pollock & Lee Krasner; when they relocated to East Hampton, he moved into their Greenwich Village studio.

These paintings are very much apposite to the music on these records, which emphasize the expressionist, highly emotional flavour of the first two quartets. Other more recent recordings, by the LaSalle or Arditti Quartets, for example, make what I think are slightly more convincing versions of the last two, 12-tone quartets. But the Juilliard's recordings are faithful, I think, to the spirit of the composer, who died in July of 1951, just before these recordings began. The 3rd and 4th Quartets are much more than mathematical constructs, and require emotional commitment as well as precision and clarity. The Juilliard Quartets bring it all to the last two, but are, I think most outstanding in the great 2nd Quartet.

Schoenberg's 2nd String Quartet is a landmark work in classical music. He wrote this music while caught up in a horrible domestic drama - he discovered his wife was having an affair with his close friend, and when she eventually returned to Schoenberg, the friend committed suicide. To help work through these events, Schoenberg introduced a soprano in the third and fourth movements, singing songs set to two poems of Stefan George:

I feel air from another planet.

The faces that once turned to me in friendship

Pale in the darkness before me.

The pain Schoenberg suffered is translated to his music in the most expressionist way, while suddenly, hundreds of years of tonal music unravels before our ears.

"Surprisingly, without any expectation on my part, these songs showed a style quite different from everything I had written before.... New sounds were produced, a new kind of melody appeared, a new approach to expression of moods and characters was discovered."

Schoenberg's use of the passive voice here is quite astounding. It's as if his revolutionary move to atonality was done without his own volition. The system he eventually created to move on from traditional music was forged in the fire of jealousy, pain, grief and guilt.

This is an outstanding performance of this work. Soprano Uta Graf and the Juilliard Quartet are especially good in the fourth movement, capturing perfectly its sense of ecstatic mystery. Arnold Schoenberg, completely steeped in the over-emotional, over-ripe world of Zemlinsky, Mahler and Richard Strauss has his crisis, and bravely moves on to the thin air of atonality and the coldly precise "Method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another." And the Juilliard String Quartet are there to guide us in following Schoenberg's epic journey.