Schoenberg, Three Piano pieces, Op 11

Over the course of a little more than twenty years, Arnold Schoenberg, creator of dodecaphonism, composed five sets of pieces for solo piano. These reflect his evolution from an initial break with the harmonic and melodic canons dominating for 300 years, through a return to a kind of neoclassicism, to finally openly address the most rigorous atonality in his last works for piano. Three Piano Pieces from Opus 11 is the first work of his piano production, composed in 1909 and premiered in Vienna the following year.

Schoenberg, musician, and painter

The period leading up to his creation was an embarrassing and unhappy one for the composer. As is well known, Arnold Schoenberg was also a painter (and an outstanding one at that), a vocation that ran almost parallel to that of a musician. In those years he met the Austrian painter Richard Gerstl, whom he took into his home to receive painting lessons from him. It was not a good idea. Gerstl and Mathilde, Arnold's wife, fell in love. Mathilde fled with her painter but returned soon after. Arnold caught his breath, but Gerstl could not stand the pain and killed himself.

The novel twist

Arnold Schoenberg (1874 - 1951)
Portrait by Richard Gerstl (1883 - 1908)

Mathilde returned in October 1908. In February of the following year, Schoenberg began the composition of the Three Pieces. And for the first time in music history, each sound or interval here showed a singular and independent value, free from the hierarchies of tonal discourse. Despite the novel twist, for Schoenberg, it was only the appropriate, obligatory path in the natural evolution of musical language. And so he pointed out in November 1909:

"I am striving to reach a goal that seems to be clear and I already feel the opposition that I will have to overcome.... It is not lack of inventiveness or technical ability, or ignorance of the demands of contemporary aesthetics that has led me to this.... [simply] I am following an inner compulsion that is stronger than education, stronger than my artistic training..."

Going a little further, it is said that Arnold looked forward to a time when grocers' boys would whistle serial music in their rounds. But, sadly for him, this never occurred.

Three Piano Pieces Opus 11 

00       No 1  Mässige (moderato)

03:20  No 2  Mässige (moderato)

09:47  No 3  Bewegte (movido)

The performance, brilliant, is by the Chinese pianist Di Wu.