Schoenberg, Transfigured Night, sextet

Arnold Schoenberg, founder of the Vienna School together with his disciples Webern and Berg, and one of the most important composers in the evolution of Western music in the 20th century had no music lessons other than those he received from a musicologist and his brother-in-law, a conductor and composer. Born in Vienna in 1874 into a very modest Jewish family, he did not have access to what in his day was an average bourgeois education, that is, one that could not do without the presence of a piano in the living room. There was no piano in Arnold's house. So his musical vocation, although manifest from childhood, had to be satisfied almost in a self-taught way.

A remarkable cellist who would surprise the world
The future creator of atonality and twelve-tone technique in close conjunction with his disciples, before the age of twenty had become a remarkable cellist, albeit an amateur, since he owed his training as an instrumentalist mostly to himself. But at the same time, he showed clear signs of aptitude for composition, which had already surprised his composer brother-in-law at an early age. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the musical world, divided between the applause of his incorruptible followers and the unleashed anger of his detractors – which would accompany the composer throughout his life – was surprised.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874 - 1951)

Transfigured Night

His early works bear the unmistakable stamp of German post-Romanticism, perhaps nowhere more evident than in his first major work, the 1899 sextet for strings Transfigured Night. However, the twenty-five-year-old Schoenberg already flirts here with atonalism, pushing tonality to its limits.

Inspired by a poem

The work, in a single movement despite its half-hour length, is inspired by a poem, making it the first "programmatic" piece written for a chamber ensemble. The episode tells the story of a woman, unfaithful to the man she really loves, who passionately and tragically confesses her infidelity to him, and the subsequent acceptance of the facts by the betrayed lover. The love of both will finally overcome the mess, "transfiguring" the night in which the confession is perpetrated.

The rendition is by the American chamber ensemble NEC Contemporary Ensemble.