Composed in 1899, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) is a transitional work in every sense, a twilight-of-Romanticism tone poem by a composer whose atonal revolution was soon to stand Romanticism on its head. Luscious in its tonal richness, Verklärte Nacht nonetheless expands tonality to its limits so that there was little place to go afterward. Unlike Richard Strauss, who expanded tonality to the breaking point but still stuck with it, Schoenberg was soon to abandon the late-Romantic rhetoric of Verklärte Nacht for atonality and then serialism—an abandonment that only adds to the work’s melancholy poignancy. By the time he composed the Second String Quartet and Friede auf Erden in the early 20th century, Schoenberg’s late-Romantic style was on the verge of disintegration, with extreme chromatic harmonies moving inexorably toward atonality. One can hear the collapse of an older world and the struggle toward a new one. A tenuous but stubborn tonality keeps asserting itself, pulling Schoenberg’s music out of the atonal abyss—but only barely. In Verklärte Nacht, tonality is still very much alive, though one can hear symptoms of its oncoming illness.
Verklärte Nacht was originally written for chamber ensemble and expanded for string orchestra in 1917. The narrative behind the notes, based on a poem from Richard Dehmel’s Weib und Welt (Woman and World), depicts two lovers in a moonlit forest. In anxiety and remorse, the woman confesses that she is pregnant by a previous lover; though she fears her current lover’s reaction, she hopes that motherhood will at least instill a purpose in life. The man’s reaction is unexpected: The beauty of the forest inspires him to rise to the occasion and proclaim that love will unite them and make the child genuinely their own. At the end, he embraces her and they continue their nocturnal walk.
It is fascinating to compare Verklärte Nacht with Erwartung, Schoenberg’s 1909 “monodrama”—a revolutionary, pre-Ulysses stream of consciousness that also has its heroine meeting her lover in a moonlit forest. In Erwartung we enter a new, terrifying century: The music is anxiety-ridden and atonal; the woman kicks her lover’s bloody corpse—which turns out to be a figment of her imagination. In Verklärte Nacht, we are still in the 19th century, with both scenario and music, even though Schoenberg plays with the limits of the tonal system.
The music paints a dark, ominous forest, then proceeds with two sonata structures: the first depicting the anxious, confessing woman, the second her warm, emphatic lover. The delicate coda shimmering over pizzicato notes provides a magical rejoinder to anyone who thinks Schoenberg was incapable of writing beautiful music. Like the abstract modern painter whose early works show that he certainly could paint representational pictures, Schoenberg demonstrates here that before he ventured into new worlds of sound, he could compose lush, Romantic melodies with the best of them.
Mahler is now a central part of musical culture; his simultaneous embrace of ecstasy and despair, swooning lyricism and brutal dissonance, epic structures and microscopic details, and ethereal melodies and coarse vernacular tunes, constitutes a largeness of vision that today’s listeners find riveting. Unlike Mahler’s contemporaries, we view him as embodying multiplicity rather than contradiction, grandeur rather than sprawl, emotional honesty rather than crassness.
Early works often yield fascinating glimpses of the mature artist to come. Mahler’s First, however, is the rare example of a long premiere symphony that bears the artist’s distinct signature in almost every measure. As Schoenberg, one of Mahler’s earliest champions, observed, “Everything that will characterize him is already present … Here already his life-melody begins, and he merely develops it. Here are his devotions to nature and his thoughts of death.”
Here also are the manic emotional shifts, the gigantic orchestra (including seven horns and five trumpets), the injection of popular sentimental tunes into epic symphonic structures, the elaborate extra-musical “program,” the long stretches of primeval stillness, the juxtaposition of caustic irony with fervent Romanticism, and the gargantuan finale that recapitulates the symphony’s disparate parts and winds things up with a big bang. Mahler was fond of saying that a symphony should contain the entire universe, and he meant it from the beginning.
When compared to his subsequent works, Mahler’s First Symphony does have some marks of youth. The gloom and dementia that shatter some of the later symphonies are only brief convulsions here. The gut-wrenching fortissimo in the middle of the first movement, the “gloomy and uncanny colors” (as Mahler called them) in the third, and the “sudden outburst of a deeply wounded heart” opening the finale are real but momentary shadows banished by the symphony’s basic brashness and brightness.
Still, the First was radical enough to alienate the 1889 audience at its Hungarian Opera House premiere. Mahler provided a detailed program for this version of the piece. In addition to the “Titan” subtitle (after a Jean Paul novel) for the entire symphony, the first movement was called “Spring Without End” (the long pedal introduction evoking “the awakening of nature at early dawn”), the second “Under Full Sail,” the third “Funeral March in the Manner of Callot,” and the finale “From Inferno to Paradise.” Mahler also included another movement called “Blumine,” but later suppressed it. In addition, the symphony was divided into two parts, “From the Days of Youth” and “The Human Comedy.” Although he later scrapped all this, at least two sections—the awakening scene at the beginning and the visionary funeral march—actually constitute some of the most vivid and exacting tone painting he ever wrote.
—Jack Sullivan