About this Piece

In 1949, two years before his death, Schoenberg wrote: “It was not given to me to continue writing in the style of Verklärte Nacht…fate led me along a harder path. But the wish to return to the earlier style remained constantly within me, and from time to time I have given in to this desire....” The style referred to was, to state the case perhaps oversimply, that of Wagner, above all of his Tristan und Isolde, with lashings of Brahms. Schoenberg continues: “Nevertheless, I believe that a little bit of Schoenberg may also be found in it, particularly in the breadth of the melodies, in contrapuntal and motivic developments, and in the quasi-contrapuntal movement of harmonies and harmonic basses against the melody. Finally, there are even passages…of indeterminate tonality, which doubtless may be portents for the future.”

It was Alexander Zemlinsky, Schoenberg’s first composition teacher (and later his brother-in-law), who had suggested to the Vienna Tonkünstlerverein in 1899 that it perform the just-completed string sextet Verklärte Nacht. But the group was not impressed, one observer dismissing it as Tristan und Isolde “smudged over.” Yet four years later the same organization did present the work, the performers being the augmented Rosé Quartet.

Schoenberg, as noted, maintained a lifelong affection for his luscious early creation, arranging it for string orchestra in 1917 and again, with slight alterations, in 1943. The inspiration for the score came from the poem Verklärte Nacht, by the German writer Richard Dehmel (1863–1920), whose sensual lyrics represented an extreme reaction to the prevalent naturalism of his time. The five main sections of Schoenberg’s composition correspond to the five sections of Dehmel’s poem:

Two people walk through a bare, cold grove;
The moon races along with them, they look into it.
The moon races over tall oaks,
No cloud obscures the light from the sky,
Into which the black points of the boughs reach.
A woman’s voice speaks:

I’m carrying a child, and not yours,
I walk in sin beside you.
I have committed a great offense against myself.
I no longer believed I could be happy
And yet I had a strong yearning
For something to fill my life, for the joys of
Motherhood
And for duty; so I committed an effrontery,
So, shuddering, I allowed my sex
To be embraced by a strange man,
And, on top of that, I blessed myself for it.
Now life has taken its revenge:
Now I have met you, oh, you.

She walks with a clumsy gait,
She looks up; the moon is racing along.
Her dark gaze is drowned in light.
A man’s voice speaks:

May the child you conceived
Be no burden to your soul;
Just see how brightly the universe is gleaming!
There’s a glow around everything;
You are floating with me on a cold ocean,
But a special warmth flickers
From you into me, from me into you.
It will transfigure the strange man’s child.
You will bear the child for me, as if it were mine;
You have brought the glow into me,
You have made me like a child myself.

He grasps her around her ample hips.
Their breath kisses in the breeze.
Two people walk through the lofty, bright night.

—Herbert Glass