小册子说明文字 PART 2

A SCHOENBERGIAN BONSAI



In the last third of the 20th century the critical approach to the musical heritage of the West had tended to be philological and abrasive: to make a clean sweep of sedimentary attitudes that have been taken for granted, to divest musical works of the artistic haziness of misguided traditions, to penetrate through the musical flesh in quest of its skeleton: all of them directed towards "the essential", towards an assumed truth, a masked reality. It therefore goes without saying that the transcription, which is the very opposite of this process, since it is, above all, a transvestment, a metamorphosis, has long been considered to be an impure contrivance, the sign of an ingrown impoverishment due to the bourgeois custom of the piano-duet and the salon orchestra, or else to that of the exhibitionistic and spectacular virtuosic recital. But it is all becoming fashionable again; musicological purism, the Nouvelle Cuisine, conceptual art, the Nouveau Roman or structureless narrative, the serial note sequence, all of this has now virtually been consigned to the oblivion of an obsolete avant-garde. We willingly bear with Monteverdi or Schubert revisited by Luciano Berio (who, incidentally, never ceases revisiting himself), or with Handel's oratorios arranged by Mozart, and sauces - somewhat alleviated, it is true - have ousted steam-cooking and reinvested our dinner plates, novels alla Balzac are having a field day, painting is all broad figurative sweeps, and poets rhyme wherever they can.

Arnold Schoenberg was a child of a fin de siecle whose heritage he was far from disdaining (Brahms, Johann Strauss, then Mahler, whose music he discovered in 1903). The basis of his teaching was precisely an X-Ray-like study of the great masterpieces of a more or less recent past, and even more, those of modern music. A theorist as much as a professional practitioner of his subject, Schoenberg moved the practice of the transcription from the salon to the lecture-room: contrary to the bourgeois custom of playing Beethoven and Brahms in piano-duet versions as "musicques de joye", but using the same artifacts (four hands or two pianos, for instance), Schoenberg reduces music to its minimal substance. Black and white becomes an obligatory profession of faith, going as far as Farben, the piece from his own Opus 16 - which only works as a movement of color - and which Webern, charged with an impossible mission, had transcribed for two pianos in 1912: Schoenberg generalized this principle in the concerts he organized in his Viennese Society for Private Musical Performances founded in 1918. In an astonishingly dogmatic text by Alban Berg the general principles of this Society are set out: "1. The careful preparation and absolute faithfulness of the performances. 2. The repeated hearing of the same works. . The withdrawal of the concerts from the corrupting influence of official musical life, the rejection of commercial competition, the indifference towards any form of failure or success." Further on Berg states: "No tendency will be privileged. Only the mediocre being excluded, all modern music - from the works of Strauss and Mahler to more recent works, which one rarely has the opportunity of hearing - may be performed."

If the prophylactic virtues vaunted by Berg ("to listen to and judge many a modern work for orchestra shorn of the multitude of sound effects it owes to its orchestration, deprived of its most conspicuous artifices") were applied to two of Gustav Mahler's symphonies (the Sixth and the Seventh for piano duets), the Fourth and the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen were arranged for a chamber orchestra. Leaving the transcription of the Fourth to Erwin Stein (1885-1958), Schoenberg busied himself with the Lieder, which were actually performed by an ensemble of ten instruments at a Society concert on 6 February 1920, and subsequently conceived of the idea of transcribing Das Lied von der Erde (1908) for a similar ensemble of thirteen performers. He set to work, but the financial failure of the Society (1921) obliged him to leave it unfinished, and the version published in 1983 by Universal is mainly due to Rainer Riehn, who scrupulously respected the indications Schoenberg had annotated on the original score for large orchestra. For that matter, this "retrieval" of an unfinished work was in conformity with the pedagogical logic of Schoenberg, who was accustomed to outlining the form the transcription was to take and then leaving the work to be done by his pupils. On this occasion it is probable that he would have meant Webern to do it.

One could be surprised, but also a little frustrated, by the transcriptions for the black and white of the keyboard of music whose instrumental magic is a structural element of prime importance. The chamber orchestra that Schoenberg employed as an "essential" body of the traditional symphonic spectrum in his first Kammersymphonie for fifteen instruments (1906) is infinitely more suited than the simple keyboard to the Mahler idiom. As in the Kammersymphonie, one is sometimes troubled by the imbalance of the strings and the winds and by the "filling in" effects helped by the piano in fortissimo passages, but Der Abschied emerges transfigured in the strict sense of the term: precisely where the symphony orchestra disintegrates and individualizes the timbres, this pared down version renders a service to the lines and the legibility of their figures. Such is the paradoxical posthumous fate of this "bonsai" reading of a work that had gone in quest of its inspiration "to a distant land" on the borders of the East...

RENAUD MACHART, translation Derek Yeld