Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (version for string orchestra)

Program notes

About the Work

Verklärte Nacht (‘Transfigured Night’) is the piece by which most concertgoers first meet Schoenberg, and it comes from before any of the things he is famous for. He wrote it in 1899, aged 25, as a string sextet, by most accounts in about three weeks. Atonality was nearly a decade away and the twelve-note method more than two. The language is the late Romantic one he had grown up with, and its two parents are easy to hear: Wagner, above all Tristan und Isolde, in the restless harmony and the recurring motifs, and Brahms in the way every theme is worked, varied and combined with the others.

What was new was the idea of writing a symphonic poem for chamber forces. The subject is a poem by Richard Dehmel from the collection Weib und Welt (‘Woman and World’, 1896), a book that had its author prosecuted for obscenity and blasphemy. Two people walk through a bare, cold wood by moonlight. The woman confesses that she is carrying a child conceived with a man she did not love, before she met the one beside her. They walk on. Then the man answers: the warmth between them will transfigure the child, and it will be his. They embrace and walk on through what the poem’s last line calls the high, bright night.

The sextet was first played in Vienna on 18 March 1902 by the Rosé Quartet with two extra players, one of them the cellist and composer Franz Schmidt. The audience was restless and some of it hostile; Schoenberg later recalled that the evening ended in a riot and in actual fights. Part of the offence was the poem, and part was the harmony, which wanders a long way from its home key of D minor. A Viennese concert society had already turned the score down, reportedly because of a single chord that the textbooks did not recognise. Dehmel himself heard the piece and wrote to the composer that he had meant to follow the motifs of his text in the music but soon forgot to, he was so enthralled.

Schoenberg later arranged the sextet for full string orchestra, and that is the form in which it is most often heard and the one played in this concert. It makes a pointed opening for this programme: Mahler’s Seventh, after the interval, was a symphony that Schoenberg and his circle revered.

What to Listen For

The music runs for nearly half an hour without a break and follows the five stanzas of the poem: the walk, the woman’s confession, the walk again, the man’s reply, and the walk transfigured.

It begins with the walk: a slow, heavy tread on a repeated low D with a falling line above it, cold and dark. The confession is the longest and most turbulent part. Listen for the agitated, sighing figures that pile up as the woman speaks, and for the solo violin and viola that emerge from the body of strings, a reminder of the piece’s chamber origins. Her section ends in something close to collapse, and the walking music returns, louder and more desolate than before.

Then comes the turn on which the whole piece depends. After a pause the cellos begin a warm, broad melody in D major: the man’s answer. From this point the harmony settles, the textures lighten, and themes that sounded anguished in the first half come back transformed. Muted strings, harmonics and rippling arpeggios stand for the shimmering night the man describes.

In the closing pages the opening tread returns one last time, now in the major and high up, over glittering figuration, and the music fades out on a long D major chord.