5 Pieces for Orchestra

Composed in 1909, Schoenberg’s 5 Pieces for Orchestra confirmed the arrival of a new kind of musical modernism, exploring wild mood swings and extremes of pace and sonority, with a dissonant harmonic language to match. Schoenberg’s idiom had then stepped into a new world of free atonality. Traditional tonal harmonic and structural control methods had dropped away so that it seemed impossible to compose on the large scale of a standard symphonic movement—making each of the Five Pieces relatively short. Originally, none had titles, and when Schoenberg’s publisher asked him to supply some, he reluctantly responded with these: “Premonitions”, “The Past”, “Summer Morning by a Lake: Chord-Colors”, “Peripeteia”, and “The Obbligato Recitative”. While the compressed forms of “Premonitions” and “Peripeteia” feature ferocious contrasts of mood and volume, “The Past” has a dreamy nostalgia recalling Mahler; and “Chord-Colors” is quiet throughout, with a succession of static chords, each repeated in gently shifting orchestration (a technique Schoenberg described as Klangfarbenmelodie or “sound-colour melody”). The Five Pieces was first performed in 1912 in London’s Queen’s Hall, conducted by Sir Henry Wood, and met with general audience bewilderment. The original 1909 score was written for a large orchestra, including a contrabass clarinet, six horns and four trombones. In 1949, Schoenberg made a new version, leaving the music unchanged, while arranging it for a standard-size symphony orchestra.