6 Little Piano Pieces

Composed in 1911, the Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19 took Schoenberg’s newly discovered world of musical “atonality” in a new direction. Until then, his instinct had generally been to compose in large musical forms. Now he found himself drawn to the opposite idea, of extreme musical compression. In a letter to his fellow composer Busoni, he wrote: “My music must be short—lean! Not ‘built’, but expressed.” The first five pieces were written in a single day (19 February 1911); and the complete cycle takes less than five minutes to perform. Each piece is a fleeting succession of musical ideas, like the sparest sketches on an artist’s notepad. While the tonal language is free and floating, the second piece deploys a repeated two-note chord (on G and B) as a kind of musical anchor point. The last piece is based on a simple repeated sequence of two chords, like a quiet lament; Schoenberg composed it on 17 June 1911, just after Mahler’s funeral in Vienna.