Suite for Piano

Written between 1921 and 1923, the Suite for Piano Op. 25 was Schoenberg’s first work to deploy his newly devised method of 12-note composition from start to finish, in each of its five movements. Besides his modernist instincts, Schoenberg was steeped in the music of Austro-German tradition, and felt keenly his responsibility, as he saw it, to take this forward into a new era. So while his idiom is here at its most advanced, the Suite for Piano also deploys forms from the keyboard-suite genre that Bach had raised to a pinnacle of mastery two centuries earlier. The opening “Präludium” (“Prelude”) recalls the impulsive, hyper-expressive style of Schoenberg’s earlier music—and this is followed by an intricately rhythmic “Gavotte”, whose outer sections enclose an elegant central “Musette”. There is a similar contrast between the free-ranging “Intermezzo” third movement and the fourth, a “Minuett” with a central Trio section. Finally, comes a fast “Gigue” (“Jig”), of extreme and brilliant technical complexity.