3 Piano Pieces

The year 1909, when Schoenberg composed his Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11, marked the point where his music moved decisively into a new world of “atonality”. Passages in Schoenberg’s earlier works had increasingly explored beyond the conventional tonality that had underpinned western classical music for centuries; but sooner or later in each case, there would be a reassuring return to a traditional key. In the first and third of the Op. 11 Piano Pieces, however, that return to tonality did not happen: Schoenberg sensed that his music had now broken free of the need to do this. The first two pieces still have a conventionally lyrical feel and flow; and the second deploys a repeated two note-figure (the notes F and D) that loosely anchors it to the key of D minor, with freer chromatic harmony floating above and around this. In the third piece, however, the music’s compressed, hyper-intense emotionalism and wild mood-switches present the new world of “atonality” as strange and disturbing. “Modern music” had arrived.