Verklärte Nacht

Composed in three weeks in 1899 during a summer holiday in the Austrian Alps, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) was Schoenberg’s first masterpiece, and it remains by far his most popular work. It had twin sources of inspiration: Schoenberg’s love for Mathilde von Zemlinsky (his future wife, and the sister of his former teacher, the composer/conductor Alexander von Zemlinsky), and “Verklärte Nacht” by the German poet Richard Dehmel (1863-1920). Schoenberg’s response was a unique kind of symphonic poem written not for orchestra, but for string sextet (a string quartet with an additional viola and cello). Dehmel’s poem depicts a couple walking alone through a forest on a moonlit night; the woman, distraught, says that she is pregnant by another man. Her companion replies that through his and her mutual love, the child will become theirs; they walk on together, and the night around them is radiantly transfigured. Schoenberg’s 30-minute work traces the course of Dehmel’s text in music of exceptional technical mastery, ranging from the turbulent late-Romantic chromaticism of the woman’s anguish to the transcendent beauty and tenderness of the man’s response. Verklärte Nacht was first performed in Vienna in 1902 and met with both warm applause (after the music) and scandalised hissing (during it). In 1917 Schoenberg arranged the work for string orchestra, and he made another similar version (mainly for copyright reasons) in 1943 after immigrating to America. While the music is better known in this format, the original string-sextet version is today also widely performed and recorded.