4 Pieces for clarinet and piano Op.5 (1913)

Mässig

Sehr langsam

Sehr rasch

Langsam

In June 1913, on the last day of a visit to Schoenberg in Berlin, Berg was devastated to be told by his mentor that his two latest works, the Altenberg Lieder Op.4 and the Four Pieces for clarinet Op.5, were “insignificant and worthless”. Exactly why Schoenberg so disliked these scores one can only guess. But what distinguishes them from works which had won Schoenberg’s earlier approval is the extreme brevity of some of the songs and all four of the clarinet pieces. His other star pupil Anton Webern, was a natural aphorist whereas Berg, he might have thought, was too prolix to emulate him convincingly. Ironically, Schoenberg himself, who was scarcely less prolix than Berg, had written Six Little Piano Pieces Op.19 two years earlier and Berg had clearly learned from them that, in a situation where tonality is negated and there is no structural system to replace it, brevity is an appropriate refuge.

Six years after his condemnation of the clarinet pieces Schoenberg’s opinion seemed to have changed: he not only accepted their dedication but also promoted their first performance at a concert of the Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen (Society for Private Musical Performances) which he ruled with autocratic authority. Whether more than one or two of those present at that performance in Vienna in October 1919 registered the apparent allusion in the very first bar to Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel is doubtful: there has certainly    been little comment on it in the 90 years since. It is not a literal quotation and it might not be intentional, but the familiar outline of the first few notes does heighten the profile of material that is to be the source of the most important melodic figurations and harmonic conjunctions in the rest of the work.

The Strauss echo is useful too in that it offers a reminder that, as in a tone poem, structure can be determined by events – which, in these atonal and athematic circumstances, is all we have to go on. The opening Mässig (moderate) is built round a central climax marked by heavily arpeggiated piano chords and a rasping flutter-tongued crescendo in the clarinet’s lowest register. The ending is an attenuated accretion of fourths high in the piano part over a progressively slower ostinato on the clarinet. If this represents the first movement of a miniature sonata, the Sehr langsam (very slow) – which clearly resembles the second piece of Schoenberg’s Op.19 in the repeated thirds in the piano part – is the slow movement, its broad melodic line rising on clarinet to a high central point and falling into near silence. The Sehr rasch (very fast) is a scherzo with fleeting, delicately articulated outer sections and a slower, expressively melodious middle section. Beginning like the second piece with repeated chords in syncopated rhythm on the piano, the Langsam finale is another slow movement, this one developing    a dramatic exchange between the two instruments towards the end. The violently percussive gestures low in the left hand set up a spectral reverberation in four open piano strings, suggesting an illusory C major conclusion with which the clarinet briefly and quietly agrees.