Phantasy Op.47 (1949)

Grave - più mosso - meno mosso - grazioso - scherzando - tempo primo

The violin Phantasy, Schoenberg’s last chamber score, is a shorter and rather less radical successor to the visionary String Trio composed after a near-death experience three years earlier. Written as a solo violin work before the piano part was added - hence the title-page description “for violin with piano accompaniment” - it was commissioned by Adoloph Koldofsky, who gave the official first performance with Leonard Stein on the occasion of Schoenberg’s 75th birthday in Los Angeles in 1949. The violiinist died two years later, just a few months before the composer, who dedicated the Phantasy to his memory.

Schoenberg’s purpose in the Phantasy was, he said, “to write a piece the unhindered flow of which cannot be derived from any kind of formal theories.” He was still too close to his Viennese background, however, to escape a historical influence which - in spite of a fairly strict application of the twelve-note technique to the thematic and harmonic material of the work - shows through not only stylistically but formally too. Like the early Chamber Symphony Op.9 (though with nothing like as much clarity), it is designed as a single movement with an exposition, a development with slow-movement and scherzo elements, and a recapitulation.

The violin’s dramatic opening gesture introduces the basic twelve-note series, in two groups of six notes each. More to the point, it is also the main theme of the work, characterised by a gruff upbeat on the very first note, passionate upward leaps and deap plunges downwards. It never reappears in exactly the same form but those attributes are distinctive enough to make it recognisable later - if not in the variations that immediately follow then at least at the salient points in the construction. In the meantime, following a brief but obviously purposeful ritardando on the piano, there is a second subject in a quicker tempo (più mosso) presented furioso on the violin. With a reference back to the main theme, the tempo drops again (meno mosso) to accommodate a melodious slow-movement episode with a particularly delicately scored passage of legato bowing high on the E-string coloured by tiny bell-like sounds at the top end of the piano keyboard.

At the centre of the work the development section begins by making an attractive (grazioso) feature of the once gruff upbeat and then turns its attention to a rhetorical treatment of the main theme. The following scherzo section is Viennese enough to include waltz-time allusions in a slower trio section before reverting to its characteristic spiccato articulation and scherzando tempo. More development leads, by way of an emphatic upbeat on the piano, to an unmistakably climactic recall of the main theme (tempo primo) and a brilliant coda based on the second subject.