String Trio, Op.45

Part 1 - 1st Episode - Part 2 - 2nd Episode - Part 3

Forced out of his teaching post at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1933, Schoenberg spent the last eighteen years of his life in exile in the United States. While, obviously, this was not a situation he would have chosen himself, it did have one distinct advantage for him. As a chronic asthmatic, he found life in California congenial not only for its political conditions but also for its climate, which probably added several years to his life. It is true that he very nearly died at his home in Brentwood Park in August 1946 - when his heart stopped beating after ill-advised medical treatment and was set in motion only by a direct injection - but even that experience had its positive aspect. It was, in fact, the inspiration for his String Trio, which he began in hospital on 20 August and completed on 23 September.

One of the greatest of all his works, the String Trio is outstanding among those written on a twelve-note series. Far from pretending that the twelve-note technique can be applied to traditional forms and conventional rhythms and textures - as in his last two String Quartets, for example - he created here a sound, a rhythmic identity and a structure as radical as his harmonic language. He was able to do this partly because vivid memories of his near-death experience and the painful treatment for it found their way into the music and demanded their own means of expression and their own colouring at the extremes of the string trio spectrum. These in turn demanded their own form which, to oversimplify the situation, turned out to be a kind of single-movement ternary structure in which the first part is recalled in the last.

The expressionist Part 1, where the themes are dramatic gestures rather than melodic motifs and where there is little apparent continuity, is followed, after a transition of silences and whispered tremolandos, by a more melodious 1st Episode featuring among other things a violin recitative with an extravagant glissando. Part 2 has a vague but surreal waltz element which, after a short pause, is developed in the 2nd Episode. Part 3 begins by echoing the muffled protest at the opening of the work but is devoted largely to a recapitulation of the 1st Episode and ends with a conciliatory if inconclusive coda.

Gerald Larner©