Three Pieces for Piano, Op.11

Mässig (moderate)

Mässig (moderate)

Bewegt (quick)

The crisis Schoenberg found himself in for a few years round 1910 was not a result of “anarchy and revolution,” he would argue, but a “product of evolution.” Even so, it was he who was bold enough to accept the implications of late-romantic harmony and develop them to their logical conclusion. In so doing he lost touch with tonality - which is akin to an artist losing touch with perspective - and deprived himself (and his pupils) of a means of structuring his instrumental compositions. That was a problem he would solve, at least to his own satisfaction, some years later. In the meantime, he was beginning to realise, he had no choice but to keep his pieces short.

Schoenberg’s cult of brevity was to achieve its extreme in the Six Little Piano Pieces, Op.19. The Three Pieces, Op.11, which were written two years earlier in 1909, retain some conventional formal elements and are rather longer. The first one is a ternary structure with outer sections based on a theme that seems to be inspired by Wagner’s Tristan Prelude. Although it is constantly varied, that theme remains consistent enough at least to throw into relief a contrastingly bright idea in dotted rhythms in the quicker middle section. The second and longest of the Three Pieces - longer than all of the Six Little Pieces put together - is built round a central climax of trills high in the right hand and is held together by repeated occurrences of a brooding rhythmic ostinato first heard low in the left hand in the opening bars. Written a few months later than the other two, the third is the most daring of the Three Pieces in that it is liberated from all formal and harmonic convention. While offering distant echoes of earlier material, it is impulsive, violent, dramatic in its colour contrasts and, by necessity, short.