The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893

The First Group: Harmonic Aspects

The thematic process of the first group rides on the surface of, and of course helps to generate, a chromatic harmony that is no less volatile. In his 1924 essay Berg presents a harmonic skeleton of the first ten measures of op. 7 in what he calls "chorale style" (ex. 8.7). He attempts to show that despite the profusion of chords that occurs within a short space, all represented in half notes in his example, "there is no single sonority, not even on the unaccented semiquavers

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Example 8.7
Berg's "chorale" or harmonic reduction of the first theme of Schoenberg's First String Quartet, op. 7 (from Reich 1965, 197).

[eighth-notes] of these ten quartet bars, that cannot be immediately clear to any car educated in the of the last century" (Reich 1965, 198). As Christopher Wintle has shown, many of the verticalities in Berg's chorale can be explained along the lines of Schoenberg's own Theory of Harmony as chromatic alterations of certain basic chords (Wintle 1980, 52-55). And although, as Wintle also suggests. Berg's harmonies are sometimes dubious representations of what seems actually to be happening in the music, the chorale nevertheless offers a good starting point for an assessment of the local-level harmonic component of op. 7.

One of the striking things about the quartet-and this is readily apparent at the opening-is the avoidance of functional dominants on the small scale and the concomitant pervasiveness of vagrant harmonies. Berg's chorale displays a dominant-seventh harmony across (his) mm. 5-7; although the harmony is somewhat obscured by the motion of the voices, it is explicit in the first half of

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m. 6 and throughout m. 7. In the actual piece, this dominant is even less apparent, and less structural. Although the A in the bass on the last eighth note of Schoenberg's m. 2 supports a

and G in the viola, the first violin sustains F. When this F resolves to E, the viola part moves on to D and

, and thus away from the dominant.

The harmonic goal of the first phrase is not the elusive dominant, but the

half-diminished chord supporting the first violin's Eofm. 3, the note that, as has been suggested above, represents both the melodic end point of the first phrase (X1) and the beginning of the second. The

chord is, as we have seen, one of Schoenberg's favorite and most versatile vagrant chords. As early as the song Mädchenfrühling of 1897 (see chapter 3), he exploited its potential for ambiguity by thwarting its tendency to move to the dominant. In the opening measures of op. 7, the ambivalence of this chord becomes a direct counterpart or corollary to the fluid phrase structure: the

is a kind of free agent, as" vagrant"in its function as is the melodic E that it underpins.

Across the A portion of the first group, Schoenberg's strategy seems to be to increase the level of dissonance and chromaticism progressively. The

seventh, which is sustained between the outer parts for two full beats in m. 5 and supports a VI7 harmony, is the most powerful or prominent dissonance up to this point. From here the next two measures sound a range of vagrant harmonies, including diminished chords on the downbeats of mm. 6 and 7. The halfdiminished ii⁷ now in root position, reappears on the downbeat of m. 8; on the fourth beat, the root

drops suddenly to

against which sounds a ninth, F, high in the first violin. From the registral and harmonic standpoints, this is the most intense sonority yet to appear: all six notes of the whole-tone scale are sounded on this beat. Through m. 9, whole-tone chords alternate with dominant sevenths and a diminished seventh, as shown in ex. 8.8; the y theme cuts off abruptly on another whole-tone sonority on the downbeat of m. 10. The bass that underpins this extraordinary progression (y³ ) moves by fifth and third in alternation:

. Despite the cadential, dominant-sounding fifth resolutions, this progression cannot be explained in traditional terms. The bass can be said to outline interlocking triads of, respectively,

major, F minor, F major, D minor, and D major. The roots of these triads spell out a diminished triad,

, and thus project horizontally the principal vagrant harmony of the first group.

The two-beat silence of m. 10 is shattering in effect: the musical discourse seems paralyzed or frozen by the disorienting harmonic-thematic spiral of theme y. The shock is then intensified, rather than dissipated, by the sequential repetition of y up a major third (and now fortissimo). The use of exact sequence (it is exact up to m. 12) is rare in Schoenberg's works after 1900, and is especially strik-

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Example 8.8
First String Quartet, op. 7, alternation of whole-tone and seventh chords in mm. 8–10.

Example 8.9
Derivation and resolution of six-note whole-tone chord, from Schoenberg 1978, p. 392 (ex. 323).

ing in view of the negative opinion he often takes of it in his writings (see, for example, Schoenberg 1975, 129-31). Here the sequence seems specifically intended to exaggerate or prolong the disruption represented by y.

The combination of vagrant harmonies with fifth motion in the bass is reminiscent of certain works of 1899 and 1900, especially the song Jesus bettelt from op. 2 (see chapter 4) and Tove's"Du sendest mir einen Liebesblick"from Gurrelieder (see chapter 6). However, the whole-tone complex now plays a greater role, and does so in a way that has important implications for Schoenberg's compositional language in 1904-5. In op. 7, Schoenberg does not treat the whole-tone scale/chord as a purely symmetrical, rootless phenomenon. It is used less to weaken or loosen tonal implications than to intensify chromatic and vagrant harmonies. By resolving the whole-tone harmonies of mm. 8-9 emphatically up by fourth, as if they were dominant chords, Schoenberg seems to stress their functional aspect.

It is essential in this context to consider Schoenberg's discussion of whole tones in Theory of Harmony, where a chord containing all six notes of the whole-tone scale is derived from a dominant ninth, by "simultaneously raising and lowering the fifth"(Schoenberg 1978, 392). This ninth chord is then resolved by fifth, like a normal dominant, as in ex. 8.9. This resolution can be compared with those in theme y of op. 7, as shown in the first four chords of ex. 8.8. (In ex. 8.8 the

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Example 8.10
First String Quartet, op. 7, transition to return of main theme (A").

whole-tone chords are represented with four, not six, notes; but, as suggested earlier, all six notes of the scale are in fact sounded in the music, where the effect and function are similar to Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony example.) This rootoriented view of even the most vagrant chords is fully characteristic of Schoenberg. As with any chord discussed in Theory of Harmony, he stresses the way in which the whole-tone sonorities are to be resolved and linked with other harmonies. In this respect he contrasts his own early compositions with those of his contemporaries:

Debussy uses this chord and scale more in the sense of impressionistic expressive devices, somewhat as a tone color (so does Strauss in Salome); but they entered my work more for the sake of their harmonic and melodic possibilities: the chords for the sake of their connection with other chords, the scale for the sake of its peculiar influence on the melody.

SCHOENBERG 1978, 393

The role of the whole-tone complex in op. 7 as intensification, rather than dissolution, of diatonic-chromatic relations is reinforced at the transition to A" in the first group (ex. 8.10). After the imitative statement of the main theme beginning on

minor (m. 54, not shown in the example), the harmony arrives at a

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chord like a German sixth on

(mm. 59-60). This chord resolves more or less normally, as an augmented sixth, to a V⁷ of D (mm. 60-61); but the dominant does not resolve directly to the tonic. Instead the bass A is pushed back up to

on the downbeat of the m. 62. On the second beat, above the

, the upper parts form a four-part whole-tone chord (

), which then breaks off into a run containing all notes of the whole-tone scale. The scale here is literally generated from the kind of whole-tone chord that in his Theory of Harmony Schoenberg calls a dominant seventh with augmented fifth (Schoenberg 1978, 391). In his ex. 319a and b, Schoenberg derives the whole-tone scale by stepping between the tones of precisely this chord. Like the whole-tone harmonies of mm. 8-9, the whole-tone scale of mm. 62-63 is made to grow out of, and thus to heighten, the preceding chromaticism.

The whole-tone scale breaks off abruptly in m. 63; the reappearance of the main theme in D minor is preceded in m. 64 by a transitional measure identical with the first measure of x² (see ex. 8.10). Schoenberg's use of this thematic fragment as a transition is a masterstroke, for it serves genuinely to mediate between the preceding whole-tone scale and the subsequent D-minor return. Whole-tone elements are still present in the

scalar descent of x² , but Schoenberg introduces two notes that significantly form part, not of the whole-tone scale, but of the tonic triad: A (also the dominant) and

.When the main theme resumes in m. 65, x² retreats to its original position in an inner part (it is varied in sixteenth notes in the second violin). But now we hear x^2— and, consequently, the whole of the main theme—differently, since in the preceding measure it has evolved directly from the whole-tone scale. In this regard the "reborn" x² now fulfills a role barely suggested at the opening of the quartet.

Here we might do well to glance back at Berg's chorale (ex. 8.7), where the harmonic reduction of the second half of Schoenberg's m. 1 (the first half of m. 2 in the chorale) reveals a whole-tone chord of the French sixth type, with E in the bass. Berg's harmonic entity may not at first seem an accurate rendering of Schoenberg's music, since it freezes into a fictional simultaneity two pitches,

and

of x² , that are presented successively as chromatic neighbors to the A. And yet it is precisely this simultaneity displayed by Berg that is incorporated into the whole-tone chord on the second beat of m. 9 of the quartet (the downbeat of m. 23 in Berg's chorale) and that is contained as well in the whole-tone scale of mm. 62-63.^[14] By reiterating x² alone as a transitional gesture in m. 64, Schoenberg in effect realizes its original whole-tone implications.

The whole process is a splendid example of the intimate, reciprocal relationship between the vertical and horizontal dimensions-between "harmony" and

[14] The relation of the whole-tone chord of m. 2 of Berg's chorale to that of m. 23 has been pointed out by Wintle (1980, 54).

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"theme"—in the quartet. What begins as an apparently linear, thematic detail in the viola part of m. 1 becomes a harmonic element in the whole-tone sonorities of mm. 8-9, then evolves back into the former role with the whole-tone scale of mm. 62-63.