I

Schoenberg was not the first to use the title "Kammersinfonie." In 1905 a composer in Berlin, Paul Juon, had published with that title a work for

strings, woodwinds, and piano.^[2] Several more similarly named pieces were to appear over the next decade or so.^[3] But unlike the chamber symphonies of his contemporaries, Schoenberg's may be said to have created a new genre, in which two previously separate traditions, those of chamber and symphonic music, merge — or, more precisely, collide. Reinhold Brinkmann has aptly called op. 9 a "gepresste Sinfonie," a compressed symphony;^[4] it might be equally considered a piece of "explodierte Kammermusik." The best way to get a sense of this dialectic of chamber/symphonic, which in turn incorporates some of the others mentioned above, is through the interpretive frameworks developed by Paul Bekker, Theodor W. Adorno, and Carl Dahlhaus, upon which I draw in the following discussion.

From the late eighteenth century the two streams of chamber and symphonic music, though independent in many respects, had tended to share instrumental structures such as the sonata form. Over the course of the nineteenth century they began to diverge both sociologically and compositionally. Symphonic music, especially as embodied in the symphonies of Beethoven, tended to address a large public audience. Beethoven's symphonies were conceived, Bekker asserted, in the spirit of human liberation and brotherhood — Menschheitsbefreiung and Menschheitsverbrüderung.^{[ 5]} As such, they are authentically gesellschaftsbildend, community forming. For Adorno, the Beethoven symphonies were "orations to mankind."^[6] Chamber music, on the other hand, was aimed at a more select, sophisticated audience — at first, from the Renaissance through the late eighteenth century, an aristocratic one; then, after the late eighteenth century, an educated, musically cultivated bourgeoisie.

These social aspects had compositional ramifications. As a public genre, and like a public oration, the symphony tended toward bolder, blunter effects. This is not to suggest any lack of compositional sophistication in the symphonies of Beethoven, but, as Adorno says, "in principle, they are simpler than chamber music despite their substantially more lavish apparatus."^[7] Chamber music — and here the late quartets of Beethoven are probably the paradigms — has a more inward and intricate compositional language. Adorno defines chamber music as being characterized by the principle of "motivische-thematische Arbeit," or motivic-thematic working.^[8] Dahlhaus adds to this definition the technique of "obbligato accompaniment," in which ostensibly secondary parts take on great thematic importance. He asserts also that chamber music became "intimately bound up with" a further compositional principle, that which Schoenberg called developing variation, the procedure of spinning out large, continuous spans from the constant transformation or reinterpretation of very reduced thematic or motivic material.^[9]

As exploited by German composers from Haydn to Schoenberg, all three of these principles — motivic-thematic working, obbligato accompaniment,

and developing variation — led to increasing compositional sophistication and, concomitantly, greater technical and interpretive demands on players. The result was a radical, perhaps even paradoxical, transformation of the status of chamber music. As it became too demanding both intellectually and technically for the private amateur player, chamber music was forced out into the public concert hall and into the hands of professional ensembles. String quartets — from the Schuppanzigh in Beethoven's day, down through the Hellmesberger in Brahms's, to those of Rosé and Kolisch in Schoenberg's (and now the Arditti and Kronos in our own) — were formed in large part to bring the music of modern composers before the concertgoing public.

From Beethoven's late quartets through the works of Brahms and Schoenberg, chamber music became a kind of refuge for the most advanced compositional techniques. In the case of Brahms, the complexity of the music and the comprehension of the public seemed still to coexist in a delicate balance. But with Schoenberg's early chamber works, a crisis point in this development was reached. In Adorno's words: "The requirements of Schoenberg's chamber music could not be reconciled any more with Hausmusik, with the ambience of domesticity. They were as explosive in content as in technique. They obliged chamber music to make its definitive move to the concert hall."^[10] And as is well known, the public reaction to Schoenberg's early chamber music was mainly hostile. Dahlhaus captures the paradox: "The isolation into which Schoenberg fell is to be understood primarily as the distancing of the chamber-music composer from the chamber-music listeners, from the musically cultivated audience."^[11]