Page 259 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

stop there…You wouldn’t put on a Picasso exhibition and stop in 1907 with Les demoiselles
d’Avignon!

I think Schoenberg is still perceived as less approachable than Berg: people swoon over
the Seven Early Songs, and the two operas are quite tantalising and engaging. Yes, you’ve got to
listen to Schoenberg with your full attention - but in a way it’s not all that different from listening
to late Strauss, which can often be quite angular.

The songs are so varied, and it’s been good to do a deep-dive and discover just how Romantic a
lot of them are: here is a composer who has enormous breadth, but I think will forever be
remembered as someone who just wrote Serialist music. It’s quite incredible to think that the
man who wrote Gurre-Lieder could also compose those Op. 48 songs which are super-sparse and
very intense, folk-song settings which also owe something to Bach, film music, cabaret songs…
And in the middle of it all there’s Pierrot Lunaire, which still sits in a league of its own today.

You mentioned Wolf there - do you see a direct line from the Classical song-tradition to
Schoenberg, or does he occupy a different space entirely?
I remember taking some Webern to my Lieder class when I was studying at Guildhall, and people
rolling their eyes as if to say ‘Oh, here comes Claire with some random twentieth-century
repertoire again’...But these songs are part of the canon, and how amazing that that canon
stretches from Schubert to Schoenberg and beyond. Schoenberg and Webern’s songs are often
quite conservative in the sense that they’re still very much voice and accompaniment: even if the
vocal line is very angular it still has its own trajectory, with the rest of the sound-world
underneath.

In something like Ravel’s Mallarmé settings (and a lot of more recent music for voice and
chamber ensemble) you have musical ideas passing through all the lines, but with Schoenberg
and Webern you can sing the vocal line unaccompanied and it stands up on its own. It’s part of
that classical song tradition which we know so well from Schubert.

A great example is The Ballad of Jane Grey, which is really in that tradition of the story-song which
Schubert, Schumann and Wolf loved so much. For all his Modernism Schoenberg is writing a
Romantic ballad here; he’s not messing about with the form. (Why and how he got interested in a
bit-part British queen I have no idea!). I don’t think he’s always such a dyed-in-the-wool
Modernist as people believe, and it would be great to transmute that to young singers as well as
to curious listeners; hopefully at least one music-student might think ‘I don’t need to bring Die
Taubenpost to Lieder class again - I’ll try Schoenberg’s Traumleben!’.

How about the influence of Schoenberg's older contemporaries, such as Mahler?
It’s interesting that you mention Mahler, as there’s a direct link there. Chris suggested we include
a couple of piano pieces, and the very last one on the album was composed just after
Schoenberg had come back from Mahler’s funeral. There are only about five distinct pitches in
there, and in terms of the way he spaced them around the instrument reminds me a bit of Ligeti;
it’s a little goodbye present to a friend, and it’s very touching.

Mahler had been a real supporter of Schoenberg’s when perhaps others weren’t; he knew
Schoenberg was a trailblazer, and because he himself was so much a part of the establishment
his support meant a lot. And Schoenberg would have been very aware that people like Mahler
and Wolf were a part of his musical pedigree. Nowadays we’ve got a bit fixated on the idea of