Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra
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The Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra in B flat is a work by the composer Arnold Schoenberg.
The concerto is "arguably the happiest, most high-spirited, playful, tender, tuneful, and balletic music that he ever wrote," as the Schoenberg expert and conductor Robert Craft has noted. The Concerto was not only an atypical work by the formidable Schoenberg. It was also totally out of character with the unhappy circumstances of the time.
The work is divided into four movements:
- Largo - Allegro
- Largo
- Allegretto grazioso
- Hornpipe
[edit] Circumstances
The Concerto was written in the summer of 1933. In May of that year Schoenberg had been forced to flee Berlin. He went to Paris (and there reconverted from Lutheranism to the Judaism of his childhood).
Schoenberg spent the summer of 1933 with his wife and infant daughter in the French town of Arachon, a seaside resort near Bordeaux. There he completed the Concerto before he left for America in October.
The work was first performed on September 26, 1934 in Prague.
[edit] The music
Schoenberg's Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra in B flat is "after" the Concerto Grosso Op. 6, No. 7 by George Frideric Handel, "freely transcribed and developed by Arnold Schoenberg." Schoenberg did more than simply orchestrate the Handel concerto. The Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra is by Schoenberg. Handel is left at the starting gate.
Schoenberg made this clear: "I was mainly intent on removing the defects of the Handelian style. Just as Mozart did with Handel’s Messiah, I have had to get rid of whole handfuls of rosalias and sequences, replacing them with real substance. I also did my best to deal with the other main defect of the Handelian style, which is that the theme is always best when it first appears and grows steadily more insignificant and trivial in the course of the piece."
Schoenberg's Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra is easy listening as Schoenberg's work goes. However, it is, as Robert Craft has observed, "one of the most demanding (pieces) for the solo instruments of a quartet since Beethoven’s Great Fugue" (Grosse Fugue).
Other works for this combination have been written by Louis Spohr, Benjamin Lees and Bohuslav Martinů.
[edit] Sources
- Program notes by Robert Craft for the recording (Naxos 8.557520) of Schoenberg's Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra in B flat major performed by the Fred Sherry Quartet with the Twentieth Century Classics Ensemble under the baton of Robert Craft.
- Center in Vienna devoted to Arnold Schoenberg
