Anton Webern

I have been trying to start my research for the new play Transfigured Night by Todd Rew and I thought, “Why not start with the music?”.

The play is based on the composer Anton Webern who is best known for his use of twelve-tone technique, a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg. I have to say that for me the music isn’t as pleasing or as satisfying as listening to Bach or Schubert (my personal favorite), but I am starting to find the beauty in it.

I have only just begun, but here is my favorite Webern piece so far:



Also, here is a brief history fo Schonenberg's Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), followed by part one of the Opus.

Verklärte Nacht (or Transfigured Night), Op. 4, is a string sextet in one movement composed by Arnold Schoenberg in 1899. Transfigured Night is considered his earliest important work. Composed in just three weeks, the work was inspired by Richard Dehmel's poem of the same name, along with Schoenberg's strong feelings upon meeting Mathilde von Zemlinsky (the sister of his teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky) whom he would later marry.

Dehmel's poem describes a man and a woman walking through a dark forest on a moonlit night, wherein the woman shares a dark secret with her new lover: she bears the child of another man.

Verklärte Nacht was controversial when it premiered in 1902. No only was the structure of the music before its time, but Dehmel's explicit references to sexual themes in the origional poem were a topic of great controversy. Unusual for its time, the music strays far from the home key, though the work is clearly rooted in D minor. A particular point of controversy was the use of a single inverted ninth chord, which resulted in its rejection by the Vienna Music Society because they claimed such a chord is 'nonexistent'. Schoenberg once remarked "and thus (the work) cannot be performed since one cannot perform that which does not exist".