Late Romantic Darkness

Clarinet Quintets are exclusive merchandise. Mozart wrote one, allegedly the last instrumental work he completed. Compared with other works by Mozart it is music of tranquillity and depth, and the clarinettist is more a chamber musician than a virtuoso soloist. Johannes Brahms also brought a chamber music approach and a calm, somewhat melancholic mood to his Clarinet Quintet, which is inspired by Mozart’s in more ways than one.

Brahms and the Clarinet

When Brahms wrote his one and only Clarinet Quintet, he had not composed for several years. Many believed him to have given up writing music for good. Then in spring 1891 he heard the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld play Weber’s Clarinet Concerto, and a mere few months later Brahms had completed his quintet. It is conceivable that Mühlfeld allowed his origins as a violinist to influence the way he played the clarinet alongside stringed instruments. In all events Brahms was inspired, and in the course of a short time he had completed four chamber music works incorporating a clarinet: a trio, the quintet and two sonatas for clarinet and piano, all dedicated to Richard Mühlfeld. Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet has four movements, of which the last, as in Mozart’s quintet, is in variation form.

From the Late Romantic era to the Hardanger Fiddle

Both mood and harmonic colouring form a connection between the Clarinet Quintet and Arnold Schönberg’s Verkärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). Schönberg wrote the work before he started experimenting with twelve-tone techniques, and harmonically the music has a late Romantic quality reminiscent of Brahms.

As an interlude between the two works Knut Hamre will play Norwegian Hardanger fiddle music. This may at first appear to be a strange leap. On the other hand, a Hardanger fiddle tunes often does the same as Schönberg seeks to do in Verkärte Nacht: it portrays, in free musical form, a person, a situation, a place or an emotion.

Words as Form

Verkärte Nacht takes its title from a poem by Richard Dehmel, a con­temporary of the composer. Schönberg uses no more of the text than the title. However, it is the poem that dictates the musical sequence: the music closely follows the course of the action in the five verses.

The poem portrays a scene in a forest in moonlight, where a woman admits to her lover that she is expecting a child with another. Schönberg translates the dramatic situation and the woman’s emotions into dark, ethereal, ambiguous timbres. As the end approaches and the lover agrees to accept the child as his own, the music also takes on a clearer aspect.

Non-existent chords

Schönberg made a breakthrough with Verklärte Nacht. Its premiere in 1902 met powerful reactions, both because of the theme of the poem and because the music bent and broke the currently acceptable rules for harmony. The conservative music scene in Vienna was most concerned with the latter. The piece is full of chromatic movement and much of the action takes place in keys distant from its declared key of D minor. The Vienna Musikverein rejected the work on the grounds that they could not play chords that did not exist.

Schönberg relates the course of the poem in a single continuous sequence of about half an hour. The music is filled with metaphor, and is thus considered one of the earliest examples of programme music for chamber ensemble.

Text: Hild Borchgrevink
English version: Roger Martin