summer cool

Verklärte Nacht
Schoenberg







"In a new century, Schoenberg takes his place beside Picasso and Joyce as a creator who altered the perception of art from innocent pleasure to an amalgam of celestial vision and cerebral struggle. In our age of vapid simplicity and dysfunctional irony, the music of Arnold Schoenberg becomes a refuge for the thinking listener, a place of principle and courage, of crossword-level complexity and, when you crack the code, of the deepest sensual satisfaction."
(all about Schoenberg, here, "Why We're Still Afraid of Schoenberg")

Transfigured Night" (Verklärte Nacht)
by Richard Dehmel
(Translation:1992 Lionel Salter)

Two People are walking through the bare, cold grove;
the moon accompanies them, they gaze at it. The moon courses above the
high oaks; not a cloud obscures the light of heaven, into which the black
treetops reach. A woman's voice speaks:

I am carrying a child, and not of yours;
I walk in sin beside you.
I have deeply transgressed against myself.
I no longer believed in happiness
and yet had a great yearning
for purposeful life, for the happiness
and responsibility of motherhood; so I dared
and, shuddering, let my body
be embraced by a strange man,
and have become pregnant from it.
Now life has taken its revenge,
now that I have met you.

She walks with awkward step.
She looks up: the moon accompanies them.
Her dark glance is inundated with light.
A man's voice speaks:

Let the child you have conceived
be no burden to your soul.
see, how brightly the universe gleams!
There is a radiance on everything;
you drift with me on a cold sea,
but a special warmth flickers
from you to me, from me to you.
This will transfigure the other's child;
you will bare it for me, from me;
you have brought radiance on me,
you have made me a child myself.

He clasps her round her strong hips.
Their breath mingles in the breeze.
Two people go through the tall, clear night

. . .

And from here:

Schoenberg wrote the following about his "Transfigured Night":

"At the end of 19th century, the foremost representatives of the 'Zeitgeist' in poetry were Detlev von Liliencron, Hugo von Hoffmannstahl and Richard Dehmel. But in music, after Brahms' death, many young composers followed the model of Richard Strauss, by composing programme music. This explains the origin of "Transfigured Night"; it is programme music, illustrating and expressing the poem of Richard Dehmel. My composition was, perhaps somewhat different from other illustrative compositions, firstly, by not being for orchestra but for a chamber group and secondly, because it does not illustrate any action of drama, but was restricted to portray nature and to express human feelings. It seems that, due to this attitude, my composition has gained qualities, which can also satisfy if one does not know what it illustrates, or in other words, it offers the possibility to be appreciated as 'pure' music. Thus it can perhaps make you forget the poem which many a person today might call rather repulsive. Nevertheless, much of the poem deserves appreciation because of its highly poetic presentation of emotions provoked by the beauty of nature, and for the distinguished moral attitude in dealing with a staggeringly difficult problem.