Chamber Symphony No. 2

Arnold Schoenberg's transition from a tonal composer in his twenties to inventing Serialism in his forties was a long, difficult, and painful process. He always insisted that he was driven by some invisible force, that something urged him to forge a new musical language — even though he had clearly mastered the late Romantic style of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. This style was, in fact, one to which he often longed to return. 

Gradually, he moved into more chromatic territory, abandoning tonality bit by bit and then fully “emancipating” dissonance by allowing chords to be made up of any of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. His ears — and eventually ours — got used to more harmonic chaos, to a more colorful world, filled with a brand-new notion of what music could be. (Schoenberg was by no means the only force pushing to upend tradition, but he is the one who pushed fastest in full public view and with the clearest sense of creating a new “system.”) The final step Schoenberg took was to systematize this new language, in which all 12 tones were set in equal balance. 

Evidence that the process was painful is provided by the Second Chamber Symphony, which he began to compose in 1906, immediately after finishing the First Chamber Symphony. In the earlier work, Schoenberg held on to tonality but no longer relied on it to guide the musical structure, as it had for generations. But immediately upon starting the Second Chamber Symphony, Schoenberg felt that he could no longer continue in the same furrow. His next step would have to be the complete abandonment of tonality — but this new work, he realized, was not going to be the one to move him that far forward, to carry the burden of voicing that new future. 

So, he left the work as a series of sketches, its two movements far from complete. He came back to it in 1911 and again in 1916, but without success. In 1938, he was asked by conductor Fritz Stiedry, a fellow German émigré who had known Schoenberg in Vienna, for a work for his group, the New York–based New Friends of Music Orchestra. 

This prompted Schoenberg to once again revisit the incomplete Chamber Symphony. Having at last a more detached view of style — in the intervening years, he had worked out his own 12-tone system and also ably orchestrated a number of other, tonal works — Schoenberg was able to complete the work in the style always intended for it. The final work is set in two movements — one slow, one fast. (At one point, Schoenberg planned a third movement but later abandoned the idea, although he incorporated some of its ideas into the completed second movement.) Stiedry ultimately led the work’s world premiere in December 1940. 

The second movement is longer than the first, but both movements provide excellent opportunities to hear Schoenberg’s gift for discovering new instrumental combinations. The size of the orchestra (a small wind section plus strings) also plays a crucial role, preventing the texture from ever becoming too thick.

When listening to Schoenberg’s 12-tone works, one often has the impression of two pieces of music being played simultaneously in different rooms. Though that sense of simultaneous “conversations” is present on occasion, in this work, the various musics blend together in happy unity. 

— Hugh Macdonald 

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.