Spotlight Schoenberg: Variations for Orchestra op. 31

The interpretation of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Variations for Orchestra” op. 31 was one of Karajan’s most ambitious and consistent recording projects ever.

Richard Osborne called it no less than “one of the artistically most successful and technologically most radical of all twentieth- century gramophone recordings.” The result gained the admiration of a large number of critics and listeners, who noted with surprise that he was able to achieve (also financial) success in a repertoire where they had never supposed he would operate.

The Variations are Schoenberg’s first twelve-tone work for orchestra commissioned by Wilhelm Furtwängler and first performed with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1928 (when Karajan was already a student at the Vienna Conservatory). Furtwängler only had three rehearsals for the performance and after that the orchestra was anything but familiar with the groundbreaking work. Karajan had to start from scratch when he put it on a programme for the first time in 1962 (only 11 years after Schoenberg’s death). Richard Osborne notes that Karajan’s friend the musicologist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt had drawn his attention to the piece. In the following years, “the work became something of an obsession (Osborne)” for Karajan and caused him to initiate rehearsals of single variations in smaller groups of the orchestra sometimes at the very end of other rehearsals, in intervals or in the spare time on tour – a fact that wasn’t always received enthusiastically by the players.
Karajan told Osborne in 1989:

“I began the project with the orchestra several years before we made the recordings. We spent a great deal of time familiarizing ourselves with the music by playing it at subscription concerts and youth concerts. But I knew from the outset that the demands Schoenberg makes in these Variations are abnormal ones which are difficult to realize properly, even in acoustically suitable concert-halls. For the recording, we reseated the orchestra for each variation to create the acoustic that one sees and imagines when one looks at the score. Some people said this was ‘manipulation’ of the music by technology; but it is the very reverse. When Schoenberg asks for the piccolo to play ppp in the top level of its register ‘so schwach wie möglich (as weakly as possible)’ with the bassoon and solo strings at different dynamic levels, and then asks for completely different textures and dynamics in the next variation, I know that this cannot be properly realized by an orchestra in a concert-hall seated in the conventional way. Realizing the Schoenberg Variations was technically the most fascinating thing in the set.”

 

To be continued…

—  P.R. Jenkins