Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16/5 – First written copy

Schönberg spent the summer of 1909 in Steinakirchen (Lower Austria) with his family, Alexander Zemlinsky, Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Max Oppenheimer. The summer proved to be very productive for him; apart from the Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, which he had begun in May (the fair copy of the full score was completed on August 11), he also wrote the third Piano Piece of op. 11 and the expressionistic monodrama Erwartung, op. 17. Prior to completing op. 16, Schönberg wrote to Richard Strauss on 14 July 1909, who had asked for orchestra pieces for the Berlin Hofkapelle concerts: “They are short orchestra pieces (between one and three minutes long), not cyclically related. […] I am expecting colossal things of them, sound and mood especially. That is all they are about: absolutely not symphonic – precisely the opposite – no architecture, no structure. Merely a bright, uninterrupted interchange of colors, rhythms and moods.” Das obligate Rezitativ, op. 16/5 exemplifies a kind of – “speaking music” – although it is not similar to recitative in the conventional sense. “One says the ineffable in free form,” as Schönberg noted in his Berlin Diary after a lecture on 22 January 1912. He was also considering the formulation of a “carried out” or “endless” recitative as a variant of the “obbligato.” The syntax of this last piece in op. 16 is symmetrical in every respect, the form atectonic, the melodic layout athematic; thus all the more weight is lent to the dynamically charged eloquently individual pitches. At a later date, Schönberg subsumed the stylistic criteria of this sonic speech with the term “musical prose.” “This is music, such as the world has never heard before. It is new in color, in form, in intention. It proclaims a new concept of tonal beauty. It seeks and discovers new accents in emphasis and in contrast. It discloses new inflections of feeling. It explores moods that never have been expressed.” (Chicago Tribune, 1 November 1913)