Speak not always of the leaves, op. 15/14

“With the George songs I have for the first time succeeded in approaching the ideal of expression and form that has been in my mind for years. [...] Now that I have set out along this path once and for all, I am conscious of having broken through every restriction of a bygone aesthetic. […] I am being urged in this direction not from the lack of invention, or technical ability, or the knowledge of the other demands of the prevailing aesthetics, but that I am obeying an inner compulsion, which is stronger than my education; that I am obeying that formative process, which, being natural to me, is stronger than my artistic training.” (Arnold Schönberg, 1910) Stefan George’s collection of poetry (Die Buecher der Hirten- und Preisgedichte der Sagen und Saenge und der haengenden Gaerten) first appeared in 1895. This volume is divided into three subsections, and Arnold Schönberg was particularly attracted to the third one, the Hanging Gardens. The poems offer a torrid narrative, recounting a young prince and his sexual awakening in a paradisiacal garden. The overall theme is one of transformation: a naïve youth quietly enters the garden and later consummates his desire with his lover in a bed of flowers. As the awakened youth parts ways with her, the garden itself then dies. With his selection of only fifteen poems, Schönberg was apparently resisting the more consistent narrative thread of George’s larger cycle. Moreover, the composer’s affinity for brevity is evident here, as more than half of the fifteen songs take less than two minutes in performance. Thus, in The Book of the Hanging Gardens, each one of these self-contained songs may be heard as its own distilled thought or mood, even a fleeting moment, and exemplifies one of Schönberg’s hallmark traits as a composer: his distinctive sensibility for aphoristic expression.