Transfigured Night

Liszt conceived virtually all of his concerted works for piano—the concertos, the Totentanz, the Malédiction, etc.—early in his creative life, but did not bring them to completion for twenty years or so. In the case of the present work, some 25 years passed between the time he made his first sketches the premiere. Liszt did not bring the composition near completion in any form until 1849, when his associate Joachim Raff provided invaluable help in orchestrating the score. It was only at that time, early in his tenure as court conductor at Weimar, that Liszt began to compose for orchestra, and because he had little experience as an orchestrator he entrusted most of the original orchestration for his symphonic poems also to Raff. By 1854, however, he felt confident enough to dispense with such assistance, and from then on he did his own scoring. The final versions of his concertos, the Totentanz and all the symphonic poems are entirely his own. He first revised the scoring of the E-flat Concerto in 1853 and, as noted above, produced the final version a year after the work's premiere.

The published score bears a dedication to Henry Litolff, whose Concertos symphoniques Liszt admired. (Litolff is remembered now almost entirely on the strength of the scherzo of his Fourth Concerto, which is frequently performed and recorded on its own.) Liszt's own concertos were initially published under that same title, and it is clear that he sought to produce some sort of synthesis of elements of both the concerto and the symphony in these works. The First, in fact, is said to have been modeled in large part after Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, as well as specific features in the same composer's Fourth and Fifth piano concertos. Moreover, a sort of "program" has been ascribed to it, similar to the one so often attached to the Beethoven Symphony.

One gesture in the direction of the symphony in this concerto is the format itself, in four movements instead of the conventional three, the added one being the scherzo, with its prominent use of the triangle. Whereas Beethoven established a practice of linking the last two movements together in many of his works (the last two piano concertos among them), Liszt went him one better by having the last three movements played without pause; he also made a good deal more of the "cyclical" use of themes here than Beethoven did.

Liszt is said to have provided words to fit the opening phrase of his E-flat Concerto: "Das versteht ihr alle nicht!" ("That, none of you understands"). The two brisk chords following that theme were to accompany either the phrase "Nur ich!" ("I alone [understand]"), or simply "Ha ha," according to the source one might favor. This gruff, provocative theme, in any event, is the "motto" of the work; it dominates the first movement and returns with force in the second half of the scherzo. The finale opens with the slow movement's languorous theme transformed into a vigorous march of decidedly martial character. In this concluding movement all the earlier themes are recalled, though references to the basic "motto" in this section are rather indirect, taking the form of the variant heard in the middle of the opening movement and hinting at the original form of the tune only in the work's closing pages.

Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) by Arnold Schoenberg
b. Vienna, Austria, September 13, 1874; d. Los Angeles, California, July 13, 1951

When Arnold Schoenberg created his remarkable sextet Verklärte Nacht or Transfigured Night in 1899, program music -- or music inspired by extra-musical stories or images -- was dominating European music. In a culture obsessed with Wagner's music dramas, abstract instrumental music seemed boringly old-fashioned. Chamber music remained the last bastion in which composers could still concern themselves with purely musical issues without poetic or philosophical embellishment.

Inspired by the poetry of his contemporary Richard Demel, the 25-year-old Schoenberg finally carried the spirit of program music into the rarefied world of chamber music. When the poet wrote to Schoenberg to express his delight after hearing a performance of Transfigured Night, the composer responded: "I cannot tell you how glad I am to be directly in touch with you at last. For your poems have had a decisive influence on my development as a composer. They were what first made me try to find a new tone in the lyrical mood. Or rather, I found it without even looking, simply by reflecting in music what your poems stirred up in me."

The poem that stirred up Transfigured Night was "Zwei Menschen" or "Two People" from Demel's collection Weib und Welt ("Woman and World") published in 1896. It detailed a shockingly unconventional love story for that period. Two lovers, a man and a woman, walk at night "through the bare cold woods." She soon confesses that she is bearing a child, but it is not her companion's. In despair and longing for motherhood, she had given herself to a stranger. "Now life has taken its revenge/ Now I met you, you," the man she truly loves. She walks on in anguish. But the man surprises her with his compassionate response: "The child that you have conceived/be to your soul no burden,/oh look, how clear the universe glitters!. . . It will transfigure the strange child." At peace, they embrace, then continue to walk on through the now transfigured "high, bright night."