Note from webmaster: This piece was performed in the same program with Schütz's Musicalische Exequien and Schumann's Choral Songs. Hence, the first two paragraphs reference these other two pieces and provide a context for the entire program.

his concert has to do with connections. We are exploring the special linkages that great composers establish with listeners, that tell us things that are otherwise inexpressible. All of the works in this program deal with pain of one sort or another, but also with hope and the possibility of remediation. It seems to me that music uniquely has the power to show how pain, and the cure for pain, are matched components in the continuum of human experience.

Schütz grieves over the pain of departure of a patron/friend in the context of a continent torn by thirty years of devastating war. Schönberg's startling clairvoyance, on the doorstep of the last century, lamenting mankind's historic failure to prevail in the war against war itself turned out to be ominously predictive of the horrible events to come. And Schumann brings pain down to an intensely intimate level in music that captures the very essence of young lovers experiencing the kind of pain that young lovers experience.

In 1907, the year he composed Friede auf Erden, Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) was just beginning his revolutionary journey into atonalism and his leadership of what was to become the most influential and contentious movement in the world of twentieth century music. He had already completed Part I of Gurrelieder, the massive choral/orchestral work which came to completion and performance in Vienna several years later. Verklärte Nacht, an early masterpiece for orchestra, dates from 1899. Both of these works, along with Friede auf Erden, pushed against the tonal/harmonic limits of romantic post-Wagnerian style. Still to come was his treatise, "Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Related Only to Each Other." This theory refuted the long-prevailing system, admittedly already under challenge by other composers, in which a single tone was designated as an identifiable key center and in which a conventional hierarchical relationship positioned all other tones in various degrees of subordinance to it. Schönberg's meticulously crafted theory was so compellingly articulated by him and so brilliantly cultivated in his own compositions that no significant composer of the twentieth century was able to simply ignore it; many adopted it for their own use, others, after thoughtful examination, rejected it. It is interesting that Schönberg, the totem for a musical revolution, occasionally abandoned the twelve-tone system himself in works dating from his American years, dismaying some of his most ardent adherents who had read theory as law. He saw no contradiction in this, believing simply that "one must follow one's own inspiration."

Schönberg set Conrad Meyer's passionate poetic essay on Peace, Friede auf Erden, in 1907. The poet records mankind's struggle to overcome the cruelty of war from the time of Christ to the present. In the light of subsequent events in the twentieth century, both the poem and Schönberg's setting take on a prophetic aspect. In no other century in human history have so many lives been lost to war's devastation. Schönberg's decision to take up Meyer's powerful text when he did, and at the particular time he did, is consistent with where the composer himself was in his own development just then. He pushes against the accepted tonal boundaries with a passionate, even angry imagination, straying at times quite far from the established D major center of the work. D is historically the key of acclamation but also of hope. At each return of the textual motif of "peace on earth" we are brought back to the consoling, reassuring consonance of the home key. This relentless pulling away into the outer space of tonal ambiguity followed by a return to the serenity of D major parallels the themes of conflict and reassurance in the poem, in the world, and in the evolving artistic journey the composer himself was traversing at the time. Friede auf Erden is a milestone in twentieth century choral music, but it is also a sermon on hope.

The Boston Cecilia performed this piece at Emmanuel Church in Boston on October 16, 2004.

© 2004 Donald Teeters. All rights reserved.