The largest, most complex and demanding work on Chicago Chorale’s upcoming Christmas concert is Arnold Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden.
Born into a lower middle-class Jewish family in Vienna in 1874, Schoenberg was largely self-taught as a composer, but came to be considered one of the most important and influential composers of the twentieth century. Active also as a music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter, he was associated with the Expressionist movement in German poetry and art. His works were considered degenerate and modernist by the Nazi Party. While vacationing in France with his family, in 1933, he was warned that returning to Germany would be dangerous. He and his family immediately left for the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, teaching at UCLA.
In 1898 Schoenberg converted to Christianity in the Lutheran church, partly to strengthen his attachment to Western European cultural traditions, and partly as a means of self-defense during a time of resurgent anti-Semitism. In 1933, the same year he moved to the U.S., he returned to Judaism, convinced that his racial and religious heritage was inescapable, and to declare an unmistakable position opposing Nazism.
Schoenberg composed Friede auf Erden, setting a text by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, in 1907. The first verse describes Jesus’ birth, while the second depicts the reality of war and bloodshed. The third and fourth verses return to hope and peace, and the dramatic conclusion suggests a vision of heavenly possibility. The compositional style reflects the period in Schoenberg’s life when his highly stylized, late-Romantic idiom was being transformed into a more rigidly structured, atonal Expressionism, and powerfully expresses the tumultuous aesthetic change taking place. The piece received its premier performance, by the Vienna Singverein, in 1911, and though he had indicated in the earliest sketches that the music was meant to be performed a cappella, Schoenberg was obliged to create an orchestral accompaniment for the concert, to support the incredibly challenging vocal writing. Chorale will perform the work in the original, unaccompanied version. Though long regarded as among the most difficult works in the choral canon, it is revered as one of the greatest modern works, and is performed frequently. Anton Webern, one of Schoenberg’s most famous and successful students, wrote to him in 1928, “Have you even heard your chorus at all? In that case, do you know how beautiful it is? Unprecedented! What a sound!”
Schoenberg eventually became disillusioned with the concept of universal harmony and peace, and his choral evocation would later elicit a somber remembrance from the composer. He wrote in 1923 that Friede auf Erden was “an illusion created in [my] previous innocence,” one created when he still believed such a unity was possible.
Schoenberg died in Los Angeles in 1951; his ashes were returned to Vienna, and interred there, in 1974.
Self-Portait.