The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op. 15, is a fifteen-part song cycle composed by Arnold Schoenberg between 1908 and 1909, setting poems of Stefan George. George's poems, also under the same title, track the failed love affair of two adolescent youths in a garden, ending with the woman's departure and the disintegration of the garden. The song cycle is set for solo voice and piano. The Book of the Hanging Gardens breaks away from conventional musical order through its usage of atonality. The piece was premiered by Austrian singer Martha Winternitz-Dorda and pianist Etta Werndorf on January 14, 1910, in Vienna.
Biographical and cultural context
The Book of the Hanging Gardens served as the start to the atonal period in Schoenberg's music. Atonal compositions, referred to as "pantonal" by Schoenberg, typically contain features such as a lack of central tonality, pervading harmonicdissonance rather than consonance, and a general absence of traditional melodic progressions. This period of atonality became commonly associated with the expressionist movement, despite the fact that Schoenberg rarely referred to the term "expressionism" in his writings. Whether or not he wanted to be associated with the movement, Schoenberg expresses an unambiguous positivity with his discovery of this new style in a program note for the 1910 first performance of The Book of the Hanging Gardens: Schoenberg's libretto transcends the tragic love poems of George and become a deeper reflection of Schoenberg's mood during this period when viewing his personal life. The poems tell of a love affair gone awry without explicitly stating the cause of its demise. In 1908, Schoenberg's wife Mathilde left him and their two children for Richard Gerstl, a painter with whom Schoenberg was a close friend and for whom Mathilde often modeled. She returned to the family from her flight with Gerstl eventually, but not before Schoenberg discovered the poems of George and began drawing inspiration from them.
Structure
Although the 15 poems do not necessarily describe a story or follow a linear development, the general subjects can be grouped as follows: a description of the paradise, the paths that the lover takes to reach his beloved, his passions, the peak of the time together, premonition, and finally, love dies away and Eden is no more.
Critical reception
Upon its initial debut in 1910, The Book of the Hanging Gardens was not critically acclaimed or accepted in mainstream culture. Hanging Gardens complete lack of tonality was initially disdained. Although a limited number of his works, including The Book of the Hanging Gardens, had been played in Paris since 1910, there was little attention from the French press for Schoenberg's music in general. The reviews received elsewhere were usually scathing. One New York Times reviewer in 1913 went so far as to call Schoenberg "A musical anarchist who upset all of Europe." Deemed the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg and his students Anton Webern and Alban Berg helped to make Hanging Gardens and works like it more acceptable. By the 1920s, a radical shift had occurred in the French reception of Schoenberg, his Hanging Gardens, and atonality in general. "For progressives, he became an important composer whose atonal works constituted a legitimate form of artistic expression."
Critical analysis
Alan Lessem analyzes the Book of the Hanging Gardens in his book Music and Text in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg. However, how to interpret the work remains debated. Lessem maintained that the meaning of the song cycles lay in the words, and one critic finds his proposed relation of words and music fits Hanging Gardens better than the other songs treated in his book, and speculates that this may be because the theory was originally inspired by this cycle. Lessem treats each interval as a symbol: "cell a provides material for the expression of poignant anticipations of love, cellb of frustrated yearnings"...the structure of cycle may, viewed as a whole, give the impression of progression through time, but this is only an illusion. The various songs give only related aspects of a total, irredeemable present." Moods are conveyed though harmony, texture, tempo, and declamation. The 'inner meaning,' if in fact there is to be found, is the music itself, which Lessem already described in great detail. Anne Marie de Zeeuw has examined in detail the "three against four" rhythm of the composition's opening and its manifestation elsewhere in the work.
As argued in Schorske's groundbreaking study of Viennese society, the Book of the Hanging Gardens uses the image of the garden as a metaphor of the destruction of traditional musical form. The garden portrayed in George's poem, which Schoenberg puts to music, represent the highly organized traditional music Schoenberg broke away from. Baroque geometric gardens made popular during the Renaissance were seen as an "extension of architecture over nature." So too did the old order of music represent all that was authority and stable. The destruction of the garden parallels the use of rationality to break away from the old forms of music.
