Now, I want to present you in contrast the first Lied from Schönberg’s “Buch der hängenden Gärten”.
It is disputed if the 15 poems Schönberg set continue the storyline of the previous poems from George’s cycle or if they are meant as an interlude projecting the speaker’s memories or dreams, or someone else’s experience. The first poem is the description of the garden. The speaker, perhaps a young prince or king, enters the garden first in the second poem, so the first poem just sets the mood.
For Schönberg, the composition of op. 15 marked a significant stylistic change. In the programme to the first private performance in Vienna in January 1910, he wrote “With the George Lieder I have for the first time succeeded in approaching an ideal of expression and form which has been in my mind for years. Until now, I lacked the strength and confidence to make it a reality. But 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.”
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Play op. 15/1 (2’10’’)
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Before I continue speaking about Schönberg’s setting of “Das Buch der
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The speaker meditates over a sleeping youth. In a kiss that might be real or imagined, he finds more than he had hoped for. The connections of meaning are difficult to understand because of the sentence structure – suddenly two verses of direct speech appear in the second stanza before the actual sentence continues. The lack of capitalization makes several interpretations possible at first glance, for example in the sixth verse “Und die berührten” that could be read either as “And they touched then” or as “And then the touched ones”. Also typical for George is the neologism “Traumesschoosse” that is difficult to understand. The poem plays with metaphors of birth and death, sleeping and awakening that are mirrored in the dynamic curve and motivic structure of Webern’s