Until the end of his life, Arnold Schoenberg upheld the leisurely production pace — approximately one work per year — that he had established in the early 1920's. The Ode to Napoleon was his project for 1943 and one of three major works (the others were Kol Nidrei and A Survivor of Warsaw) prompted by World War II and its prefatory events. The Napoleon of this opus is Adolf Hitler, and, in this musical protest, Schoenberg, settled in America, depicts the horror of war and the colossal vanity of the individual who often brings it about. Perhaps, like the reflections of his fellow expatriate Thomas Mann, who did his bit for the war effort (thereby obscuring his appalling pro-Wilhelmian stance, circa 1914) with his "Listen, Germany” broadcasts, Schoenberg's thoughts on war are those of an ”unpolitical man." At the best of times, statecraft does not offer an easy target for music drama, and in times of war rarely does it deserve or get an analytical response. The prevailing tone of the Ode to Napoleon is far from war hysterical, but this is a mercurial work in which conventional developmental rhetoric is bypassed and rapid cinema-style dissolves are employed to link its diverse scenes. The composer's commitment to the metaphorical pertinence of Byron's verse is underscored by the modified sprechgesang delivery entrusted to the male narrator. In contrast to his earlier, more celebrated exercise in speech-song, Pierrot Lunaire, in which a female reciter swoops about a regular musical stave, the declamatory indulgences of the present work are restricted by ledger lines set immediately above and below a horizontal graph. The result : a more realistic deployment of the voice than in Pierrot that in no way inhibits the quasi-instrumental attitude of the recitation. Actually, Schoenberg enhances Byron's occasionally posturing poesy through his customary rhythmic dexterity and newly acquired sensitivity to the English language. He also decorates the narrator's graph with some enharmonically derived accidentals that are all but impossible to realize in performance, but that provide, in their subtle allusion to the gravitational force of tonality, an important clue to the musical purpose of this work. For the Ode to Napoleon is Schoenberg's most urgent plea on behalf of that cause for which he campaigned with increasing fervor in his American years — the coexistence of tonality and twelve-tone technique. Several works from that period, notably Theme and Variations, Op. 43A, Kol Nidrei, Op. 39, and Variations on a Recifative, Op. 40, for organ, are, in fact, almost conventionally tonal — only a certain disruptive impatience with the obligatory niceties of chromatic voice leading sets them apart from those heady essays in post-Romantic tonality which Schoenberg composed at the turn of the century. This impatience stems directly from his experience in twelve-tone writing, for, in these works he is, in fact, asserting a priority of triadic rather than tonal forms, or of what I have referred to in previous notes for this series of Schoenberg recordings as ”1ow-yield dissonant combinations.” Other works from this period, such as the Piano Concerto, Op. 42, and Violin Fantasy, Op. 47, utilize a fairly conventional twelve-tone discipline. Even in these pieces, however, Schoenberg is careful to select tone rows notable for motivic symmetry rather than for diversity of outline. In such works it is the rule rather than the exception for the composer to exploit invertible siblings of his primary row forms and to minimize that transpositional promiscuity which twelve-tone writing theoretically favors. The row drawn upon for the Ode to Napoleon possesses an almost unlimited triadic potential.
Glenn Gould (from the original Liner Notes)
Eugene Ormandy
Glenn Gould
The Music of Arnold Schoenberg
(Vol. VII)
Tracks
Lp 1
1 Trio for Violin, Viola and Cello, Op. 45 15:41
2 Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41 13:56
*
Lp 2
1 Variations on a Recitative, Op. 40 5:59
2 Fantasy for Violin and Piano, Op. 47 2:36
3 Theme and Variations, Op. 43B 11:44
*
Members of the Julliard Quartet [Op. 45]
Robert Mann - vl
Raphael Hillyer - vla
Claud Adam - cel
The Julliard Quartet [Op. 41]
Glenn Gould - p [Opp. 41 & 47]
John Horton - spkr [Op. 41]
Marilyn Mason - org [Op. 40]
Israel Baker - vl [Op. 47]
The Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy - dir. [Op. 43B]
Recorded at Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York City ; May 11 & 12, 1966 [Lp 1, # 1] ; February 3 & 4, 1965 [Lp 1, # 2] & July 10, 1964 [Lp 2, # 2] ; Philharmonic Hall, New York City ; February 16, 1955 [Lp 2, # 1] & Town Hall, Philadelphia ; October 2, 1963 [Lp 2, # 3]