Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens) is a fifteen-part song cycle

Song cycle

A song cycle is a group of songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a single entity. As a rule, all of the songs are by the same composer and often use words from the same poet or lyricist. Unification can be achieved by a narrative or a persona common to the songs, or even, as in Schumann's...

 composed by Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...

 between 1908 and 1909, setting poems of Stefan George

Stefan George

Stefan Anton George was a German poet, editor, and translator.-Biography:George was born in Bingen in Germany in 1868. He spent time in Paris, where he was among the writers and artists who attended the Tuesday soireés held by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. He began to publish poetry in the 1890s,...

. 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.

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 harmonic dissonance rather than consonance, and a general absence of traditional melodic progressions. This period of atonality became commonly associated with the expressionist

Expressionism

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...

 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:

With the [Stefan] George songs I have for the first time succeeded in approaching an ideal of expression and form which has been in my mind for many years. Until now I lacked the strength and confidence to make it a reality. I am being forced in this direction … not because my invention or technique is inadequate, but [because] I am obeying an inner compulsion, which is stronger than any upbringing. I am obeying the formative process which, being the one natural to me, is stronger than my artistic education.

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 1907 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.

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 scarring. One New York Times reviewer in 1913 went so far as to call Schoenberg “A musical anarchist who upset all of Europe."

Deemed as the Second Viennese School

Second Viennese School

The Second Viennese School is the group of composers that comprised Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils and close associates in early 20th century Vienna, where he lived and taught, sporadically, between 1903 and 1925...

, Schoenberg and his students Anton Webern

Anton Webern

Anton Webern was an Austrian composer and conductor. He was a member of the Second Viennese School. As a student and significant follower of Arnold Schoenberg, he became one of the best-known exponents of the twelve-tone technique; in addition, his innovations regarding schematic organization of...

 and Alban Berg

Alban Berg

Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer. He was a member of the Second Viennese School with Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.-Early life:Berg was born in...

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 analyses 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, cell b of frustrated yearnings" …the structure of [the] 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.

The garden as a metaphor

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.

Sources

• Brown, Julie (1994). "Schoenberg's Early Wagnerisms: Atonality and the Redemption of Ahasuerus". Cambridge Opera Journal 6, no. 1 (March): 51–80.
• de Zeeuw, Anne Marie (1993). "A Numerical Metaphor in a Schoenberg Song, Op. 15, No. XI". The Journal of Musicology 11, no. 3 (Summer): 396–410. (Subscription access)
• Dick, Marcel (1990). "An Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg's The Book of Hanging Gardens, op. 15". In Studies in the Schoenbergian Movement in Vienna and the United States: Essays in Honor of Marcel Dick, edited by Anne Trenkamp and John G. Suess, 235–39. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press. ISBN 0889464499
• Domek, Richard C. (1979). "Some Aspects of Organization in Schoenberg's Book of the Hanging Gardens, opus 15". College Music Symposium 19, no. 2 (Fall): 111–28.
• Dümling, Albrecht (1981). Die fremden Klänge der hängenden Gärten. Die offentliche Einsamkeit der Neuen Musik am Beispiel von A. Schoenberg und Stefan George. Munich: Kindler. ISBN 3463008297
• Dümling, Albrecht (1995). "Öffentliche Einsamkeit: Atonalität und Krise der Subjektivität in Schönbergs op. 15". In Stil oder Gedanke? Zur Schönberg-Rezeption in Amerika und Europa, edited by Stefan Litwin and Klaus Velten. Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag.
• Evans, Richard (1980). [Review of Lessem 1979]. Tempo: A Quarterly Review of Modern Music 132 (March): 35–36.
• Huneker, James (1913). "Schoenberg, Musical Anarchist Who Has Upset Europe". New York Times (January 19): magazine section part 5, page SM9, 4055 words
• Lessem, Alan Philip (1979). Music and Text in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg: The Critical Years, 1908–1922. Studies in Musicology 8. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. ISBN 0835709949 (cloth); ISBN 0835709957 (pbk)
• Médicis, François de (2005). "Darius Milhaud and the Debate on Polytonality in the French Press of the 1920s". Music and Letters 86, no. 4:573–91.
• Puffett, Derrick (1981). [Review of Lessem 1979]. Music and Letters 62, no. 3 (July–October): 404–406.
• Reich, Willi (1971). Schoenberg: A Critical Biography, trans. Leo Black. London: Longman; New York: Praeger. ISBN 058212753X. Reprinted 1981, New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0306761041
• Schäfer, Thomas (1994). "Wortmusik/Tonmusik: Ein Beitrag zur Wagner-Rezeption von Arnold Schönberg und Stefan George". Die Musikforschung 47, no. 3:252–73.
• Schorske, Carl (1979). Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, first edition. New York: Knopf; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 0394505964
• Smith, Glenn Edward (1973). "Schoenberg's Book of the Hanging Gardens: An Analysis". DMA diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1973.