Shaping Form: Performances as Analyses of Cyclic Macroform in Arnold Schoenberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op. 19 (1911), in the Recordings of Eduard Steuermann and Other Pianists

Arnold Schoenberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke (Six Li le Piano Pieces), op. 19 (1911), offer a fruitful case study to examine and categorize performers’ strategies in regard to their formshaping characteristics. A thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis of 46 recordings from 41 pianists (recorded between 1925 to 2018), including six recordings from Eduard Steuermann, the leading pianist of the Second Viennese School, scrutinizes the interdependency between macroand microformal pianistic approaches to this cycle. In thus tracing varying conceptions of a performance-shaped cyclic form and their historical contexts, the continuous unfurling of the potential of Schoenberg’s musical ideas in both “structuralist” and “rhetorical” performance styles is systematically explored, offering a fresh approach to the controversial discussion on how analysis and performance might relate to one another. DOI: 10.30535/mto.26.4.9 Volume 26, Number 4, December 2020 Copyright © 2020 Society for Music Theory 1. The Mutual Productivity of Performance and Analysis [1.1] In his 2016 book Performative Analysis, Jeffrey Swinkin, makes the striking observation that it can hardly be the point of a musical performance to project or communicate analytical understanding. A performance might respond to an analysis of a certain work, just as an analysis might respond to a specific performance, but the end result will always be two autonomous interpretations, each impossible to reduce linearly to the other (25–27). Swinkin’s view seems convincing at first, but in the end resigns itself to the impossibility of a concrete relationship between theory/analysis and performance. This arguably results from his method, which tends to proceed from theory to musical praxis, from analysis to performance, rather than in the reverse direction (U 2019b). [1.2] It is here that the questions that motivated the PETAL research project (Performing, Experiencing and Theorizing Augmented Listening) arise: How might we intertwine musical analysis and practical performance in a way that leads to new understanding for both sides, ultimately reaching beyond their continuous polarization? This question, which Nicholas Cook had posed already in 1999,(1) remains difficult to answer today, despite a blossoming of new directions in musical performance studies in the last two decades. The intention of avoiding prescriptive analysis, which claims to derive a recipe for “correct” performance from the structure of the music, has led researchers to consider the value of moving from performance to analysis. Our research takes up this trend, and we especially a empt to further develop the idea that musical form is not grounded in the score alone, but—following the harpsichordist Robert Hill—is also brought forth by the performers “in real-time” (Hill and Mahnkopf 2015, 19). Expanding this idea, one might argue that musical form is constituted predominantly in the sounding event of a performance. [1.3] The school of musical performance studies that has emerged around Nicholas Cook, Mine Doğantan-Dack, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, and John Rink offers especially varied impulses for such an approach, though it also raises complex methodological problems.(2) An important tendency of this scholarship is the a empt to break with the text-centered approach of traditional music theory and musicology, in the sense of the performative turn. The goal is not simply to compare or even adjudicate between performances seen merely as different “interpretations” of a fixed text, but rather to emphasize the autonomy of the performance with respect to its model. For Cook this shift leads to the concept of the “work as performance”: the a empt to conceive of the work on the basis of the situatedness of performative agency (and not of a fixed text) (Cook 2013, 237–48; U 2015, 279). The possible interpretations of a “text,” which might contain and/or allow countless different readings, are understood in their own right as valid works of art, not in service of but on equal footing with the text. [1.4] Although we do not concur entirely with Cook’s conclusions, we are guided by the hypothesis that varying conceptions of the performance of the large-scale form of a work can fundamentally shape both the perception and (music-theoretical) analysis of this form and can lead to markedly different interpretational consequences. At the same time, we aim to point to the complex interaction of interpretative decisions with historical discourses and tropes of the music’s reception. Our research thus a empts to demonstrate that in addition to being historical documents in their own right, practical, sounding interpretations can exhibit fully valid analyses of a work (Cook 1995; Lester 1995). This sounding evidence can be treated on a par with musictheoretical analyses or wri en historical documents with mutually fruitful results. We ultimately consider a musical text and its sounding performance(s) as central representations of a musical work.(3) By positing a continuous interaction between performance and analysis, this article aims at investigating performance strategies towards cyclic (macro-)form. While we have taken efforts not to prejudice recorded performances by analytical insights gained beforehand, we acknowledge that performances occur in a discursive space in which (implicit or explicit) analytical thought is continuously present—for example, by aspects of “informed intuition” (Rink 2002, 36) on which performers build their sounding interpretations. [1.5] Throughout our investigations, the large-scale form of complex, cyclical works has occupied the center of our a ention.(4) We have examined and categorized performers’ strategies systematically in regard to their form-shaping characteristics, understanding microform and macroform as closely interdependent, and in this way aimed to challenge a frequent thesis of recent musicological literature: that large-scale form is largely irrelevant for the perception and performance of music.(5) For Leech-Wilkinson, for example, “long-term structures are theoretical, useful for composers, an invitation from analysts to imagine music in a particular way, but apparently not perceptible (save in the vaguest outline via memory)” (2012, [4.10]). On the other hand, Doğantan-Dack observed as early as 2008 that “the way a performer handles local details is very much related to her conception of large-scale relationships—or her lack thereof” (2008, 305). We therefore proceed on the assumption that the relationship of microand macroform between the poles of performance and analysis holds many as yet unanswered questions that shall be scrutinized in the following discussion. 2. Arnold Schoenberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, op. 19, as a Case Study [2.1] Arnold Schoenberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke (Six Li le Piano Pieces), op. 19, from 1911 offer a particularly promising case study. Several early recordings are available from pianists close to the Schoenberg school, for which a close link between structural analysis and pianistic interpretation can be assumed. Particularly noteworthy are the six recordings by Eduard Steuermann, which Christian U (forthcoming) has considered in detail in their historical context in a separate article. Also, the short duration of these pieces allows a detailed evaluation of a relatively large number of different recordings. The following investigation is based on both quantitative and qualitative analyses of 46 recordings from 41 pianists, including the six by Steuermann (1949, 1954, 1957a, 1957b, 1962, 1963) and 40 other recordings stretching from 1925 to 2018, each by a different pianist (Example 1). With the exception of three live recordings by Steuermann and three recordings made for the PETAL project, only published recordings were considered. Selections were based on the criteria of historical balance (we considered approximately the same percentage of recordings for each decade, from the 1920s to the present), international relevance and prominence of the performer, and availability of the recordings.(6) [2.2] Furthermore, in a workshop with three pianists, we discussed the shaping of the cycle in performance, documented the pianists’ particular strategies, and a empted to understand them from a historical perspective.(7) In preparation for this workshop, an annotated score of Schoenberg’s op. 19 was created, to which the following analyses will make frequent reference. This score, which is freely available online, combines analytical accounts and tempo-graphs with a musical text that integrates variant readings from the first autograph and autograph fair copy in different colors.(8) In the following exposition, we start with the historical context and the question of a historically informed interpretation of the cycle and then correlate varying pianistic strategies of macroand microformal molding. A. Cyclical Potentials in Schoenberg’s op. 19 [2.3] Schoenberg wrote five of the six pieces of the Klavierstücke, op. 19, in a single day (19 February 1911). The sixth, however, came almost four months later on June 17, likely in response to Gustav Mahler’s funeral on May 22, also the subject of one of Schoenberg’s paintings from the same time period (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 108, 137–38; Massow 1993; McKee 2005). A fair copy in Schoenberg’s hand and the first printed edition of the six pieces contain only minor revisions. The short cycle (with a total duration of around five minutes) is one of Schoenberg’s few contributions to the genre of (usually cyclically ordered) short pieces adopted far beyond the Second Viennese School between 1909 and 1914, a reaction to the so-called “Mammutismus,” that was popular in the decades around 1900 (and to which Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder—also completed in 1911—were a substantial contribution) (Obert 2008, 79–83; Taruskin 2010, 1–58). Along with the Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16 (1909), these six piano