For me, this Arnold Schönberg quotation expresses the composer’s attitude towards music – not just towards his own, but towards music in general. The seriousness with which he was striving for truth in music is without parallel. The fact that this attitude also meant a certain lack of compromise will be further discussed below…
In a few days the world will be celebrating Arnold Schönberg’s 150th birthday – and the G. Henle publishing house will of course also be joining the celebration! Reason enough to pause for a moment to highlight Schönberg’s significance for our catalogue.
When I joined G. Henle publishers as a trainee in 2004, the house programme then looked very different: Lacking were composers of classical modernism. This is because, with very few exceptions, our catalogue only includes copyright-free works. Whenever a copyright is about to expire, we prepare for that in good time. In 2004 I was therefore involved in helping the editorial team find sources for Maurice Ravel’s works (which we were then able to welcome into our catalogue in 2008). Quite a few such major events followed over the next few years: Alban Berg became available in 2006, Sergei Rachmaninoff was added to the programme in 2014, Béla Bartók and Anton Webern followed in 2016, Richard Strauss in 2020, and most recently, in 2024, Sergei Prokofiev also became a Henle composer. By the 2020s, we were therefore proud to be able to offer a number of core New Music works in Henle Urtext quality. But one name was missing: Arnold Schönberg. It was always clear to us that, as a ‘classical music publisher’, we would also include the modern classical composer Schönberg in our Urtext catalogue, a step that we were able to take in 2022, when the copyright expired in many parts of the world.
A few years earlier, I myself had travelled to Vienna to plan the project, where Therese Muxeneder welcomed me to the Arnold Schönberg Center (ASC) and took me straight to its treasure vault, the source archives. Priceless documents are preserved here. And the ASC team’s unique attitude and that of the Schönberg heirs ensure that these are not kept behind closed doors: They deliberately facilitate access to both the sources and the music itself, preparing ideal conditions for researchers to overcome any fears of contact (which some people may perhaps have towards this music). The ASC thus became the ideal collaboration partner for our source work (and I would like to take this opportunity to say a big ‘thank you’ to Therese Muxeneder and the whole team). She incidentally placed on the table this business card during my very first visit:
So, it was clear: we were to have not only Schönberg’s inclusion in the Henle catalogue on our radar, but also his 150th birthday in 2024. This initial spark gave rise to a number of projects in the following years, Urtext editions, a magnificent facsimile and much more to come. For an overview, please take a look at the Schönberg birthday tile on our website. We are delighted to be able this way to celebrate Schönberg and his music – especially this year, but he will of course be a permanent pillar of our programme.
But now I’m putting on editor’s glasses to shed light on the question: What does it actually mean to edit Schönberg’s music? My colleagues Annette Oppermann and Peter Jost have dealt with this question in previous blog posts concerning the editions of ‘Verklärte Nacht’ and the 2nd String Quartet. I myself supervised the new edition of the piano pieces. The anthology with all the piano pieces – editions available both paperbound and clothbound; the only one of its kind, by the way! – was a labour of love that allowed me rapidly to expand my horizons. Who would have thought, for example, that in his youth the New-Music Schönberg would have begun with three entirely Brahmsian piano pieces? Pieces that he never published himself, but which we have printed in our volume’s appendix (audio examples are available here).
I would like to emphasise three aspects making the editorial work on Schönberg very special.
1. With those pieces composed using twelve-tone technique, the aim was to find out whether Schönberg really applied his method consistently. Just as we initially mistrust the sources when an illogically dissonant, non-harmonic tone is to be found in Mozart’s music, we have to ask ourselves whether it is intentional in Schönberg’s music when, for example, the 9th tone in a row is not followed by the 10th, but instead by the 11th. But what consequences can be drawn from such a discovery? Was Schönberg simply mistaken? Is the deviation from the row intentional? What could be the reasons for this? In cases of doubt, the Henle Urtext edition now contains footnotes indicating such findings and thoroughly weighing the pros and cons so that pianists can decide for themselves which reading is more convincing.
op. 33a, mm. 21–22 with footnote
Comment for op. 33a, m. 22
2. An important source type for Schönberg’s piano pieces are the so-called personal copies. These are copies, usually of the first editions, in which entries and corrections can be found. Many other composers in music history do, of course, also have personal copies. What is unusual in his case, though, is that there are often several extant copies whose entries rarely coincide. Some also have entries in other handwritings, sometimes by students or pianists who rehearsed the works in question with the master. Assessing the status of these entries is tricky and difficult: Are they valid corrections that should be taken into account in a new edition? Are they merely ‘internal’ annotations and echoes of discussions that do not indicate a deliberate change to the text? The ‘lacking’ tones from the twelve-tone row mentioned above are often addressed in the personal copies; in some cases, Schönberg’s entries are ennobled as authentic with initials, i.e., a short signature – thus claiming a high level of authority. The following example shows such an initialled entry, though it does not clearly help us later generations:
Personal copy of the first edition of op. 33a with autograph annotation: „wahrscheinlich weg“ (probably to be omitted)
Arnold Schönberg Center, call number: H 3
Should the upper note d3 now be ‘omitted’ or not?
3. This last aspect (Schönberg’s signing of corrections) is followed by a final observation: He wanted to have the greatest possible control over his works’ published music text. Initialling his corrections seems pedantic, almost obsessive, as well as transferring changes introduced only in the printing process back to all earlier stages of the sources. His instructions to the publishing house and engravers are often meticulous, with every aspect to be regulated down to the smallest detail. If his ideas were not realised, Schönberg reacted indignantly and irately and did not spare any words in his complaints. The autograph engraver’s model for the Suite op. 25 (see here) contains angry entries on the first page of the score, including: ‘I urgently request that you let me know who has taken it upon themselves to make changes to my manuscript that are clearly against my intentions!’ And later, in a letter to the publisher, he complained about these interventions’ ‘lack of taste’ – even though he had wanted to steer the engraving meticulously in the right direction with instructions:
Arnold Schönberg Center, call number: T22.04G
You might think that music texts prepared with such precision would be easy to edit. In fact, as a modern editor, all you have to do is follow his instructions – right? Here, too, things are more complex. It is almost a bit of a relief to realise that Schönberg (very humanly) repeatedly fell short of his own standards. He did not, after all, transfer corrections to all source layers, did overlook details, did not enter changes in all affected spots, etc., etc. So, we editors also had some tough nuts to crack, as you can see from the examples above. Decisions had to be made, and we often had to admit honestly our perplexity and pass our uncertainty on to the musicians.
I would like to conclude this striving for the best possible textual basis, by recalling the quotation opening this blog post. For Schönberg’s music and his struggle for it is always characterised by this seriousness, even lack of compromise, that is alien to anything merely decorative or ornamental: it should always be ‘true’. And we endeavour to live up to this high standard with our Urtext editions.
Congratulations, Arnold Schönberg! We are proud now to have this classical composer of modernity also in the Henle catalogue!