Klarinet Archive - Posting 000043.txt from 2000/09

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] An interesting story about Schoenberg
Date: Sun, 3 Sep 2000 05:39:53 -0400

On Sat, 02 Sep 2000 17:48:56 -0700, leeson0@-----.net said:

> "At one point the clarinetist Polatschek leaned over to whisper to
> Burghauser that he had just discovered he had by mistake been playing
> a clarinet in B-flat instead of the one in A specified in the score,
> and Schoenberg hadn't noticed it -- which led to Burghauser's
> suggestion that the musicians play wrong notes to see if Schoenberg
> would hear them, and their discovery that he did not hear them."

It's difficult to know what to make of stories like this. We know that
anecdotes often get exaggerated and elaborated in the telling, if
they're passed from one person to another -- and even if they're told a
large number of times by one person.

To start with, it's worth noting that this is the sort of story that
orchestral players quite like to tell, isn't it? Music that's really
difficult to play, a conductor that's a difficult person to deal with --
what more delightful than that he can't hear whether or not you're
playing what he wrote? It helps the beer go down a treat!

Well, the Schoenberg Kammersymphonie clarinet part is largely in A, with
the central scherzo on the Bb.

The way the story is told seems to suggest that Polatschek had failed to
read correctly which clarinet he should take, and had been playing for
some time without Schoenberg noticing. If that's so, one possibility is
that Polatschek made his mistake at the very beginning, just not
noticing that the part's in A; or that he failed for some reason to
change back to the A clarinet after the scherzo.

We can dismiss the first alternative: it would certainly be impossible
to play the beginning of the piece on the Bb clarinet without *everyone*
noticing, because the held F major chord in the fourth bar would have a
C# in it, and in bars 6 to 9 the melody is doubled by all the high
winds, including the A clarinet.

Likewise the return. The clarinet switches to A for the ghostly
sehr langsam passage in fourths, with col legno strings, which is
completely exposed. Playing a semitone sharp here would be like a slap
in the face.

Could it have been the other way round? That is, could Polatschek have
failed to make the switch to *Bb* for the scherzo, and the story has
been garbled? Well, no, because almost immediately in the scherzo the
clarinet and piccolo have exposed octaves, which again would stick out
like a sore thumb.

So, perhaps we should read the story differently. Perhaps what happened
was that in the course of the rehearsal, Schoenberg jumped from one
part of the piece to rehearse a couple of bars in another; Polatschek
didn't see that he should switch clarinets, and Schoenberg didn't
notice.

That's a bit more plausible. We might imagine that Schoenberg was
concentrating on another part of the group, and wasn't listening
overmuch at that moment to what the clarinet was doing. (The most
likely part of the piece for this to occur, funnily enough, is the part
that's actually on the Bb clarinet.)

But I've played this piece probably around a hundred times, and
conducted it around 10 times, and I have to say that I find it very
implausible that the error could have persisted for longer than a bar or
so, say. All the players would notice, never mind the conductor! There
are just too many unison and octave doublings, and the tonal mismatches
would be too extreme.

Finally, I suppose we should consider the possibility that Schoenberg,
despite being a great composer, actually was unable to hear blatant
wrong notes, in a tonal piece, when he conducted rehearsals. (This is
the suggestion made in the story at the end, though the degree to which
it was found to be true by our bassoonist informant and his colleagues
is -- conveniently? -- left unspecified.)

This could be so, I suppose. I don't know of any other evidence for it.
He was a professional 'cellist.

By the way, if you don't know this Op 9 of Schoenberg, I thoroughly
recommend it. As I said, it's an early, tonal work, not at all
difficult to listen to; and it's very, very exciting. Get the original
chamber version rather than the later version for full orchestra.

If you buy London Sinfonietta/Atherton you get me trying to negotiate
the D/Eb part, unfortunately without the help of a D clarinet. (You
also get some searing horn playing from Barry Tuckwell, who turned up 15
minutes late for the session from a meeting with his ex-wife's
solicitor. We knew where he'd been, and nobody said a word, not even
the conductor:-)

One thing is certain: even if Schoenberg didn't hear clearly what his
players *were* doing when they were rehearsing his piece, he certainly
heard pretty clearly what they *should* be doing when he was writing it!

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN family artist: www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339

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