Content area
Full Text
Richard BloeschIowa City, IA
David Castleberry[lang ]castlebe[commat]marshall.edu[rang ] (EDITOR)
Rundfunkchor Berlin, Simon Halsey, Director
Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Kent Nagano, conductor.
Harmonia Mundi 801821
Recorded April 2003; released 2004
Duration: 59.8 minutes
A new recording of the intimidatingly daunting oratorio fragment, Die Jakobsleiter , by Arnold Schoenberg is, musically speaking, a momentous occasion. The previous path-breaking recording (1980), conducted by Pierre Boulez, has now in many respects been superseded, especially because this new CD incorporates SACD technology. To experience comprehensively the sonic wonders of this performance one needs a multichannel SACD player with multichannel amplifiers and speakers. On normal equipment the CD still sounds quite remarkable, however. Also on the disc is
p.105
Schoenberg's complete short-score manuscript for viewing by those whose computers have the most up-to-date capability.
The music, as we have it, is a setting of only the first (and shorter) part of Schoenberg's two-part libretto. He began writing the text in 1915 and completed it in 1917. The whole libretto was published in the summer of 1917 and he began to compose the music. After writing 600 bars, he was called up to military service for the second time, and, even though he returned to civilian life after a few months, the interruption had devastating consequences. During the next four years (1918-22), he managed to write only another hundred bars. It was not until 1944 in America that he returned once more to the manuscript. But this time his revision stopped at bar 44. Schoenberg left a short score with indications of instrumentation. After his death, his former pupil Winfried Zillig produced a full score. Zillig plausibly explained why things turned out the way they did: "The twelve-tone system having been discovered, once and for all, work on Jacob's Ladder clearly became impossible.... And although Jacob's Ladder contains constant premonitions of this new system, in this of all pieces his search had kept leading him along other paths, which were no longer negotiable." 1 Schoenberg's original intention was to...