Violin Concerto (Schoenberg) - Style and Form

Style and Form

Schoenberg had made a return to tonal writing upon his move to America and, though the Violin Concerto uses twelve-tone technique, its neoclassical form demanded a mimesis of tonal melody, and hence a renunciation of the motivic technique used in his earlier work in favour of a thematic structure (Rosen 1996, 101). The basic row of the concerto is:

While the row is not necessary for understanding any good twelve-note piece, an awareness of it in this concerto is useful because the row is very much in the foreground, and is quite obviously abstracted from Schoenberg's concrete melodic-thematic thinking (Keller 1961, 157).

It is in a three movement fast-slow-fast form, traditional for concertos:

1. Poco allegro—Vivace. Opinion is divided about the form of the first movement. According to one authority, it is in sonata form (Keller 1961, 157), while another asserts it is a large ternary form, concluding with a cadenza and a coda (Mead 1985, 140). It employs a wide variety of row forms, often in families associated by hexachordal content (Mead 1985, 141).
2. Andante grazioso
3. Finale: Allegro. The last movement is a rondo with an unusually dynamic development. It only gradually becomes clear that the underlying character is that of a march. There is a second cadenza just before the end, which rounds off the whole work in cyclic fashion (Keller 1961, 157).

The concerto was premiered on December 6, 1940, by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski with Louis Krasner as the soloist (Krasner had previously given the premiere of the Violin Concerto by Schoenberg's pupil, Alban Berg).

The concerto was first published in 1939 by G. Schirmer.