Transfigured night

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
String Sextet No. 2, op. 36, G major
His two string sextets op. 18 (1858-60) and op. 36 (1864-1865) are among the first chamber music works that Johannes Brahms wrote.
The Sextet op. 36 was premiered in Boston in May 1865 by the “Mendelssohn Quintette Club”. “Here I have freed myself from my love in Göttingen”, Brahms said, alluding to his engagement to Agathe von Siebold, which he broke off in 1858. Musically, he set her name to music: the sequence of notes A-G-A-D-H-E is incorporated into the secondary theme of the first movement (1st violin).

Bohuslav Martinů: (1890-1959)
String Sextet H224
“Joy and a humble, unpretentious attitude” should characterize music – that was the demand of the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů, whose tragic life and work represents the sad final chapter of Czech national music, which began with Dvořák. He was the most productive Czech composer of the 20th century, with chamber music occupying an important place in his oeuvre. He can be seen as the perfecter of the Smetana-Dvořák-Janáček tradition, which he took up in the spirit of folk classicism. His oeuvre is stylistically very diverse.
Martinů moved from Prague to Paris in 1923 in search of the “true foundations of Western culture”: “order, clarity, measure, taste, precise, sensitive, direct expression”.
This is reflected in his String Sextet, composed in 1932, whereby the highly emotional nature of the work suggests a premonition of the coming war.
1940 Martinů had to flee Paris as a Czech Jew and finally reached New York in an adventurous way in 1941, where all positions for exiled musicians had already been filled. He was saved by the fact that the conductor Koussevitzky commissioned him to write a symphony, which was a great success and enabled him to gain a foothold in America. Nevertheless, he suffered from a constant longing for his homeland.

Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951)
“Verklärte Nacht” op. 4
Schönberg composed the string sextet op. 4, Verklärte Nacht, in 1899 during a vacation with his composition teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky and his sister Mathilde (whom he married in 1901). He was inspired to write this composition by a poem by Richard Dehmel from 1896.
The five-stanza poem, which precedes the score, describes the walk of a couple in the moonlight, in which the woman confesses to her lover that she is expecting a child by another man. She meets with magnanimous understanding from the man, who wants to accept the child as his own.
As clearly intended program music, Schönberg transfers the idea of the “symphonic poem” to the realm of chamber music. Verklärte Nacht is a work from Schönberg’s first tonal creative phase.
Gustav Mahler recommended that the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra perform the piece. The premiere in Vienna in 1902 left audiences and the press baffled; today, Verklärte Nacht is one of Schönberg’s most frequently performed pieces.
Schönberg wrote a performance statement for his piece in 1950.

Transfigured night

Two people walk through a bare, cold grove;
the moon walks with them, they look into it.
The moon walks over tall oaks,
not a cloud dims the sky light,
into which the black spikes reach.
The voice of a woman speaks:

I am carrying a child, and not from you,
I walk in sin beside you.
I have grievously wronged myself;
I no longer believed in happiness
and yet I had a strong longing
for the fruit of life, for motherly happiness
and duty – then I delighted myself,
then I shudderingly let my sex
be embraced by a strange man
and still blessed myself for it.
Now life has taken its revenge,
now I have met you, O you.

She walks with an awkward step,
she looks up, the moon walks with her;
her dark gaze drowns in light.
The voice of a man speaks:

The child you have conceived,
be no burden to your soul,
o see how clearly the universe shimmers!
There is a radiance around everything,
you float with me on a cold sea,
yet a warmth of your own flickers
from you into me, from me into you;
it will transfigure the foreign child,
you will give birth to it, from me,
you have brought the radiance into me,
you have made me a child yourself.

He grasps her around the strong hips,
her breath mingles in the air,
two people walk through the high, bright night.

by Richard Dehmel, 1874-1951