7 - The String Trio: metaleptic Schoenberg

Summary

Something was burning. And besides,

At the far end of the room a discredited waltz

Was alive and reciting tales of the conquerors

And their lilies – is all of life thus

A tepid housewarming? And where do the scraps

Of meaning come from? Obviously,

It was time to be off, in another

Direction …

John Ashbery: “April Galleons”

Introduction

Schoenberg composed his String Trio, op. 45, primarily during a period of convalescence following a nearly fatal heart attack that he suffered on August 2, 1946. Schoenberg's own recollections of the events of his illness as well as a discussion of their relevance to programmatic elements in the String Trio have been studied by Walter B. Bailey. Bailey describes the original commission for the trio, Schoenberg's initial conception of its form, and the relation of that conception to the finished work.

The dates on the manuscript of the Trio, 20 August – 23 September 1946, show that it was written largely during the period when Schoenberg was recovering from his heart attack. Leonard Stein, a frequent visitor in the Schoenberg home, recalls that Schoenberg worked on the score even before he was strong enough to leave his bed. The work, however, had been commissioned somewhat earlier by A. Tillman Merritt of Harvard University. In a letter of 28 May, 1946, Merritt asked Schoenberg to write a chamber composition of unspecified instrumentation for a concert that would accompany the “Symposium on Music Criticism” that Harvard would host the following May…. Schoenberg accepted the commission in a letter of 15 June 1946, where he noted that he had begun work on the score. […]