insightPeter Bradley-Fulgoni‘not a concerted
intellectual experiment,
but an organic evolutionof musical expression’2arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012

insight

The mystery ofModern dissonance
The story goes that when thetwenty-year old Brahms visited Liszt
in Weimar in 1853, Liszt effortlessly
sight-read the younger man’s piano
Sonata in C major (a work ofconsiderable technical difficulty).
Brahms was astounded by this featof consummate musicianship.
However, when Liszt then played
his own, as yet unpublished, B
minor Sonata, Brahms fell asleep.
Liszt probably understood that theyoung composer was tired after hislong journey, and of course thestory may be apocryphal, butnevertheless the fact that they
never met again may be read as a
metaphor for a divergence ofmusical tendencies that came tocharacterise nineteenth-century
high art music. Some describe thisas ‘the war of the Romantics’, abitter dispute between the New
German School (principal figures,Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner)and traditionalists, such as Brahms,
whose work was deemed oldfashioned. It was a spat thatembroiled the whole of musicalEurope.
Liszt and Brahms were both
Romantics but whereas Brahms wasconservative, stylistically andharmonically – Hans von Bülow,the musico-political spokesman of
the New German School, would
describe his first symphony as‘Beethoven’s Tenth’ – Liszt could bedisorientating and daring on bothfronts. For example it was Liszt who
perfected the development ofsignificantly longer formal
structures solely through themetamorphosis of themes: bysubjecting a leitmotiv to a variety ofpermutations both rhythmic andintervallic, he preserved a unity
within variety and vice versa. The
provision of such a unity had also

been the architectural role ofsonata form within the Classicalsymphony, but whereas that had
been more suited to thecharacteristics of absolute music –or music unrelated to pictorial or
poetic suggestion – Liszt’sstructures, epitomised by his B
minor piano Sonata and his
symphonic poems, gave the theme
developmental possibilities moreakin to cellular mitosis and centred
on a belief in feelings and emotions– in short, a belief in the power of‘the sublime’.
Within these new structuralforms Romantic expression wasgiven further freedom by thedismantling of tonality. Tonality isbased on scales. An octave can bedivided into twelve notes, each asemitone apart. If you play them
one after the other, the result is
described as chromatic – a scale insemitones without a home key.
However in the scales of Westernmusic from the time of Bach, sevennotes are used to make up the‘major’ and ‘minor’ scales and theintervals between them are notalways semitones. In thisarrangement the result is diatonic– the scales assume a ‘home’ key
and, therefore, a sense of resolution
when a chord based on the fifthnote of the scale (the ‘dominant’) is
followed by one based on the firstnote (the ‘tonic’). The simple
consonance of this tonic–dominantrelationship is the basis of every
simple nursery-rhyme tune. Within
this tonal system, more piquantharmonies, or dissonances, areused for effect – indeed theexpressive role of dissonance aspart of an opposition (consonance–dissonance) was the basis forexpression in music in the West up
until the time of Schönberg andinsightarq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012

Poly-dimensional: the introduction to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (showing the ‘Tristan chord’ in bar 2) ...

‘stylistically and harmonically disorientating and daring’... and Schönberg’s comment: the first line of Mäßige, from his Drei Klavierstücke, Opus 11

the Second Viennese School in theearly twentieth century.
In the works of Liszt and Wagner,a re-definition of tonal resolutionengendered a sort of emancipatedidea of consonance. The daring
harmonic progressions of Wagner
are exemplified by the so-called‘Tristan chord’ in the opening
phrase of his opera Tristan und Isoldeof 1865. Often pinpointed as thegenesis of this essentially
Modernist idea, its polydimensional nature enables it to becontextualiszed in a multiplicity of
tonal contexts – or none. Liszt, too,
pursued the logical inference of
tonal dissolution to the point
where the opening motif in his
experimental and prescient latepiano piece Nuages Gris of 1881,
could be re-presented
intervallically as the opening ofBerg’s piano Sonata Opus 1 – a workwhose conception of tonality hints
at a pure chromaticism
reminiscent of Wagner.
The denser the chromaticism,the more the tonal centre – thesense of tonal stability – isobscured. But it is Arnold
Schönberg who developed this lineof thought to the point where eachof the twelve notes of the chromaticscale is given equal importance – anindependence that provides noover-riding sense of key. Thus is
Schönberg considered the inventorof atonalism. If, in the words of one

commentator, he was ‘the ravisherof the listener’s ear’, it was not acrime that went unnoticed: there
was shouting during the first
performance of his second String
Quartet in 1908 and public protests
afterwards, even as critics rushed todeclare the composer insane.
This ‘Schönberg scandal’, as it
was called, was part of a wider
historical picture on anincreasingly international scale.
One may think of radical
composition such as Scriabin’s
creation of an atonalism
independent of Schönberg(especially in the late piano sonatas
written after 1911) and Debussy’sexperimentalism (for example inhis second set of piano preludes of1913); then there was the infamous
reaction to Stravinsky’s Le Sacre duPrintemps at its first performance in1913 when police had to be called toquell a riot. In the visual arts, too,hostility was shown towards thework of Matisse (in 1905, a critic
repeated Ruskin’s words on
Whistler: ‘a pot of paint flung in
the public’s face’), Picasso andBraque created a sensation by their‘bizarreries cubiques’, and theintensifying gloom of the infraworld of German Expressionist
painting and drama compounded
the sense of shock.
Even nowadays the idea of such
Modern dissonance is shrouded inmystery. It could be said that in thefirmament of high art music at thetime of Schönberg and hisfollowers, the great upheaval
apropos of harmony, form andstructure caused a cataclysmic
revolution, the consequences ofwhich resound to the present.
Many years on from my first recital
performances of works by‘Moderns’ such as Schönberg, Berg,
Gerhard and Di Gesu, such music
can still be met with suspicion andhostility, as if seen as a misstep inan otherwise jolly tonal romp. But
Schönberg, for example, rejected
the idea of tonality not as aconcerted intellectual experiment
but as an organic evolution ofmusical expression: for him, a newpalette of emotions could only be
expressed within the parameters ofa new musical order; indeed, theemotional intensity of works by all
the composers of the Second
Viennese School (Schönberg,Webern, Berg and Gerhard) would
be incomprehensible if offset
against a background of traditional
diatonic harmony. It was
Expressionism – and theirdisillusionment in the aftermathof the First World War would
compound feelings offragmentation and alienation thatthey transferred to their music.
Schönberg’s piano works Opus 11and 19 belong to his own highly
creative Expressionist period(1908–11) – a time also considered  The mystery of Modern dissonance    Peter Bradley-Fulgoni

3

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arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012

insight

Massimo Di Gesu: an extract from the manuscript of ‘Through a glass ...’, 2001

‘Di Gesu’s music reconnects with theSecond Viennese School’

Arnold Schönberg, shown on an Austrian stamp of 1974 (engraver and designer, Otto Stefferl)

to be his most controversial since,
curiously, his later ‘serialism’,pursued and perfected by his pupil,
Webern, has become a morenormal aspect of today’s musicalacceptance as exemplified by thework of Pierre Boulez.
There were other significant
voices. The work of Hindemith in
the 1920s, for example, had an
unconstrained dissonance that, in
Glenn Gould’s words ‘gave way inthe 1930s to a determination tobring dissonance to heel in theinterests of structural cohesion’.
In the Dritte Sonate für Klavier (1936)
with its amazing triple fugue
finale, redolent of the ecstatic
polyphony of J. S. Bach, we have anPeter Bradley-Fulgoni

The mystery of Modern dissonance

undisputed masterpiece as well as,perhaps, an ascetic balance
between the old and new orders.
These composers, whose work isessential in any discussion ofModern high art music, arereferenced by Massimo Di Gesu. Hismusic has a unique tonal language
traceable to Schönberg, and in thatway it represents a breath of fresh
air in the doldrums of‘contemporary music’ malaise. His
reconnection with the Second
Viennese School eschews fashion,
rejects Post-Modernism and adopts
an exclusively atonal idiom;moreover it is characterised by thesearch for a gravitational pull thatlinks the elements of the music

narrative so that these can sound asmuch as possible ‘necessary’ to one
another. There is a hint here of
Beethoven’’s motto, written in thescore of his Opus 135 string quartet:
Es muss sein (it must be): theco-ordinates of this particular‘necessity’ are found in his harmony(where he focuses on a circularsystem of eight-note chords
suggestive of Scriabin’s multialtered dominants) and in his
counterpoint (where he refers tothe way both Schönberg and Strauss
re-thought Bach’s principle ofdynamic magnification throughmelodic-rhythmical contrast).
The war of the Romantics was
not fought without occasionalinstances of a truce. In his memoirs,
the great Scottish pianist Frederic
Lamond, who studied with Liszt,
retells the story of a musical gettogether in Vienna where Brahms,
the traditionalist, played from themanuscript of his Variations on a
Theme of Handel while Wagner, thetrail-blazer, sat at the piano besidehim: ‘When the composer finished[Wagner] spoke the remarkablewords: “I would never have thought
it possible to compose such
Variations after Beethoven.” A few
days later Wagner sent to Brahms acopy of the Rhinegold, bound ingold.’ One might say that thefactions were reconciled. Schönberg
himself played a part in this: hesought to reconcile Brahmsian
formal lineaments with
Wagnerian chromaticism in his(tonal) Verklärte Nacht of 1899. His
subsequent transfigurations ofharmony, form and structure areaspects of the vibrant spirit ofModernism. The tensions withinthat shift are ones that composers
such as Di Gesu embrace, pianists
like myself recreate, and thepublic ...?
Peter Bradley-Fulgoni’s previous essays
for arq on J. S. Bach’s forty-eight
preludes and fugues and on Beethoven’s
piano sonatas were published in arq
10/3+4 and 14/4. His latest recording,of music of, and around, the twentiethcentury from late Liszt to Di Gesu andentitled PianOLYPHONY, is on theFoxglove Audio label (Fox 091). Future
engagements include a concert tourof Russia at the behest of the Richter
Foundation where, among other things,
he will perform the Schönberg piano
concerto and a new piano concerto
by Di Gesu.
Photo: Peter Bradley-Fulgoni after arecital at the Sviatoslav Richter
Memorial Apartment, Moscow, 2008.