To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Schönberg's birth, Editions Contrechamps and the Philharmonie de Paris are (finally) publishing for the French-speaking reader all the diversity of his writings: texts on music, autobiographical texts, librettos, fiction texts , theoretical or educational projects, texts on the Jewish question, texts on contemporary personalities or on composers of the past… including striking aphorisms.
The monumental edition includes more than 330 texts, a very large number of which are unpublished in French, and others, unpublished altogether. Translated by Jean-Pierre Collot and edited by Jean-Pierre Collot and Philippe Albèra – The texts are presented chronologically, from 1890 to 1951. 1562 pages.
Born in Bohemia, Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) wrote throughout his life, from his youthful poems to the Psalms of the end: plays, librettos (set to music or not), fictions, aphorisms, intimate writings, essays on music, on interpretation, on politics or religion, musical analyses, remarks on his contemporaries, on painting and literature, on technological progress, etc… This edition, the most complete to date, brings together a vast set of writings presented in chronological form, as if it were leafing through the pages of a personal diary.
He was thought to be a painter; Schönberg was therefore also a writer; at least he was convinced of it. Without absolutely defending the quality of his prose, on a strictly literary level, the corpus thus restored, which includes a number of unpublished works, provides information on the personality of the composer, his personal intentions without contingency of any kind; they bear witness to their own thinking, their logic. We follow the evolutions of musical language: the jump out of tonality, then the “method of composition with twelve sounds”… they reveal, among other things, his own vision of music which “innovative” can perhaps be described as “structuralist”. Clairvoyant, even visionary (on the question of Jewishness which concerns him), Schoenberg also knows how to claw and defend himself, in particular against critics and detractors.
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MORE INFO on the website of the publisher Contrechamps: https://editions-contrechamps.org/livres/schonberg_ecrits/
Event in Geneva around the Writings of Schönberg – Tuesday November 12 at 8 p.m., rue du Général-Dufour 16,
Screening and meeting in collaboration with Cinémas du Grütli
