“Verklaerte Nacht” was one of the greatest discoveries of my youth, a profound miracle of beauty for an adolescent student of composition. One of the first recordings I ever heard when my parents were able to afford a vinyl disc player, spent hours listening to it over and over. This profound impact sent me on a quest for the score in my conservatory’s library, I took it out, and began studying it. Several years later, I started conducting the string orchestra version. The culmination of my life-time love for this beautiful work by Arnold Schoenberg is meant as a humble tribute.

The marvellous piece was composed in three weeks in 1899 as a sextet for two violins, two violas and two violoncellos. The first known manuscript dates from December 1st of that year. It was premiered in the Wien Musikverein on March 18, 1902 by the Rosé Quartet with the addition Franz Jelinek, viola, and Franz Schmidt, violoncello. The piece was transcribed by the composer for string orchestra in 1917, and it was again revised, newly arranged and then published in a new version for strings  in 1943.

The  visible and audible faithfulness shown in this piece is verifiable in the extent to which this ‘translation’ accurately renders the meaning of the original musical text. The formal equivalence is explained by the ‘note-by-note’ transcription, applied in most passages, including tremolos, arpeggios and passages that belong idiomatically to string instruments’ structures: I worked on getting those passages adapted to pianist fingerings. Both the counterpoint complexity and the astonishing harmony novelties are explicitly adapted in such a way that this ‘translation”demands powerful skills and proven dexterity- complex writing, intricate  voicing, and expanded chordal building are a task to pianists.The studious performer will find plenty information on proposed fingering  -designed as helpful advising. At passages where a robust chordal combination exceeded a normal fingering, the pianist will need to solve rapid octave changes posed as ‘grace chords’.

The piece requires a sophisticated managing of the three pedals. The ‘sustain’ pedal must be used assiduously, and must be used in different degrees of depth, to provide distinct levels of resonance. The soft pedal (‘una corda’ in the score) is absolutely necessary in several passages marked ‘pianissimo’  and will necessarily produce timbre differentiation.  Finally the sostenuto pedal is genuinely essential to maintain and underline the bass line in certain phrases where the imposing importance of pedal-tones supports the higher voices combining arpegios and different melodies at a given time.

The great artistic beauty and astounding magnitude of Verklaerte Nacht’s technical achievement have prompted the creation of several musicological essays: the portentous morphological structure has received diverse  interpretations, although all listeners and players have reacted unanimously with admiration to its radiant beauty and wondrous expressivity.  Built as a departure from a Wagnerian language, the music is rooted in new findings of structural sequencing. It shows both the path of the great composer of Tristan but also alludes to the constructivism of Johannes Brahms. The original piece demonstrates the enormous capacity, and astonishing technical brilliance of a young composer. Because of the virtuosic treatment, it could be compared with a ‘paraphrase’ in the Lisztian sense. It is written with the same intention Liszt conceived for his version of Beethoven Symphonies: technical challenges, some innovative notation, certainly  original fingering distribution.

As it is written in the preface, this is a work of love and admiration for a great composer in his most beloved music.