Arnold Schönberg
Fragment for Voice, Cello, and Piano
Draft. 1951

Arnold Schönberg’s last months were characterized by serious illness. Gertrud Schönberg told the composer’s sister, Ottilie Blumauer, that he suffered from asthma, constant high blood pressure, and depression. Schönberg had become too weak to participate in family life. The Modern Psalm, op. 50, which remained a fragment, is generally considered to be his last work. On 7 May 1951, about a half year after abandoning the choral piece, Schönberg received a visit from the Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. His daughter Nuria recalled: “Immediately after the visit, Schönberg began to compose a little piece for cello with boy’s voice and piano. He had written the text together with my mother [Gertrud Schönberg]. It was based upon an experience of my brother Lawrence, who was 10 years old at the time.“ I got an A in arithmetic describes, from a child’s perspective, the conflict between the development of intellectual abilities and the desire to find belonging in a larger group; it plays out as an allegory between receiving the top grade in arithmetic and success in a baseball game. The first 15 bars of the cello part were completed by Schönberg. Here, he restricted himself to a statement of the primary form of the row, with constant repetition and variation of smaller pitch collections. The first five bars are mostly limited to the pitches c# , g#, and a, which are playfully developed and sometimes reordered. Schönberg’s son Lawrence probably recognized himself in this cheerful-melancholy Andantino gracioso: about 10 years after the death of his father, he began a degree in mathematics and became a high school teacher.