Arnold Schönberg
Suite for Piano, op. 25/iii. Musette
Fair copy. 1923

Schönberg's Suite for Piano op. 25, completed in 1923, is perhaps a subtle echo of the Sonates pour divers instruments of his French colleague Claude Debussy, who translated idioms of the French baroque into a contemporary sound language in this group of works. In Schönberg’s piece, formal characteristics of stylized dance movements are emphasized by the conditions imposed by the twelve-tone method. The classical Musette is characterized by a pedal tone, by means of which the tonic is continuously heard. Schönberg chose the third tone of the series, g, for the sustained pedal of his Musette, op. 25/iii, and let it wander audibly through octave transpositions while the remaining tones of the series prance about it with stereotypical melodic figures. The work’s compositional models are the piano suites of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose name is also echoed in the series’ retrograde beginning with b-a-c-h (standard pitch nomenclature in Central Europe uses “b“ to represent b♭ and “h“ for b♮). By referencing the “first of all German and foreign artists“ (Johann Nikolaus Forkel), Schönberg created an association with the origins of the tradition whose continuation he believed he could secure with the twelve-tone method.