Talk:Variations for Orchestra (Schoenberg)

Grammar

For the record, this edit is grammatically incorrect. A Google search for "a set of variations on a theme" shows that "a set of variations on a theme" is a common expression. The present introduction is grammatically incorrect, as it jumps from a singular to a plural in an improper way. Toccata quarta (talk) 10:38, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

There's more wrong with this than grammar. Why the text includes a link to "Passacaglia" isn't explained by following the link, which leads you to a citation of a completely different, and differently conceived, Schoenberg work. It's not impossible that by employing an arcane definition and a mciroscope some specialist might find a bar or two in the texture he or she could claim to be reminiscent of a passacaglia ( after all, folk have claimed to find one note canons in Schoenberg before now), but they'd have to work pretty hard to get there. (Nevertheless, someone in Croatia has, though he's found it more or less where Brahms put his St Antoni Variations passacaglia - in the first part of Schoenberg's finale exposition. I'm not going to argue. Perhaps that's what the link was intended to guide the punter to. If so, perhaps it should say so.) It's nice to know a flexatone is present, but usually it's not all that easy to hear it in performance. It's also nice to know that this is a work for "large ensemble" - but even Schoenberg himself called a spade a shovel from time to time and he does here - the word "orchestra" is in the title. This is actually his first large work for orchestra alone since the Five Orchestral Pieces, isn't it? And if the orchestration - which is often extraordinary - reminds one of anything it's often the "Trinklied" in "Das Lied von der Erde". If the author quotes a lecture on the piece by Schoenberg to emphasise that the ordinary punter can't be expected to dictate the reception of the piece, but has no further recourse to it, what is the ordinary punter, coming to Wikipedia for help, to think? Go to his score and count the bars until he finds the theme? In fact it's in the sidebar "Combinatorial tone-row' (what a mouthful, apparently coined by Milton Babbitt, and it should be linked to the Wikipedia article on it) but he's not guided there. Or told that it begins and is mostly sustained as a cello line - as in, curiously, an almost exactly similar juncture in Strauss's Don Quixote, not to mention Delius' Appalachia. (Schoenberg knew quite a bit of other contemporary composers' music, though perhaps not much Delius, and at the time of Don Quixote he had not declared war on Richard Strauss) Nice to know, too, that the BACH tag appears. What is it doing there? Does Schoenberg tell us? It could be that he had Der Kunst der Fuge in mind, perhaps.

This isn't a popular masterpiece, even among critics, but it is demonstrably a masterpiece and a very important one. Once you get through the technical undergrowth which now surrounds it, it's also pretty listenable. But it's never had much luck in reference books and it isn't getting any hereDelahays (talk) 08:41, 12 July 2014 (UTC).

It's not quite seven years since I wrote the above, and if no-one has read it since, I probably deserved that result. So I recommend the following, which is far more useful to the innocent enquirer than anything else in this assemblage of evasions - plus a recording under Zubin Mehta i n San Francisco made forty years ago at least, which is magnificnetly played and pre-Boulez.https://www.universaledition.com/arnold-schonberg-655/works/variationen-5573 Delahays (talk) 13:42, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Errors in tone row graphic

There are errors in the tone row graphic. 188.39.246.21 (talk) 10:41, 5 February 2015 (UTC)

More specifically, the combinatorial row graphic should be labeled P(0) and I (9), yes? RebaMerchant (talk) 20:57, 4 October 2017 (UTC)