Before you read the text

1. Practise aloud.

lead – leader, complete – completion, set – setting, state – statement, recite – reciter, strange – strangeness, complex – complexity, dense – density, atonal – atonality, personal – personality, impossible – impossibility, honest – honesty; influence – influential, rhythm – rhythmic, harmony – harmonic, form – formal, drama – dramatic, instrument – instrumental, orchestra – orchestral, favour – favourable, tonal – atonal, conventional – unconventional; rare – rarefy, marry – remarry, integrate – disintegrate; rapid – rapidly, immediate – immediately

2. Pronounce correctly.

sextet, cabaret, intensification, quartet, band, sequence, atonality, suite, variation, cycle, expressionist, expressionism, melancholia, quintet, progress, structure, standard, genre, presentation, academy, confrontation, surrealism, attack, chorus, Austrian, Hungarian, private, contrapuntal, tonal, rhythmic, extreme, dramatic, choral, Prussian, artistic, religious, disintegrate, communicate, characterize, date

3. Read the sentences and translate them paying special attention to the italicized words and word combinations.

1. Tannhäuser was one of the leaders among minnesingers in the mid-13th century. 2. The musician gives violin lessons. 3. The musical style of mastersingers dates from the l5th century. 4. The composer replaced the violin by a cello. 5. There are three movements in the Symphony. 6. The Suite in G for strings is one of the acknowlegded works by A. Schoenberg. 7. She playes the violin in a chamber orchestra. 8. The Conservatory band went on tour to Switzerland. 9. In the village he enjoyed fresh air. 10. He gave his point of view in a short statement. 11. His deep passion justified his behaviour. 12. Schubert couldn't find an appropriate libretto for his opera. 13. Everybody laughed at his jokes. 14. Schoenberg wrote many of his works in the 12-tone serial method. 15. The Society of Music Lovers is organized in our city. 16. Wagner worked in Munich under favourable conditions. 17. Because of his revolutionary poems Pushkin was obliged to leave St. Petersburg. 18. Wagner communiсated with Liszt and many other musicians. 19. His music is a reflection of a disintegrated world. 20. Eleven years later Wagner returned to the completion of his music- drama “The Nibelungs’ Ring”.

4. Look through text A and tell a few words about it contents.

5. Read text A carefully.

Text a arnold schoenberg

The first half of the 20th century is usually characterized as a period of revolutionary experiments in music. That's why it deserved the name New Music. Its most influential leader was Arnold Schoenberg.

Arnold Schoenberg, an Austro-Hungarian composer, was born in Vienna in 1874 and died in Los Angeles in 1951.

He began violin lessons when he was eight and almost immediately started composing, though he had no formal training until he was in his late teens, when Zemlinsky became his teacher and friend (in 1910 hе married Zemlinsky's sister). His first acknowledged works date from the turn of the century and include the string sextet “Verklaerte Nacht” as well as some songs, all showing influences from Brahms, Wagner and Wolf. In 1901–3 he was in Berlin as a cabaret musician and teacher, and there he wrote the symphonic роеm “Pelleas und Melisande”. He then returned to Vienna and began taking private pupils. Berg and Webern were among the first. He also moved rapidly forwards in his musical style. The large orchestra of “Pelleas” and the “Gurrelieder” was replaced by an ensemble of 15 in Chamber Symphony no.1, but with an intensification of harmonic strangeness, formal complexity and contrapuntal density: like the String Quartet no.1, the work is composed as a single movement including the characters of the traditional four and using every effort to join uncoventional ideas (a sequence of 4ths in the Chamber Symphony, for instance) into a conventional discourse. When atonality appeared, as it did in 1908, it came as the result of a doomed attempt to accomodate ever more disruptive material. However, Schoenberg found it possible a quater–century later to return to something like his tonal style in such works as the Suite in G for strings, the completion of the Chamber Symphony no. 2 and the Theme and Variations for band.

That, however, was not possible immediately. The sense of key was left behind as Schoenberg set poems by Stefan George in the last two movements of String quartet no. 2. For the next few years he lived in the new, rarefied musical air. With tonality had gone thematicism and rhythmic constraint; works tended to be short statements of a single musical state, justifying the term “expressionist” (Five Orchestral Pieces; Three Pieces and Six Little Pieces for piano). The larger pieces of this period have some appropriate dramatic content: the despair of a woman waiting for her lover (“Erwartung”), the strange stories, melancholia and jokes of a disintegrating personality (“Pierrot lunaire”, for reciter in Sprechgesang with quintet), or the progress of the soul towards union with God (“Die Jakobsleiter”).

Gradually Schoenberg came to find the means for writing longer instrumental structures, in the 12-note serial method. He also founded the Society for Private Musical Performances (1919 – 21), involving his pupils in the presentation of new music under favourable conditions. In 1923 his wife died (he remarried the next year), and in 1925 he moved to Berlin to take a master class at the Prussian Academy of Arts. While there he wrote much of his unfinished opera “Moses und Aron”. The main idea of this opera is the impossibility of communicating truth without some distortion in the telling: it was a strong confrontation with despair on the part of a composer who insisted on the highest standards of artistic honesty.

In 1933 he was obliged as a Jew to leave Berlin: he went to Paris. Later the same year he arrived in the USA, and he settled in Los Angeles in 1934. It was there that he returned to tonal composition, while developing surrealism to make possible the more complex structures of the Violin Concerto and the String quartet no. 4. In 1936 he began teaching at UCLA. After a heart attack in 1945, however, he gave up teaching and made some return to expressionism (“A Survivor from Warsaw”, String Trio), as well as writing religious choruses.