April 30, 1994

Marilyn Nonken: A Schoenberg Biography By Piano

By Bernard Holland

Listening to Marilyn Nonken negotiate the entire piano literature of Arnold Schoenberg at Christ and St. Stephen's Church on Wednesday night was to engage in a chronological drama, part heroic adventure and part tragedy. The repertory is small and relatively brief; Schoenberg lived 20 more years after the final two pieces (Op. 33) were written in the late 1920's and early 30's.

As in the case of Beethoven's sonatas, however, the piano has written a composer's biography: the Brahms-infatuated Three Pieces of 1894, the post-tonal explorations of the Three Piano Pieces (Op. 11), and Six Little Pieces (Op. 19); the fully fledged 12-tone works of Opus 23 and Opus 25, then Opus 33, and finally from the keyboard, silence.

The stamp of a singular personality, rigorous and deeply thoughtful, is in all of this music; yet as individual items progressed under Ms. Nonken's sure hands, one couldn't help sensing a paradox of purpose, a simultaneous need to flee from the past and to carry the past on one's back into the future.

The arguments for atonality's inevitable self-defeat are familiar. One is the 20-century listener's learned and possibly innate impulse to hear fundamental attractions of one tone to another, which is the basis of the tonal language. The other is the instrument Schoenberg's piano inherits, tuned as it is to reflect these human connections. So much of this music employs the rhetoric of old ways of hearing but without its spelling and grammar. The absence of tonal centers as firm reference points invites a certain unfettered flow of ideas, but Schoenberg keeps returning to forms based a completely different kind of hearing. The baroque dance movements of the Suite (Op. 25) ape the old (the Gavotte and the Minuet uses A-B-A repeats) but lack the compelling reasons for the old, namely the inevitable path back to a point of rest.

In his spoken commentaries on this program, Walter Frisch told of Schoenberg's parenthetical indications of tonic and dominant in scores that avoid the hearing of either. Indeed, so much of the phrasing is shaped after Brahms and Schumann. Schoenberg meant this paradox to be logical: the natural melding of old and new. Yet the two contradict each other. The listener deeply admires the craft of this music and recognizes its expressive language while at the same time feeling frustrated in a blind alley.

Ms. Nonken does very well. The later pieces are difficult both for the body and for the intellect, but her technique is in place and her feeling for these pieces is so heartfelt, so sincere, that one is constantly engaged. In an odd way, her role may have been that of a preservationist, a determined protector of important music that history embraces in the abstract and, who knows, one day may take to heart.