Violin Concerto (Schoenberg)

The Violin Concerto (Op. 36) by Arnold Schoenberg dates from Schoenberg's time in the United States, where he had moved in 1933 to escape the Nazis. The piece was written in 1936, the same year as the String Quartet No. 4. At the time of its completion, Schoenberg was living in Brentwood, California, and had just accepted a teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Schoenberg had made a return to tonal writing upon his move to America and, though the Violin Concerto uses twelve-tone technique, its neoclassical form demanded a mimesis of tonal melody, and hence a renunciation of the motivic technique used in his earlier work in favour of a thematic structure (Rosen 1996, 101). The basic row of the concerto is: $\new Staff \with { \remove "Time_signature_engraver" \remove "Bar_engraver" } \relative c'' { \clef treble \override Stem #'transparent = ##t a4 bes ees b e fis c cis g aes d f }$

While the row is not necessary for understanding any good twelve-note piece, an awareness of it in this concerto is useful because the row is very much in the foreground, and is quite obviously abstracted from Schoenberg's concrete melodic-thematic thinking (Keller 1961, 157).

It is in a three movement fast-slow-fast form, traditional for concertos:

The concerto was first published in 1939 by G. Schirmer.

The concerto was premiered on December 6, 1940, by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski with Louis Krasner as the soloist (Krasner had previously given the premiere of the Violin Concerto by Schoenberg's pupil, Alban Berg). Krasner later made a recording of the concerto, with Dimitri Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

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