Wind Quintet (Schoenberg)

The Wind Quintet, Op. 26, is a chamber-music composition by Arnold Schoenberg, composed in 1923–24. It is one of the earliest of Schoenberg's compositions to use twelve-tone technique.

Schoenberg's Wind Quintet was one of his first twelve-tone compositions (Schoenberg 1975, 225). It was composed in 1923–24, and individual sketches in the composer's sketchbook number 5 contain precise data on the progress of the composition. The world premiere took place on Schoenberg's fiftieth birthday, 13 September 1924. The score's dedication is "Dem Bubi Arnold" (To little Arnold), the composer's grandson, his daughter Gertrud and Felix Greissle's child (Butz 1988, 251).

The Quintet is in four movements:

The work is laid out in the four-movement pattern of Classical chamber-music forms, using the thematic contrast usual in them (Neighbour 2001). In this way, Schoenberg sought to restore the innate expressive qualities of the forms of tonal music, and so the Quintet, along with the Suite for piano, op. 25, the Suite for septet, op. 29, the Third String Quartet, op. 30, and the Variations for Orchestra, represent the most extreme point of his neoclassicism (Rosen 1996, 88).

The first movement follows standard sonata-allegro layout, and "is perhaps the most notorious example of a twelve-tone movement imitating a tonal form", with a repeated two-theme exposition, a development section, and a recapitulation in which the second theme is transposed up a perfect fourth, as if it were a tonal work with the second key area originally in the dominant (Mead 1987, 73). The mistaken impression is easily formed that this is "some sort of musical taxidermy—rondo and sonata-allegro skins stuffed and mounted with chromatic sawdust" but, despite superficial appearances, the structure is quite a different thing (Mead 1987, 67). The opening theme of the first movement, for example, is in two phrases. The first, antecedent phrase uses the first hexachord of the basic series; the second, consequent phrase uses the second hexachord (Schoenberg 1975, 228).

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