Arnold Schönberg
Suite for Piano, op. 25/i. Prelude
First draft. Started 24 July 1921

The scenic surroundings of Lake Traunsee offered the best conditions for Schönberg’s need for recreation and inspired him to create new works. He began to notate a piano piece on 24 July 1921. The place name “Traunstein“ was corrected: Schönberg first localized his piece with that mountain, which he could see from his domicile on the opposite shore of the lake. The composition evolves from the integration of four-pitch figures that can be combined into twelve-tone rows. In the secondary voice, the row is shifted to the note b; after that, a repetition of notes marks the beginning of the inversion of the row: The intervals between the notes remain the same, but they are inverted. The ordering of the pitch material is bound to the requirement that no pitch is repeated in the course of a row before the others have sounded once – however, immediate repetitions of individual tones or of groups of tones occur frequently