Arnold Schönberg
Variations on a Recitative for Organ, op. 40
Sketch for Variation VIII. 1941

According to Dika Newlin, Arnold Schönberg urged his students to never blindly follow modern idioms, but instead to make artistic decisions independent of compositional fads: “There is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.“ As seeming proof of this dictum, Schönberg created no twelve-tone works for several years after completing his String Quartet No. 4, op. 37. Although he began a twelve-tone sonata for the Contemporary Organ Series published by H. W. Gray in 1941, he discarded initial sketches in favour of Variations on a Recitative for Organ, op. 40. The underlying theme spans 11 measures and contains all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale. Free pitch repetitions make clear by the fourth measure, at the latest, that there is no twelve-tone row but rather a melody that is based on d as a tonal center. The page for Variation VIII is hardly distinguishable from similar twelve-tone sketches. The system in the middle of the page shows three-note groups written in red pencil; these turn out to be inversions of the pitch groups written in blue ink immediately above – the theme of the recitative dispersed into cascades of pitches. With these variations, the composer achieved the “carefully considered use of the entire twelve-tone space“ (Jan Maegaard) without having to completely relinquish the principles of major/minor tonality.