Wind Quintet

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).

The opening melody of the scherzo movement starts with the fourth note of the basic series, the first three notes having already appeared in the accompaniment. Unlike some other passages in the Quintet, the accompaniment here uses the same tones as are found in the melody, but not at the same time. Later in the same movement, different forms of the row are combined in contrapuntal elaboration (e.g., the inversion and retrograde inversion in b. 88–94)—a procedure also featured later in the Rondo (Schoenberg 1975, 232).

The third, slow movement is in an extended ternary form, with coda. A substantial transition section in bars 53–81, with a change of meter and faster tempo, connects the central section to the return of the opening material (Mead 1985, 131).

The finale follows the expected pattern for a classical seven-part rondo, with motivically distinguished sections in a design that may be designated as A–B–A'–C–A"–B'–A–coda. These sections are also distinguished by the row forms used on the surface (Mead 1987, 82).

In chronological order of recording: