Schoenberg - Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41 (1942)

Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41 (1942) A melodrama by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), setting a poem by Lord Byron for a reciter, piano and string quartet. Schoenberg, whose Jewish background forced him to emigrate to the United States soon after the election of the Nazis in 1933, saw Napoleon as a forerunner of Hitler. Although this work was composed in 1942, at the height of the Second World War, Schoenberg correctly predicted Hitler’s downfall. In 1948, Schoenberg told his biographer, H. H. Stuckenschmidt: “Lord Byron, who had at first admired Napoleon greatly, was so disappointed by his simple resignation [actually his abdication in 1814 at Fontainebleau] that he made him the object of his most bitter scorn. I do not think that I failed to reflect this in my composition.“ In this work, Schoenberg makes use of the twelve-tone technique, which he had pioneered decades earlier; the basic tone row is E-F-D flat-C-G sharp-A-B-B flat-D-E flat-G-F sharp. However, there are numerous referenc