Arnold Schönberg
Symphony
for choirs, soli and orchestra
Fragment. 27 May 1914

In 1915 Arnold Schönberg announced to Alexander Zemlinsky the composition of a large symphony – a highly “’constructed’ work, in contrast to the many purely impressionistic [pieces] of my recent output.“ Any work titled “Symphony“ is, simply by virtue of the genre named in its title, part of a tradition that required unifying structural components as the foundation of its compositional design. Schönberg experimented with the possibilities of using identical tone groups to shape different motives and themes (and thereby create unity among different ideas). Later in life he remembered sketches for “the theme of the Scherzo [...] which accidentally consisted of twelve tones.“ The fragmentary short score of the movement shows that Schönberg not only constructed a tone-row using the complete chromatic scale, he also at least partially transposed it.