Arnold Schönberg
Trattato di armonia

In this review, I won't discuss technical data, nor will I critique the manual, also because I believe that this text, being the immense masterpiece and the massive super classic that all of us classical musicians recognize it to be, is already perfect as it is. Ok, maybe it needs some updates, given that this book, titled Manual of Harmony, was published in 1963, but the structure of the Treatise, as far as I'm concerned, should be left as it is.

Before continuing, I want to emphasize that the Treatise on Harmony is the most comprehensive discussion on Structural Functions of Harmony, another absolutely fundamental text by Schönberg (of which I am eagerly awaiting a new volume edition), where the Austrian composer, founder of the Second Viennese School, in which he gathered two of his students, namely Alban Berg and Anton Webern (let's not forget that during that period, he was implementing what is a truly extraordinary innovation for 20th-century music, i.e., dodecaphony [or seriality]). Subsequent composers, such as the Venetian Luigi Nono (who married Nuria, Schönberg's daughter), Henze, Hindemith, and so on (up to the French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez (a student of the Darmstadt school who composed, among other things, Le marteau sans maître [i.e., The Hammer without a Master]), then took the serial compositional method to its extreme consequences, giving rise to integral serialism. The text, an incredible masterpiece, can comfortably be compared to the texts of Massimo Mila, such as the fabulous Brahms and Wagner, a collection of essays published by Einaudi, of which I own the very first edition from 1994. What is this text about? It's easy to say: harmony, which is the discipline that deals with the study of different sequences of chords (or sounds). To cite a practical example, I will focus in particular on the first movement of Gabriel Fauré's Quartet op. 15 no. 1, a study adventure of mine. First of all, it should be noted that the first movement of this Quartet is in Sonata form, thus structured according to the canonical classical form, codified precisely in the classical period: exposition - development and recapitulation (following the latter, there may be a more or less extended coda leading to the real epilogue of the piece). This means that the two themes presented at the beginning are in two different keys between them (when there are three themes [see for example the two Clarinet and Piano Sonatas op. 120 by Brahms], the first theme is in the key of the piece [to make a reference to this book and to use the words of Schönberg himself, it is said that the first theme is in the 'region' of the tonic], the second is presented in the 'region' of the dominant [which is the fifth degree of the scale], and the third in a different key, chosen by the composer, and this key can be either close [or 'relative', which is the same thing] to the key of the piece's root, or distant). These are the rules of classical harmony. Fauré, instead, already begins to 'break' with these rules and begins to experiment, proposing innovative solutions, which paved the way for subsequent composers. In fact, returning to Fauré's Quartet, the first theme is in the 'region' of the tonic, that is, in C minor; the second theme, instead of being in D minor, i.e., in the region of the dominant, as classical harmony rules would suggest, through a long modulatory bridge, eventually lands in E-flat major which, besides being the relative major of the Quartet's root key, is also its mediant, or the third degree of the scale. To put it briefly, once the exposition concludes (enabled by the arpeggio of E-flat major, which is the key of the second theme), the development section begins, entirely based on the elaboration of the first theme, the one in C minor. In this section, elements of the first theme return, but also (in the piano part), elements of the intro, which in the exposition served to affirm the root key of the entire piece. Moreover, it seems that Fauré is seeking a way to finally reestablish and reaffirm the root key of the piece, which occurs at the beginning of the varied recapitulation. There is not much to say about the recapitulation, because the first theme is restated in the same way it was presented at the beginning of the piece; but..... the real surprise concerns the second theme which, in fact, is not restated in E-flat major, but in C major, i.e., in the major tonic. Harmony, as mentioned, serves, in the context of a thorough harmonic analysis, to be done in practice on the piano, the violin, or any chosen instrument, to recognize the relationships between the different chords and sounds. The other text by Schönberg, namely Structural Functions of Harmony, is often considered a separate text, but it is not so; in fact, to be 100% concise, it is the compendium of the Treatise on Harmony; But aside from all this, this second text explains what role various harmonic progressions have in the context of any piece, orchestral or not. And as I said, I am patiently waiting for the new edition of this second text.

As one can infer, this text is for those who are already dealing with purely musicological issues, but it also includes crucial pedagogical insights that are still relevant today.