Chords Flip in Pfitzner’s String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor: R and I (Part II)

The German composer Hans Pfitzner met Adolf Hitler early in 1923, and according to Michael Kater's account in Composers in the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (Oxford, 1999), Hitler was not impressed. When Pfitzner learned of Hitler's internment in Landsberg later that year, Pfitzner hoped to reconnect with Hitler. He bought Hitler a book that he hoped would inspire him, and inscribed in it the dedication "To Adolf Hitler, the great German" and dated it April 1, 1923: 95 years ago today. Pfitzner never sent the book.

Among his chamber works, Pfitzner's Second String Quartet, op. 36, written in 1925, received special admiration. According to Kater, Paul Hindemith sought to premiere the work with his Amar Quartet. Arnold Schoenberg’s composition student Winfried Zillig was particularly impressed by the chromatic boldness of the work. The modernist journal Melos, when recognizing Pfitzner as a contributor to New Music, singled out this work and its similarity to recent works of Schoenberg, who was a couple years into his serialist period.

Pfitzner would have chafed at this comparison: he disdained the twelve-tone method. Nonetheless, two harmonic-progression pillars in the first movement of his op. 36 demonstrate -- with a little manipulation -- a retrograde-inversion (RI) relationship, a kind of musical transformation that musicians most readily associate with Schoenberg. The grand-staff reduction below shows both the movement's opening thematized chord progression in C-sharp minor, and the exposition's final cadential arrival in the relative key of E major. The four lines match the expected four quartet performers from top to bottom.

The graphic below shifts these pitches from the diatonic staff to a chromatic grid: the small numbers show when these notes occur using the measure.beat form. It simplifies and moves an octave higher the cello part of the cadential music. It also aligns the cello's C#-E resolution with the resolutions in the other parts. With these rather modest transformations, this cadential progression is a retrograde and inversion (a 180° flip) of the opening chord progression: the two stacks of notes and intervals on the left -- when fused together and turned 180° -- match the two stacks of notes and intervals on the right, allowing for enharmonic equivalence. The instrumental assignments do not follow the flip, but the flip does preserve registral arrangement, which is a more precise kind of RI relationship than the typical Schoenbergian flip.



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