Good morning all! It is time for a second clue to puzzle 398: it was written in Los Angeles before the last War by an excessively famous Viennese composer. It is in the key of G minor, and besides the chorus and orchestra heard in our extract it calls for a speaker.
Good morning, Mr Grew! Could 398 be Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw?
Sorry no that is not it.
Prompted by Mr Sudden's post, we shall now have a second attempt at 398 - Schoenberg's Kol Nidre, Opus 39?
But congratulations yes that is the one. It was written in 1938; to our ears it sounds rather crude, but Malcolm Macdonald indicates the opposite. Schoenberg took a collection of the flourish-like motives which make up the traditional Kol Nidre, and submitted them to "serial treatment within a tonal framework." The construction of the work, adds Mr. Macdonald, is "totally disciplined: every bar, every idea is derived from the given melodic fragments, whether by mirror forms or interpenetration of motives."
