Peace on Earth

Arnold Schoenberg’s moving hymn Friede auf Erden (Peace on Earth) was one of his last works to be composed in a tonal, late romantic style while simultaneously displaying intermittent steps in the direction of atonality. The text based on a poem by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer displays a similar brittleness and fragility, expressing both the yearning hope for universal peace and its destruction through war, ‘murder and terror’. Schoenberg depicts this conflict through the highly contrasted juxtaposition of major and minor keys, consonance and dissonance and homophony and polyphony. The work concludes on the words ‘peace on earth’ with a conciliatory D major chord which is however only ultimately reached aft er a sorrowful chromatically descending passus duriusculus.