Eugene Hartzell, Komponist, Wien, 1932

< >	Monologue 1, Sonatina for Clarinet

Jahr	1957
Sätze	in drei Sätzen
Dauer	10'
Verlag	Doblinger
Uraufführung	28.06.92 Wien, Palais Palffy / Wladimir Tomaschuk
Über das Werk	My Monologue 1 was the starting point of a series of Monologues for various solo instruments. This little piece was a first tentative venture into a new hemisphere - which, considering the small proportions of the Sonatina, one might say I then saw through the wrong end of an opera-glass. The Sonatina is frankly patterned on the solo sonatinas of Hans Erich Apostel, who was my teacher at the time and it was written in Vienna. This gives away the twofold purpose of the piece immediately: dodecaphonicism, which here is not a row but a handful of 12 notes, shaken each time around and sorted as best serves the theme; and the - perhaps Quixotic - ambition to write, using just one instrument, a fully-fledged sonata in miniature. Which is to say: 1st movement in sonata form, with two distinct themes, development and recapitulation; 2nd movement an Adagio based on a single theme; 3rd movement a five-part Rondo. Obviously, the Sonatina was a traditional piece, or even worse, a doubly traditional one. But that was the point of the exercise. The problems, then, are not so much technical (though I am told that there is plenty of that kind too) as musical. And this involvement of the mind may cause the player to forgive me for the lack of "exciting new" sounds and fingering tricks. Eugene Hartzell