Arnold Schoenberg described his musical lineage by naming Johann Sebastien Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, and Richard Wagner. Chief characteristics of this tradition of composing include its sense of thematic development, the masterful manipulation of asymmetrical sequences, and deft transitions. Schoenberg’s most direct influences — the seemingly contradictory Brahms and Wagner — are immediately discernable: the first in Schoenberg’s arrangement of balance and thematic concentration; the second in the coherence of his music’s perpetual proliferation. Brahms succeeded in embedding essentially melodic themes in symmetrical formal structures (sonatas, scherzos, etc.), while Wagner set melody free through continuity and irreversibility. The first purely instrumental work in Schoenberg’s catalogue is Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night), op. 4 (1899), for string sextet. It nods to both composers — to Brahms, in its elaborate melodies with a thematic function, and to Wagner, in the choice of an uninterrupted narrative form. Almost immediately, Schoenberg amplified this approach in his only symphonic poem, Pelleas und Melisande, op. 5 (1903).

Schoenberg’s loyalty to immediate tradition set him apart from his most prominent contemporaries, Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky. This loyalty stemmed from his strong awareness of historical necessity in the evolution of art. The aesthetic orientation that would define his career is captured in the humor of his famous reply to the question “are you Arnold Schoenberg, the composer?” — that someone had to be and no one wanted the job, so he took it on himself.¹ His aesthetic stance meant, in Theodor Adorno’s words, facing the consequences of the historical evolution of musical material (harmony, melody, and form) as it stood in his own time. This meant tirelessly upholding the radical innovations of his early years, then making the problematic turn to serialism, and, finally, weighing the impact of a religious conviction that became all the more powerful as it emerged as having been justified by history.

Dissolution and dazzling brilliance: 1900-1915

The singular nature of Schoenberg’s music was immediately evident in his first lieder, opp. 1 and 2 (1900). These works feature a complex interplay between tonal phrase structures (marked by links, points of emphasis, and strong polarities) and rich melodic inventiveness, which stood out in the intervals. While Hugo Wolf (whose final lieder were written in 1897) and even Brahms had already pushed the form toward modernity, Schoenberg accentuated a break with the past. He used highly ambiguous harmonic progressions and resolutions and avoided immediate repetition — even of ideas already challenging to grasp quickly. These are the terms Alban Berg would later use to explain why, even from a tonal perspective (referring, in this case, to the String Quartet No. 1), “Schoenberg is so difficult to understand.”² The difficulty only grew as Schoenberg’s dense layering of ideas tended toward information overload. His music embraced a simultaneity of elements of equal density, rejecting the traditional hierarchy between theme or melody versus accompaniment. The String Quartet No. 1, op. 7, and the Chamber Symphony No. 1, op. 9 (1905-1906), are excellent examples of this density, which would become key in Schoenberg’s style.

By boldly expanding the length of these works — which run for approximately twenty-five and forty-five minutes, respectively, without real interruption, tightly fusing the four traditional movements into one — Schoenberg revealed the tremendous importance of thematic articulation in his music. This was a viewpoint he would continue to defend throughout his career. In 1934, he wrote, “I am rather inclined to believe that one may sooner sacrifice logic and unity in the harmony, than in the thematic substance, in the motives, in the thought-content.”³

The first major dissolution of the rules and forms of traditional music was thus the breakdown of tonal sentiment, even as Schoenberg was refining his motivic work. Quartet No. 2 (1908), for example, is built on a cyclical theme, with a third movement that teeters on the edge of the unknown while accumulating references to the preceding movements. Similarly, Piano Pieces, op. 11, nos. 1 and 2 are “ultrathematic” as Pierre Boulez described them, and nos. 1 and 2 of Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, are strongly anchored in highly significant ideas. The influence of Brahms’s late Klavierstücke (opp. 116 to 119) is undeniable here.

But in works like op. 11, no. 3, and op. 16, nos. 4 and 5, Schoenberg retreats from any form of thematic foundation. Schoenberg forces the execution of ideas at such a speed that they become like flashes of lightning: all that remain are a few reflexes of composing, such as the conjoined movement of the outer voices, the near-stasis of the inner parts (a subtle reference to sacrosanct counterpoint), and tightly packed chromatic chords (in particular, in Erwartung, op. 17).

In sum, not only is the listener’s memory challenged by the lack of repetition, but the narrative itself seems intentionally erased, at least temporarily. The final movement of Quartet No. 2, “Entrückung” (Rapture), embraced this approach, foreshadowing the shocks that were to come.

Schoenberg’s non-thematic works are characterized by his striking redirection of energy toward the production of timbre. The third of the Five Pieces for Orchestra employs the emerging Klangfarbenmelodie (“sound-color melody”). The listener encounters not a melody of different consecutive pitches, but of a single pitch (or group of pitches) played successively by different instruments. Anton Webern would soon adopt this practice. Perhaps most significantly, this newfound primacy of timbre gave rise to completely new musical textures, focused around myriad of what Adorno called “sound tasks.” This was a second and crucial dimension of Schoenberg’s style throughout the rest of his career.

This radical about-face in Schoenberg’s composing (which he discussed at the end of his Theory of Harmony) contains an element of the crisis of self described in a letter to Wassily Kandinsky (24 January 1911) as an “elimination of conscious will in art,” “unconscious elaboration of form,” and “form = manifestation of form.”⁴ Rational continuity had been replaced by a jump, a leap, a total and dazzling disconnect from immediate causality, with cryptic harmonic resolutions and fragmented motivic links. Both the Five Pieces for Orchestra and the monodrama Erwartung exemplify this fragmentation, while at the same time patching it over with an almost systematic use of ostinato — a sort of musical stream of consciousness that becomes the only element capable of reuniting the disjointed parts into a whole.

Another striking feature of these works is a sense of deep solitude, which helps explain the quotation and self-quotation in them. Wagner remains a presence, particularly through allusions to Tristan and Parsifal. In Erwartung, the text resonates with the opening line of Schoenberg’s 1901 Lied, op. 6, no. 6 “Am Wegrand” (By the Wayside), where a feeling of isolation within a passing crowd is expressed in the same gesture — the transfer of the vocal line to the woodwinds, while the piano’s bass line is taken up by the voice. Out of this personal crisis came a powerful response: Die Glückliche Hand (“The Hand of Fate”), op. 18 (1910-1913). In it, the protagonist — endowed with a supreme knowledge scorned or ignored by the masses — remains utterly alone.

While the works Schoenberg produced between 1911 and 1915 remain anchored in this world, their brevity, along with his more structured treatment of poetic texts, reveals a clear shift toward clarity. Schoenberg’s resounding Pierrot Lunaire, op. 21, written in 1912 — and inexplicably held up as the emblematic work of the Schoenbergien revolution — is a paradoxical embodiment of this aesthetic. The very diction of Pierrot Lunaire was new. His famous Sprechgesang (spoken singing) did not come from the cabarets of Berlin, but instead reflected his desire to infuse the piece with a theatricality of his own invention. The piece also evokes the new path Stravinsky would begin to explore just after Le Sacre du Printemps. At the same time, Schoenberg affirms his own direction by drawing on older techniques: a return to strict two-voice counterpoint in the seventh poem, canon in the passacaglia of the eighth, and nostalgia in the twenty-first.

A final step offers a key to understanding the profound transformation still to come. The first and the last of Schoenberg’s Vier Lieder, op. 22 (1913 and 1916), return to the same themes of solitude and presentiment that permeate the finale of his 1908 Quartet No. 2. In the face of mounting anxiety over an inevitable clash in the crisis of tonality, Schoenberg made the uneasy decision to adopt twelve-tone technique.⁵

Necessity and the arbitrary

When Adorno noted in reference to twelve-tone melody that “every tone that serves merely to build chords remains arbitrary,”⁶ he was justly pointing out that twelve-tone composition, in becoming a system, introduced an external logic to the music itself. This logic included rules like not repeating a note until all eleven others have been played, and the revival of ancient rhetorical devices such as linear movement (left to right), retrograde, inversion, and retrograde inversion. In the expressionist music that followed 1909, all twelve tones were being aggregated implicitly, if only to assert a now-inevitable rejection of repetition. But the internal logic — how sounds were staked or layered — remained a necessary condition to prevent total disorder. By introducing an external order, Schoenberg aimed to put an end to this fragile balance. But right away, his work would show how relative this move was: the Musette from the Piano Suite, op. 25 (1925), is built on a repeated G pedal tone. Repetition was already making a comeback, undermining the detachment of a new kind of art that, as Adorno put it, “lacked its own theoretical motivation.”

Schoenberg said that, at a deep level, “composing with twelve tones grew out of necessity.” He specified from the beginning that it was possible to use the technique to compose in a traditional manner, in that it was “justified already by historical development.” Twelve-tone composing was “just one manifestation of a reaction, one that does not have its own special causes but derives from another manifestation — which it tries to contradict, and whose laws are therefore the same, basically, as its own.” Found in texts he wrote between 1941 and 1923, these remarks explain both the didacticism of his earlier compositions and his later blossoming.⁷

As with his earlier use of suspended chords, Schoenberg introduced the twelve-tone technique with great care. Early examples include the final movement of Quartet No. 2 (1908) and the last of his Five Piano Pieces, op. 23 (1923). A quick comparison of the energy of the second of the Five Piano Pieces and the stiffness of the fifth offers a sharp insight into how radical this shift was. He then set about endlessly justifying it, with suites, serenades, quartets, quintets, variations: all keeping within the hallowed world of the classical tradition (opp. 24 to 31, 1923-1928). At times, the contradiction becomes especially striking, his jagged, ragged writing alongside repeat signs that point back to a musical past (particularly Serenade, op. 24, and Suite, op. 25).

While Variations for Orchestra, op. 31 (1928) is a seamless return to the universe of Brahms, String Quartet No. 3, op. 30 (1926), reintroduces a fundamental element: melody. Its first movement is structured around a long ostinato of steady eighth notes, echoing Schubert’s String Quartet No. 13.

The turning point between the relative severity of Schoenberg’s earlier style and his later development was opera. Moses und Aron (1930-1932) returns to Schoenberg’s theme of the suffering of possessing knowledge but without the words to persuade others. In the last two decades of his life, Schoenberg’s work unfolded into entirely new forms. Often these works are built around strongly worded texts, such as Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, op. 41, which denounces tyranny (1942), or A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46, which commemorates the martyrdom of a people (1947). In the latter, Schoenberg breaks up his tone row, causing the piece to lose its abstract nature and transforming it into a powerful warning that sounds throughout the tragic story (with trumpet calls and muted chords). In the final moments, when the Jewish prayer Shema Yisrael is chanted, it becomes almost irrelevant that the tone row is sung forward, in retrograde, in transposition.

Schoenberg’s universe remained unwavering. His exploration of a kind of new classicism — not the pastiche-driving neoclassicism of the time — is heard in Violin Concerto, op. 36 (1936), and Piano Concerto, op. 42 (1942), which feature moments of true calm and a fresh melodic approach.

As for Trio, op. 45 (1946-1947), it was written after Schoenberg suffered a serious heart attack and narrowly survived. The intense jolts in the music (which for Schoenberg represented the hypodermic injections he received) are woven into a highly organized thematic and formal structure. This shows the strength of a style that goes far beyond questions of musical syntax.

Faith

At critical moments of this trajectory, Schoenberg’s faith sharpened both his energy and his doubts. Between 1917 and 1922, Jacob’s Ladder, for example, explored the ascent of dying souls going to meet their God, urging them in that precise moment to surrender their ego and abandon all self-consciousness. This was the same kind of surrender he also described in his letter to Kandinsky during a crisis in composition. Then, after the first five years of Schoenberg’s experimentation with twelve-tone composition, from 1930 to 1932, Moses und Aron raised the question about passing along words of truth. Moses knew the truth but could not sing; Aaron had the voice, and could communicate. And yet, the inscription of Das Gesetz (The Law) — also the title of the second piece in his Six Pieces, op. 35 — remained central. For Schoenberg, historical and moral necessity were central, guiding principles.

Finally, Schoenberg’s yearslong reaction to the rise of Nazism and its murderous violence is powerfully expressed in his late choral works, starting with Kol Nidre, op. 39, written in 1938, and continuing through the three religious pieces of his op. 50, written in 1950. The texts of Dreimal Tausend Jahre, op. 50a, and De Profundis, op. 50b are imbued with a calm trust in God, absorbing their occasional exhortations. Modern Psalm, op. 50c, displays a renewed connection with one of the most profound elements of Schoenberg’s universe: the power of the spoken word (Sprechstimme). This connection runs from his early Gurre-Lieder (1900) on through A Survivor from Warsaw, with its expressionist intensity and violently jolting instrumental and vocal writing. The final strophe, a prayer for unity with God as the highest form of happiness, restores a sense of peace that remains present in Schoenberg’s final years, as well as the atmosphere of lightness that pervades Jacob’s Ladder’s closing.

Jacob’s Ladder, Moses und Aron, and Modern Psalm were all left unfinished. Their metaphysical questioning reflects the question of truth in art — an unfinished quest in its own right.

Notes

^{1. Arnold Schoenberg, Le Style et l'Idée, p. 86. BBC Music Magazine, relates the full anecdote: “Schoenberg used to tell a story about his extremely unmilitary war service in the Austrian army during the World War I, when an officer asked if he was ‘that notorious composer’. ‘Well, Sir, it was like this:’ replied Private Schoenberg in broad Viennese dialect, ‘somebody ‘ad to take on the job, and nobody else was willing, so I got landed with it meself.’” (Calum MacDonald, “Arnold Schoenberg: Twelve-Tone Serial Thriller,” in BBC Music Magazine, 29 June 2012; https://www.classical-music.com/features/composers/arnold-schoenberg) ↩}

^{2. Alban Berg, Ecrits, Monaco, Éditions du Rocher, 1957. ↩}

^{3. Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea: Selected Writings by Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, transl. Leo Black, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1975, p. 280. ↩}

^{4. Schoenberg-Busoni/Schoenberg-Kandinsky, Correspondances, textes, Genève, Contrechamps, 1995. ↩}

^{5. The complete quote in Style and Idea (op. cit. [note 3], p. 218) reads: “After many unsuccessful attempts during a period of approximately twelve years, I laid the foundations for a new procedure in musical construction which seemed fitted to replace those structural differentiations provided formerly by tonal harmonies.
I called this procedure Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Which are
Related Only with One Another.
This method consists primarily of the constant and exclusive use of a set of twelve different tones. This means, of course, that no tone is repeated within the series and that it uses all twelve tones of the chromatic scale, though in a different order.” ↩}

^{6. T. W. Adorno, Philosophie de la nouvelle musique, Paris, Gallimard, 1962, p. 82. (English: Philosophy of New Music, transl. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, p. 66.) ↩}

^{7. Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea, op. cit. (note 3), p. 216, p. 220, and p. 207, respectively. ↩}