Schoenberg found his artistic voice largely through the composition of lieder or art songs, which also mark important nodal points in his creative development. (See Table 2.1 for an overview of his lieder.) Close to thirty songs, all published posthumously, survive from Schoenberg's formative years through about 1900. They show him grappling with basic issues of structure and expression in an idiom that owes much to Schumann and Brahms, and something to Hugo Wolf. Of his first eight published opuses, composed between 1898 and 1905, five consist of lieder (Opp. 1, 2, 3, 6, and 8, the latter for orchestra). In this period Schoenberg also completed most of Gurrelieder, initially a song cycle with piano that evolved into the colossal cantata marking the climax of his tonal period.

Across these works we can trace a growing command of a Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian musico-poetic rhetoric. The cabaret songs or Brettllieder from 1901 hone a more popular, satiric tone that was to play a role in Schoenberg's later works, especially Pierrot lunaire. In the songs based in the poetry of Stefan George from 1907 to 1908, including the cycle The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op. 15, Schoenberg plunges beyond the limits of conventional tonality and form. The Orchestral Songs, Op. 22, of 1913–16, mark the end of Schoenberg's free atonal period. The Three Songs, Op. 48, the only ones to use the twelve-tone method, are Schoenberg's very last compositions before he left Germany in the spring of 1933.