Building on the discussion of earliness in the Prelude and Interlude, this chapter examines how Webern began to forge a narrative of earliness in relation to his own compositional development. It argues that this narrative solidified fully only as a result of the psychological dependency on Schoenberg that Webern developed in the years after completing his studies with him in 1908. This argument is grounded in an analysis of how Webern, between 1909 and 1914, increasingly distanced himself from certain influences that once had shaped his musical thinking, most notably those of Richard Strauss. That said, there is evidence that Webern continued to engage with his early compositions at later stages in life and even reworked parts of the String Quartet M. 79. In the light of these findings, this chapter suggests that the category of earliness is inherently porous, yet shining through the category’s porousness is its critical-heuristic potential.

Schoenberg claimed to be the successor of Richard Wagner in the tradition of German and Austrian music culture. For this reason, he had to deal with the latter’s antisemitic nationalism throughout his life. For Schoenberg, on the other hand, Wagner was at the centre of his artistic concerns, which always retained its vitality. The chapter shows that Wagner is at the centre of Schoenberg’s compositional experiments in his early work around 1900. In 1910, Schoenberg uses Wagner’s ideas as a starting point to justify his radical expressionism. Around 1920, he takes Wagner to task for introducing the twelve- tone technique; and around 1930 he fights with Wagner for his right to a German culture. In this way, Wagner’s enduring fascination is put at the service of continually changing needs.

Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern are commonly grouped together as the ‘Second Viennese School’, with Berg and Webern – notwithstanding their own monumental contributions to twentieth-century music – frequently relegated to Schoenberg’s students, or even ‘disciples’. This chapter locates Berg and Webern in the huge shadow of their teacher and mentor, and considers the possibility that the Schoenberg–Webern–Berg trinity obscures a number of meaningful differences and antagonisms – musical and personal – between the three composers, and that Webern and Berg, as Schoenberg’s perpetual pupils, have become subordinate – ‘other’ – to the master in the discourses of musicology and music criticism. At the same time, it is clear that the members of the Second Viennese School – coming from a common cultural history and social and artistic milieu – understood themselves to have a unified vision for art and a shared sense of purpose.

‘Schoenberg the Painter’ serves as a cultural history of the early evolution of Arnold Schoenberg’s as an artist. In particular, it explores how the personal relationship between the Austrian expressionist artist, Richard Gerstl (1883–1908) and Schoenberg became key in Schoenberg’s own artistic development. In particular, this chapter examines the paths that led to the convergence of the two men’s creative output in Gmunden in July 1908, which saw Schoenberg compose his seminal Second String Quartet, op.10, and become, in the vocal fourth movement, the first to cross the bridge to atonality, and saw Gerstl produce a series of extraordinary large-scale expressionist portraits of members of Schönberg’s circle. This chapter offers new hypotheses not only regarding the evolution of Schoenberg’s works over the period of the relationship between the two men, but also the previously under-considered level of influence that Gerstl may have had on Schoenberg’s wider creative and musical output at the time.

Performers have played a crucial role not only in communicating Schoenberg’s music and musical thought to a wider audience, but also in framing expectations and reception. This chapter places Schoenberg in a Romantic context of aesthetic, not least emotional, expectations and of exacting extension of performance possibilities and requirements, and suggests that some of the difficulties Schoenberg’s music experienced with audiences may be attributed to inadequate performance or to the unwillingness of musicians to perform it. Various performances of Schoenberg’s music are considered, starting with Schoenberg himself, taking in artists such as Alexander Zemlinsky, Marie Gutheil-Schoder, Eduard Steuermann, Marya Freund and Rudolf Kolisch, and concluding with conductor advocates such as Hans Rosbaud and, posthumously, Pierre Boulez.

The chapter looks at fin-de-siècle Vienna, and reviews its cultural politics, the impact of its city life on writing and artistic expression and, above all, the new attention to language that was absorbed into literature and poetry emanating from French Symbolism. The dangers of lapsing into an aestheticism that denied political reality is discussed, and there is a focus on the importance of the indirect impact such perceived changes in expression and the value of poetic language had on Schoenberg, and indeed on Berg and Webern. Key figures included here include Rilke, Schnitzler and, above, all Hofmannsthal and Stephen George, taken here as writing in crucially different modernist modes, but both directly influential.

Composed between 1906 and 1908, Webern’s Dehmel songs have turned into something of a playground for scholars keen to unravel the origins of atonality. Drawing on hitherto unexamined sketches, this chapter offers new insights into the harmonic strategies and devices through which Webern interpreted Dehmel’s poetry. Analytical focal points to be considered include Webern’s use of modal mixture, common-tone tonality, and the SLIDE transformation. In particular, it is argued that, in these songs, voice leading is roped into the business of, quite literally, ‘envoicing’ absence. Extending the scope of these considerations, the chapter concludes with a discussion of Webern’s George setting Entflieht auf leichten Kähnen, completed in 1908, with a focus on the way the choir renders the poem’s semantic juxtaposition of ‘sorrow’ and ‘spring’ in terms of a double-bind. In this way, this chapter provides fresh glimpses into the complex relationship between poetological and harmonic ideas in Webern’s compositional imagination.

This chapter explores how Schoenberg, after fleeing the Nazis in 1933, established himself as a composer, conductor, teacher and writer in Los Angeles, his hometown for the last seventeen years of his life. Light is shed on how he privately and professionally came to terms with his Jewish and Austro-German identities while also developing an American identity. In Los Angeles he built new international circles of friends and colleagues, engaged in political activism, created a diverse body of Jewish-, German- and American-inspired compositions, taught hundreds of students and wrote important books and articles, greatly advancing the reception of his music and ideas in the US.

Composed in the summer of 1905 outside the penumbra of Arnold Schoenberg’s teaching, and inspired by Giovanni Segantini’s Trittico della natura, Webern’s String Quartet M. 79 has garnered much scholarly attention since its posthumous publication in 1965. While some commentators discerned in the work the critical turning point at which Webern self-consciously began to embark upon his famous ‘path’ to atonality, others have sought to explain its ostensibly tripartite form in programmatic terms. Drawing on recent developments in sonata theory and harmonic analysis, as well as new insights into the manuscripts and sketches, this chapter considers the quartet in terms of a complex dialogue between ‘programmatic’ and ‘absolute’ meaning strata, mediated by the contemporaneous reception of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this way, it challenges those interpretations that deem the work either as merely a blueprint of Segantini’s triptych or as the inception of Webern’s ‘high modernism’.

Radio, television, film, the phonograph, wire recorders and mechanical instruments are but some of the technologies that Arnold Schoenberg wrote about or utilized during his lifetime. Infinitely curious and inquisitive, Schoenberg invented all sorts of things, some of which, including a typewriter for musical notation, belie his interest in technology. Rather than provide a broad survey of Schoenberg’s engagement with technology, this chapter focuses more specifically on how Schoenberg interfaced with technology as a means of presenting artistic ideas, particularly musical ideas. Though Schoenberg’s views on technology may appear ambivalent or, at times,even contradictory, something approaching consistency emerges when his writings about technology are considered in the context of his writings about how the musical idea is transmitted from composer to listener.

Schoenberg’s years in Berlin (1901–3, 1911–15, 1926–33) can be written on the city as an evolving network of people, places and institutions that shifted from the margins to the centres of cultural life, only to be erased when he left for the last time in 1933. These three periods were marked by profound changes in his life and works, mirroring the cataclysmic transformations of Berlin and Germany as a whole. This chapter sketches out the story of Schoenberg’s three Berlins, using a map for each period to chart the changing locales of his life in the city as well as the dramatically expanding artistic and cultural spheres in which he operated. While Schoenberg often embraced the image of an isolated, misunderstood prophet, the reality was a person deeply engaged with the people and places around him.

The relationship of the two leading musical figures of the early twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg and Richard Strauss, is difficult to assess, given their strong egos and senses of mission that would lead to quite differing contributions to music and an eventual break. Nevertheless, the two composers initially recognized each other’s importance for musical art. This chapter examines the evolution of their association, from one of friendly mutuality, through the distancing that Schoenberg’s atonality occasioned, to a mutual disassociation at the end of their lives.

This chapter considers the crucial role Alexander Zemlinsky played in exposing Central European audiences to the music of Schoenberg and other musical modernists. From the early years in Vienna, through his tenures in Prague and Berlin and up to his emigration to the United States, Zemlinsky consistently programmed new works as a conductor and offered practical assistance and spiritual camaraderie behind the scenes. He was also an inspiring figure as a teacher and composer, first for Schoenberg and later for their many mutual students and colleagues. Despite various strains and breaks in their personal relationship, Zemlinsky remained a steadfast public ally for Schoenberg and members of his circle, sharing in and preparing the way for their struggles and successes.

This chapter examines the composer’s music–theoretic thought by considering the topics highlighted in the title of his treatise, The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation. Aspects of his analytic methods including his understanding of the ‘musical idea’, presentation in the organic artwork, the concept of monotonality and the logic of musical form will be discussed in relation to Beethoven’s Symphony no. 3 in E-flat Major, op. 55, the ‘Eroica’ – the first score Schoenberg owned and analysed. Further comments will consider the foregoing theoretic–analytic subjects in relation to a programmatic reading of the ‘Eroica’ written by Richard Wagner, whom Schoenberg esteemed as a composer.

In the 1960s, Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer discovered a wealth of hitherto unknown manuscripts and sketches by Webern, including source materials for more than 130 works and arrangements dating from his earliest compositional beginnings to the year he completed his formative studies with Arnold Schoenberg (c. 1899–1908). This introduction outlines how this monograph seeks to contribute to ongoing scholarly efforts to understand Webern’s early work more than a half-century after the Moldenhauers’ sensational finds. Moreover, it makes a case that Webern’s early compositions provide a pertinent opportunity to rethink the category of earliness. An uncritical shibboleth in Webern scholarship, and neglected in musicological discourse at large, earliness, it is suggested, poses an attractive counter-paradigm to the well-established category of lateness, especially when conceived of as explicating the essence of a body of so-called juvenilia and its constitutive tensions.