This chapter studies relations between Schoenberg, Stravinsky and their respective camps, from the early twentieth century through the composers’ later years in California. Beginning with an early moment in which their relations were characterized by curiosity and mutual respect, it sketches the emergence in the 1920s of an opposition between Schoenberg’s expressionism and Stravinsky’s neoclassicism. It then examines how this opposition was reinterpreted and codified (if not ossified) in T. W. Adorno’s influential Philosophy of New Music, and in his subsequent writings on both composers. Adorno described Schoenberg’s music as a seismograph that registers tremors of feeling; this chapter reworks Adorno’s metaphor in order to propose that the Schoenberg–Stravinsky–Adorno triad might register tectonic movements of a much larger modernity. Engaging with recent literature on all three figures, it suggests some ways their work might relate to modern regimes of racial difference.

Schoenberg explored atonality principally in ten groundbreaking works composed between March 1908 and the end of 1917. The atonal works can be divided into two phases, which differently develop the expressive capacities of atonality in a wide array of vocal, orchestral, chamber and solo piano genres. In this chapter, Schoenberg’s atonal musical language is contextualized relative to his broader compositional characteristics and trajectory, and the ten works are each situated in terms of genre and thematic content, to map out Schoenberg’s exploration of atonality as an expressive soundscape.

Completed in 1905 as one of the earliest large-scale works that Webern produced under Arnold Schoenberg’s tutelage, the Langsamer Satz for string quartet has been deemed ‘disarmingly conventional’ (James Beale), as no more than an ‘exercise’ (Walter Kolneder) through which the young composer honed his compositional craft. Challenging this mode of interpretation, this chapter attends to what is perhaps the movement’s most salient feature: its exuding sense of lyricism. Through a combination of voice-leading and transformational perspectives, it is argued that the lyricism pervading the work is rooted in an audacious dual-tonic practice. The movement’s tonal disposition is further illuminated with reference to contemporaneous debates that erupted in post-Riemannian music-theoretical discourse, especially Georg Capellen’s conception of Doppelklänge (‘hybrid chords’). The picture emerging from these considerations is that the Langsamer Satz features compositional strategies that seem rather unusual for an ‘exercise’, and which cannot be explained with reference to Schoenberg’s musical thought alone.

In Schoenberg’s Vienna the theatre, more so than music, was central to cultural discourse; unsurprisingly, opera and musical drama interested Schoenberg from early on, and he returned to dramatic genres repeatedly throughout his compositional career. In surveying the lively and varied theatrical life of Vienna around 1900 and after, this chapter examines shifting trends in modernist drama – including changing fashions in staging and set design – alongside the influence of significant authors, artists and innovators. It locates the Viennese stage as a site for cultural exchange with other major European centres, and ultimately argues that, if written from the perspective of the theatre, the history of Viennese musical modernism would look quite different from the story of post-tonal progress that has dominated our narratives of Schoenberg’s creative trajectory.

Schoenberg’s music has always attracted the avid attention of critics. Some ridiculed his music, especially at first, while others came to respond favourably to its modernist demands. This chapter explores trends in the critical reception of Schoenberg as they have varied across time and place, from his initial entry into the Viennese music world in the early 1900s, through the increasingly harsh, often antisemitic rejections he endured in the 1920s and 1930s, to his re-evaluation in the post-war years, particularly in the United States. In addition, it highlights the composer’s reactions to some of the harsher criticism he received.

Since their discovery in the 1960s, Webern’s early compositions have been shrouded in myths. Woven into the rich tapestry of their reception history are many misconceptions and clichés that require careful unpicking. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it examines the methodological criteria and discursive strategies based on which Webern’s early work has been made the subject of scholarly inquiry. Secondly, it unravels how prevailing understandings of Webern’s early work implicitly theorise earliness as a historiographical category and inherently articulate ideas about origins and beginnings. In so doing, this chapter situates the monograph in relation to the multiplicity of interpretations offered by generations of Webern scholarship, while highlighting the heuristic potential that the category of earliness holds, in relation to Webern’s early work and beyond.

This chapter discusses the political contexts of Arnold Schoenberg’s life in the final decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (c.1889–1922). The rulers of that empire, members of the Habsburg Dynasty, faced a number of crucial challenges that they ultimately were unable to overcome. These included numerous military defeats of course, but also internal dynastic problems relating to overstretched resources, Italian Unification and shifting attitudes toward religion and the Papacy, and a dynastic shift in its male members’ policies toward women. Schoenberg experienced the end of more than 600 years of Habsburg rule in Austria. This epochal shift would have consequences for his thought and music.

This chapter begins by discussing the impulses that motivated Schoenberg to begin composing in the twelve-tone style: his desire to circulate through all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale, and his need to make the remainder of a piece develop from its initial material or Grundgestalt. It briefly traces his path toward twelve-tone music, as well as relating that journey to Josef Matthias Hauer’s work. The main part of the chapter defines the principal feature that set Schoenberg apart as a twelve-tone composer: the ‘musical idea’, and illustrates the musical idea as an overarching framework in an analysis of the Prelude from the Suite, op. 25. It then explains how Schoenberg’s followers and successors moved away from the notion of ‘idea’ as framework toward other modes of organization.

Who was God for Schoenberg? And what did Schoenberg believe was the necessary human response? Schoenberg’s spiritual and intellectual path was long and winding, often iconoclastic, shaped by antisemitism and personal losses, and always characterized by a deeply personal quest for a transcendent truth – an Ideal or Idea [Gedanke] – that was at the same time intuitively known but inexpressible by human means. The path ultimately led him to a passionate Zionism, an unshakeable belief in ‘one, eternal, all-powerful, invisible and unrepresentable God’, and a corresponding ascetic spirituality that survived both inward anguish and political persecution.

Schoenberg frequently betrayed a certain anxiety over his position within music history and especially within the Austro-Germanic canon. He acknowledged Johannes Brahms as a seminal influence on his musical style, in particular regarding phrase construction, metrical manipulations and methods of motivic development. Brahms served as a role model for the young Schoenberg and loomed large in his later teaching and theoretical investigations. Furthermore, Brahms proved fundamental to the ways Schoenberg navigated his own shifting national, musical and religious identities (especially after Schoenberg’s emigration from Nazi Germany in 1933). This chapter explores these three avenues of influence and ends by flipping the two protagonists around, interrogating Schoenberg’s role in the critical evaluation of Brahms’s music and legacy.