The androcentric tropes typical of modernist narratives distort Schoenberg’s story and the interpretation of his compositions by eliding his engagement with women and the feminine. Yet his social circle included a number of progressive women, including the educator Eugenie Schwarzwald and medical doctor Marie Pappenheim. This study considers two operas Schoenberg composed twenty years apart, each based on a libretto written by a woman and featuring a female protagonist who reflects the social situation of women in her milieu. Moreover, each opera was a vehicle for a distinctive compositional innovation, Erwartung (1909) marking the pinnacle of Schoenberg’s ‘intuitive aesthetic’ in its freely non-tonal, non-repetitive style, and Von heute auf morgan (1929) the first twelve-tone opera.

Tonality was a central concept and practice for Schoenberg, informing compositions thatspan the periods most often characterized as tonal, atonal and twelve-tone. Through to about 1908 Schoenberg’s musical language is based on tonality as largely understood and practised by Brahms and Wagner, and by composers closer to Schoenberg’s generation, including Wolf, Pfitzner, Zemlinsky, Reger, Mahler and Strauss. Subsequent works from about 1909 to 1921 avoid standard forms and harmonies but feature many tonally oriented gestures and phrases. Many of his twelve-tone compositions also contain structural traces of tonality, such as what he thought of as ‘tonic’ and ‘dominant’ forms of the row. Several of Schoenberg’s works after 1934 show him yielding to an urge to (in his own words) ‘compose tonal music’.

This chapter is an interview with Schoenberg’s daughter, Nuria Schoenberg-Nono. In the interview, Mrs Schoenberg-Nono recalls a domesticated Schoenberg: playing games and making school lunches for his children, doting on his wife Gertrud, and strolling through the wilds of a then-undeveloped west Los Angeles. She recounts Schoenberg constantly musing about teaching and the best way to reach even the most obtuse students, and how the generosity of the Schoenberg family was sometimes taken advantage of by acquaintances who liked to stop by on the way back from the beach for impromptu parties. In all, Nuria Schoenberg-Nono paints a portrait of Schoenberg is very different from his reputation as a ‘severe’ modernist; rather, in her memories, Schoenberg appears as a warm and kindly father and husband – and as sometimes delightfully quirky as well.

In the beginning, relations between Mahler and Schoenberg seem to have been somewhatstormy. In fact, there were not only frictions of character between Schoenberg and Mahler, but also substantial differences in their conception of composition. In contrast to the prevalent opinion expressed in the copious literature on the topic, the relationship between Schoenberg and Mahler resembled that of two composers who were fundamentally alien to each other musically, but who, through human solidarity, a common ethical view of uncompromising artistic coherence and a closeness that grew over the years, decided to approach each other compositionally as well. Several examples from Schoenberg’s works will be shown in the chapter to substantiate this thesis.

This chapter examines the long-held belief that Arnold Schoenberg endured dire financial hardship for most of his life, due in large part to his unwavering and highly principled commitment to modern music. Schoenberg can be compared to Mozart with regard to his money woes: both composers apparently struggled to support themselves and their families and were tragically under-appreciated and under-compensated during their lifetimes, despite the enormity of their artistic significance. In each case, however, the situation is more nuanced: for both composers, money came and went, for a variety of reasons. In the chapter, the popular mythos of Schoenberg’s ‘perpetual insolvency’ is contextualized and challenged by considering his constantly changing personal and professional circumstances, and the different ways in which he earned money.

This chapter takes an expansive view of Schoenberg as a writer to reflect the breadth of genres, topics, and purposes he pursued on paper, in addition to his textbooks on composition and music theory. Most of his writings are argumentative. Underwriting these arguments are not only biblical and enlightenment sources, but sources in contemporary life and thought. The chapter shows how the tension between enlightenment and contemporary perspectives vitalize Schoenberg’s language – what he says and how he says it. That so many of Schoenberg’s writings have managed to jump the translation gap successfully and have exerted influence on generations of English readers makes this chapter possible. A selection of such writings and topics spanning Schoenberg’s career are examined.

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’.