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.

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.