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.

This chapter highlights Schoenberg’s encounters with art, literature, politics and religion in Vienna, the city where he spent more than half of his lifetime and where he made his first steps as a composer. With his broad interests, Schoenberg profited from the diverse, international metropolis that affected his world views and artistic work. Social democratic ideas and the workers’ movement were influencing him as well as Jewish culture, embedded in the fall of the Habsburg Empire and rising antisemitic ideas. Vienna’s coffee houses as meeting points for artistic circles, a vivid music scene, as well as the visual arts such as the Secession, Jugendstil and Expressionism, were equally inspiring for his artistic output.

This chapter describes the development of psychoanalysis at the turn of the century in Vienna and the links between psychoanalysis and music. It suggests that, even if its founder, Sigmund Freud, was only marginally concerned with music, there might be some similarities between the two disciplines: after all, the task of the psychoanalyst is to listen with the ‘third ear’. The chapter then introduces Freud’s circle, the so-called Psychological Wednesday Society, which later became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and which had some music-loving members, and examines the topics and the frequency of the discussions about music at Society meetings. The chapter concludes with the finding that references to music took up only a marginal amount of time in the overall discussion, and the hypothesis that Freud’s lack of interest in music played a weighty role in this.