‘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.

The decade (1899–1909) separating Verklärte Nacht from Schoenberg’s second major contribution to Night Music, the monodrama Erwartung, was typically turbulent and productive. Based mainly in Vienna, he established himself as a competent conductor, and also as the revered teacher of talented young composers such as Berg and Webern. The ambitious scale of Schoenberg’s major compositions from these years confirmed his determination to distance himself technically from admired contemporaries like Strauss, Busoni and Mahler. In pursuit of greater intensity and concentration, romanticism gave way to expressionism, as chordal dissonances were freed from their traditional need to resolve. And although critics were often hostile, Schoenberg retained the admiration and respect of performers as well as of friends such as Zemlinsky and Mahler. The affair between his wife Mathilde and the painter Richard Gerstl (ending in uneasy reconciliation after Gerstl’s suicide) fuelled the fierce musical outbursts of important compositions like the Second String Quartet, as well as of Erwartung.