Arnold Schoenberg Essentials

Having started his career in the footsteps of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss under the wing of Alexander von Zemlinsky, Arnold Schoenberg proved himself a major figure within the late-Romantic tradition. This is best illustrated by his astonishingly vivid orchestral portrait of love and moonlight, 1899’s Verklärte Nacht, and by his mighty 1911 cantata Gurre-Lieder. Yet Schoenberg felt a strong pull to create a new, boundary-breaking language for music, similar to what Wassily Kandinsky had done for painting. This creative urge led to his first atonal works in 1909, and the subsequent invention of his 12-tone technique, in around 1923, which he refined with his pupils Anton Webern and Alban Berg. It threw open the doors for successive generations of composers and changed the language of music forever. Here’s a perfect opportunity to explore Schoenberg’s seductive, swirling post-Romantic scores, and the composer’s first ventures into atonalism (Three Pieces for Piano and Pierrot Lunaire), as well as works that embrace his 12-tone system, including the Op. 23 Five Pieces for Piano, A Survivor from Warsaw, and the Piano Concerto. You’ll discover, too, Schoenberg’s admiration of Johannes Brahms in his orchestration of the composer’s Piano Quartet No. 1, revealing scintillating details that Schoenberg claimed were otherwise lost in the original scoring.