Schoenberg: ‘Night Music' – Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung

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Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) is often portrayed as a composer who began as a heart-on-sleeve late Romantic only to evolve during the First World War into an austere, mathematically-obsessed deviser of musical puzzles. Yet to claim that in his music he replaced tonality with its absolute opposite, atonality, as the twelve-tone method swept away all trace of traditional harmonic and thematic processes, is as misleading as to argue that romantic warmth and humanity morphed into the purest and most austerely modernistic spirituality. This handbook refocuses the wealth of recent research into two of Schoenberg's major compositions; the expressive character of those relatively early works which centre on nocturnal images of darkness and despair is at its most original and powerful in Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung, where the dramatic interplay between stabilising continuities and disorientating fragmentations reveals the elements of a modernist aesthetics that remained fundamental to Schoenberg's musical thought.

• Highlights the special historical and cultural features of early twentieth-century Vienna
• Underlines ways in which music became a crucial contributor to early twentieth-century modernism in the arts
• Synthesises and refocuses the wealth of recent research into two of Schoenberg's major compositions from the years 1899–1909