Schoenberg And Modernism

Arnold Schoenberg was born in 1874 and died in 1951, an important period in literature, music and painting as it is when modernism started. The Jewish composer, painter and music theorist was autodidact and studied Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms and Wagner – who are polar opposites by most contemporary listeners. Modernism, in literature, is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, express the new sensibilities of one’s time. The two authors we will focus on are both foremost and prominent modernists: Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) who wrote The Voyage Out in 1915, and Katherine Mansfield (1888 – 1923), author of The Singing Lesson (1920).

One of Schoenberg’s first compositions, Verklärt Nacht (1899), a string

As the sextet tries to musically render an extra-musical narrative, it is a programmatic work comprised in five sections corresponding to the number of stanzas, though there is no separation between the movements. Leitmotif-like elements are dissolved, varied and recombined in Schoenberg’s attempt to bring Wagner’s music and Brahms’ together: sensual sonorities, and formal harmonies and variation structure. As the concepts of development and variation (or tonal cohesion) are united in this first programmatic chamber music, we speak of a « developing variation » which was seen as better than simple literal repetitions, according to Schoenberg: “repetition is the initial stage in music’s formal technique, and variation and development its higher developmental stages” . While Wagner uses literal repetitions, Schoenberg seems more interested in the other concept he found while analysing Brahms, which might be the reason why the composition slightly derives from German late Romanticism and shows signs of atonality. Therefore, the influence of these two famous composers in this sextet for two violins, two violas, and two celli, is obvious. This composition reminds us of a character from

The emancipation of the dominant-quality dissonances has followed this pattern, with the dominant seventh developing in status from a contrapuntal note in the sixteenth century to a quasi-consonant harmonic note in the early nineteenth. By the later nineteenth century the higher numbered dominant-quality dissonances had also achieved harmonic status, with resolution delayed or omitted completely. The greater autonomy of the dominant-quality dissonance contributed significantly to the weakening of traditional tonal function within a purely diatonic context.