Arnold Schoenberg 1909

The music that Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) composed in the early 20th century was certainly not met with open arms and curiosity. On the contrary, it was often met with outright hostility.

In the Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16 from 1909 (the version for smaller ensemble is from 1920), he truly pushed the boundaries of traditional harmony and rhythm, with fragmented phrases and distinctive colourings. What his contemporaries, often hostile, perhaps failed to recognize was that he was building upon and expanding the late Romantic tradition – traces of which become evident once the dust has settled.

At this time, before the First World War, he was a student in Vienna of the composer and conductor Alexander von Zemlinsky. Later, Schoenberg and his own students –including Anton Webern and Alban Berg – would form the radical movement known as the "Second Viennese School" (the first being made up of the likes of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven).

From the same year, 1909, we find Erwartung – a "monodrama" for soprano and chamber orchestra. He composed this incredibly intense, expressionistic music in just a few weeks, but it took fifteen years (!) before the work had its premiere in Prague in 1924, with his old teacher Zemlinsky conducting. In the dreamlike text, an anxious woman wanders through the forest, desperately searching for her lover.

Schoenberg said: ”In Erwartung the aim is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour”.