Schoenberg: ‘Night Music' – Verklarte Nacht and Erwartung

Arnold Schoenberg's music is often portrayed as replacing tonality with atonality, but this is misleading. This handbook refocuses on two of Schoenberg's major compositions, Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung, which reveal the elements of a modernist aesthetics that remained fundamental to his musical thought.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 180 pages
Publication date: 30 November 2023
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Arnold Schoenberg, a renowned composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is often portrayed as a journeyman who began as a passionate and emotional Romantic, only to transform during the First World War into an austere and mathematically-driven creator of musical puzzles. However, it is misleading to assert that in his music, he entirely replaced tonality with its absolute opposite, atonality, as the twelve-tone method eliminated all traces of traditional harmonic and thematic processes. Similarly, it is incorrect to suggest that romantic warmth and humanity gave way to the purest and most austerely modernistic spirituality. This handbook aims to refocus the wealth of recent research on two of Schoenberg's major compositions: Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung. In these relatively early works, Schoenberg's exploration of nocturnal images of darkness and despair reaches its most original and powerful. The dramatic interplay between stabilizing continuities and disorienting fragmentations in these compositions reveals the fundamental elements of a modernist aesthetics that remained central to Schoenberg's musical thought throughout his career. By examining these works in detail, this handbook provides a fresh perspective on Schoenberg's artistic development and his contribution to the evolution of 20th-century music.

ISBN-13: 9781009077361