Although the conditions and problems facing a creative artist vary in different times, an ethnic culture imposes a certain common tradition and leads to a fundamental similarity of outlook. An understanding of the roots and historical development of a culture is essential for an assessment of any individual artist. Assuming this fact, the opportunity is given of seeing the comparative value, the parallels and divergences of individual composers, seemingly unrelated, in a logical and responsible manner. For example, Brahms and Wagner were for decades believed to be antipodes, while we today, in comparative detachment, are able to see the affinities in the common national character of their work.

The German school of music at the threshold of the twentieth century based its teaching upon the study of German music from J. S. Bach to the romantic masters, virtually neglecting earlier music or that of other nationalities. The melodic and rhythmic idiosyncrasies, the harmonic subtleties and the freedom of expression attained by these composers were measured by comparison with arbitrary prototypes of so-called normality (or regularity) created by the theorists. Mastery over technical material was obtained by a study of traditional harmony and academic counterpoint, based upon Fux rather than upon Palestrina and his Italian and Flemish predecessors. Although the music of France, Russia and other nations was studied, a fundamental schism had developed between the outlook of German musicians and those of other national schools. Heinrich Schenker, in his illuminating article 'Rameau or Beethoven' (Das Meisterwerk in der Musik III, München, 1930), heads his article with a quotation from a letter of C. P. E. Bach: 'You may loudly proclaim that the fundamentals of the art of my father and myself are anti-Rameau.' This divergence of attitude continued and grew, and even when German composers were influenced by the works of other national schools, their attitude remained (and remains) sharply differentiated. The very nature of the German tradition and method is a dialectical one and its development is one whereby each successive composer builds upon the technical achievements of his precedessors. There was little place for eclecticism. French composers, eclectic by nature, were much more open to newly discovered technical possibilities and to influence from hitherto unknown types of music. The German remained comparatively little affected by the new experiences made possible by a rapidly improving system of communication and the consequent opportunities for cultural exchange with remote regions of the earth. The teachings of Vincent d'Indy and Paul Dukas illustrate the eclectic and experimental tendency. The influence upon Debussy of Eastern music at the Paris World Exhibition is well known. The differences in method between the two traditions is clearly seen at times when Debussy and Schönberg work with similar musical material, but with utterly different approaches and results. The German attitude of mind, one that can hardly be found in any other cultural sphere of the West, results in a cumulative style steadily and logically progressing to great subtlety and complexity.

One must remember that the German musical language was already in a state of advanced development at the time when Schönberg entered the field. Brahms and Wagner, the former with a subtle juxtaposition of new asymmetries of form and rhythm beneath a surface of the traditional, the latter with his liquidation of the old formal divisions and functions into a dramatically coherent whole, founded the style which composers like Wolf, Mahler, Reger and Strauss developed towards a flowering in the art of music completely original in its plasticity and powers of free and largely asymmetric construction. The developments of Wolf and Mahler in the elaboration of the melodic line (continuing what Wagner had begun) and the widespread adoption of Brahms' great developments in the variation of harmony, brought the musical language to a point at which Schönberg's principles of 'varied repetition' and 'musical prose' can be considered a realistic assessment of the musical style of the time. It is our purpose to demonstrate the processes by which Arnold Schönberg, in the period of his creative life until 1923, was to bring this musical language towards its logical conclusion and subsequent, seemingly revolutionary, development.

Development of artistic style stipulates a dual process: on the one hand, an accumulation of increasingly varied elements, an extension of the means of relating previously unrelated material and consequently, a persistent replacement of comparative regularity and symmetry by asymmetry and irregularity. On the other hand, it stipulates (and this must be particularly emphasised) restriction, reduction and simplification, seemingly retrogressive habits, and the deliberate neglect or sublimation of traditional elements arising from new æsthetic considerations. There results a positive process of addition and accumulation in the creative mind and imagination and a quasinegative restriction determined by choice and individual preference. When we consider the various facets of the progress of Schönberg's music, we see that the balance between these two contrasting elements of development more than anything else distinguish him from his contemporaries and mark him as a great composer. The farther his style progressed (seemingly away from the German past), the more he concerned himself with analysis and thought upon the fundamental problems inherent in classical and romantic German music. His particular path as an innovator was largely achieved by his more than usual powers of perception to understand and analyse the problems which had faced Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and many others. Although his musical language was from the beginning one of great originality, the technical means which he used were, to a great extent, derived from the processes of his predecessors in German music. Aware of the continuous striving towards a new musical language, Schönberg wrote in a letter at the time of the completion of Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, Op. 15: 'I have succeeded for the first time in approaching an ideal of expression and form that had hovered before me for some years.… I may confess to having broken off the bonds of a bygone æsthetic … '(quoted by Dika Newlin in Bruckner, Mahler, Schönberg, New York, 1947). Seemingly contradictory is the famous sentence in his article 'Brahms the Progressive' in Style and Idea (London, 1951): 'Analysts of my music will have to realise how much I personally owe to Mozart. People who looked unbelievingly at me, thinking that I made a poor joke, will now understand why I called myself a pupil of Mozart, must now understand my reasons.' These two quotations (and many similar ones can be found in Schönberg's writings and sayings) are characteristic of the duality of his purpose and his development.

In attempting to trace the continuity of musical thought employed in Schönberg's compositions from the Gurrelieder (1901) to the Serenade, Op. 24 (1923), we shall deal separately with the different aspects of construction: first, with his treatment and subsequent dissolution of the functions of tonal harmony; then with the significance of his return to the use of counterpoint; and finally, with the character of his rhythm and with other elements which contribute to his conception of form and the novelty of his expression.

Throughout his life, Schönberg occupied his mind with the problems of tonal harmonic structure (Harmonielehre, Vienna, 1911, Structural Functions of Harmony, pub. posthumously 1954). His system of describing structural harmonic processes may be said to be based on the progressive theories of Simon Sechter, who was Bruckner's teacher and the master with whom Franz Schubert had decided to study counterpoint a few weeks before Schubert's death. In his Die richtige Folge der Grundharmonien (Leipzig, 1853), Sechter greatly extended the harmonic vocabulary by acknowledging, describing and analysing chords and harmonic progressions which, although used for a long time by individual composers (even as early as J. S. Bach) for certain purposes of expression, had not previously been granted a theoretically clarified inclusion in the system of tonal harmony.

Schönberg (as others before him and with him) developed the theory of harmony, following Sechter's pattern of incorporating into the system of functional harmony increasingly complex harmonic phenomena which appeared in the works of contemporary composers, sometimes for reasons of freer part-writing and sometimes with the aim of achieving ever more subtle expression. At the beginning of the century, composers like Reger, Mahler and Strauss wrote in an idiom which went very far in the elaboration of harmony and, while adhering to the basically diatonic construction of tonal harmony, included in their vocabulary more and more chords of a chromatic character or chordal combinations of intervals not primarily connected with diatonic harmony (intervals of the whole-tone scale, chords built on fourths, combination of tritone with other intervals, etc.). Some of the harmonies used (especially passing chords in vast prolongations) are of a nature only loosely connected with the idea of diatonic harmony. Schönberg, feeling that here the limits of tonal harmonic analysis were reached, started calling certain types of chords 'roving harmonies'. He saw in these novel chordal phenomena, quite rightly, the source of astonishing new developments and, at the same time, the danger of over-development and of obscuring the basic cadential structure. Wagner had already seen this danger and after Tristan and Isolde largely withdrew from the advanced position he had established. Some of these new harmonic happenings in the works of Reger, Strauss (in Elektra and Salome) and Mahler (particularly in the Seventh and Ninth Symphonies) met with very severe censure from the more conservative contemporary critics and some novel management of chords which Schönberg used in his early works was strongly criticised, e.g. the inversion of the chord of the ninth in Verklärte Nacht and the use of the Quartenharmonien (chords built on fourths) in the first Chamber Symphony, Op. 9.

Schönberg's use of the whole-tone scale can be compared to good advantage with the practice of Debussy. We find in Debussy's works passages which are almost entirely built, harmonically and melodically, on elements of the whole-tone scale. His predominantly vertical approach to harmony, which takes the actual character of the sound as a basis for the unity of the harmonic structure, has led to very impressive innovations and has influenced many of Debussy's contemporaries (and even composers up to the present time). Schönberg uses the whole-tone scale in a completely different way. In the Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, written in 1906, the fundamental structure is considerably influenced throughout the work by the partially whole-tone character of the first subject, but nevertheless all appearances and developments of these whole-tone elements are strictly subordinated to the functional plan of harmony which binds together the whole work. Furthermore, Schönberg uses many other methods of harmonic form-building {Quartenharmonien, varied sequences etc.) which, although apparently complete innovations, are also fitted into the plan of the whole harmonic layout in the manner of the German tradition of composition, and his ability to connect seemingly heterogeneous elements into one logical whole shows him clearly as a follower of Brahms and particularly of the later Beethoven. No such over-all construction can be detected in composers of different traditions, as for example—Debussy.

The Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, is of the greatest significance when showing Schönberg's progress in the harmonic sphere. We cannot, within the scope of this article, describe in detail the complete freedom and mastery Schönberg achieved in this idiom, using all kinds of means in expanded tonality, creating a structure unparalleled by previous music in its variety and subtlety of harmonic form-building, but we want to mention his use of free and more varied relationship of consonance and dissonance. Through his use of the widely leaping and internally varied melodic lines which were his heritage from Wagner and Wolf, he created a new and striking independence between horizontal melody and vertical chord. The result appears to approach in certain places some form of polytonality. Schönberg in subsequent works made considerable use of this and even applied, instead of polyphony in single lines, a technique of passing chord anticipations and suspensions to whole complexes of chord movement. It may be defined, to use the term of Joseph Schillinger, as 'Strata Harmony'. If we compare movement to a succession of vertical straight lines, we see in the application of this technique that these lines become distended and, as it were, distorted. This led to a weakening in the effect of the functional harmonic structure. Thus the technique, grown from humble beginnings where composers ornamented and contrapuntally prolonged their cadences, now brought music to the point where these cadences had been decorated and disguised to such an extent that in many cases they completely disappeared from view, or rather from hearing. Schönberg's use of roving harmonies, his contrapuntal prolongations and the all-important obscuring of the cadences, led him imperceptibly to a position where he had to withdraw key signatures, which became obsolete and gave a false impression of the harmonic structure (starting with the last movement of the Second String Quartet). This was a step towards that 'mythical' atonality which was attributed to Schönberg, yet it was the logical dialectical development of his technique.

It is, of course, an error to see the so-called 'atonal' works as representing some entirely new concept which fell from heaven. Schönberg had stretched the harmonic structure to a point at which the fundamental harmonies and cadence points no longer had full functional significance either aurally or intellectually. For a time he was still prepared to use the technique of harmonic composition which became completely free, and relied more and more on his individual powers of imagination. It is indeed true to say that in works such as the Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16, or Erwartung, Op. 17, although the overall harmonies might still be analysed according to the principles of tonal structure, the overlapping and frequent use of the neighbour-note technique, combined with the propensity of octave displacement, although completely coherent, make the works practically free of a felt tonality. Even as early as the Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11, we see, as it were in embryo, the kind of technique which he later brings to fruition. In the second half of the first piece, the subject is varied by a replacement of its smaller intervals, the ninth replaces the second, the eleventh the third, etc. In observing this octave displacement, one can understand better the characteristic sound of this music. Whereas in music from Bach to Brahms, the octave had played a most important part in the harmonic and melodic structure, the development of chromatic elaboration and the whole system of extended harmony show us these new intervallic progressions as well as many fourths and a great insistence on the old bogey, the tritone, taking a preponderance of emphasis in the melody and harmony. The traditional functions of a harmonic structure could no longer be said to apply to Schönberg's music. Sooner or later the composer had to face the problem of finding other form-giving elements to substitute for the lessened harmonic functions. From this time onwards, the analysis of his music in terms of fundamental harmony, which had generally been the satisfactory method up to this time, must of necessity be insufficient, artificial and contrived. One need only examine Hindemith's attempt to analyse the third piano piece from Op. 11 to see how little it helps towards an understanding of the musical structure.

It will now be necessary to occupy ourselves with the analysis of those elements which Schönberg found satisfactory to introduce into his work as substitutes for functional harmonic structure, and all subjects which will be discussed in the further part of our enquiry must be understood as such. The development of his counterpoint, his rhythmic practice and other new elements which he saw fit to introduce into his music, will be assessed primarily according to the purpose with which they were introduced, namely, the substitution of form-giving elements for the faded ones of tonal harmony. Schönberg's progress from Pelleas and Melisande, Op. 5 (1902-3), to the Serenade, Op. 24 (1923), the point at which he introduced the twelve-note technique, can now be seen as the gradual introduction of such new elements, in their elaboration breaking more and more into the domain of the functional harmonic structure. Certainly the most significant among these elements is Schönberg's reintroduction into his music, at the most fundamental level, of the principles of counterpoint.

During the nineteenth century the German composer's approach to counterpoint underwent a considerable change. Although Beethoven, especially towards the end of his life, and later, to a lesser degree, Reger and Mahler, made considerable use of counterpoint and concerned themselves with the problem of integrating it with their basically homophonic styles, the romantic followers of Beethoven (Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann and also Brahms) tended to give up the procedures of real counterpoint and to replace them with a harmonically inspired polyphony. With Wagner, who most clearly represented the spirit of the nineteenth century, the polyphonic texture developed still farther away from the original contrapuntal methods, even remembering that the point of departure was not a strict modal style of counterpoint but the well-developed harmonic style of the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century German contrapuntalists. Strict counterpoint was the product of a musical age which thought not in the major-minor tonic system but in a system of authentic and transposed modes, the fundamental difference being that the modal form had a wider degree of possibilities for cadencing. Schönberg realised that with the disappearance of a valid tonal centre, the possibilities for introducing a freer approach to the cadence again existed, in fact his adoption of the twelve-note technique placed him under the obligation of regarding all twelve chromatic notes as equally valid for cadencing, i.e. a dodecatonic system. But at the period in his work before the twelve-note system had crystallised, we see him introducing the elements of a strict contrapuntal practice into the gradually dissolving tonal framework.

In treating the development of music of this period, T. Wiesengrund-Adorno observes that in harmonies composed of an unusual combination of intervals, the single note becomes less integrated in the unity of the chord. In a series of such chords, these comparatively loose notes lend themselves more easily to polyphonic treatment than they would do in more simple diatonic progressions. Chord progressions of relatively constant and similar tensions (according to Schönberg's theory, dissonances are equal to heightened consonances) demand new means of counteracting the greyness and uniformity of harmonic texture. Schönberg felt the need to reintroduce elements of strict counterpoint into his music. There are many examples of this in such works as the Five Orchestral Pieces, the opera, Die glückliche Hand and Pierrot Lunaire. For example, in the first movement of the Five Orchestral Pieces at Fig. 10, the trumpet plays a cantus firmus-iike motif of ten bars in minims. This motif enters simultaneously in crotchets in the trombone part while at the same time the violins and violas play the motif as a canon at the octave in quavers. Eight bars later the strings bring a four-part canon of the motif at only a quaver's distance. Such adaptation of the principles of imitation to form the musical basis of the texture is one of the more simple examples of Schönberg's contrapuntal practices. He took the devices known to contrapuntalists farther than did even Bach in his most strict contrapuntal compositions. Besides making continous use of prolongation and contraction, canon, fugato, passacaglia and other contrapuntal forms, he introduced inversion, cancrizans and quite a number of even more obscure contrapuntal practices which had not been in use since works such as the Musikalisches Opfer and the Hammerklavier Sonata. In the times of Bach and Beethoven, the strict contrapuntal devices had been modified according to the principles of tonality. While this was essential for the expressiveness and perfection of the harmonic style, the musical form-giving significance of real counterpoint was weakened. For example, in Beethoven's Op. 135 Quartet, the interversions of the three-note motif are only of limited significance, the musical structure being achieved by other means. For Schönberg, such procedure had far more importance in that he treated the contrapuntal devices as form-giving elements in themselves. In doing this, he certainly made a major formal innovation within the principles of musical structure of his time, as such contrapuntal methods had hardly been used for three hundred years. Even now, only a few specialists know in any satisfactory detail the methods and procedures of the composers of early contrapuntal schools.

Schönberg went very far in the emphasis on counterpoint. His music was impelled more and more by purely contrapuntal means, rather than by a fusion of harmony with counterpoint, so that in certain passages he factually endangered the primarily harmonic validity apparent in the post-Wagnerian musical language. In this, he went farther than Mahler, who had also been working in this direction. Thus, comparing the Adagio of the Tenth Symphony, sketches of which were published after Mahler's death, with the first or last movements of his Ninth Symphony, which in its finished state it would no doubt have resembled, we see that Mahler still conceived his work in the first instance vertically and later dissolved it into polyphonic texture. But even in a work as early as Schönberg's Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, although it is still to a great extent conditioned by functional harmonic construction, many passages are no longer harmonically conceived, to such an extent are they primarily contrapuntal. The introduction of this rigid contrapuntal practice not only realised vertical combinations which were to become Schönberg's normal in later times, but also tended towards the even further liquidation and invalidity of other traditional formal principles. In the final works of this period the whole texture becomes so detailed, so attenuated and fragmentary, that harmonic development as it had been understood ever since the time of Bach virtually disappeared.

Among the younger generation, there is frequent criticism of Schönberg's seeming lack of method in rhythmic construction. This criticism, made especially by non-German musicians, is based on a completely erroneous comparison between the characteristics of Schönberg's German cultural tradition and those of other national schools. We do not wish to minimise the validity of Stravinsky's rhythmic methods or the other forms of rhythmic construction resulting from stricter attention to the combination of numerical values. On the contrary, one may sympathise and find a development of this long-neglected aspect of musical composition desirable. But it is valueless to criticise a composer from a viewpoint he did not share and consequently could not consider. The thinking which led Messiaen and his school to their adoption of rhythmic composition and eventually to serial forms of rhythmic construction, could only have been alien to Schönberg even if known to him. It is important to remember that German music had always been rather simple in its rhythms—Luther's hymns had been a typically Protestant simplification of the subtle style of Gregorian chant. One need only look at the simple metres of German poetry of the Middle Ages, which always had a far more limited range of rhythmical interests than did that of other nations. The essence of German music can be found in rhythms of more or less regular patterns within binary and ternary forms. It was these, and not the more varied rhythms of the South or of the Slavs, which were in use in Germany throughout most of its musical history. The Germans wholeheartedly accepted the simple peasant dances of their own and neighbouring countries, and the March and Ländler form the main source of rhythmical inspiration in German music. (The other characteristic ingredient of German music, the sentimental song, is to be found at a very early date in the Locheimer Liederbuch; its simple and primitive rhythm and its free layout became the main source of the characteristic singing melodies of the German slow movement.)

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the German composers developed a refined and subtle manner of using the few rhythmic elements which were known to them. The most astonishing examples are Haydn and above all Mozart, who brought to perfection a technique of composing with varied bar- and phrase-lengths. In doing this, they accorded with modern concepts concerning the nature of rhythm. Matila C. Ghyka, in his Essai sur le Rythme (Paris, 1938), quotes several remarkable definitions of rhythm, among them: 'Rhythm is in time what symmetry is in the Platonic sense, viz. the proportional arrangements of elements in space' (E. d'Eichtal). Again, Professor Sonnenschein (What is Rhythm? Oxford, 1925): 'Rhythm is that property of a sequence of events in time, which produces on the mind of the observer the impression of a proportion between the durations of the several events or groups of events of which the sequence is composed.' If we agree with these definitions or with the definition of James Joyce that rhythm is the relation of the parts to the whole, we find that in the music of the time of Mozart and Haydn, many elements contributed to the expression of the rhythmic structure. In a deceptively simple manner, Mozart manages to create a form which is built of asymmetric quantities. We find examples of the contractions and prolongations expressed not only in the juxtaposition of rhythmic elements, but also in the closely calculated interchanges of different types of musical texture (diatonic scales, chromatic scales, arpeggios, etc). Alban Berg in his article 'Why is the music of Schönberg so hard to understand?' draws attention to this characteristic of Mozart's music. He quotes the nineteenth-century German theorist, Büssler: 'The greatest masters of form cherish free and bold constructions and rebel against being squeezed into confines of even-numbered bar groups.' This method was further developed in the nineteenth century. The English writer C. F. Abdy Williams (The Rhythm of Modern Music, London, 1909) devotes a great deal of space to the analysis of the music of Brahms and others from this viewpoint. Wagner with the free declamatory style in his Musikdrama also contributed greatly to the freeing of the musical construction from the 'prison' of the regular bar groups.

Schönberg was particularly interested in these rhythmic methods and created forms in which the music became almost totally free of metre. In this way he composed Pierrot Lunaire, Erwartung, Four Orchestral Songs, Op. 22, and Die glückliche Hand, among other works. Later, with his adoption of twelve-note technique, it is a matter of great interest that he tended to abandon this style of 'musical prose' and in such works as the Piano Suite and the last two String Quartets, wrote phrases of varied lengths within a simple, almost static, rhythmical form. Here he is most closely allied to the eighteenth century. Whether this was a satisfactory development of the early twelve-note technique could be disputed, and it is certainly a proof of the clear-sightedness and the genius of Schönberg that during the last years of his life he returned to the richer rhythmical structure of the works which he had written just before the adoption of the twelve-note system.

These rhythmic developments went hand in hand with Schönberg's development of the free-moving melody. Schubert, Schumann and Wagner had contributed towards a melody of great subjective expression. Schönberg, after Wagner and Hugo Wolf, introduced the wide spans of series of compound intervals into his melodies. Although chromatic elements, variations of character and creation of interval-contrasts are already well developed by Wagner in the singing line of the parts of Brünnhilde and Isolde, Schönberg's freeing of the octave led to a melos in which intervals appear as a result of melodic, as opposed to harmonic, elaborations and octave displacements. The abundance of passing notes and rhythmic decoration, in relation to the structural movement of harmony, which was a well-known characteristic of post-Wagnerian style, led Schönberg to a form of melody which, for the sake of tension and variety, carefully avoids the notes sounding in the supporting harmony and gets more and more shy of repeating notes.

Schönberg continued the endeavours of composers of the nineteenth century to expand and extend the existing forms of music. He went farther than Mahler, who had considerably developed traditional forms. At the turn of the century, the discovery by Freud of the existence of free associations and the consequent feeling for less logically and more subjectively connected associations in art had the greatest significance for the development of Expressionism. They led Schönberg to a greater degree of formal detail, an increasing amount of variation and a tendency to compress the single ideas of a piece into shorter spaces of time. In the first Chamber Symphony, although he is still working within a traditional form derived from the one-movement symphonic structure probably invented by Liszt, he liquidates many elements of this form and resorts frequently to a method which can be considered an equivalent to free association (Schönberg liked to call these passages, which one can already find in Mahler, Inselbildung). Gradually, his habit of rarely repeating any subject, even in a varied form, led to the difficulty of understanding Schönberg's music. This is certainly the underlying reason why the works of Schönberg are, and probably will continue to be, more difficult for the ordinary listener to appreciate than the music of Webern, Berg and other contemporary composers. Schönberg himself seemed conscious of, and disturbed by, this fact, and he adopted many methods, some successful, some less so, in his efforts to overcome these difficulties. Many of the innovations he introduced, culminating in that of the twelve-note technique, were designed to clarify and illuminate the highly individual development of his musical thinking. He dispenses with colour for its own sake and in his instrumentation uses the orchestra to bring the important lines of his musical argument into greater relief. At the same time he invented a new type of the application of orchestral colour, the Klangfarbenmelodie or melody of 'timbres', first to be found in a systematic application in the third of his Five Orchestral Pieces, Farben. The musical argument of this piece is carried by changes of emphasis in instrumental groups, creating an entirely new kind of expression. In the fifth piece, Das obligate Rezitativ, the instrumentation is used to give the melody a constantly changing colour. (This technique is obviously an extension of the Wagnerian ewige Melodie.) The result of this experiment is that the natural connections and logical developments in his music can sometimes be more easily understood by the ear than by the eye.

As we have shown with the development of his harmony and counterpoint, when Schönberg's works were no longer effectively bound by traditional structural forms, he was faced with the problem of finding suitable new forms. In his Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19, he attempted to restrict himself to the exposition and variation of one single idea. The best example is the last piece, allegedly inspired by Mahler's funeral, in which the alternation of chords and fragments of motifs, probably derived from the memory of bells, constitute the piece. In these pieces, Schönberg attempts something fundamentally different from the short pieces of Berg and Webern. Whereas Berg in his Clarinet Pieces tended to contract what had been large forms and Webern in many of his short pieces used traditional formal principles, which found here the utmost concentration imaginable, Schönberg made his ideas suitable to the limitations of a completely integrated short form. Later, when he attempted larger forms again, we find a seemingly chaotic juxtaposition of such short forms, and it is in these works that the most daring and far-developed examples of Schönberg's personal, essentially expressionistic, art are to be found. Yet they remain valid as a perfect development of the characteristic integration of form and content.

In order to conclude this part of the discussion, we shall examine a work which may be regarded as typical of the most advanced and most individual Schönberg ever reached: the monodrama in one act Erwartung. Unfortunately it is not possible here to go into sufficient detail to clarify all our opinions, but it is hoped that it will be sufficient to justify our argument.

The first reaction upon hearing Erwartung is the very antithesis of the experience when listening to the perfection and apparent Apollonian symmetry of the eighteenth-century classicists. That particular effect upon the listener of classical music at its zenith was obtained by a skilful balance of asymmetries and variants which was so well realised that it resulted in the illusion of perfect symmetry. The style of Schönberg's music tended to cover the well-calculated proportions in its texture which has, as has that of Wagner, an appearance of almost continuous unbroken movement. In Erwartung we experience a sense of being overwhelmed and lost in a maze of variation and juxtaposition of elements which are hardly memorable and result in a seeming structural incoherence. But as we know the composition better, we find that all these variants and 'free associations' are well moulded into an overall shape and can be understood in a similar way to the works in the style of the preceding post-Wagnerian era. Though the chordal structure is complex and the individual parts are heavily doubled in augmented fourths, sevenths, etc. (which in this case tend to loosen the vertical coherence), an arc is circumscribed and the basic tonal principle of movement away from and towards a point or centre is retained. The technique of the work does not in itself seem to be a new departure. The basic idea for such immensely long and involved tonal structures had already been developed by Wagner, Mahler and Strauss. The novelty of the aural harmony results from the development described above. One feels that Schönberg here already starts 'composing with notes'; that is, that he tended to replace triads as the functional agents with the identity of individual tones.

The music of Erwartung falls into two parts. The overall 'top line' (Schenker might have called it Urlinie), whether expressed by the voice or by the instruments, is clearly delineated, although it cannot everywhere be found in the apparent main themes and motifs of the music. The first section commences with a progression from G sharp via B natural to C sharp at the beginning of the composition and closes at bar 270 at the words 'Nun küss ich mich an dir zum Tode'. The climax is reached at bar 194, at the cry 'Hilfe', an accent and leap down directly from the highest note of the voice part (B natural) to C sharp above middle C, a fall of well nigh two octaves. The second part proceeds from bar 270 to the end. The general division is a dramatic one; the first half consisting of the Search and Discovery of the lover's body and the subsequent dementia; the second part of a kind of Liebestod sung by the women in a fervid state of anguish and jealousy of the other 'She' (Death, who has taken her lover).

The orchestral introduction of four bars makes a clear movement from G sharp through B natural to C sharp (quasi-dominant/tonic). It is repeated in a contracted form, this time moving to the leading note C natural-B sharp); the soprano enters for the first time on C sharp. The first scene, as it were in closed form, is clearly founded on a structure in which the notes C sharp and G sharp are predominant. To add to the illusion of a closed form, many of the chords are retained literally and appear throughout the scene. Practically all important structural notes, the notes which begin and end all phrases, are C sharp and its neighbour notes. There is a movement towards an emphasis on the semitone below at bar 29 et seq., but a clear return to the quasitonic of C sharp in the codetta of the scene, bar 35 et seq. In the following scenes there is a gradual heightening of tension. Twice high B flats in bars 153 and 179 lead to the cry 'Hilfe' in bar 190 on the high B natural which falls back to C sharp. This is the overall climax and highest point of the melodic line. From here the melody falls, often in long leaps, back to the C sharp in bar 270. (It is interesting to observe the parallel of the falling minor sixth (A-C sharp) in bars 194 and 270, obviously characteristic as a cadential movement as well as a psychological weakening, a premonition of death.).

The second half commences from G sharp (the first note of bar 273 and 274) and moves up to the B flat of bar 313, cadencing back to G sharp at bar 317, just before the extraordinary bars where the voice sings the words 'Oh, der Mond schwankt.… ' From here, the music falls again with greatly augmenting note values, to the dramatic point in bar 350 'für mich ist kein Platz da.…' The final section, which seems to act as a kind of spiritual resolution, lowers the tension by the introduction of chords of whole tone triads, which move in regular manner and, turning, reach again a section in which a C sharp seems to take its important position, introduced as a pedal in bar 416 and remaining a key note of the voice part, especially at the cadencing on 'dir entgegen … ' in bars 422-3. The C sharp disappears completely in bar 424, allowing the bass to make a determined step towards B natural. The final solution comes in the contra bassoon's C sharp in the middle of bar 425, introduced most characteristically by the last melodic phrase of the opera. The voice, which had again taken the G sharp (quasidominant) at bar 424, continues in bar 425 to the last utterance and reaches by a tritonus step the G sharp, slightly later than the C sharp bass has been established by the bassoon. The oblique vertical resolution of the harmony is characteristic of Schönberg's methods. It is also not without importance that three trombones have the triad A, C sharp, F natural at the point where the contra bassoon reaches the C sharp in the higher octave.

It might seem that an analysis which is made in the ways briefly indicated above would have but limited validity in this type of music. Yet we feel that the replacing of a harmonically valid form by an overall melodic one, though it could not have the significance of the old forms, nevertheless enabled the composer to differentiate between sections which return to their starting-point and those which move away from it. This is of the greatest importance towards an understanding of the subsequent revolution in the manner of composing music. The position may be compared to that reached by Joyce in Finnegan's Wake. In this work, the author could hold the thread through the maze of images, diversions, etc., only by continuous and relatively unvaried repetition of the so-called story (the death and rebirth). The conclusion reached is that the method of free association could no longer in itself prove to be a satisfactory manner of creation. The artists concerned seem to have realised that to create wider and more variegated forms they needed some valid structural principle, which would enable them to give more finite form to the perpetual variants their expression demanded.

After the astonishing realisation of the last works described, it became apparent to Schönberg that to continue his musical creation he had now constantly and intellectually to develop the composition with twelve notes. He saw clearly that for a time he would have to apply this entirely new method to forms much less elaborate than those he had used before. He made concessions in using older and simpler forms which he had discarded for quite a time. Even the regular sonata form and the form of the classical variations were used again and again, but filled with the completely new content resulting from his now strict use of the twelve-note system. Although the last period of Schönberg's musical creation (which does not come within the scope of this article) must be considered quite as important as the earlier periods, and he achieved works which can in every way stand comparison with his earlier achievements, perhaps even in some cases surpassing them, the line of development in this last period is not as clearly definable as it had been earlier. While endeavouring to give older forms new content, Schönberg creates intermittently works which might at first sight appear to continue directly the style of the great expressionist compositions like Pierrot Lunaire, Die glückliche Hand and Erwartung—for example, Ode to Napoleon, A Survivor from Warsaw and especially parts of his opera, Moses and Aaron. But when observed and analysed in more detail, these works, although in effect and texture frequently reminiscent of works of an earlier period, speak in a completely new musical language and the use of the twelve-note system is here, quite naturally and logically, freer and less strict than in those works based on older forms (which, for want of a better word, may be described as 'neo-classicist'). Schönberg also, in some of the masterpieces of the last period (e.g. Orchestral Variations, Op. 31, and particularly Moses and Aaron), combines new forms, which he went on creating in direct continuation of his expressionist period, with more stylised classical sections. The introduction and the extraordinary finale of the Orchestral Variations, Op. 31, are much nearer to this free expression than the variations themselves, which are kept to a large extent within the classical frame. And in the opera, Moses and Aaron, for dramatic and other reasons—some of the material had been sketched many years earlier, during Schönberg's expressionist period—free forms, with all the manifold applications of Inselbildungen and purely linear-based formulations (as explained in our analysis of Erwartung) alternate with the more consolidated and simplified forms of the dance movements. Schönberg's treatment of harmony and counterpoint certainly went into a period of great simplification as soon as he had decided to compose in the strict twelve-note system. Harmonically, this system gave him security in its definite application, and in counterpoint he was no longer hampered by the unclear position in which the polyphonic style had been ever since the introduction of tonal and later functional harmony. In fact, only then did counterpoint regain the freedom and expression which it had had at the time of the early Flemish and Italian schools.

Schönberg's rhythm (except in those few compositions in which he kept very close to traditional dance or Lied forms) and basic adherence to musical prose was not developed much farther in his last period. Here and there a simplification may be observed, but seldom a further refinement. The tonal works of the last period need not be discussed here, as they were written partly for teaching purposes or as commissions for certain American institutions. And Schönberg has told us that several of these compositions, especially the very beautiful second Chamber Symphony, were based on material invented in his youth.

Schönberg was a master of German music. Even the fact that he spent the later part of his life in America in no way changed his determination to follow to the end logically and methodically what he felt was the right way (although living in America had considerably changed the style and attitude of many composers, e.g. Hindemith and Bartók). We should like to see in Schönberg's last achievement, the opera, Moses and Aaron, on which he worked practically all his life, the climax of his musical creation. Unfortunately he did not live to finish this work. The short experience we have of the opera (it has been performed only once so far, in 1954) gives us the impression that this is a work of supreme inspiration, perhaps Schönberg's greatest. Quite new experiences in sound, harmony and rhythm take us by surprise in the famous dances from the opera. The rhythm especially, as never before in Schönberg's works, moves in an orbit not far from Stravinsky's, and the whole expression is far more striking than in any of Schönberg's works after Erwartung.

We are not here concerned with the fact that Schönberg' s work will always be much more difficult for the listener and the student than the works of his pupils and other contemporary composers. We do not think that this fact has anything to do with the greatness of his inspiration and fulfilment. It will always be amazing to observe the particular intellectual quality of Schönberg's compositions, their fast-moving sequence of thought and invention, their most imaginative colours of orchestration and the sometimes harsh and insistent reiteration of strong sounds and expressions. Just as we must recognise that Wagner's work, although prepared by many major innovators, was the culmination of nineteenth-century German music, we must without doubt recognise that Schönberg's achievements—his compositions, his teachings, his writings—as well as his personal seriousness and belief in his mission, make him surely the greatest and most important musician of the first half of the twentieth-century.