Five Orchestral Pieces and Pelleas und Melisande in Full Score

by Arnold Schoenberg

Perhaps more than any other composer of his time, Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) influenced the course of twentieth-century music. His compositional style moved progressively from lush, late Wagnerian chromaticism to a complete break with traditional tonality, later organized theoretically as "composition with twelve tones." This systematic control of all pitches evolved into a similar serialization of all of music's elements — a revolutionary advance that dominated international composition through most of this century.
This edition of two of Schoenberg's most important orchestral works invites music lovers into the first steps of the revolution he helped bring about. The symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande (1902), based on Maurice Maeterlinck's play, reveals Schoenberg's expanding chromatic language. The Five Orchestral Pieces (1909) demonstrates the composer's daring exploration of a music that renounces motivic connections as well as tonality. Both of these groundbreaking works are presented here in authoritative editions.

Genres: Music

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Noted Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg abandoned tradition and developed the twelve-tone system for music.

Associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, he led the second Viennese school. He used the spelling Schönberg until his move to the United States in 1934, whereupon he altered it to Schoenberg "in deference to American practice."

His approach in terms of harmony developed among the major landmarks of 20th-century thought; at least three generations in the Europeans and Americans consciously extended his thinking or in some cases passionately reacted in opposition. During the rise of the Nazi party, people labeled jazz as degenerate art.

People widely knew Schoenberg early in his career for his success in simultaneously extending the opposed German romantic styles of Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner. Later, his name came to personify pioneering innovations, the most polemical feature of 20th-century art. In the 1920s, the technique, a widely influential method of Schoenberg, manipulated an ordered series of all in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term variation, and this first modern embraced ways of motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.

Schoenberg, an important theorist, also painted and influentially taught his students, who included Alban Berg, Anton Friedrich Wilheim von Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, and later John Milton Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, and many other prominent. Avant-garde thought throughout the 20th century echoes many of practices, including the formalization of method and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically. His crucial, often polemical views of history and aesthetics influenced many significant critics, including Theodor Adorno, Charles Rosen, and Carl Dahlhaus,of the 20th century. His thought also considerably influenced the pianists Rudolf Serkin, Artur Schnabel, Eduard Steuermann, and later Glenn Gould.

The Arnold Schönberg center in Vienna collects his archival legacy.