Schoenberg

[Héctor]

"I am a conservative who was forced to become a radical," Schoenberg described himself. Clearly much of the musical community has not seen him in this way, since a significant portion of it continues to dismiss Schoenberg's music as formless and unlistenable. On the surface, most of his music appears to be a complete departure from anything previously written, utilizing bizarre harmonies, unresolving dissonances, extreme dynamics, and disjunct melodies. However, a closer look reveals that not only does Schoenberg cling to the musical ideals of the Romantic era, but also that his predecessors, including Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, and even Beethoven, already had begun to develop the stylistic techniques which Schoenberg's audiences found so shocking. Schoenberg took these beginnings of a style, which later became known as expressionism, and simply brought them to their logical conclusion by destroying tonality. In the period between the destruction of tonality and the development of the twelve-tone method, Schoenberg created works which look to Romantic ideals for their structure, yet which deny one of the most important parts of this Romantic structure, tonality, since he thought Wagner had exhausted the possibilities of tonality in Tristan and Isolde.

See Schoenberg, the Romantic

[Héctor]

Schoenberg - Violin Concerto Op.36 (by Hilary Hahn, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra)