Schoenberg breaks with tonality

In 1908 and 1909 the Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg wrote music with no home key. The last movements of his Second String Quartet, premiered in December 1908 to a hostile audience, drift away from any key center, and his Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11 (1909), are usually named as the first freely atonal works. In ordinary tonal music a piece centers on one note and its chord, and dissonant chords resolve into it. Schoenberg stopped resolving them, calling it the emancipation of the dissonance.¹²

The step was prepared by a century of chromatic music. Beethoven stretched classical forms, and Wagner's operas, including the Ring cycle and Tristan, used chords so unstable that the key often felt unclear. Schoenberg, who worked in the Vienna of Mahler and Freud, took this to its logical end. He was also a painter who showed his work with the Expressionists, and his music matched their focus on raw inner states. Pierrot Lunaire (1912) added Sprechstimme, a half-spoken singing style.²

Schoenberg later felt atonality lacked structure and in the early 1920s devised the twelve-tone method, in which all twelve notes of the scale appear in a fixed order before any repeats. His pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern, with him the Second Viennese School, developed the approach in different ways. The Nazis forced Schoenberg out of Germany in 1933, and he settled in California. His ideas shaped postwar composers such as Boulez and Stockhausen, though most concert audiences still found atonal music difficult.²