The decade (1899–1909) separating Verklärte Nacht from Schoenberg’s second major contribution to Night Music, the monodrama Erwartung, was typically turbulent and productive. Based mainly in Vienna, he established himself as a competent conductor, and also as the revered teacher of talented young composers such as Berg and Webern. The ambitious scale of Schoenberg’s major compositions from these years confirmed his determination to distance himself technically from admired contemporaries like Strauss, Busoni and Mahler. In pursuit of greater intensity and concentration, romanticism gave way to expressionism, as chordal dissonances were freed from their traditional need to resolve. And although critics were often hostile, Schoenberg retained the admiration and respect of performers as well as of friends such as Zemlinsky and Mahler. The affair between his wife Mathilde and the painter Richard Gerstl (ending in uneasy reconciliation after Gerstl’s suicide) fuelled the fierce musical outbursts of important compositions like the Second String Quartet, as well as of Erwartung.

The accident of parentage; impinging cultural, social, and political forces; unbidden encounters, events, and opportunities: these are not under a composer’s control, but can have a momentous impact on personal and compositional development. Consequence is not, however, inevitable. So for those trying to gain insight into a composer’s world, his or her decision-making is more important than mere factual circumstance: how they respond to the environment of which they are a part, and, not least, the myriad decisions undertaken in the creation of a compositional persona and in the course of actual composition. This chapter surveys the compositional environment in which Britten made his entrance. It took Britten a while to find the most powerful and ambitious means of employing simplicity, in pursuit of a complexity formed from the density and quality of relationships rather than the mere overlaying, entanglement, or busyness of complicatedness. This quest is traced with reference to some key works, while noting that Britten’s eclecticism refreshes a strong individual voice to the end of his career.

This chapter is an examination of Britten’s engagement with progressive musical and aesthetic thought. As a successful and popular composer, Britten is rarely identified as an ‘avant-garde’ artist, yet his career took note of progressive developments from 1930s neoclassicism to 1970s minimalism. For mid-century critics, Britten was a cosmpolitan figure; more recently, his commitment to tonality argues a ‘reactive modernism’, in dialogue with tradition. Britten’s relations to avant-garde thought involve successive historical contexts. In the 1930s, he sought to study with Berg, wrote experimental film soundtracks, and explored neoclassical parody, without abandoning key tonality. In the 1940s, Britten’s music developed greater metric complexity. Britten’s 1950s catalogue increasingly explores a personal twelve-tone thematic idiom, along with non-European percussion sonorities inspired by renewed encounters with Balinese gamelan. Criticising avant-garde ‘complication’ in the 1960s, Britten tempered public scepticism with personal support for British avant-gardists.

The introductory chapter begins by offering a rebuttal to Ethan Haimo’s claim in Schoenberg's Transformation of Musical Language (Cambridge, 2006) that “atonal” is an inappropriate term for Schoenberg's middle-period music. It does so by presenting Schenkerian analyses of “Jesus bettelt,” Op. 2, No. 2, and the first Piano Piece, Op. 11, demonstrating that the traditional contrapuntal structures of tonal music are present in the first piece, though often harmonized with unusual chords, but are incomplete or non-existent in the second piece. The chapter then proceeds to show how features originally characteristic of tonal music, other than typical Schenkerian middlegrounds, play crucial roles in organizing Op. 11, No. 1 – traditional tonal form, as well as motivic and harmonic processes that manifest and elaborate the “musical idea,” a conflict-elaboration-solution narrative.