Schoenberg’s family background might have suggested that he would have a career as a bank clerk or schoolteacher. Yet his early commitment to music, and pursuit of expert contacts who encouraged his ambitions, marked him out as someone determined to take risks and to avoid easy options. Five years after having shown his ability to compose an effective if derivative string quartet, Verklärte Nacht (1899) for string sextet – later arranged for string orchestra – was a decisive leap forward in which respect for tradition was set against the radical perception that chamber music and tone poetry need not be kept apart. Sources considering Verklärte Nacht’s genesis in detail, and exploring its processes in depth, are surveyed. The extent to which the young composer was prepared to challenge conventional boundaries was reinforced by the unfailing resourcefulness with which his music consistently reflects the style and form of its poetic source.

As one of the inventors of the twelve-tone technique and the first well-known composer of twelve-tone music, it makes eminent sense that Arnold Schoenberg would be understood by scholars and musicians as a traditionalist. This chapter explores an important, but often neglected, way Schoenberg preserved tradition in his serial music: through the use of a ‘musical idea’ that involves the introduction and elaboration of a problem and its eventual solution. The chapter presents two analyses: of the Prelude op. 25 and the Piano Piece op. 33a. Both pieces illustrate problems and elaborations that stem from the differences between a symmetrical pitch-class or interval pattern (presented or implied at the beginning) and various close or distant approximations of it. The symmetrical pattern is then reasserted at or near the end, and the approximations are connected to it in significant ways, as a solution.

Chapter 3 turns its attention to the “Book of the Hanging Gardens” songs, Op. 15 – some of Schoenberg’s earliest atonal pieces. As settings of texts by Stefan George, these songs illustrate the large framework I call “basic image.” A basic image distills a visual shape of some sort from the poem’s first few lines of text, then uses it to control various aspects of the song’s pitch and rhythm. In Op. 15, No. 7, “Angst und Hoffen,” the basic image is of a lover turning his face alternately upward toward hope and downward toward fear (that his beloved would be lost to him), while his body first constricts, then expands to emit longer and longer sighs. In Op. 15, No. 11, “Als wir hinter dem beblümten Tore,” the guiding image is that of a memory (of a past tryst with the beloved) in the lover’s mind that disappears, but is at least partially recovered after some striving. This second image has points in common with the other kind of framework, the “musical idea.”

In Chapter 5, the Six Little Piano Pieces of Op. 19 are portrayed as a step in the direction of clear and traditional musical form, and more audible motivic processes, after the more abrupt forms and less obvious motivic relations (though far from non-existent) of Op. 11, No. 3, and Erwartung. I describe Pieces No. 2, 3, and 6 in detail, showing that these miniatures are organized by the same frameworks, “musical idea” and “basic image,” as previous works analysed in the book. Piece No. 2 manifests a musical idea that grows out of a conflict between hexatonic, octatonic, and whole-tone subsets, in which the hexatonic emerges victorious over the other two. Piece No. 3 expresses an “idea” of the same kind, but at the last minute the hexatonic collection’s ability to synthesize is thwarted by diatonic subsets. And piece No. 6, the famous portrayal of Mahler’s funeral bells, portrays an image of Schoenberg reaching up to take Mahler’s mantle as tonal composer, but falling back down into first pandiatonic territory and then chromaticism.

Chapter 2 demonstrates how the second and third Piano Pieces of Op. 11 form a cycle together with the first, in that they take up motives, harmonies, and processes that were introduced in the first piece, and use them to create narratives of conflict, elaboration, and solution – “musical ideas.” Op. 11’s processes include an expansion of pitch intervals within motives that generalizes into an expansion of pitch-class intervals within set classes, and an “explanatory” process that shows how unfamiliar pitch-interval collections can be reconciled to familiar motives through set-class identity with them. In Op. 11, No. 2, a conflict between set classes and motives similar to the one found in Op. 11, No. 1, is elaborated and resolved using the “explanatory” process, among other devices. In Op. 11, No. 3, the expanding and explanatory processes exist side by side in conflict, but rather than coming together in a solution, the expanding process simply crowds out the explanatory one, so that the “musical idea” is incomplete. My analysis of Op. 11, No. 3, pushes back against the common notion of the piece as “athematic,” in that it portrays the piece as a battle of motivic processes.

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.