{"id":348,"date":"2021-03-15T17:06:53","date_gmt":"2021-03-15T17:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/program_note\/second-viennese-school\/"},"modified":"2025-06-01T14:19:20","modified_gmt":"2025-06-01T14:19:20","slug":"second-viennese-school","status":"publish","type":"program_note","link":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/program_note\/second-viennese-school\/","title":{"rendered":"The Second Viennese School"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is a commonplace, of course, in history to observe that there are times in which most aspects of life seem predictably to change little\u2014whether economic, political, social, or artistic.\u00a0 Inevitably, there follow those times in which nothing is predictable and significant alterations in every facet of society seem to cascade, one upon the other, and nothing remains the same thereafter.\u00a0 We now understand the beginning of the twentieth century to be one of those periods.\u00a0\u00a0 All was in flux–science, art, philosophy\u2014and most lamentably, politics and military power, as well.\u00a0\u00a0 The cataclysm of World War I was nigh, monarchies were to disappear, and new and oppressive forms of governments arose.\u00a0 Intellectual life in all its forms walked, as it must, hand in hand with these events, and especially so the arts.\u00a0 Any visit, today, to an art museum reveals the stark changes in perception, technique, and expressive means underwent by visual artists of that time.\u00a0\u00a0 In music, the parallel upheavals were equally fundamental and epochal.\u00a0 And the epicenter for that remarkable pivot was fin-de-si\u00e8cle<\/em> Vienna\u2014the city of Freud, Mahler, Klimt, Wittgenstein, and a host of other seminal intellects.<\/p>\n

The legacy of titans of Western art music that lived and worked in Vienna is fundamental to music history:\u00a0 Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms.\u00a0 But, by the end of the century, thoughtful composers\u2014especially in Vienna\u2014agonized over how to move forward in musical style, but yet maintain the tradition and rigor of their formidable predecessors.\u00a0\u00a0 The music of Wagner, especially that of Tristan und Isolde<\/em> had taken traditional tonality to the brink of dissolution, and others, Gustav Mahler most importantly, extended that trend.\u00a0 But, the way forward was more than murky.\u00a0 It remained for an intense, largely self-taught, composer and teacher, and two of his immensely gifted students to explore one of the ways to the musical future.\u00a0 That, of course, was Arnold Schoenberg and his prot\u00e9g\u00e9s, Anton Weber and Alban Berg.<\/p>\n

Together (often deemed confusingly as the \u201cSecond Viennese School\u201d) they proposed and produced masterworks in a musical style that was one of the major directions in musical composition of the twentieth century.\u00a0 Others\u2014notably Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok, and their successors\u2014offered other different, distinct responses to the question:\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cWhat is modern music, what does it mean, and what does it sound like?\u201d\u00a0 Schoenberg began to compose early on in a musical style that attenuated the tonality of Romanticism in a dense, chromatic texture.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t take long for him to jettison all pretense of traditional adherence to the idea of composing in a single tonality, with excursions to related key areas, and the psychological pleasure of returning home.\u00a0\u00a0 Three hundred years of building, extending, and integrating amazing nuance in this technique saw much of its apotheosis in the work of Wagner, Richard Strauss (later), and Gustav Mahler.\u00a0 But, Schoenberg saw that it had run its course.\u00a0 His personal musical solution, and that of his talented young students, Berg and Webern, led first to atonality, and when the limitations of that became apparent, to the 12-tone technique.\u00a0 Together, working in almost total collaboration, they moved quickly from late Romantic style into jettisoning the core of that style\u2014tonality\u2014for the bewildering world of atonality, and finally into the organization of atonality into the totally controlled texture of 12-tone composition.\u00a0\u00a0 Their collective body of works, while certainly not the all-encompassing solution to twentieth-century modernism, nevertheless constitutes a treasure of musical masterpieces from the first half of the century. Moreover, their artistic solutions became perhaps the dominant style of composition for a time after World War II\u2014especially for Europeans and those in the American academic school\u2014attracting even the attention of Igor Stravinsky, who had thitherto steadfastly maintained his own stylistic identity.\u00a0\u00a0 While it must be admitted that the dissonance and frequent obscurity inherent in Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern has never been to everyone\u2019s taste, there is no denying the fundamental ethics, integrity and genius of their work.\u00a0 While they differed, often strikingly\u2014in their respective styles, they all offer rewards to the listener who will spend the time to listen without preconceptions and with an open mind.\u00a0 Beauties and profound musical meaning lie beneath the daunting surface.<\/p>\n

–Wm. E. Runyan<\/p>\n

\u00a92015 William E. Runyan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"program_note_tax":[149],"class_list":["post-348","program_note","type-program_note","status-publish","hentry","program_note_tax-secondvienneseschool"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note\/348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/program_note"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"program_note_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.runyanprogramnotes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program_note_tax?post=348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}