Early 20th-Century Modernism—Arnold Schönberg

Overview

Arnold Schönberg saw himself not as a revolutionary but as someone who was taking the next inevitable step in the history of German/Austrian music. His musical heritage was that of the German/Austrian tradition, a tradition that he believed was shackled by traditional tonality. His attempt to “emancipate dissonance,” as he put it, led to the creation of works that changed the course of Western musical history. They were written in his so-called freely atonal period and included the seminal and strangely beautiful Pierrot Lunaire of 1912.