Schoenberg and Atonalism: When Tonality Dissolves

The Problem of Tonality

To understand Arnold Schoenberg, one must first understand what tonality is and why, at the beginning of the twentieth century, some composers felt it had reached the limits of its possibilities.

Tonality is the harmonic system that has dominated Western music from approximately the seventeenth century to the present: the idea that every musical work is organised around a central note — the tonic — toward which all musical material tends to return. When we listen to a Beethoven symphony in C minor, we feel throughout the work a kind of gravitational pull toward that C: the music moves away, creates tension, and eventually comes home. That tension and resolution are the emotional engine of virtually all the music the Western listener recognises as classical music.

The problem — if it can be called that — is that throughout the nineteenth century composers expanded that system with increasing audacity. Wagner pushed harmony to a state of near-permanent tension in which resolution was indefinitely postponed. Debussy freed chords from their function within tonal progressions. By the time we reach 1900, tonality had been stretched so far from its original foundations that several composers, independently, arrived at the same question: what if one simply lets it go?

Schoenberg was not the only one to do so, but he was the most systematic, the most radical, and, in time, the most influential.

Arnold Schoenberg: The Path to the Abyss

Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna in 1874 and died in Los Angeles in 1951, having lived on two continents and through two world wars that transformed the world he knew. He was Jewish, and the rise of Nazism forced him to leave Germany in 1933 and emigrate to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life teaching at the University of California.

His musical trajectory follows an arc that seems almost inevitable in retrospect, though no one saw it coming while it was happening. His early works are late Romantic: the symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande (1903) and the string sextet Verklärte Nacht (1899) — Transfigured Night — are works of Wagnerian emotional intensity, with harmony pushed to chromatic extremes but still anchored in recognisable tonal centres. They are extraordinary works, and it is important to listen to them to understand that Schoenberg did not arrive at atonalism through rejection of the past but through exhaustion of its possibilities.

The turning point comes around 1908–1909. In works such as the Three Piano Pieces op. 11 and the song cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, Schoenberg takes the step no one had sustained before: he abandons any tonal centre entirely. There is no tonic. There are no functionally defined chords. There is no harmonic gravity. The notes float in a space without hierarchy, where none has more weight than any other.

This is called atonalism: literally, music without tonality. And the effect, for the listener formed in the Western tradition, is to lose the ground underfoot in the most literal sense: the music sounds strange, unsettling, as though something fundamental were broken or missing. That sensation is not a perceptual error: it is exactly what Schoenberg was seeking.

Between 1908 and 1916, Schoenberg explored this new territory without a safety net: a period of free atonalism in which there were no rules or system to replace tonality, only pure intuition and expressive necessity. It was the most radical and disorienting phase of his career, and also the one most directly tied to the aesthetic that dominated the artistic world around him.

Musical Expressionism

Schoenberg's atonalism did not arise in a vacuum. It emerged in the context of Expressionism, the artistic movement that dominated the Viennese and German cultural scene of the early twentieth century: an aesthetic that sought to express the most extreme interior states — fear, anguish, the fragmentation of the self — with an intensity that realist representation could not achieve.

The Expressionist painters — Kandinsky, Kirchner, Schiele — distorted forms and colours to externalise what was happening within. Schoenberg, who was also a painter and a personal friend of Kandinsky, did the same with sound: if tonality was the system of realist representation in music, atonalism was its Expressionist distortion.

The monodrama Erwartung (Expectation, 1909) is the summit of this period. It is a work for soprano and orchestra in which a woman searches for her lover in a nocturnal forest and finds him dead. It lasts about thirty minutes and is, throughout, an uninterrupted state of psychological terror: the orchestra does not describe the scene from outside but inhabits the interior of the protagonist's mind, with all its irrationality, its leaps of thought, its mixture of love and horror. Atonal music is here the only possible language: tonality would be too ordered, too reasonable for that state.

Pierrot lunaire (1912) takes Expressionism to another level. It is a cycle of twenty-one pieces for a voice and a small instrumental ensemble, based on Symbolist poems by Albert Giraud. The voice neither sings nor speaks: it uses a technique called Sprechstimme — spoken-sung voice — in which the performer follows the pitches indicated in the score but without sustaining them, letting them fall or rise as in exaggerated declamation. The result is somewhere between unsettling and fascinating: something halfway between opera, theatre, and nightmare.

The Twelve-Tone Method: Imposing Order on Chaos

The free atonalism of 1908–1916 solved one problem — liberation from tonality — but created another: without any organising principle, music risked becoming arbitrary noise. Schoenberg was too rigorous a composer to accept that.

In the early 1920s, after several years of compositional silence, Schoenberg presented his solution: the twelve-tone method, also called the method of composing with twelve notes. The idea is elegant in its logic: the Western chromatic scale has twelve notes. In tonal music, those twelve notes are not equal: some are more important than others depending on the key. Schoenberg proposes that all twelve notes be treated with strict equality: before any note can be repeated, the other eleven must have sounded.

This sequence of twelve notes is called a series or row, and it can be used in four forms: the original, the inversion (upside down), the retrograde (back to front), and the retrograde inversion. The system ensures that no note is repeated so often that it acquires the weight of a tonic. The equality among the twelve notes is absolute. There is no harmonic home: all notes are equally at home and therefore none of them is.

What the twelve-tone method offers is structure without tonality: an organising principle that makes it possible to construct large-scale works — symphonies, quartets, concertos — without resorting to the mechanisms of the tonal system. Schoenberg's late works, such as the Violin Concerto (1936) or the String Trio (1946), are buildings of extraordinary internal complexity and coherence, though listening to them demands a very different kind of attention from that required by Beethoven.

The historical significance of the twelve-tone method extends far beyond Schoenberg's own works. It offered twentieth-century composers a coherent alternative system — a way of working with seriousness and rigour outside tonality. And although history would make it the subject of endless debates — is it the future of music or a dead end? — its influence on the second half of the twentieth century was enormous and continues to resonate today.

The Viennese Circle: Berg and Webern

Schoenberg did not work alone. Around him formed what is known as the Second Viennese School — the first being that of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven — consisting principally of two disciples who took the twelve-tone method and carried it in completely different directions.

Alban Berg was the most lyrical of the three: his atonal and twelve-tone music retains a Romantic emotional temperature, a singability that builds bridges toward the listener. His opera Wozzeck (1925), based on a play by Georg Büchner about a humiliated and maddened soldier, is one of the summits of twentieth-century musical theatre: atonal in language, but of a dramatic intensity no listener can ignore. His Violin Concerto (1935), written as a requiem for Alma Mahler's daughter, is perhaps the most accessible and moving work in the twelve-tone repertoire.

Anton Webern was the opposite pole: he took the twelve-tone principle toward extreme concentration, an economy of means that is almost silent. His works are very brief — some pieces last less than a minute — and of a density that requires repeated listening to reveal their architecture. Webern was the most influential composer on the post-war avant-garde: the young composers of the 1950s took him as their model, considering that his radicalism was the only possible path forward. But that story belongs to a later post.

Difficult Music or Misunderstood Music?

It would be dishonest not to acknowledge that the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern is, for most listeners, difficult. Not in the sense that it is technically complex to listen to — no musical knowledge is required — but in the sense that it does not offer the emotional handholds to which the tonal tradition has accustomed us: there are no melodies recognisable on a second hearing, no resolutions that bring relief, no emotional narrative with a clearly perceptible beginning, development, and end.

And yet there is something in it worth seeking. Berg's music in particular has a capacity to express extreme emotional states — pain, loneliness, fear — that few musics possess. And Webern's music has a kind of inhabited silence, a tense fragility, that can be of a very particular beauty for those who learn to listen to it on its own terms.

The question Schoenberg's story leaves open is not whether his music is beautiful or not. It is whether musical language can renew itself indefinitely or whether there are biological and cultural limits to what the human ear can learn to enjoy. That question has no definitive answer. But while Europe debated between atonal radicalism and the search for new paths, a Hungarian composer was doing something no one expected: leaving the conservatories, walking through the fields, recording the voices of peasants, and discovering that the renewal of Western music could come from the most unexpected of places.

"If it is art, it is not for all. And if it is for all, it is not art." — Arnold Schoenberg

Listening Suggestions

• Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) — Schoenberg: the starting point. Schoenberg still within late Romanticism, but already at its limit. Beautiful and accessible.
• Pierrot lunaire — Schoenberg: the most characteristic work of musical Expressionism. Bewildering on first listening; fascinating on the second.
• Wozzeck — Alban Berg: the most powerful and dramatically accessible atonal opera in the repertoire. Essential.
• Violin Concerto — Alban Berg: twelve-tone writing with a Romantic soul. A good bridge between the new language and traditional sensibility.
• Symphony op. 21 — Anton Webern: nine minutes of absolute concentration. For those who want to understand where the principle of maximum economy leads.