Arnold Schoenberg
First period: Late Romanticism

Beginning with songs and string quartets written around the turn of the century, Schoenberg's concerns as a composer positioned him uniquely among his peers, in that his procedures exhibited characteristics of both Brahms and Wagner, who for most contemporary listeners, were considered polar opposites, representing mutually exclusive directions in the legacy of German music. Schoenberg's Zwei Gesänge, Op. 1, first performed in 1903, set two contemporary poems to expressive music bordering the limits of the Lied genre. Schoenberg's Six Songs, Op. 3 (1899–1903), for example, exhibit a conservative clarity of tonal organization typical of Brahms and Mahler, reflecting an interest in balanced phrases and an undisturbed hierarchy of key relationships. However, the songs also explore unusually bold incidental chromaticism and seem to aspire to a Wagnerian "representational" approach to motivic identity.

The synthesis of these approaches reaches an apex in his Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (1899), a programmatic work for string sextet that develops several distinctive " leitmotif "-like themes, each one eclipsing and subordinating the last. The only motivic elements that persist throughout the work are those that are perpetually dissolved, varied, and re-combined, in a technique, identified primarily in Brahms's music, that Schoenberg called " developing variation ". Schoenberg's procedures in the work are organized in two ways simultaneously; at once suggesting a Wagnerian narrative of motivic ideas, as well as a Brahmsian approach to motivic development and tonal cohesion.

Citing Berg and Webern on Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 1, Op. 7 (1904–1905), Joseph N. Straus emphasized the importance of "motivic coherence" in the three's œuvres more generally. "Every smallest turn of phrase, even accompanimental figuration is significant", Berg asserted, parenthetically praising Schoenberg's "excess unheard-of since Bach ". Webern marveled at how "Schoenberg creates an accompaniment figure from a motivic particle", proclaiming "everything is thematic! There is... not a single note... that does not have a thematic basis."
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