Other meanings of Second Viennese School
Music History
The Second Viennese School designates the circle of early twentieth-century composers centered on Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Active mainly in Vienna between roughly 1904 and 1930, they pioneered the emancipation of dissonance, atonality, and later the twelve-tone method, fundamentally altering the course of Western art music. The term distinguishes them from the First Viennese School of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, though the connection is more ideological than stylistic.
The Second Viennese School emerged from Schoenberg's teaching in early twentieth-century Vienna, where he gathered a circle of students including Berg, Webern, and later figures such as Hanns Eisler and Egon Wellesz. Their shared aesthetic rejected the late-Romantic chromaticism of Wagner and Strauss in favor of a more radical harmonic language. Schoenberg's concept of the 'emancipation of dissonance' held that dissonant chords need not resolve to consonances, freeing composers to explore atonality—music without a tonal center. This break with tradition was not a rejection of the past but an evolution, as Schoenberg argued in his theoretical writings, including his influential Harmonielehre (1911). The group's early works, such as Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire (1912) and Berg's Altenberg Lieder (1912), exemplify this new expressive freedom, often using Sprechstimme and extreme registers to convey psychological intensity.
Around 1921, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone method, a systematic technique in which a row containing all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale is used as the basis for a composition, with permutations of the row (transposition, inversion, retrograde) generating the musical material. This method aimed to provide a structural alternative to tonality while maintaining coherence. Berg and Webern adopted the technique in distinct ways: Berg used it flexibly, often incorporating tonal elements and traditional forms, as in his Lyric Suite (1926) and the opera Lulu (unfinished at his death). Webern, by contrast, applied the method with extreme rigor and brevity, producing works of crystalline clarity and pointillistic texture, such as the Symphony, Op. 21 (1928). The method's influence extended beyond the school, shaping the postwar avant-garde, particularly through Webern's impact on composers like Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
The Second Viennese School faced considerable hostility from audiences and critics, who often dismissed their music as chaotic or degenerate. The 1913 'Skandalkonzert' in Vienna, which featured works by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, ended in riots and police intervention. Despite such opposition, the group gained a devoted following among progressive musicians and intellectuals, and their ideas were disseminated through Schoenberg's teaching and the Society for Private Musical Performances (1918–1921), which presented new music in a controlled, rehearsal-heavy environment. The school's legacy was cemented in the post-World War II era, when the twelve-tone method became a cornerstone of academic composition, particularly in the United States and Europe. Their works are now staples of the modern repertoire, and their theoretical concepts remain central to music analysis and pedagogy.
Beyond the central trio, the Second Viennese School included a wider circle of composers and theorists whose contributions are often overlooked. Among them, Egon Wellesz, a student of Schoenberg, became a pioneering scholar of Byzantine music and composed in a more lyrical style. Hanns Eisler, another pupil, later turned to political music and collaborated with Bertolt Brecht, using twelve-tone techniques in a socially engaged manner. The school also had a significant female presence: Schoenberg's student Vilma von Webenau and the composer and pianist Else C. Kraus were active, though their works remain largely unrecorded. The group's influence extended to literature and visual arts, with Schoenberg himself an expressionist painter who exhibited with the Blue Rider group. The term 'Second Viennese School' itself was coined only in the 1920s by musicologist Paul Bekker, and its boundaries have been debated, with some scholars including figures like Ernst Krenek and even the young Igor Stravinsky in its orbit.
The term 'Second Viennese School' was coined retrospectively; the composers themselves did not use it.
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