Second Viennese School Timeline and Central Composers

The Second Viennese School refers to a modernist musical movement that introduced radical concepts to Western music, including serialism, atonality, and intentional dissonance. Based in the Austrian capital of Vienna in the first half of the twentieth century, the Second Viennese School revolved around the revolutionary composer Arnold Schoenberg and a number of his pupils—most notably Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

Music historians named this movement the Second Viennese School in reference to the First Viennese School, which involved giants of the classical era like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert, and Ludwig van Beethoven. All of these classical musicians were active in Vienna in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Unlike the classical music of the First Viennese School, which emphasized diatonic harmony (or hummable melodies), the hyper-modern music of the Second Viennese School took a highly analytical approach to music through approaches like Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.

The musical innovations of the Second Viennese School are linked to its leader, Arnold Schoenberg.

• Schoenberg’s early successes: Born in Vienna in 1874, Schoenberg began his career as a Romantic composer who toyed with dissonance. This approach put him in league with other Germanic composers like Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Strauss. Schoenberg was at his most popular during his Romantic period, thanks to works like Verklärte Nacht (1899), Pelleas und Melisande (1903), and Gurre-Lieder (1913).
• Early experimentation: In the midst of his relative success, Schoenberg began experimenting with new tonalities. This was clearly pronounced in his String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10, with soprano, which he composed in 1908. He proceeded in this direction with Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens) in 1909, Five Orchestral Pieces in 1909, and Pierrot Lunaire in 1912.
• The twelve-tone method: By the 1920s, Schoenberg had created his own method for organizing music, which fell well outside the conventions of diatonic harmony. Commonly known as the twelve-tone method, or serialism, it involved all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. Schoenberg arranged notes into tone rows, where each of the 12 notes in a chromatic scale must be played before a note can be reused. Tone rows are used to build an entire composition, much like a subject is used to build a traditional fugue. Works from this period include Suite for Piano (1923), Wind Quintet (1924), and Variations for Orchestra (1928).
• Student following: Schoenberg's twelve-tone serialism sounded thorny and dense to many untrained ears, but the music of his students maintained more of a bridge to the Romantic era and its emphasis on melody. Such composers include Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Erwin Stein, Egon Wellesz, Robert Gerhard, Norbert von Hannenheim, and Viktor Ullmann. As one of Schoenberg's most successful students, Berg is best known for his Violin Concerto (1935) and for the operas Wozzeck (1922) and Lulu (1937). Webern is best known for his short instrumental pieces such as Concerto for Nine Instruments (1934) and Variations for Piano (1936).
• World War II: The Second Viennese School has no formal beginning or end, but by the time of World War II, its prominent composers had dispersed. Schoenberg, who was Jewish, fled to America, and Berg died of sepsis in 1935. An occupying American soldier killed Webern in Vienna in 1945.

While many composers are associated with the Second Viennese School, three helped define it.

1. 1. Arnold Schoenberg: Schoenberg was the founder and leader of the Second Viennese School. In his early career, he evolved his style from a progressive form of Late Romantic music and developed his own way of structuring music called the twelve-tone technique, or serialism. These techniques provided the foundation for the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg's embrace of serialism, and even pure atonality, had a profound influence on other composers. While he was far from the most popular classical musician of the twentieth century, he was one the most influential.
2. 2. Alban Berg: Berg was one of Schoenberg's earliest students, and he maintained closer ties to Romanticism than his mentor did. Berg was not nearly as prolific as his mentor Schoenberg, but the works he did produce remain widely performed by contemporary orchestras, choruses, and opera companies. They include the instrumental pieces Lyric Suite (1926) and Violin Concerto (1935), the song cycle Altenberg Lieder (1912), and the operas Wozzeck (1922) and Lulu (posthumously premiered in 1937).
3. 3. Anton Webern: Anton Friedrich Wilhelm von Webern was more faithful to the twelve-tone method than Berg, but his pieces are often considered more melodically driven than those of late-period Schoenberg. He experimented with musical concepts like timbre, dynamics, orchestration, and articulation, on top of the twelve-tone harmonic concept. His pieces were notably brief compared to other Second Viennese School composers, and they influenced musicians like Pierre Boulez, John Cage, and Edgard Varèse.

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