Second Viennese School

The informal grouping of Arnold Schoenberg and his two most important pupils, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, working in Vienna from approximately 1903 to 1933. The three composers developed from late Romantic chromaticism (influenced by Wagner and Brahms) through free atonality (c.1908-1920) to systematic twelve-tone composition (from c.1921). Despite sharing the same teacher and city, their musical personalities were strikingly different: Schoenberg retained a strongly Romantic expressive rhetoric; Berg synthesised the new language with Romantic lyricism; Webern pursued an extreme compression and structural rigour that had no parallel in either teacher or colleague.

Webern's works require a different performance approach from Schoenberg's or Berg's: the Romantic expressivity that suits Berg's Sonata or Schoenberg's early pieces is inappropriate in Webern's Op. 27. Webern's music is crystalline and architectural rather than expressionist: the performer should think of Webern alongside Mondrian or Palladio, not van Gogh.