His first mature pieces were in a moody, emotionally turbulent post-Wagnerian style. “Transfigured Night,” “Pelleas und Melisande” and “Gurrelieder,” all written around the turn of the century, are tonal and share many traits with Mahler and Richard Strauss: extended musical forms, restless, roving harmonies, explosive climaxes and a rich, prodigious use of the orchestra. “Gurrelieder,” a 90-minute oratorio-like work for a gigantic conglomeration of orchestra, choruses and solo voices, is the ne plus ultra of extravagant last-gasp Germanic Romanticism.
But even when he was writing in the tonal idiom of these early works, Schoenberg never made it easy for his listeners. He was, as Sachs points out, “difficult” from the very start. His first string quartet goes for a full 40 minutes of frenetic energy entirely without pause. While Strauss would annually deliver a tone poem or opera that became an instant hit, Schoenberg’s music remained respected but rarely performed.
And then suddenly he executes a volte-face, one of the most shocking stylistic changes in the history of classical music, trading the lavish, hypertrophied forms of the early works for a new language of compressed, often gnomic utterance. Tonal relationships begin to implode; familiar formal templates disappear; and the emotional ambience, especially in theatrical works like “Pierrot Lunaire” and “Erwartung,” becomes eerie, inward, ghoulish, even psychotic.
Clichés abound in describing what happened to tonal harmony in the works of this period (and of those of his two famous students Alban Berg and Anton Webern), the most persistent of which is that tonality was “exhausted,” or “collapsed,” i.e., that by 1910 everything that could be discovered about harmony had been found and exploited and that there was nowhere to go except to abandon it. Schoenberg, by way of explanation, offered the notion of “emancipation of the dissonance,” an optimistic phrase if there ever was one. But the gap between willing listener and iconoclastic composer just grew wider, became a chasm. Without tonal harmony to unite and give direction to the flow of sounds, the listener was more often than not unable to find coherence and meaning in the music.