Romanticism on Steroids—Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht and Stravinsky's The Firebird

Romanticism on Steroids 

Schoenberg:Transfigured Night(Verklärte Nacht)—1899

Stravinsky: The Firebird—1910

Schoenberg and Stravinsky, the “destoryers” of tonality, also happened to be two of its greatest masters. This is especially important to remember with Schoenberg, who was often accused of writing twelve tone music because he didn’t have the abilityto write good tonal music! Acquaintance with Schoenberg’s early tone poem for string sextet, Transfigured Night (Verklärte Nacht), (1899) should be sufficient to understand how deeply misinformed those critics had been. Schoenberg’s early music draws from the implications of Wagner’s tonally groundbreaking opera Tristan and Isoldeand fuses it with the dramatic tone poems of Richard Strauss. The result is breathtaking emotional drama that takes the late German Romantic musical language of Strauss and Mahler to its most dizzying heights.

As Schoenberg fused the language of the German late Romantics, Stravinsky did the same in his early music fusing the language of the French Impressionists—Debussy and Ravel—with the Russian late Romantics—Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. His ballet The Firebirdi (1910) s a summation of both the dazzling French and Russian orchestral techniques, the swirling textures, the wide palette of colors, and exciting extended techniques for all the instruments. The Firebirdis also a summation of the French and Russian harmonic innovations that pushed tonality to its limits—whole tone scales and clusters, rich extended chords, and tritone progressions. 

Both these pieces are among the most ravishing in the classical repertoire. We will want to keep this in mind and heart as we trace the profound stylistic changes in music of both composers that so confounded the majority of the public.