Lucia Švecová

Wagner’s Multiple Influences on Foundations of Modernism in Arnold

Schönberg’s Opp. 2 and 4.
List of Contents

List of Contents 3

List of Figures 4

Abstract 5

I. Modernism, Wagner, and Schönberg 6

II. Philosophical Influences 14

III. Literary Influences 22

IV. Musical Influences 27

V. Conclusion 38

Bibliography 42

2
List of Figures

Figure 1 – Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, ‘Prelude’, bars 1-3. 18

Figure 2 – Arnold Schönberg, Op. 2 No. 1, ‘Erwartung’, bars 15-18. 30

Figure 3 – Arnold Schönberg, Op. 2 No. 2, ‘Jesus bettelt’, bars 42-43. 31

Figure 4 – Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, ‘Prelude’, bars 25-26. 32

Figure 5 – Arnold Schönberg, Op. 2 No. 1, ‘Erwartung’, bar 1. 34

Figure 6 – Arnold Schönberg, Op. 2 No. 3, ‘Erhebung’, bars 1-3. 34

Figure 7 – Arnold Schönberg, Op. 2 No. 1, ‘Erwartung’, bar 10. 35

Figure 8 – Arnold Schönberg, Op. 2 No. 1, ‘Erwartung’, bar 12. 36

Figure 9a – Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, final ‘Poco piu mosso’. 36

Figure 9b – Arnold Schönberg, Op. 4, Verklärte Nacht, bars 18-19. 37

3
 Abstract

Richard Wagner’s work was undeniably influential at the turn of the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries. However, as modernist composers sought to move out from beneath

Wagner’s shadow, the connection between Wagner’s work and the shaping of modernism

became less easy to determine. Furthermore, this connection was made more complex by

the phenomenon of Wagnerism, which influenced artists, writers, and composers as a

movement rather than through the impact of Wagner’s work as such. Nevertheless, despite

the fact that many aspects of modernism represented a reaction against the cults of

Romanticism, one of the examples of which was Wagnerism, there are aspects of Wagner’s

work that laid the foundation of other modernist tendencies.

The present work considers Arnold Schönberg as an example of a modernist composer

influenced by Wagner, and specifically his two works composed in 1899, Op. 2 Vier Lieder

and Op. 4 Verklärte Nacht, which may be identified as the first traceable turning points in

Schönberg’s developing modernist tendencies. Thus, the philosophical, literary, and musical

aspects of these Schönberg’s works are analysed in order to reveal similarities with Wagner’s

work. Subsequently, the identified similarities are evaluated as to whether they do in fact

represent the foundation of Schönberg’s modernist tendencies, and therefore whether they

may suggest that the root of those tendencies could have indeed been in Wagner’s work. As

this seems to be the case, the wider questions of the varied influences on the shaping of

modernism and the influence of Richard Wagner in particular may open up an opportunity

for further discussion.

4
 I. Modernism, Wagner, and Schönberg

The foundations of modernism represent a complex of attitudes and tendencies with

important implications for understanding the work of both modernist and pre-modernist

composers. The present work looks at two composers, Richard Wagner and Arnold

Schönberg, as two landmarks in the musical development before and at the start of what

became known as ‘modernism’. Particularly in the Austro-German musical tradition, the

influence of past and contemporary composers on each other had always been very strong

and had similarly shaped modernism. On the other hand, from the outset modernism might

not be expected to be based on works of Romantic composers because, to a large extent,

modernism was a reaction against Romanticism. Eric Hayot explains both ‘Romanticism’ and

‘Modernism’ as modes of creation with particular features, which stand in opposition

because the ‘Romantic mode’ is utopian and ‘world-creating’, while the ‘Modernist mode’ is

‘world-denying’.1 Nonetheless, although the mode of his work could be said to have been

Romantic rather than Modernist, Wagner’s influence at the end of the nineteenth century

was hard to escape, and many of his ideas positively influenced the new modernist thinking.

Before we can proceed any further, it needs to be established what we mean by

‘modernism’, its ‘foundations’, and which Schönberg’s works we refer to. The focus of the

present work is determined by a particular definition of modernism. That is, modernism is a

term that was created in the nineteenth century and had been applied with different

meanings until the latter half of the twentieth century. Whilst Julian Johnson claims that

‘modernism’ refers to ‘a period of Western history beginning somewhere around the end of

1
E. Hayot, ‘Realism, Romanticism, Modernism’, in On Literary Worlds, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012,
pp. 130-132.

5
the sixteenth century and which appears to approach a terminal phase in the latter part of

the twentieth century’, Leon Botstein outlines how the first usage of the term between

1883 and 1914 referred more to the controversies in the distorted continuation of the

eighteenth-century cultural practice rather than to the radical innovation of the new

practices.2 Only in the twentieth century it more generally represented trends in aesthetics,

scholarship, and performance practice, which attempted to create something ‘adequate to

the unique and radical character of the age’.3 The present work will focus on its meaning in

the twentieth century as a distinctive feature of the fin-de-siècle era, understanding it, in

Johnson’s words, as a ‘set of recurrent concerns’ universal to all aspects of life and culture.4

Hence, we will consider not only musical but also philosophical and literary aspects of

modernism in Wagner’s and Schönberg’s and work.

The foundations of a movement that applies to ‘all aspects of life and culture’, though, are

hard to define. Furthermore, one of the main features of the fin-de-siècle era was the

fragmentation of styles, and therefore there are arguably more contrasts than similarities

between works of modernist authors. Nevertheless, we can attempt to define the main

pillars of modernist attitudes, which had also led to the fragmentation of styles. The

fragmentation itself implies the importance of individualism, of creating an individualistic

style, as one of the pillars. Of course, any artistic creation always implies that the creation is

individualistic insofar as it is created by different individuals. However, at the turn of the

twentieth century this had gained a new meaning when suddenly there were multiple

contrasting artistic schools and authors working alongside each other, creating very

2
J. Johnson, Out of Time: Music and the Making of Modernity, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 2.;
L. Botstein, ‘Modernism’, Music Grove Online, 2001 (accessed 11 January 2019).
3
L. Botstein, ‘Modernism’.
4
J. Johnson, Out of Time, p. 1.

6
different works in very different styles. We need only to mention the polarity between the

Secession Movement and the Second Viennese School in Vienna, or the contrast between

German-Austrian expressionism and Parisian impressionism. The increased sense of

individualism was partly caused by the growing sense of self-importance of the author, a

product of ‘the Romantic idea of genius’, which, according to David Large and William

Weber, ‘reached its peak in Wagner’.5 This self-importance was obvious in the Second

Viennese School. Joseph Auner comments on the term ‘Second Viennese School’, saying

that this was a label with which Schönberg and his friends claimed a great deal of

importance by association with the First Viennese School, even though there was arguably

no resemblance between the two groups of composers.6

Nevertheless, an association with a Viennese group in particular pointed to the fact that

Vienna as such represented a pool of thought and ideas, where people from several areas

and disciplines met and shared their thoughts. Subsequently, another characteristic trait of

thinking of modernist composers was their drawing from different disciplines. Here Brian

Sims evokes a reference to Wagner when he calls Vienna at this time ‘an intellectual

Gesamtkunstwerk’, where new ideas in science, literature, and painting ‘quickly

intermingled with those emanating from music per se’.7 We can observe groups of

composers working closely with groups of artists, such as the Second Viennese School

composers sharing ideas with the circle of artists around Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus, and Oscar

Kokoschka.8 Finally, another fundamental concept in the artistic life of this period was the

5
D. C. Large and W. Weber, Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984,
p. 22.
6
J. Auner, ‘The Second Viennese School As a Historical Concept’, in B. R. Sims, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern:
A Companion to the Second Viennese School, London: Greenwood Press, 1999, p. 2.
7
B. R. Sims, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, 1999, p. xiii.
8
J. A. Smith, Schoenberg and His Circle, New York: Schirmer Books, 1986, p. 39.

7
notion of revolution and progress. However, this was often a notion understood differently

by the audience and the authors. At the time, the public saw modernism as a ‘rebellion

against the accepted and the traditional’, but even though there was a lot of social critique

in modernist works, the authors always perceived a sense of historical continuity –

modernism was a rebellion against the current state of affairs rather than a rejection of

preceding historical events.9

Modernism was, of course, by far more complex and a product of many more foundations.

Nonetheless, for the purpose of the present work, we will focus on the three foundational

concepts of individualism, ‘intellectual Gesamtkunstwerk’, and revolution and progress,

which are general enough to encompass the different meanings of modernism, yet specific

enough to help us identify which tendencies and lines of thought in the fin-de-siècle

modernism can be seen as common to Wagner’s tendencies. Some of the main tendencies

visible in Schönberg’s writings are ideas linked to historical or evolutionary progress – the

idea of a solitary revolutionary artist, who is forced by Art to create specific works, in order

to bring about the evolution towards the emancipation of dissonance. That is, through the

evolutionary progress the emancipation of dissonance as a progress towards the equal

status of all twelve tones of the chromatic scale became a logical conclusion of what was

bound to happen in musical development; a ‘necessary change’.10 Hence, rather than a

radical revolution, such progress is only an inevitable continuation of historical

development, whereas ‘all revolutions simply bring reaction out into the open and can

threaten what took years to grow’, and therefore Schönberg never considered himself a

9
A. W. Dow, ‘Modernism in Art’, The American Magazine of Art, Vol. 8 No. 3, January 1917, pp. 113-116.
10
A. Schönberg, ‘Composition with Twelve Tones (1)’, in L. Stein (transl. L. Black), Style and Idea: Selected
Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 216.

8
true ‘revolutionary’.11 In this way, Schönberg’s later compositions represented a

consequence of the preceding periods of ‘technical armament that enabled [him] to stand

distinctly on [his] own feet’, even though when people speak of his later compositions, they

connect them ‘with horror’.12 Nevertheless, Schönberg’s role was to bring about the

necessary change, even if most of the audiences would not understand it, and therefore

Schönberg saw himself as the solitary artist who simply obeyed what Art commanded of

him. In his 1937 essay ‘How One Becomes Lonely’ he compared himself to Socrates, who

preached the truth but had to be condemned so that the truth would be revealed, and

similarly Anton Webern in his lectures recorded in The Path to the New Music claimed that

Schönberg sacrificed himself to realise the necessary change, even though he knew he

would face rejection.13 Indeed, consequently in realising this change Schönberg created a

new individualistic style – in the same 1937 essay he claimed that by the time of the

composition of the Kammersymphonie, he had found his ‘own personal style of composing

and that all problems which had previously troubled a young composer had been solved’,

although the style was not so appreciated by the public.14

In his 1941 essay, ‘Composition with Twelve Tones (1)’, Schönberg closely links the

emancipation of dissonance as a central concept of his compositional philosophy with

Richard Wagner, when he argues that ‘Richard Wagner’s harmony had promoted a change

in the logic and constructive power of harmony’.15 Hence, it seems clear that to some extent

Schönberg was influenced by Wagner. Firstly, both composers recognised the corrupted

11
A. Schönberg, ‘New Music’, in L. Stein, Style and Idea, p. 137.
12
A. Schönberg, ‘A Self-Analysis’, in L. Stein, Style and Idea, p. 76.
13
A. Webern, (transl. L. Black, ed. W. Reich), The Path to the New Music, London: Theodore Presser Company,
1963, p. 15.
14
A. Schönberg, ‘How One Becomes Lonely’, in L. Stein, Style and Idea, p. 49.
15
A. Schönberg, ‘Composition with Twelve Tones (1)’, p. 216.

9
state of music of their time and wanted to change it. Wagner addressed this as the issue of

‘fashion’, which is mutually exclusive with true art that stems from the perception of ‘need’,

a necessity.16 Schönberg experienced the ‘corrupted taste’ of the audiences that were not

attuned to his music when between 1908 and 1913 he experienced what Malcolm

MacDonald calls the ‘Peripeteia’ of extensive criticism.17 In a letter to Ferruccio Busoni

Schönberg expressed his annoyance at the current situation in what appears as a

‘revolutionary credo’:

I strive for: complete liberation from all forms

From all symbols of cohesion and of logic.
Thus:
Away with ‘motivic working out’.
Away with harmony as
Cement or bricks of a building.
Harmony is expression
And nothing else.
Then:
Away with Pathos!
…18

Schönberg made it clear, though, that his New Music was not a complete break with the

past but a historically inevitable progress, in line with the previous developments. In the

aforementioned 1937 essay ‘How One Becomes Lonely’, Schönberg also refers to the

surprise that many expressed upon finding out that his Harmonielehre only talks about ‘the

technique and harmony of our predecessors’, arguing that, actually, it was:

16
R. Wagner (transl. E. Warner), ‘The Artwork of the Future’, in The Wagner Journal special issue, 2013, p. 20.
17
M. MacDonald, Schoenberg, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 1-23.
18
A. Schönberg, in a letter to Ferruccio Busoni, cited in M. MacDonald, Schoenberg, p. 9.

10
 … just because I was so true to our predecessors [that] I was able to show that
modern harmony was not developed by an irresponsible fool, but that it was the
very logical development of the harmony and technique of the masters.19

Wagner felt the same, if not greater, kind of devotion to faithfulness to the historical

developments – Carl Dahlhaus argues that Wagner viewed himself ‘as the heir apparent and

sole custodian of the classical legacy in both literature and music’.20 Thus, as it will be

discussed later, what both Wagner and Schönberg meant by ‘revolution’ was bringing about

the inevitable evolution rather than rejecting the past. In his essay on New Music,

Schönberg himself argues that Wagner played a necessary role in the musical evolution,

since:

Wagner’s attempt to create a new connection between music and theatre was
indeed a necessity. Had music not learned … to adapt itself quickly and exactly to
states and happenings, then our present-day art would lack its wealth of forms,
its ability to find an expressive turn in the most limited space, and to illustrate it
by characteristic invention.21

A year later Schönberg argued that his own harmonic developments ‘were logical

consequences of Wagner’s harmony’, thereby confirming that his New Music, as one of the

new modernist artistic directions, was built upon the foundations laid by Wagner.22

Finally, the reason why the present work focuses specifically on Schönberg’s 1899 works

(i.e. Op. 2 Vier Lieder and Op. 4 Verklärte Nacht) is that these can be seen as the first

identifiable shift away from the Romantic ideas in Schönberg’s philosophy, subject matters,

and musical content of his works to the later development of his twelve-tone method. Due

19
A. Schönberg, ‘How One Becomes Lonely’, pp. 50-51.
20
C. Dalhaus (transl. B. J. Robinson), Nineteenth-Century Music, London: University of California Press, 1989, p.
196.
21
A. Schönberg, ‘New Music: My Music’, in L. Stein, Style and Idea, p. 105.
22
A. Schönberg, ‘National Music (2)’, in L. Stein, Style and Idea, pp. 172-173.

11
to the aforementioned similarities between the ideas of Wagner and Schönberg, an analysis

of the modernist aspects of these Schönberg works may help us to identify to what extent

Wagner influenced the shaping of modernism. Walter Frisch in his book Early Works of

Schoenberg analyses the 1899 works and argues that it was through the 1899 settings of

Dehmel’s poems that Schönberg moved ‘definitely beyond the Brahms style to explore and

gain mastery over a more progressive chromatic language and more ambitious musical

forms’.23 Frisch in turn claims that ‘[t]here is no question that this language owes much to

Wagner’.24 The 1899 works were also important due to the fact that in them Schönberg

combined the influences of Brahms and Wagner. According to Frisch, Schönberg himself

claimed that Verklärte Nacht was such a synthesis as a result of the process taking place in

the Vier Lieder settings – a synthesis of the ‘Wagnerian sphere’ of harmony and the

‘Brahmsian sphere’ of motivic language.25 In fact, the first of the songs from Vier Lieder,

‘Erwartung’, already embodied these processes, and the last two completed settings, ‘Jesus

bettelt’ and ‘Erhebung’, represented individual developments of harmony and form

respectively – according to Frisch, ‘[t]he former shows a great mastery of chromatic

harmony and thematic transformation, the latter of motivic development, polyphonic

density, and flexible phrase structure’.26 Hence, Brahms was a significant influence in the

early works of Schönberg, but it was the discovery of Wagner’s ideas in his works that

encouraged Schönberg to take a different compositional path. This synthesis of two

compositional styles that were usually perceived as being in opposition was the first step

towards it. In other words, in Opp. 2 and 4 Schönberg both acknowledged the inspiration

23
W. Frisch, The Early Works of Schoenberg 1893-1908, London: University of California Press, 1993, pp. 82-83.
24
Ibid. pp. 82-83.
25
Ibid. p. 83.
26
Ibid.

12
from the past and also started developing the new musical style, for which Dehmel’s poems

were a useful vehicle:

To Richard Dehmel Berlin-Zehlendorf 13 December

1912

Dear Herr Dehmel,

I cannot tell you how glad I am to be directly in touch with you at last. For your
poems have had a decisive influence on my development as a composer. They
were what first made me try to find a new tone in the lyrical mood. Or rather, I
found it even without looking, simply by reflecting in music what your poems
stirred in me. People who know my music can bear witness to the fact that my
first attempts to compose settings for your poems contain more of what
subsequently developed in my work than there is in many a much later
composition. So you will understand that the regard in which I hold you is
therefore both cordial and above all grateful. …27

It is clear, therefore, that the 1899 Dehmel settings represent a period when Schönberg for

the first time took the courage to compose something contrasting, which would hint at the

later serialist method that to many seemed a complete break with the compositional

tradition. During this period, he turned from simply following the model of Brahmsian style

to eventually creating something of his own. It is no coincidence that, as Schönberg himself

states in his 1949 essay ‘My Evolution’, it was in these years that through Alexander

Zemlinsky he was introduced to Wagner.28 Subsequently, Schönberg used Wagner’s ideas

and musical style as a catalyst for his own individual modernist thinking.

27
E. Stein, Arnold Schoenberg Letters, London: Dover Press, 1979, p. 15.
28
A. Schönberg, ‘My Evolution’, in L. Stein, Style and Idea, p. 80.

13
 II. Philosophical Influences

Philosophical influences on composers’ work are naturally difficult to define, as they may

encompass any ideas behind the work that composers may or may not have expressed in

writing. However, both Wagner and Schönberg did in fact write extensively about the ideas

behind their work, which makes it possible to compare them. We can also identify the

influences in the choice of subject matter in musical works, and therefore we shall look at

the subject matters of Schönberg’s Opp. 2 and 4., as well as the philosophical ideas behind

compositional theories in his earlier writings, and compare them to Wagner’s.

In identifying any similarities, however, the impact of Wagnerism has to be noted, since

using ideas similar to Wagner’s was often merely a result of dedication to the cult of

Wagnerism rather than to Wagner’s ideas. Weber and Large define Positivism as an

important nineteenth-century influence, the frustration with which created fertile grounds

for the popularity of Wagnerism at the end of the century.29 Positivism, as an attempt to

quantify human experience, ‘had emerged as a response to the social, economic, and

political dislocations of the early nineteenth century’, influencing Wagner himself in the

1840s.30 The ‘deficiencies’ of positivist thinking, according to Weber and Large, however

later encouraged people to turn to ‘the religion of their fathers for their emotional anchor in

troubled times’.31 At the same time, due to the ‘desiccating effects of rapid social change’

there was a ‘need for an emotional piety that was less vulnerable than orthodox religious

observance’, and the cult of Wagnerism seems to have conveniently provided this.32 Thus, it

29
D. C. Large and W. Weber, Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, p. 17.
30
Ibid. p. 17.
31
Ibid. p. 18.
32
Ibid. 18.

14
is likely that, in this context, Schönberg was also influenced by the religious appeal of

Wagnerism.

The subject matter of Schönberg’s settings of Dehmel’s poems was naturally predetermined

by Dehmel’s poetry, but there must have been a reason for why Schönberg chose these

exact poems and for why he returned to setting Dehmel’s poems after he left them for a

year in 1898. As J. William Myers described in the Note on Richard Dehmel, Dehmel mostly

wrote about love, ‘for in love [he] saw a major instinct that must be clarified if it is to serve

creative uses’.33 His poems, therefore, provided Schönberg with perfect philosophical

material for subjects of sexuality and transfiguration through love, which we see in

Wagner’s work as well. Dehmel said about Weib und Welt that:

… the book shows how a human being, contrary to his holiest principles,
abandons himself to a sensual passion, and is thereby driven by the most painful
emotional turmoil, finally to a disgraceful death.34

This is parallel to Wagner’s concept of passion, as it is most significantly portrayed in Tristan

und Isolde – according to Wagner’s programme note, it is a story of:

… endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power,
fame, honour, chivalry, loyalty and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial
dream; one thing alone left living—longing, longing unquenchable, a yearning, a
hunger, a languishing forever renewing itself; one sole redemption—death,
surcease, a sleep without awakening.35

Hence, the fact that Schönberg chose philosophical concepts for his work so similar to those

in Wagner’s work means that either Schönberg was inspired by Wagner in choosing these

33
J. W. Myers, ‘Note on Richard Dehmel’, Poet Lore Vol. 66 No. 1, Spring 1971, p. 52.
34
R. Dehmel, cited in W. Frisch, The Early Works of Schoenberg, p. 81.
35
R. Wagner (transl. W. A. Ellis), ‘The Prelude to “Tristan und Isolde”’, in The Prose Works of Richard Wagner
Vol. 8, London, 1899, pp. 386–87.

15
poems, or, on the other hand, that such ideas were simply popular within Wagnerism of the

fin-de-siècle era. Nevertheless, the fact that authors such as Schönberg followed Wagner’s

ideas so closely suggests that Wagner’s influence extended beyond the cultural context of

Wagnerism.

Let us look closer at how these ideas were originally expressed in Wagner’s work. Laurence

Dreyfus claims that ‘erotics’ as a philosophy of sexual love, which is apparent in all his

works, is ‘one of Wagner’s most important contributions to music’.36 Whilst Wagner’s work

consists of many more, richer aspects, sexual love is nevertheless fundamental in the

philosophy of his musical dramas. According to Dreyfus, ‘Wagner was the first to develop a

detailed musical language that succeeded in extended representations of erotic stimulation,

passionate ecstasy, and the torment of love’.37 On the one hand, claiming that all

Schönberg’s incentive for setting poems about love and transfiguration through sexual love

was the fact that Wagner used the same theme extensively would be an over-

generalisation. Also, Dreyfus’s claim has to be approached carefully, since his arguments are

themselves influenced by the Wagnerian admiration. On the other hand, however, Wagner

was clearly an important precursor of the later fascination with erotic themes in music

because, even if he was not the first composer to portray them, he encouraged a more

explicit portrayal of those themes. Dreyfus takes us through the individual dramas, showing

that Wagner started portraying his obsession with love from Tannhäuser onwards, until he

reached the climax of all portrayals of sexual love in Tristan, which would be cited again and

again, decades after Wagner’s death. Dreyfus argues that the reason for the strong

impression of saturated eroticism in this work is the fact that Wagner did not use his

36
L. Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, London: Harvard University Press, 2010. p. ix.
37
Ibid. p. 2.

16
leitmotifs in relation to the plot but rather ‘the music was allied from the start to

experiential ideas on erotic love’.38 This is obvious from the start of the opera when, in

Dreyfus’s words even ‘the sailor’s innocent love song’ provokes almost a sensual reaction of

a ‘pent-up erotic fury’ in Isolde who takes the song as mocking her. Subsequently, ‘the chief

marker’ of this erotic in Tristan is the rising chromatic motive, referred to by Dreyfus as

‘Desire’, since desire seems to be ‘embedded in the famous half-diminished chord’, created

through ‘voice-leading with an irregular resolution’, and in the lack of resolution of the

dominant seventh (Figure 1).39 The influence of this famous figure on the musical content of

Schönberg’s Opp. 2 and 4 will be shown later. These musical features represent an outward

sign of eroticism as one of the characteristic aspects of modernism – let us only look at

Wilde’s or Strauss’s Salomé, or Gustav Klimt’s works such as Danae or The Kiss. Yet, it was

arguably Wagner who prepared the grounds for that kind and extent of artistic expression

of eroticism.

Fig. 1: Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, ‘Prelude’, bars 1-3.

Apart from the specific works of 1899, Schönberg also drew inspiration from Wagner’s

compositional philosophy. For example, in his essay ‘The Artwork of the Future’, Wagner

talks about art as a ‘need’, whereby the composer composes simply because they cannot do

38
L. Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, p. 100.
39
Ibid. p. 101.

17
otherwise.40 He also talks about the necessity of progress in his essay on Beethoven, when

he describes the progress that ‘music has made’ through Beethoven; yet admits that this

particular progress was confined to the development of melody, and therefore new music

had to be inevitably created to connect this development to the total work of art.41

Schönberg taps into the idea of artistic creativity as a need in his essay ‘Heart and Brain in

Music’ when he argues that the ‘real composer’ only writes music for their own pleasure

rather than for audiences, because, as a creator, they ‘must open the valves in order to

relieve the interior pressure of a creation ready to be born’.42 In other words, artistic

creativity is an instinctive response to the pressure of Art. Similarly, already in his 1911

essay ‘Problems in Teaching Art’ Schönberg expressed his disagreement with composers

being taught what they ‘can’ do in music, since what they really ought to be taught is what

they ‘must’ do, as Art demands that of them.43 In addition to that, Dehmel himself took on

board Wagner’s philosophical ideas concerning the Gesamtkunstwerk, which was very likely

to be another incentive for Schönberg to come back to Dehmel in the period when he was

so strongly influenced by Wagner. Frisch argues that Dehmel applied the Gesamtkunstwerk

approach in his symbolist technique of using visual images, which he describes in his 1894

diary: ‘Nowadays we aim to make poetic technique more sensuous by incorporating

painterly and musical effects, just as painting and music attempt to learn new means of

expression from the sister arts.’44

40
R. Wagner, ‘The Artwork of the Future’ p. 16.
41
R. Wagner (transl. R. Allen), Beethoven, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, (1860) 2014, pp. 136-137.
42
A. Schönberg, ‘Heart and Brain in Music’, in L. Stein, Style and Idea, p. 54.
43
A. Schönberg, ‘Problems in Teaching Art’, in L. Stein, Style and Idea, p. 365.
44
R. Dehmel, cited in W. Frisch, Walter, The Early Works of Schoenberg, p. 93.

18
Apart from identifying the philosophical influences, however, we should consider to what

extent these represent the foundations of modernist tendencies. A philosopher who

represents a link between the two composers, and will be discussed later as a common

literary influence, is Friedrich Nietzsche. Wagner and Nietzsche’s interactions ranged from

admiration to estrangement, resulting in Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner, but their mutual

influence on each other is undeniable. Therefore, where Schönberg’s works use Nietzsche’s

ideas, they can be seen as linking directly back to Wagner. According to Andrea Jean

Dismukes, the works by Richard Dehmel that Schönberg chose for his 1899 works were

influenced by Nietzsche’s concepts of ‘subjectivity and individualism’, thus being part of the

line of thought shared by both Wagner and Nietzsche, which led to individualism as one of

the main modernist tendencies.45 Another foundational modernist tendency mentioned

before was the idea of ‘revolution’ in as an evolutionary progress, and this is again

something where Wagner’s and Schönberg’s views coincide. An author who was particularly

dedicated to proving that Wagner stood for this meaning of revolution was Aleksei Losev.

Konstantin Zenkin describes Losev’s portrayal of Wagner in the philosophical work The

Historical Meaning of Richard Wagner’s Aesthetic Worldview, where Losev argues that

Wagner was ‘a permanent revolutionary’, even though that contradicted the generally

accepted view in the post-Wagnerian era.46 Zenkin argues that although this Losev’s claim

might be interpreted as a desire to ‘rehabilitate’ Wagner in the context of the Soviet regime,

his reasons were ‘much more profound’, since in the broad understanding of revolution,

Wagner always sought ‘to destroy the world based upon sin’ and to return it on the correct

45
A. J. Dismukes, A study of Arnold Schoenberg’s response to the poems of Richard Dehmel as revealed in
selected songs from “Op. 2”, Doctorial Dissertation: University of Alabama, 2006, p. 10.
46
K. V. Zenkin, ‘Losev’s Interpretations of Richard Wagner’, Russian Studies in Philosophy Vol. 56 No. 6,
November 2018, pp. 491-497.

19
path of progress.47 Even though Schönberg rejected the term ‘revolutionary’, what

Schönberg means by ‘revolutionary’ here is a reaction to the public taste, a ‘renovation

through bad growth’; thus not the same kind of revolution that Losev talks about in the

context of Wagner.48 Schönberg wanted to bring about the necessary change, to rid music

of the structures that did not reflect the social progress, which means that he identified

himself with the Wagnerian meaning of revolution.

47
A. F. Losev, cited in K. V. Zenkin, ‘Losev’s Interpretations of Richard Wagner’, pp. 491-497.
48
A. Schönberg, ‘New Music’, p. 137.

20
 III. Literary Influences

Walter Frisch claims that in 1899 Schönberg found ‘his own path, his own voice’ in Dehmel’s

collection Weib und Welt.49 This was a rediscovery of Dehmel’s works, which Schönberg first

set in 1897, and it culminated in Verklärte Nacht, based on an excerpt from Weib und Welt

on pages 61-63 in the original 1896 publication. J. William Myers celebrates the novelty of

the poem Verklärte Nacht by saying that Dehmel ‘made every poem a new rich thing

rhythmically; the metre is the very music of that particular thought and passion’.50 He goes

on to argue that translators fail to do justice to the ‘absence of hardened convention’ in the

poem, and instead he puts forward Schönberg’s ‘musical translation’, which was at the time

truly unconventional, yet closely following the five-part structure of the text and thus

conveying its meaning.51 We have already pointed out how the subject matters of the

poems dealing with sexual love were inspired by the Wagnerian line of thought.

Subsequently, the Wagnerian literary basis of Schönberg’s works arguably also opened up

more space for Wagnerian musical expression. Hence, the literary influences in Schönberg’s

Opp. 2 and 4 represent a crucial element in the relation between Schönberg’s musical

modernism and Wagner’s ideas.

Firstly, let us look in more detail into the literary origin of Schönberg’s works in 1899. He

was so inspired by Dehmel’s Weib und Welt that he did not use its poems only for Opp. 2

and 4 (Op. 2 No. 1 ‘Erwartung’, Op. 2 No. 2 ‘Jesus bettelt’, Op. 2 No. 3 ‘Erhebung’, Op. 4

Verklärte Nacht) but also for fragments of other songs that he started composing in the

49
W. Frisch, The Early Works of Schoenberg, pp. 79-80.
50
J. W. Myers, ‘Note on Richard Dehmel’, p. 52.
51
Ibid.

21
same year (Mannesbangen in the spring; Op. 3 No. 3 ‘Warnung’ in May; Gethsemane in

May; Aus schwerer Stunde in August; and Im Reich der Liebe in the autumn).52 According to

Dismukes, Dehmel’s ‘poems, in general, reflect two common themes: unrestrained

indulgence of self and the physical relationship of man and woman’.53 As was discussed

among the philosophical influences, Wagner used very similar themes in his work, focusing

on the philosophy of sexual love, which could also be interpreted as indulgence of the self

through erotic love. In addition to that, Dehmel’s poetry inspired the modernist tendency in

Schönberg’s work because of its own impact – Dismukes describes that ‘Dehmel’s poetry

was both offensive and intriguing to the readers of his day’ due to how it controversially

mixed religious matters with sexuality.54 For instance, the poem which Schönberg set in Op.

2 No. 2, ‘Schenk Mir deinen goldenen Kamm’, or also known as ‘Jesus bettelt’, represents an

erotic version of the story of Mary Magdalene. Frisch points out that Dehmel’s work had an

immense impact on young authors, and therefore also provided a good material for musical

works on the verge of creating a completely new style.55

In contrast, ‘Waldsonne’, the fourth song of the cycle Vier Lieder, was not based on a poem

by Dehmel but on a Johannes Schlaf poem, representing another important literary

influence.56 Although less explicitly erotic, the poem still features the longing of love, as well

as the idea of a night to be transfigured. The theme of a transfigured night clearly evokes

Verklärte Nacht, yet here it is to be transfigured by ‘ein goldener Schein’ [a golden gleam],

even though it is not clear what that represents.57 Schlaf was not only a poet but also a

52
W. Frisch, The Early Works of Schoenberg, Table 3 on p. 80.
53
A. J. Dismukes, A study of Arnold Schoenberg’s response to the poems of Richard Dehmel, p. 11.
54
Ibid. p. 12.
55
W. Frisch, The Early Works of Schoenberg, p. 81.
56
Ibid. p. 1.
57
J. Schlaf (transl. R. Stokes), ‘Waldsonne’, in Oxford Lieder < https://www.oxfordlieder.co.uk/song/2364>
[accessed on 22/09/2019].

22
dramatist, and Ingo Stöckmann introduces him as an author of what she calls an ‘intimate

Drama’ [intimen Drama].58 She specifically refers to his plays from the turn of the century;

Gertrud, Die Feindlichen, and Der Bann. These dramas represent German naturalism, but

Schlaf added a deep and revealing psychological insight to them, which led Stöckmann to

coin them as ‘intimate’.59 Uncovering aspects of the subconscious and the sexual, that had

been largely ignored in the past, is another modernist feature, which can be compared not

only to the link between the religious and erotic in Dehmel’s work but also, more

importantly, to Wagner’s explicit portrayal of eroticism. Apart from that, Schlaf’s work bears

further similarities with Wagner’s work in what The Oxford Companion to German Literature

calls the ‘mystical tendencies’ in Schlaf’s poems, which eventually took ‘a political turn’

towards nationalism in his later works.60 Myths were obviously of a great importance to

Wagner, as it can be seen especially in the Ring cycle based on a combination of Nordic

myths. His works such as Die Meistersinger and his very last work, Parsifal, had strong

political connotations with a nationalist undertone, confirmed also by his writings, such as

the essay ‘What is German?’.61 Hence, Schönberg’s use of Schlaf’s poem brought in another

literary influence which was marked by significant similarities with Wagner’s works.

Apart from the similarities between the subject matters of Wagner’s and Schönberg’s

works, however, we cannot forget that Schönberg was a writer in his own right, having left

behind a large body of writings, mostly collected in the book Style and Idea.62 He was not

58
I. Stöckmann, ‘Das innere Jenseits des Dialogs Zur Poetik der Willensschwäche im intimen Drama um 1900
(Gerhart Hauptmann, Johannes Schlaf)’, Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und
Geistesgeschichte Vol. 81 No. 4, 2007, pp. 584-617.
59
Ibid.
60
H. and M. Garland, ‘Schlaf, Johannes’, in The Oxford Companion to German Literature, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997.
61
R. Wagner (transl. W. A. Ellis), ‘What is German?’, in The Prose Works of Richard Wagner Vol. 4, London,
1895, pp. 149-170.
62
A. Schönberg, in L. Stein, Style and Idea.

23
dedicated to creative writing in the same way as Richard Dehmel, but he directly referred to

Wagner frequently, representing a Wagnerian literary influence on subsequent authors.

Particularly, in his 1949 essay ‘My Evolution’ Schönberg describes in detail the importance

that Wagner had on his development through the Gesamtkunstwerk approach, which

realised the necessary progress in theatre.63 The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, within

which all art forms cooperate, also highlights the fact that the literary influences are part of

a closely intertwined mixture of influences, which cannot always be divided exactly into

distinct categories.

In addition to that, we can find sources of literary inspiration, common to both Dehmel and

Schönberg, in works of other writers who were themselves inspired by the Wagnerian line

of thought. Perhaps the most important influence could be traced back to Friedrich

Nietzsche. As we have mentioned before, there is a direct line of thought leading from

Wagner to Schönberg via Nietzsche. Dieter Borchmeyer argues, for example, that

Nietzsche’s first book, Birth of Tragedy (1872), was to a large extent a product of the sharing

of ideas between Wagner and Nietzsche during Nietzsche’s visits to the Wagners’ at

Tribschen in the 1860s and 70s.64 Nietzsche’s work then influenced Schönberg’s modernist

tendencies, as Nietzsche was one of the main contributors to the discourse around the issue

of ‘modernity’ – according to Frank Chouraqui, Nietzsche provided a reflective account of

modernity that ‘haunts us’ because it questions ourselves as ‘the moderns’.65 One of the

foundational ideas of Nietzsche’s modernist aesthetics was the argument that ‘European

63
A. Schönberg, ‘My Evolution’, p. 80.
64
D. Borchmeyer, ‘Richard Wagner und Nietzsche’, in U. Müller and P. Wapnewski, Richard Wagner Handbuch,
Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1986, pp. 116-117.
65
F. Chouraqui, ‘Modernity in the Mirror’, The Agonist Vol. 4 No. 1, Spring 2011, <
http://www.nietzschecircle.com/AGONIST/2011_03/Sedgwick_Chouraqui-FINAL.pdf> [accessed on
20/09/2019].

24
culture was in decay and that this decay had to be interrupted by art’.66 This is a claim which

can be traced back to Wagner’s writings and was later reflected in Schönberg’s views.

Wagner referred specifically to the German ‘decay’ and the need to find true German art

(such as is portrayed in Die Meistersinger), and those ideas influenced Nietzsche – as

Dahlhaus argues, ‘Nietzsche’s development as an aesthetician depended first and foremost

on his relationship with Wagner’.67 Similarly, Schönberg’s theory of a necessary artistic

change in face of the ‘corrupted taste’ of the public could be interpreted as stemming from

that basis. In other words, the ‘aesthetization’ of culture that underlined Nietzsche’s

writings was common to both Wagner and Schönberg, and therefore represents a

connecting line of thought between the three.68 This connecting line also extends to other

modernist writers, such as Max Weber or Theodor Adorno, through the concept of

‘autonomous Art’ as an implication of the idea of ‘aesthetization’ of culture.69 Art was

clearly ‘autonomous’ for both Wagner and Schönberg, insofar as it commanded the artist to

bring about the inevitable evolutionary change, and this idea resonated with many

modernist authors.

66
M. A. Prange, Nietzsche, Wagner, Europe, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013, p. 9.
67
C. Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Late Nineteenth
Century, London: University of California Press, 1980, p. 32.
68
Ibid.
69
J. Rundell, Aesthetics and Modernity: Essays by Agnes Heller, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012, pp. 47-48.

25
 IV. Musical Influences

Similarly to philosophical influences, a precise identification of musical influences would

require drawing a line between original elements and points of inspiration, which is

problematic and not possible. Nevertheless, within musical traditions such as in Austria and

Germany composers could never escape the influence of their predecessors, and in turn the

work of the predecessors gained greater importance by affecting a range of different

responses from different composers. Walter Frisch opens his book Early Works of

Schoenberg with Max Reger’s letter, in which he quotes Otto Lessmann (editor of the

Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung in Berlin from 1881 to 1907), who refers to the context of ‘the

notorious dialectic that dominated Austro-German music in the late nineteenth century’ –

Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss and their followers were ‘seen shrouded in a cold,

dense mist’, whilst Brahms and his followers were ‘radiating intense warmth and light’.70

The choice of words as comparing a ‘mist’ to the ‘warmth’ may be interpreted as suggesting

a distinction between the ‘mainstream’ style and the unclear, individualist modernity. Frisch

continues by saying how most of the nineteenth-century music became greatly indebted to

Brahms, following him closely as a model, which means that this ‘mainstream’ was being

reinforced among both the audiences and composers.71 By contrast, Wagner entered the

scene as an outsider, and even after he gained an established place, the musical style of

Wagner and Liszt was being seen as contrasting to the regular Brahmsian style.72 Schönberg

also admired Brahms in his early years, as he later wrote about it in his 1947 essay ‘Brahms

70
W. Frisch, The Early Works of Schoenberg, pp. 3-4.
71
Ibid. p. 4.
72
C. Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism, p. 72.

26
the Progressive’.73 However, just before the start of the new century, Schönberg’s discovery

of Wagner could have been the turning point which inspired him to pursue a unique new

style rather than follow the ‘mainstream’ of Brahmsian legacy.

At that time, Schönberg strived to combine the formative influence of Brahms with the

newly discovered influence of Wagner – Frisch describes Schönberg’s three stages of ‘early

development, from a Brahms-oriented period (1893-97), to one in which Wagnerian

expanded tonality becomes allied to Brahmsian techniques (1899-1903), to a more wholly

individual synthesis (1904- 8)’.74 Identifying such chronological development is what leads

us to look at Schönberg’s 1899 compositions. There is a clear stylistic distinction between

the works written before Opp. 2 and 4 and the works following. Until Brahms’s death in

1897, Schönberg was often dedicated to transcriptions of Brahms’s music, or to the

composition of distinctively tonal pieces, such as the unpublished D major String Quartet.75

Dismukes argues that it was Brahms’s death, as ‘the end of an era’, that might have

triggered a ‘new beginning for Schönberg in developing his own compositional style’.76 The

‘new beginning’ was marked by his first mature pieces with strong Wagnerian influence,

which were the groups of Lieder (Opp. 1, 2, and 3), and most importantly his first large-scale

piece, Verklärte Nacht.77 We have already mentioned that Schönberg was introduced to

Wagner by Alexander Zemlinsky, and Dismukes says that it was through Zemlinsky’s

connections that Schönberg ‘entered the musical and artistic scene in Vienna’.78 There he

would get to know many of the famous Viennese artists and literary figures who used to

73
A. Schönberg, ‘Brahms the Progressive’, in L. Stein, Style and Idea, pp. 401-410.
74
W. Frisch, The Early Works of Schoenberg, p. xv.
75
N. Deypalan, An Analysis of Arnold Schoenberg’s Orchestral Transcription of Johannes Brahms’s Piano
Quartet No. 1, Op. 25, Doctorial Dissertation: University of South Carolina, 2012, p. 238.
76
A. J. Dimukes, A study of Arnold Schoenberg’s response to the poems of Richard Dehmel, p. 8.
77
Ibid.
78
Ibid. p. 7.

27
meet at a café next to the Burgtheater ‘for discussions on literary works and music,

especially Wagner’s’ – according to Rudolf Steiner, ‘they could discuss Tristan und Isolde for

hours’.79 Subsequently, choosing to set Dehmel’s poems was a confirmation that the

Wagnerian influence on Schönberg prevailed over Brahmsian, since Brahms claimed that

Dehmel’s poetry was ‘not well suited for musical treatment’.80

As we have already mentioned, Schönberg regarded the emancipation of dissonance,

initiated by Wagner, as the most important musical development in the evolution of music,

which necessitated his radical response.81 In the 1931 essay ‘National Music (2)’, Schönberg

again makes it clear that his own harmonic developments were merely ‘logical

consequences of Wagner’s harmony, further steps along the path the latter had pointed

out’.82 In the 1941 ‘Composition with Twelve Tones (1)’, Schönberg explains that the term

emancipated dissonance signifies the role of dissonance being equal to that of consonance,

which in turn also causes the ‘renounce[ment] of a tonal centre’.83 Dahlhaus argues that

Wagner did not abandon tonality but, rather than building hierarchies on a stable tonal

centre, he established ‘an order of succession’ which did not give the works an overall tonal

structure but used extensively the effect of the lack of resolution, such as in the famous

Tristan progression (Fig. 1).84 Wagner thus created ‘fragmentary allusions to keys’ in his

‘floating’ tonality, which create an effect of the accent falling ‘on harmonic details – on

single chords or unusual progressions’.85 This is precisely what Schönberg used later in his

79
A. J. Dimukes, A study of Arnold Schoenberg’s response to the poems of Richard Dehmel, p. 7.
80
J. Birke, ‘Richard Dehmel und Arnold Schoenberg: Ein Briefwechsel’, Die Musikforschung Vol. 11, 1958, p. 28,
quoted in Frisch, 1993. p. 66.
81
A. Schönberg, ‘Composition with Twelve Tones (1)’, p. 217.
82
A. Schönberg, ‘National Music (2)’, p. 173.
83
A. Schönberg, ‘Composition with Twelve Tones (1)’, p. 217.
84
C. Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism, p. 66.
85
Ibid. p. 73.

28
twelve-tone method when he wanted to ensure that each note of the chromatic scale

would be emphasised equally. Even though Opp. 2 and 4 were not composed in the twelve-

tone method, Philip A. Friedheim argues that there was already ‘a radical alteration of

harmonic structure’ present – for instance, the middle section of Op. 2 No. 1, ‘Erwartung’, in

bars 11-17 transforms the conventional circle of fifths (G9-D9-A9-E9-B9) into a tool for an

unusual progression of a half-step modulation when the last chord, B-D#-F#-A as a V7 of E,

enharmonically represents (F)-A-Cb-Eb-Gb, ‘an altered II9 of Eb’, which is the key in bar 18

(Figure 2).86 Friedheim explains that this is a ‘harmonic ambiguity’, which allows ‘the

composer to interpret a dominant chord in either one of two keys’ and appears throughout

Schönberg’s work as a mark of fluid tonalities.87

Fig. 2: Op. 2 No. 1, ‘Erwartung’, bars 15-18.

Friedheim also notices an innovative reinterpretation of harmonic progressions in the final

cadence of Op. 2 No. 2, ‘Jesus bettelt’, where the secondary dominant G# major chord

resolves directly to the tonic (Figure 3) – he argues that this is the first time that Schönberg

‘eliminated’ the dominant chord from the final cadence as a ‘deliberate curtailment of a

86
P. A. Friedheim, Tonality and Structure in the Early Works of Schoenberg, Doctorial Dissertation; New York
University: University Microfilms International, 1963, p. 100.
87
Ibid.

29
progression’ that suggests rather than specifies the harmonic direction, and this ‘indicates a

changing attitude toward tonal function’.88

Fig. 3: Op. 2 No. 2, ‘Jesus bettelt’, bars 42-43.

Frisch points out that Schönberg also used such elimination of the dominant in Op. 2 No. 3,

‘Erhebung’, where he ‘seems to avoid any straightforward dominant whatsoever: pure E

major is nowhere to be found’.89 Op. 2 No. 4, ‘Waldsonne’, similarly avoids the dominant in

the final cadential passage when at first in bar 38, in a place where we could conventionally

expect an imperfect cadence, the tonic D major progresses to G minor seventh, and then

the final D major in bar 41 is not preceded by the dominant A major but instead by the

repeated progression of G minor seventh to C# diminished seventh. Finally, Op. 4 Verklärte

Nacht makes use of the same feature – Richard Swift describes how the ‘tonal scaffolding’

of the piece lacks any dominant area, and therefore creates an impression of

‘incompleteness’ despite arousing anticipation.90 Wagner’s Tristan, to which this piece is

often compared, of course uses the dominant sonority extensively, but it also arouses

anticipation in a similar way by the incompleteness of the resolution, which was likely to be

88
P. A. Friedheim, Tonality and Structure in the Early Works of Schoenberg, p. 107.
89
W. Frisch, The Early Works of Schoenberg, p. 107.
90
R. Swift, ‘1/XII/99: Tonal Relations in Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht”’, 19th-Century-Music Vol. 1 No. 1, Jul
1977, pp. 3-14.

30
the inspiration for Schönberg’s compositional technique here. In addition to that, Swift

claims that these developments in Verklärte Nacht constitute ‘an intensely personal style’,

which refers back to individualism as one of the fundamental modernist tendencies.91

Fig. 4: Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, ‘Prelude’, bars 25-26.

In terms of other unusual progressions, ‘Jesus bettelt’ continues to use chromatic

modulations throughout the song, such as the progression from the tonic F# minor in bar 1

to the minor supertonic, G minor, in bar 2 and more definitively in bar 8. The following

section uses what could be described as Dahlhaus’s ‘fragmentary allusions to keys’ that

accentuate such unusual progressions – bars 10-11 move through keys that are a tone

apart, C# minor to Eb minor to F diminished, creating a modulation through unrelated keys.

A similar unexpected shift occurs at the start of the short coda when the F# diminished

seventh in bar 34 shifts to a G# diminished in bar 35. In Verklärte Nacht, we can find a

similar unusual harmonic structure – Frisch refers to Schönberg’s own analytical documents

which point out the half-step tonal relations as references to the half-step motivic elements

in the individual themes.92 Schönberg specifically suggested that the large-scale tonal

scheme here is ‘shaped by symmetrical half-step relations around the tonic’ when ‘the D

91
R. Swift, ‘1/XII/99: Tonal Relations in Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht”’.
92
W. Frisch, The Early Works of Schoenberg, p. 123.

31
minor of the first part if juxtaposed with the Eb minor at the end of the transition’, and ‘the

D major of the second part is approached first from above, from the Eb minor, then later

from below, from Db (enharmonically C#) major’.93 Furthermore, there are also half-step

progressions noticeable on a smaller scale – for instance, in bars 195-200 a motif, which

oscillates between G diminished and Db diminished chords, is transposed at first to G#

diminished and D augmented in bar 197, and then to A diminished and Eb augmented in bar

199.

Another significant musical influence that Schönberg might have derived from Wagner’s

works is the leitmotif technique, which is one of the main compositional techniques widely

associated with Wagner. As he explains in ‘The Music of the Future’ [‘Zukunftsmusik’],

Wagner was concerned with finding a better means of presentation of ideas, and therefore

he created a technique, closely linked to instrumentation, in which the motif would re-

appear in different modulations and rhythmic and melodic forms every time the theme with

which it was associated appeared.94 Even though Schönberg less clearly linked it to specific

ideas, a similar motivic technique can be seen in Opp. 2 and 4. For example, Dismukes

argues that in ‘Erwartung’ he achieved ‘motivic unity’ by the fact that the first bar ‘provides

the primary thematic material for the entire song’ (Figure 5).95 This motivic work is not only

visible in the melody but also extends to the function of the opening chord, whereby ‘each

of the notes in this chord resolves to the next by half-step motion’, and Dismukes argues

that the whole piece, on the small and larger scale, is built on this feature.96

93
W. Frisch, The Early Works of Schoenberg, p. 123.
94
R. Wagner (transl. W. A. Ellis), ‘Zukunftsmusik’ (1860), in Richard Wagner’s Prose Works Vol. 1, London,
1894.
95
A. J. Dismukes, A study of Arnold Schoenberg’s response to the poems of Richard Dehmel, pp. 46-48.
96
Ibid.

32
 Fig. 5: Op. 2 No. 1, ‘Erwartung’, bar 1.

Dismukes continues by arguing that ‘Erhebung’ also uses a similar technique, whereby the

motive from bars 1-3 represents ‘the foundation for the entire piece – melodically and

harmonically’.97 It indeed appears in both the accompaniment and the vocal entrance which

doubles the piano in bar 2, while bar 2 is the retrograde version of bar 1 (Figure 6).

Consequently, according to Dismukes ‘[t]his thematic material supplies the essential

melodic substance of each subsequent phrase’.98

Fig. 6: Op. 2 No. 3, ‘Erhebung’, bars 1-3.

97
A. J. Dismukes, A study of Arnold Schoenberg’s response to the poems of Richard Dehmel, pp. 46-48.
98
Ibid.

33
In Verklärte Nacht Frisch argues that its thematic content is ‘shaped by thematic processes

and large-scale harmonic procedures lying largely outside the sonata tradition’, which

suggests a comparison with Wagner’s thematic processes.99 Frisch lists the individual

themes that are used throughout the piece, and describes how they are repeated with

alterations in different instruments. Hence, this motivic technique is inherently linked to

instrumentation, and here Schönberg himself admits that Verklärte Nacht was inspired by

Wagner when he says that ‘the treatment of the instruments, the manner of composition,

and much of the sonority were strictly Wagnerian’.100

Finally, the most unambiguous reference to Wagner is in quotations of motives from

Tristan. ‘Erwartung’ makes a clear reference in bar 10 when the melodic line in the first half

of the bar copies the exact chromatic line from the Tristan prelude (Fig. 1). Nevertheless,

Schönberg enriches it by the added sense of harmonic transformation on the third beat

when, instead of Eb as the tonic of the subdominant Ab sonority of the first two beats, the

following chord is Emi with added fourth resolving to G7 (Figure 7).

Fig. 7: Op. 2 No. 1, Erwartung’, bar 10.

99
W. Frisch, The Early Works of Schoenberg, p. 116.
100
A. Schönberg, ‘My Evolution’, p. 81.

34
After that, in the ‘etwas bewegter’ passage in bars 12-17 transposes the appoggiatura figure

which resolves onto a seventh chord, thus mirroring the same Tristan progression (Figure 8).

Fig. 8: Op. 2 No. 1, Erwartung’, bar 12.

Verklärte Nacht further refers to Tristan by making use of the motif, which appears as the

resolution of the progression towards the end of Act III, chromatically approached through a

triplet (Figure 9a). In Verklärte Nacht, bars 18-19 repeat the same melodic shape of a

chromatic descending line ascending back up through a triplet (Figure 9b).

Fig. 9a: Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act III, final ‘Poco piu mosso’.

35
 Fig. 9b: Op. 4, Verklärte Nacht, bars 18-19.

On the other hand, Frisch points out that irony was an important feature of modernism, and

therefore perhaps such direct quotations of Tristan might have been underlined by some

sense of irony rather than creative influence.101 Nevertheless, the references to Tristan are

present across Schönberg’s 1899 works, suggesting a real interest in the work. Thus, it

seems that Opp. 2 and 4 were quite open in admitting the musical influence Wagner had on

the development of Schönberg’s musical style.

101
W. Frisch, German Modernism, London: University of California Press, 2005, p. 129.

36
 V. Conclusion

Thus, we have explored some of the main similarities in Wagner’s and Schönberg’s

philosophical views, literary influences, and musical content. However, do these similarities

indeed coincide in what we at the start identified as the main pillars of modernist

tendencies? Let us now come back to the three concepts which underline the main ideas

behind modernist works; individualism, the belief in historical progress, and the ‘intellectual

Gesamtkunstwerk’.

The individualist tendency in the philosophical aspect of Wagner’s and Schönberg’s works

may be seen in the fact that both of them perceived the task of bringing about the

necessary change, as Art commanded, even though it was a solitary effort. The literary

inspiration for Schönberg’s Opp. 2 and 4 similarly bore individualist marks of not being

accepted by the general public at the time, due to its perceived inappropriateness. Yet,

Schönberg chose Dehmel’s poetry as inspired by Wagnerian philosophy. Furthermore, the

use of the musical emancipation of dissonance, despite being a ‘logical consequence’ of the

previous harmonic developments, made Schönberg’s music less comprehensible for

contemporary audiences, and therefore in its context we can regard it as individualistic.

The idea of the ‘logical consequence’ then refers to the historical progress. With regards to

their compositional philosophies, both Wagner and Schönberg were ardent advocates of

guarding the true meaning of Art in the former case, and of following the inevitable

evolution of music in the latter case. This evolution was directly linked to history though,

just as Schönberg’s literary influences were linked to Wagner through Nietzsche, although

Nietzsche was already inactive in 1899 and passed away a year later. In terms of musical

37
content of Opp. 2 and 4, Schönberg referred to the past by combining the influences of

Brahms and Wagner, trying to make sense of the historical developments which used to be

regarded as being in opposition, and demonstrate that the evolution through emancipation

of dissonance was inevitable.

Last but not least, the ‘intellectual Gesamtkunstwerk’ in both Wagner’s and Schönberg’s

works is apparent in the fact that, as the present work demonstrates, the philosophical,

literary, and musical aspects of their works are so intertwined that one cannot be

considered without the other. Hence, the foundations of modernist tendencies were clearly

present in Wagner’s work and inspired Schönberg to realise them in developing his new

musical style.

Nevertheless, even though finding similarities between the attitudes that can

retrospectively be identified as modernist is a strong argument for the fact that Schönberg

drew inspiration for his modernist works from Wagner, this can by definition be only a

hypothesis. That is, even when Schönberg admitted Wagner’s influence, we should be

always aware of the fact that many of his writings were ideologically motivated and were

inflected accordingly. Similarly, it is important to realise that, as Frisch points out in German

Modernism, Wagner often shaped modernism, as it were, negatively – many authors

reacted to Wagner’s legacy through irony, with their styles defined by being in opposition to

Wagner.102 Subsequently, Frisch argues that such works often become ‘interesting more for

what they reveal of [their] response to and assimilation of the model than of their own

aesthetic qualities’.103 Hence, the ironic responses show that Wagner’s work was immensely

102
W. Frisch, German Modernism, p. 186.
103
W. Frisch, The Early Works of Schoenberg, p. 5.

38
significant as a model, which the composers either sought to get closer to or distant

themselves from – in other words, the composers reacted more to Wagner’s presence than

his works. Wagner’s presence, however, was also characteristic by his determination to be

individualistic, and the present work shows that this encouraged later composers, such as

Schönberg, to devise even more courageous and individualistic styles.

The phenomenon of Wagnerism undoubtedly exaggerated the extent of Wagner’s own

influence. Erwin Koppen says that the last decade of the nineteenth century was defined by

various strands of Wagnerism, while some of them did not have much to do with Wagner’s

ideas at all.104 Thus, perhaps more than the influence of Wagner himself, we should

consider the historical momentum of the spread of his popularity. Large and Weber

summarise that momentum in their book Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics.105

The whole book points at what they argue in the ‘Introduction’; that ‘Wagner did not

stimulate admirers alone – he stimulated a cause’.106 Nevertheless, that still means that

Wagner served to create an important historical momentum. The present work points out

that the ‘causes’ that Wagner stimulated – individualism, the belief in historical progress,

and the intellectual Gesamtkunstwerk – represented an essential point in the historical

development, which influenced composers at the beginning of the new century, and thus

shaped the new modernist movement.

Maybe the best way to summarise how Wagner influenced the foundations of modernism is

the claim which Carl Dahlhaus made in his book Between Romanticism and Modernism –

that the transition between these two artistic directions was made by attempts to re-

104
E. Koppen, ‘Wagner und die Folgen’, in U. Müller and P. Wapnewski, Richard Wagner Handbuch, p. 609.
105
D. C. Large and W. Weber, Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics.
106
Ibid. p. 15.

39
interpret the Wagnerian legacy, from the shadow of which composers had to at first liberate

themselves.107 Even though the ‘Wagnerian legacy’ did not determine modernism itself,

there is evidence that it laid the foundation without which much of modernism might not

have been formed the way it was.

107
C. Dahlhaus, Between Romanticism and Modernism, pp. 40-78.

40
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