Although Pierrot lunaire (1912) is technically more radical than Erwartung in some ways, with its pervasive use of ‘speech-song’ vocal technique, it requires only six performers and complements Night Music features with less expressionistic episodes. Since setting Stefan George’s vision of spiritual aspiration in the finale of the second quartet, then contemplating the musical legacy of Mahler and its exploration of transcendent spiritual states, Schoenberg brought consideration of his own relationship with Judaism into an ambitious plan for an oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter. As part of this characteristically far-seeing exercise in rethinking basic principles, he also moved towards the formulation of what became known in the 1920s as the twelve-tone method. Cultural attitudes changed greatly after World War I, and Schoenberg was not impervious to the neoclassical retreat from expressionism. Yet his motivic techniques (not least the variously ordered pitch-class collections formed from the letters of his own name) survived transformation from the pantonality of his earlier music into more systematically ordered twelve-tone compositions. Often making explicit allusions to tonal principles and traditional formal designs, he retained the textural flexibility and expressive intensity of the Night Music years. Elements of technique and ethos already implicit in Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung found new purpose in compositions that left the post-Wagnerian spirit of Schoenberg’s Viennese years far behind.

Do you remember the first time you heard the music of Igor Stravinsky? Or modernist music? My own teenage introduction to both was Ragtime (1917–18), our music teacher helping us join the dots between its particular strand of twentieth-century classical music and Scott Joplin’s evergreen rag, ‘The Entertainer’ (1902), which the pianists among us would struggle to play.1 Looking back, the muffled giggling which Ragtime provoked was due as much to the jolting introduction of its faint and weird-sounding cimbalom as to the relentless discontinuities that shape its phrasing, melody and timbre. To hear Stravinsky repeatedly is to understand how these innovations relate to one another, but the shock of having to process his music for the first time was real and literally physical. Here were strange folk- and jazz-inspired sounds, far removed from the Classical and Romantic orchestras that had framed our expectations of so-called classical music until that point. Ragtime’s sound was, and remains, quite alien.