Schönberg »beim Wort genommen«

While it has become common practice to employ Arnold Schönberg’s theoretical terms in analyses of works of the classical style, ignoring the anachronism, they are not consequently applied to Schönberg’s own works or works of his students. Indeed, such an “historically informed” analytical approach faces considerable difficulties, especially when considering works of Schönberg’s “free atonal” period (1907–1922). That the majority of Schönberg’s theoretical works were written during later periods of his life and that comparable sources for the earlier periods are scarce is only one of the problems that such an approach faces. This article reviews Schönberg’s concept of musical “motif” and discusses its analytical applicability to the works of the “free atonal” period. It can be shown that even after the abandonment of tonality, motivic thinking continued to guide Schönberg’s compositional technique, even though it was sometimes developed to extreme dimensions. A short “motivic” analysis of the well-known piano piece op. 11,3 aims to demonstrate that in the light of this historical evidence widely used characterizations of Schönberg’s atonal works as “athematic” or their description as an “uncontrolled free style” have to be reconsidered.