Modernism: The Second Viennese School
Following the example of Wagner, Richard Strauss, Zemlinsky and Schreker had pushed traditional tonality to the absolute limits. Now a new group of composers appeared in Vienna who wanted to take music beyond. Operatic modernism truly began in the operas of two composers of the so-called Second Viennese School, Arnold Schoenberg and his acolyte Alban Berg, both advocates of atonality and its later development (as worked out by Schoenberg), dodecaphony. Schoenberg's early musico-dramatic works, Erwartung (1909, premiered in 1924) and Die glückliche Hand display heavy use of chromatic harmony and dissonance in general. Schoenberg also occasionally used Sprechstimme, which he described as: "The voice rising and falling relative to the indicated intervals, and everything being bound together with the time and rhythm of the music except where a pause is indicated". Schoenberg intended Moses und Aron as his operatic masterpiece, but it was left unfinished at his death.
The two operas of Schoenberg's pupil Alban Berg, Wozzeck and Lulu (left incomplete at his death) share many of the same characteristics described above, though Berg combined his highly personal interpretation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique with melodic passages of a more traditionally tonal nature (quite Mahlerian in character). This perhaps partially explains why his operas have remained in standard repertory, despite their controversial music and plots.
Read more about this topic: Opera In German
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