Schoenberg’s musical innovations and expressive power

That is a harsh review. The opening critic hears noise, clashing sounds, and little worth listening to. But whose music is being criticized? The author says the description resembles reactions to Schoenberg, then reveals that this particular review was written about Beethoven.

Keep those two claims separate. The quotation describes an early listener's reaction to Beethoven; similar language could describe many listeners' reactions to Schoenberg. Neither claim tells us that the author agrees with the criticism. The comparison is setting up a reason to reconsider an unfavorable first impression.

Beethoven is now a cultural icon, but acceptance took time. Even his most challenging works did not become popular until the twentieth century, after recordings made repeated listening possible. That makes the opening review useful: music that initially alienates people can later be appreciated. Difficulty or controversy at first hearing does not settle a work's worth.

The author then follows Schoenberg through three styles. We don't need to be musicians to follow the relationships. First, he worked in a late-Romantic style already common in his youth. People who like Brahms often enjoy his Verklaerte Nacht once they get past the composer's name. That observation challenges listeners' prejudice against Schoenberg; it is not the author calling his music bad.

Next, Schoenberg pushed the unstable harmonies of that style until they lost their tonal basis. The text gives two motives: he saw this as the next step in music's development, and he needed it for what he wanted to express. Put simply, the musical experiment and the expressive goal went together. We do not have to share his sense of destiny to understand the movement from one style to the next.

Finally, he developed the 12-tone technique to give nontonal music a new system of order. This is a response to the preceding development, not an unexplained jump into unrelated music. The sequence is easier to retain as a progression: shifting harmonies, a departure from tonality, then a new way to organize that nontonal music.

The author calls his technical mastery awe-inspiring. That is clear praise. The music also becomes more condensed and harder to follow, with sharper contrasts. Complexity can explain why listeners struggle without establishing that the composer lacks skill.

The final paragraph tells us which achievement matters most. What does the music have to say? The answer is that Schoenberg captured recognizable, sometimes unsettling emotional states that earlier music had not expressed. The author values that expressive contribution more than the invention of a particular technique.

The claim that someone would have needed to invent Schoenberg is emphatic praise for that contribution. We needn't take it as a literal claim that the world could not function without him. Its role is to stress how essential the author considers this new emotional expression.

That also completes the response to the opening criticism. Some listeners may find the music disturbing, but the author offers a different reason: it confronts difficult truths, rather than merely producing disagreeable sounds. Our main-point prediction should preserve the contrast between poor reception and real achievement. Schoenberg deserves admiration for his innovations and expressive power, with particular emphasis on the emotions he made music capable of conveying.