NGV Vienna Art and Design - Klimt Schiele Hoffmann Loos

Music

Vienna has long held a pre-eminent place in Europe's musical life, being home to the musical giants Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), Franz Schubert (1797–1828), Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951).

• Gustav Mahler
• Arnold Schoenberg

Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, occasionally designated as the First Viennese School, belong to the Classical period in Western music, which extends from the early to mid eighteenth century into the early nineteenth.

Yet the term 'First Viennese School' is misleading – strictly speaking there wasn't one. While Mozart and Haydn knew and admired one another (and there was much cross-pollination of musical ideas and invention) and Beethoven took lessons in composition with Haydn for a shorttime, they were all independent of one another.

While Beethoven straddles the Classical and Romantic periods, Brahms and Schubert, the 'inventor' of the Romantic Lied, are central to the Romanticism of the nineteenth century. Mahler stands as one of the great late Romantic composers while pointing the way to modernism in the twentieth century.

Schubert was the only one of these composers born in Vienna. Brahms, born in Hamburg, settled permanently in Vienna in 1868. He was appointed artistic director of the famed Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Music Lovers) from 1872 to 1875, introducing the Viennese to some of the great baroque music of Bach and Handel.

From mid century, Vienna was in the grip of the Viennese waltz which found its greatest expression through Johann Strauss II, the 'waltz king'. His operettas were also extremely popular along with those of Lehar and Offenbach.

The Second Viennese School evolved around Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and his two most well-known students Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

Initially the music of Schoenberg – and to some extent his pupils – used late-Romantic tonalities and chromatic expression (indeed Mahler championed Schoenberg's music during his lifetime).

The evolution of dissonance and atonality into the twelve tone system of composition was not evident until the early 1920s, but it is the uncompromising individuality of these composers and their formal rigour that distinguishes this Second Viennese School.