Second Viennese School

As Viennese School ( sometimes called Second Viennese School or New Vienna School or Viennese atonal school ) in the history of music by Arnold Schoenberg (therefore also called Viennese School ) called out -building in Vienna composers circle at the beginning of the 20th century, the relevant exerted influence on the development of new music.

Besides Schönberg belonged to the inner circle of his two pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who took lessons from him in 1904 (later of these, and other students of Schoenberg were added ). After a period of free atonality developed ( 1908 ) Schoenberg in the early 1920s the so-called twelve-tone technique, who took over his students and autonomously modified and further developed. Schoenberg took the view expressed to have the twelve-tone only found and not invented, as it has always existed in his opinion, but was only discovered by him.

Despite these especially for the music audience radically appearing innovation, the Vienna School saw in a tradition of the composers of the Viennese classical, Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. As a common principle of composition of these precursors, on the one anknüpfte theoretically, you could see the processing of musical motifs and themes in the variation form. This deliberate continuation of the tradition distinguishes the Vienna School, for example, of the other major trend in the music of the 1920s, the neo-classicism, in which an attempt was made to explicitly break away from the previous epoch of Romanticism.

The Vienna school fell apart in the 1930s. The key causes are likely the forced emigration of Schoenberg in the U.S. after the seizure of power by the National Socialists in Germany as well be the death of Alban Berg (1935 ). Nevertheless emanated from her after the Second World War a large influence on many composers.

Other personalities of the Viennese school were, inter alia,

• The philosopher, (music) sociologist and composer Theodor W. Adorno ( student of Alban Berg )
• The composer Hanns Eisler (temporarily; pupil of Arnold Schoenberg )
• The composer Hans Erich Apostel ( student of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg )
• The composer, musicologist and Schoenberg 's biographer Egon Wellesz