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20th-century time capsule: five objects from a period that changed music forever

In the early 20th century, a major development occurred that would change music forever.

A new approach to music composition - often referred to as serial music or the twelve-tone technique - was instigated by the Second Viennese School.

Radio 3 Presenter Tom McKinney follows in the footsteps of the composers who dared to tamper with the building blocks of music, and finds five objects that help tell the story of this revolution in sound.

The objects include a self-portrait, an unusual chess board and an asteroid...

1. The Laughing Self-Portrait

Self-Portrait Laughing, 1907 by Richard Gerstl, © Belvedere, Vienna

The Second Viennese School was a group of composers active in early 20th-century Vienna.

Its chief protagonists were Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

But many others were attracted to the to Schoenberg and his school - artists, poets and philosophers - including Richard Gerstl.

Gerstl was a young Viennese painter who, for a time, was a central figure in Schoenberg’s life.

Gerstl taught Schoenberg to paint and was one of his close friends.

However, in the summer of 1908, things started to go wrong.

Schoenberg’s wife, Matilde, ran away with the painter.

She eventually returned, but the affair brought Schoenberg close to suicide.

Im the end it was Gerstl who took his own life a few months later.

He stabbed and hanged himself in front of a mirror after burning the majority of his work.

One surviving piece is the disturbing Self Portrait, Laughing.

Painted shortly before his death, it now hangs in the Austrian Gallery Belvedere in Vienna.

The ordeal inspired Schoenberg into a period of creative frenzy that shifted his music towards expressionism, making Gerstl’s suicide a transformative moment in the development of 20th-century music.

Listen: Tom McKinney on Richard Gerstl's curious Laughing Self-portrait

What was the Second Viennese School?

Arnold Schoenberg was the presiding genius and artistic leader of The Second Viennese School, a group of composers active in early 20th-century Vienna.

Other prominent members include Schoenberg's pupils, the composers Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

Schoenberg’s desire to make music from sounds that previous composers had thought off-limits led to compositions that broke free from past traditions.

As well as opening up a new world for composers to explore, Schoenberg opened our ears as listeners to new ways of feeling, new ways of imagining what music could be.

That’s why he and his music are still so essential. Without Schoenberg, 20th and 21st-century music could never have been the same. No Schoenberg, no Stockhausen.

Listen: Tom Service on 'How to Listen to the Second Viennese School'

2. Coalition Chess

Schoenberg’s great musical innovation was the twelve-tone method, which abolished key signatures and represented all twelve notes in an octave scale equally. It was a system devised to contain the chaos of atonality.

Containing chaos within a logical system was a specialty of Schoenberg’s, and not one restricted to musical composition.

In the 1920s, he devised the four-player game of Coalition Chess which swapped knights, rooks and pawns for machine guns, submarines and aeroplanes.

Regardless of the outcome, the game was designed to replicate the sequence of events in WWI. Chess expert Professor Ernst Strouhal views it as Schoenberg’s method of processing the tumult of WWI through the application of logic and process.

Listen: Tom McKinney on Schoenberg's Coalition Chess.

3. Cards

Playing cards by Schoenberg. Image used by permission of Belmont Music Publishers, Los Angeles

Aptly for a composer who played with the rules of musical form, Schoenberg was a keen games and sports fan. His creativity extended beyond music into the design of several toys including a custom set of tiddlywinks and a wooden forerunner of the Rubik’s Cube.

Schoenberg used his skill as a painter to create bespoke sets of playing cards, illustrating one deck in a style reminiscent of Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession, and another with a series of comical caricatures depicting grotesquely misshapen heads.

Listen: Tom McKinney on Schoenberg's games

4. The number 23

Alban Berg’s work may have broken with the tonal traditions of Bach and Mozart, but he followed at least one of their compositional practices: numerical symbolism.

The number 23 was Berg’s signature.

It recurs in his work and guides the structure of many of his pieces, with important moments occurring in gaps of 23 bars, or significant melodies entering at bar 23.

Some have suggested that Berg had a bizarre irrational fear of the number 23, which could have developed from a serious asthma attack suffered on the 23 July, possibly in 1908 when he was 23.

Afflicted with a more typical numerical phobia, Schoenberg was terrified of the number 13. It's said that on his 76th birthday (13th September), he was plunged into depression upon someone mentioning that 7+6=13. Schoenberg died the following year in July… on Friday 13th.

Listen: Tom McKinney on the Second Viennese School's numerical obsessions

5. Asteroid 4529 ‘Webern’

"I feel air from another planet"

Image courtesy of Mattia Galiazzo of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Vienna

So sings the soprano in the final movement of Schoenberg’s controversially received but influential Second String Quartet. In 1984, another planet was almost where the composer and his students Berg and Webern found themselves when astronomer Edward Bowell lent their names to three new asteroids discovered between Mars and Jupiter.

While Schoenberg continued to wrestle with “a longing to return to the older style”, and Berg never fully detached himself from the late-Romantic music of Brahms and Mahler, Webern made the most decisive break with the music of the time. He rejected opulent harmonies, symphonies lasting over an hour and large orchestras, replacing them with sparse, alien textures, shards of sound and small ensembles, all condensed into microscopic timeframes.

It’s fitting then, that in terms of distance from Earth, Schoenberg and Berg are relatively close together but Webern is much further out in space, just like his music.

Listen: Tom McKinnery on Asteroid Webern

As part of Radio 3's Breaking Free - The Minds that Change Music season, Tom McKinney travels to Vienna and examines a selection of the above in The World of the Second Viennese School in 5 Objects.

Discover more about Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School.

More programmes from the Breaking Free season.