The Mirror of Tonality: Transitional Features of Nineteenth-Century Harmony

harmony, and ultimately to atonality, is still commonly described from the point of view that Schoenberg developed to establish the historical inevitability of his own music. Seen in this way, the force of harmonic change in the nineteenth century was a gradual heightening of chromaticism that eventually obscured tonal functions so much that tonality broke down. As Schoenberg himself put it in a famous sentence, The overwhelming multitude of dissonances [could] not be counterbalanced any more by occasional returns to such tonic triads as represent a key.' Schoenberg clearly felt that this situation justified, even demanded, his own harmonic style, which tended toward total chromaticism long before he developed the twelve-tone system. His earliest atonal pieces, the finale of the Second String Quartet and Das Buch der hdngenden Gdrten, quote texts from Stefan George that intimate the discovery of something unknown, miraculous, perhaps terrifying-all of which the music evokes hauntingly. Yet the rhetoric of discovery is deceptive; the truth is that Schoenberg was interpreting, not discovering, atonality as chromatic saturation. At the same time, he was rejecting he other interpretive prospects opened by composers like Debussy, Busoni, and Skriabin. Schoenberg's exclusive claim on the territory of early atonality has gradually evaporated as the cultural identity of his style has grown clearer: a expressionism as firmly rooted in turn-of-the-century Vienna as classical psychoanalysis.2 His vision of tonality in collapse has been more stubborn.