Richard Wagner’s music and the way he created it are closely interconnected to the vocal delivery of the actors and singers of his childhood and youth. Or to put it more precisely: during the time of his socialisation in early nineteenth-century Saxony, there was practically no difference between the profession of an actor and a dramatic singer. The same people performed in spoken drama and music theatre what led to a declamatory style of singing that was typical for German music theatre. This style shaped Wagner’s Sprechgesang, both considering its structure and its genesis. He did as a composer what the dramatic actors of his time whose performances shifted between singing and speech did on stage: he developed his vocal lines out of declamation and created different degrees of more or less speech-like passages. The latter poses a challenge for the historically informed performance practice of his works.

Although Pierrot lunaire (1912) is technically more radical than Erwartung in some ways, with its pervasive use of ‘speech-song’ vocal technique, it requires only six performers and complements Night Music features with less expressionistic episodes. Since setting Stefan George’s vision of spiritual aspiration in the finale of the second quartet, then contemplating the musical legacy of Mahler and its exploration of transcendent spiritual states, Schoenberg brought consideration of his own relationship with Judaism into an ambitious plan for an oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter. As part of this characteristically far-seeing exercise in rethinking basic principles, he also moved towards the formulation of what became known in the 1920s as the twelve-tone method. Cultural attitudes changed greatly after World War I, and Schoenberg was not impervious to the neoclassical retreat from expressionism. Yet his motivic techniques (not least the variously ordered pitch-class collections formed from the letters of his own name) survived transformation from the pantonality of his earlier music into more systematically ordered twelve-tone compositions. Often making explicit allusions to tonal principles and traditional formal designs, he retained the textural flexibility and expressive intensity of the Night Music years. Elements of technique and ethos already implicit in Verklärte Nacht and Erwartung found new purpose in compositions that left the post-Wagnerian spirit of Schoenberg’s Viennese years far behind.