Although Schoenberg's earliest published works were written for the voice, the composer had by then produced much other music, including a number of pieces incorporating strings. Indeed, Schoenberg had studied, at least informally, both the violin and cello, and thus was well equipped to meet the compositional challenges of his Op. 4, the substantial string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night; 1899). Its great success in Europe opened the gates of fame for the young composer, and even today, it remains one of Schoenberg's most familiar works—and certainly one of the least "difficult" for listeners.

The poetry of Richard Dehmel was a strong influence on the composer during the final years of the nineteenth century. Three of the songs from Schoenberg's Op. 2, for example, are settings of the poet's verse. Similarly, the underlying programme of Verklärte Nacht—the first important application of the traditionally orchestral tone poem genre to a chamber work—is taken from a poem in Dehmel's Weib und Weit. In later years the composer acknowledged that the compulsion he felt to express Dehmel's unique passions in music was one of the key determining factors in his early musical development.

Superficially, the programme is simple and seemingly improbable: during a brisk, moonlit evening walk, a woman confides to her lover that she is pregnant with another man's child. Before meeting her present lover, she felt that the only way to bring meaning into her life was to bring another life into the world. The man replies gently, compassionately, that the strength of their love for one another will transform the unborn babe into his own child. Schoenberg's musical structure is so entirely self-sufficient that one feels the programme to be almost nonessential. In fact, Schoenberg felt that he had so fully captured the deeper, more fundamental human drama of which Dehmel's poem is just one possible encapsulation that he was reluctant to tie his work down by its association with a literary source; consequently, he avoided public comment on the relationship between Dehmel's poem and his own musical "translation."

Verklärte Nacht is cast in a single thirty-minute D minor/D major movement for an ensemble of two violins, two violas, and two cellos. (The work also exists in Schoenberg's own arrangement for string orchestra made in the 1920s and revised in the 1940s.) Schoenberg's dual—and seemingly divergent—musical influences, Wagner and Brahms, are present throughout. Still, Schoenberg succeeds in marshalling a highly contrapuntal and chromatic language that is entirely his own for the first time in his career. After the static, quietly throbbing D minor of the opening passage, the work quickly ventures into a world of dense counterpoint, often hinting at the tonal center without making an unequivocal return. In fact, it is not until the warm D major sonority that begins the second half—corresponding to the man's loving reply—that a sense of tonal stability is restored, if only temporarily. The work comes to a close with shimmering arpeggio figures and string harmonics as the couple walks off into their new life together.

© All Music Guide