The Second Viennese School (the name recalls the “first” — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) is Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Having passed through late-Romantic chromaticism and free atonality (Pierrot lunaire), Schoenberg around 1921 formulated dodecaphony — a method of composition based on twelve equal tones.
Each of the three took his own path: Berg preserved emotion and a link to tradition (the operas Wozzeck, Lulu); Webern drove the style to extreme concision and pointillism, later becoming a model for the post-war avant-garde (Boulez, Stockhausen). The school's ideas fundamentally reshaped the academic music of the 20th century.
