One of Schönberg’s main theoretical themes was the concept of the musical idea.Footnote 1 The musical idea (musikalische Gedanke) was, in the words of one of his students, Josef Rufer, the “Archimedes’ point” in thinking about music. For Schönberg, the musical idea was linked to the concept of musical logic, which was viewed as an adequate representation of thought unfolding in time. Both of these concepts are not new. Johann Nikolaus Forkel had spoken about this first in the “General History of Music” (1788), where he explained the parallelism of music and language—he referred to harmony as “musical logic.” A special contribution to the development of this concept was made by Eduard Hanslick in his treatise “On the Musically Beautiful,” where he wrote about “thinking in sounds.”

Schönberg gradually came to see the musical idea as the metric of all things in composition. In “The Theory of Harmony” (1911), he argues that the musical idea is not defined solely by its material substance, the visible and audible dimension, and that the text of the notes only roughly conveys its true content. From the very beginning of his reflections, he perceived the musical idea as a metaphysical given. Unlike his predecessors (Johann Scheibe, Johann Quantz, Anton Reicha), who identified the musical idea with melody, Schönberg reveals that for him it is something significantly more. During the period 1920–1930, he formulates musical thinking as a form of human thinking.

Composing is thinking in tones and rhythms. Every piece is the presentation of a musical idea. Musical thinking is subject to the laws and conditions of all our other thinking, and beyond that must take into consideration the conditions resulting from the material. All thinking consists essentially in bringing things (concepts, etc.) into relationship with each other. An idea is the production of a relationship between things otherwise having no relationship to one another. Thinking therefore searches out the relationships between things. Thus, every idea is based on relationships.Footnote 2

According to Schönberg, the interweaving of mutual relations between sounds is the realisation of a musical idea, its materialisation in the process of interpretation—the realisation in sound of the structural components based on these relations. Schönberg treats a musical idea somewhat equivocally: both as a generating substance of the work and as an accumulation of specific musical characteristics. Differentiating between the concepts of “idea” and “motive,” he wrote: “The idea is the whole, and the motive is not one of its parts, but simply a part of its presentational material.”Footnote 3 The idea and the motive in [Schönberg’s] interpretation refer to “different levels of the being of a musical work: the ideal level and the material level, which serves as the realisation in sound of the ‘world of ideas’ of the work.”Footnote 4

Schönberg downplayed the role of the interpreter (as many composers did—J. R.). “What is essential is not the quality of sound […] but what is written: the (geometrical, mathematical or ‘architectonic’) relations between pitches and timespans,”Footnote 5—he wrote in 1929. “When the composer thinks of sound quality, dynamics and tempo, he is already his own interpreter of his ideas. That is, he employs the means of performance in order to lend his ideas general accessibility. Performing artists then become, to a certain degree, interpreters of interpretation. Yet the idea is a finished product, without any interpretation, as soon as it is notated.”Footnote 6 But who will realise it? While it is only written on paper, it can languish there forever. It is a great pity that Schönberg does not acknowledge this.

The collection of articles “Style and Idea” (1950) provides the most comprehensive definition of Schönberg’s conception of the musical idea:

In its most common meaning, the term “idea” is used as a synonym for theme, melody, phrase or motive. I myself consider the totality of a piece as the idea: the idea which its creator wanted to present.Footnote 7

“Style is transient, idea is eternal, it cannot grow old […]. An idea as a thematic ‘seed’ of the composition, on the one hand, and as the process of realizing the potential contained in it and the final crystallisation in the form of a work, on the other, are dialectically interrelated as categories of the part and the whole.”Footnote 8 When understanding the theme as an idea, the interpreter must look for appropriate means of expression. “In the creation of a work of art, nothing should interfere with the real idea. A work of art must elaborate on its own idea and follow the conditions which this idea establishes.”Footnote 9 This is the challenge of interpretation, which must discern these conditions of the work and follow them. This is how the rules of one art (the creation of music) influence the behaviour of another (interpretation).

The goal of the musical form is not beauty at all, but perceptibility; however, if that goal is achieved, then beauty emerges of itself. In this way, in the chain of totality—perceptibility—beauty, through perception and realisation, the modulation from the compositional-technical sphere to the aesthetic sphere occurs. Here, the role of the interpreter as the discoverer of beauty (through perception) and revealer of beauty (through interpretation) is indisputable. “Understanding a work is based on memorisation, on the ability to retain the various musical structures in the memory and to follow the fate of the ‘characters’ of the musical development, recognizing them in all their guises, in all their manifestations.”Footnote 10 Schönberg did not compose by juxtaposing 12 tones one with another, but always by juxtaposing motifs and themes: this must be borne in mind when performing music of this style.

Schönberg’s concept of the musical idea shares an indubitable similarity with other examples of analytical thought, such as the theory of Heinrich Schenker, which posits the existence of a single deep primordial structure (Urlinie, Ursatz) in all musical works, and Asaf’ev’s theory of intonation, which, with the help of the concept of intonation, explains processes of the becoming, evolution, performance and perception of music of different eras.Footnote 11

It is notable that both Schenker and Asaf’ev developed their global theories in the same period as Schönberg. Ernst Kurth can also be considered as belonging to the same group. They all avowed the universal tenets of artistic creation which were popular in the first decades of the twentieth century, while the second half of the century decisively rejected the existence of “general lines” and concentrated on the heterogeneity of individual phenomena. One should also mention the instrumentalist trend thriving at the time, which was encouraged by ultramodern music that did not really require interpretive action oriented towards the revelation of thought. It was deemed sufficient to convert the work into sound so as to demonstrate the “possibilities of the instrument.”