In this lucid, revealing book, award-winning pianist and scholar Charles Rosen sheds light on the elusive music of Arnold Schoenberg and his challenge to conventional musical forms. Rosen argues that Schoenberg's music, with its atonality and dissonance, possesses a rare balance of form and emotion, making it the most expressive music ever written.

Concise and accessible, this book looks at Schoenberg's ambiguous relation both to the central tradition of Western music and to the complex developments of modernism. Rosen analyzes Schoenberg's expressionist beginnings and how they relate in theory, performance, and musical experience to the system of atonality set forth in the music of Berg, Webern, and Schoenberg himself.