Transfigured Night for String Orchestra

Schoenberg wrote this music in three weeks in 1899, staying at Payerbach with his teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky and Zemlinsky's sister Mathilde, whom he married two years later. The original is a string sextet, finished on 1 December 1899 and inspired by a poem of Richard Dehmel in which a woman confesses to her companion, on a moonlit walk, that she is carrying another man's child, and he answers that their warmth will make the child his. Schoenberg arranged the score for string orchestra in 1917 and revised that version in 1943.