Verklärte Nacht, op. 4

Schoenberg's opus 4 was his first substantial work and, for a composer later known as the inventor of twelve-tone writing, remains his most widely heard. He composed it in 1899 after Richard Dehmel's poem of 1896, in which a couple walking through a dark wood by moonlight confront the woman's confession that she is pregnant by another man. The Vienna Tonkünstlerverein refused the sextet, reportedly over an inverted ninth chord that no textbook catalogued, and the premiere waited until March 1902, when the Rosé Quartet and colleagues played it in Vienna.