Schoenberg was inspired by many “greats” but also was self-taught. Wagner incorporated chromaticism and shifting tonality, making music feel unresolved or harmonically different. Schoenberg borrowed what Wagner did in some of his works.

“In his youth, the self-taught composer Schönberg was a Brahmsian until he began to admire Richard Wagner just as much. “This is why in my ‘Verklärte Nacht’ the thematic construction is based on Wagnerian model […] and on Brahms’ technique of – as I call it – developing variation on the other hand.” Up until the time of his symphonic poem “Pelleas and Melisande” (finished in 1902), Schönberg’s Romantic side was unmistakably evident in his music, his increasingly complex scores still lush with the sonorities of a sensuous world of sound; “Transfigured Night” and the “Gurre-Lieder” are timeless witnesses to late-Romantic composing style, poised on the gateway onward to “other planets.”