The work's belated completion was prompted by the conductor Fritz Stiedry, who asked Schoenberg for an orchestral piece for his New Friends of Music Orchestra in New York.
1, for 15 players, has a concise form in which the four movements of a traditional symphony are condensed into a single larger one, and establishes the soloistic orchestral writing sporadically found in works such as Gurre-Lieder and Pelleas und Melisande.
[2] The Second Chamber Symphony was begun shortly after the first was completed, but despite several efforts (in 1911 and again in 1916), Schoenberg was unable to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.
Indeed, my style has greatly deepened meanwhile, and I find it hard to reconcile what I then rightly wrote, trusting my sense of form and not thinking too much, with my current extensive demands in respect of ‘visible’ logic.
It avoids the doubling of instrumental lines in favor of a differentiation of individual parts, showing that Schoenberg’s later style placed greater emphasis on clarity of textures than did his earlier orchestral scores.
[citation needed] In his 1948 essay "On revient toujours", he wrote: I was not destined to continue in the manner of Transfigured Night or Gurre-Lieder or even Pelleas and Melisande.