Sechs kleine Klavierstücke

[1] After having written large, dense works such as Pelleas und Melisande, up until 1907, Schönberg decided to turn away from this style, beginning with his second string quartet of 1908.

The following excerpt, translated from a letter written to Ferruccio Busoni in 1909, well expresses his reaction against the excess of the Romantic period: My goal: complete liberation from form and symbols, cohesion and logic.

This multicoloured, polymorphic, illogical nature of our feelings, and their associations, a rush of blood, reactions in our senses, in our nerves; I must have this in my music.

Schoenberg penned the sixth piece on June 17, shortly after the death of Gustav Mahler.

Following the expressionist aesthetic, each piece can be understood to be a long composition condensed into a single brief miniature.

The work is commonly described as atonal, or at least any resemblance to tonality is fleeting, but it predates Schoenberg's later dodecaphonic development.