In setting Richard Dehmel’s poem “Verklärte Nacht” (Transfigured Night) in his op. 4, the young Arnold Schönberg pursued the intention, as he himself said, of “attempting those new forms in chamber music which have been created in orchestral music based on a poetic idea”. Composed in September 1899 in a few weeks whilst he was on holiday, the Sextet incorporates the ideas of the symphonic poem in its programmatic character and its one-movement form, and also displays late Romantic traits in its ...