Arnold Schoenberg’s moving hymn Friede auf Erden (Peace on Earth) was one of his last works to be composed in a tonal, late romantic style while simultaneously displaying intermittent steps in the direction of atonality. The text based on a poem by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer displays a similar brittleness and fragility, expressing both the yearning hope for universal peace and its destruction through war, ‘murder and terror’. Schoenberg depicts this conflict through the highly contrasted juxtapositi...