Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna, Austria, on September 13, 1874, and died in Los Angeles, California, on July 13, 1951. The first performance of Verklärte Nacht took place in Vienna on March 18, 1902, performed by the Rosé Quartet. Verklärte Nacht is scored for the strings of the orchestra. Approximate performance time is thirty minutes.

Arnold Schoenberg originally composed Transfigured Night in 1899, as a sextet for strings. In 1917, Schoenberg arranged the sextet for string orchestra. Transfigured Night is based upon a poem of the same name by the influential German writer Richard Dehmel, that was published in 1896. The narrative takes place during a moonlit night. A couple walks through a barren grove. The woman confesses she is pregnant by another. The man responds that that the love they bear for each other will transfigure the child, to whom he will be a father. The man and woman fall into each other’s arms, and wander into the moonlit night.

Transfigured Night belongs to Schoenberg’s early period, embracing a lush, late-Romantic form of expression. Schoenberg would soon abandon this approach for a more avant-garde, atonal idiom that earned him both fame and notoriety. Schoenberg believed that Transfigured Night did, in some ways, look forward to his later works. In a letter of February 12, 1927 Schoenberg wrote:

"I usually answer the question why I no longer write as I did at the period of “Verklärte Nacht” by saying I do, but I can’t help it if people don’t recognize the fact. In the case of some works about which I have been asked this…people are actually beginning to recognize this even now and forgive me for composing not only as beautifully as before but also much better than then."

The beauty, passion, and rich instrumental palette of Verklärte Nacht have earned it a place of respect and affection, even among those who find Schoenberg’s later works more problematic.

Verklärte Nacht is a single-movement work that divides into five sections. These correspond to the five sections of Dehmel’s poem: (1) The introduction of the moonlit setting and the two principal characters, (2) The woman’s confession, (3) The woman gazes at the moon, (4) The man’s response, and (5) The lovers’ embrace and journey through the night.