The reasons for the form relatively spread in that interpret the works of Schoenberg are complex. His music is extremely difficult to touch, not so much in what it does to the technical thing but to the expressive thing, and is the whole challenge. As it is extraordinarily rich in implications, which are fulfilled or are frustrated in many levels and often much later inside a piece, it is necessary to listen to it often before the work is opened to the listener.

Schoenberg lived many years and had a fascinating development. His creative life in general splits into four periods. During the first one it was absorbed by the overloaded emotions of the late romanticism. Verklärte Nacht ("in the Night Transfigured"), typical of the first Schoenberg period, it was written in three weeks, when the composer was 25 years old. It sounds like Wagner or Mahler, but very praised. As Schoenberg was feeling the need to introduce more and more expressive disharmony in his music, it was to him more and more difficult to solve this disharmony of convincing form. Therefore it left the resolution and, with her, the tonal system that had constituted the base of virtually all the western music from 1600, approximately.

The composer went on to his second period, and the most radical, his period atonal. He wrote music full of the enthusiasm of the discovery and the exploration of a new world of sounds. Nevertheless, before it was spending a lot of time, it met that needed an organizing beginning that remplazara the tonality. It did not compose anything for seven years, period in which it developed the system dodecafónico. Schoenberg used to conciliate the radicalism of his music atonal with the traditions of his past. The pieces of his third period use old forms, and use his tonal lines in forms vaguely similar to the traditional centers of tonality, as well as to the antiquated thematic groups. During his final period, Schoenberg was looking with nostalgia at his first tonal music. The rigorousness of his writing slackened dodecafónica and it even went so far as to compose some tonal music. This way, his final style incorporates the integration of all the aspects of his previous styles and it produced his big masterpieces: the Fantasy for Violin, the Trio for Ropes and his last choral pieces.
Although it is not possible to detect in Verklärte Nacht all the directions that Schoenberg would continue finally, it is typical of the hyperemotional personality of all his music. We hear tironeos excited in the limits of the tonality, and understand how the young prompt composer would feel that it had to go beyond his tonal system. In his last years once one asked him why musician as Verklärte Nacht was already not writing. The replicó: "I keep on doing it, but nobody realizes."

The piece was conceived originally like sextet for ropes. Alexander Zemlinsky, main and future brother-in-law of Schoenberg, tried to achieve that it was interpreted, but the Tokünstlerverein, the professional joint only one of Vienna of the epoch, pushed it back. A member rejected the piece, saying: "It sounds as if someone had daubed Tristán's score while it was still fresh." Later, Schoenberg remembered with bitter irony that the work had not been accepted for his interpretation because it was containing a chord that was definitely prohibited for the rules of the harmony. "It is clear that there does not exist anything that looks alike to the investment of a chord of ninth; therefore, there is nothing that looks alike to the execution of the same one. In fact one cannot interpret anything that does not exist."

When finally the premiere took place, Mahler heard some of the essays and felt deeply affected. It turned into defender of the work of Schoenberg and continued it being throughout the years along which he had left, even when the later Schoenberg pieces were turning out to be difficult to understand to him.

Verklärte Nacht is inspired in a poem of the collection of Richard Dehmel, there titled The woman and the world. Dehmel (1863-1920) was a poet who was combining the ideas of Nietzsche of the superman with the politics of the socialism. His work had a powerful influence in the times of change of century. In the Schoenberg score an extract of the poem is quoted. Both the poem and the composition share a climate of morbidness, typical of the last years of the XIXth century

Henry E. Krehbiel paraphrased the fragment quoted by Schoenberg:

Two mortal ones walk along a cold and sterile coppice. The moon travels over the high oaks, which skeletal branches rise in view of moon without clouds. A woman speaks. He confesses a sin to the man who is next to you: a son waits and he is not the father. He had stopped believing in the happiness and, longing for the plenitude of the life, the maternity and the mother's duties, it had been delivered, trembling, to the hugs of a man that she did not know. He had believed bendecida, but now the life was taking revenge for her giving him this love that he was feeling for the one that was walking next to you. It advances unsteady, observing with opaque look the moon that continues it. The man speaks. That his soul is not loaded by fault thoughts. Here the sheen of the moon wraps to the universe. Together they cross frozen waters but there is a flame in each one who shelters to other. It will transfigure the stranger and she will give to him this son. Because she has inspired the shining sheen inside him and also it has turned him into a child. They fall down one in arms of other. Kissing, his breath is mixed in the air. Two mortal ones stroll around under the wonderful moonlight.

Egon Wellesz, student of Schoenberg, explained that Verklärte Nacht

"it is composed of five sections, between which the first one, the third one and the fifth one they are of a more epic character and this way they paint the portrait of the deep feelings of the persons who stroll around under the moonlight in the cold night. The second one contains the passionate complaint of the woman, the quarter the supported answer of the man, who demonstrates big depth and comprehension warmth".