Breaking Free - the minds that changed music.

In The Essay this week, personal reflections on the revolutionary music and ideas of the Second Viennese School as they searched for an antidote to all the certainties and expectations of the past, and cast music on a new path of dissonance and discovery, shocking audiences then and now.

Bethany Bell is a BBC foreign correspondent and has lived in Vienna for more than 15 years. In tonight's Essay Bethany remembers living in Mödling, a town near Vienna where Schoenberg lived and where on walks with Berg and Webern he devised his radical ideas for music.