Serialism developed as a way forward from what was felt by adventurous composers to be the dead end of tonality reached by 19th-century composers, notably Richard Wagner. Wagner had stretched tonality to its limits with his music, culminating with his opera Tristan und Isolde in 1859. Later composers, such as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, continued in the same tradition, but others, beginning with Arnold Schoenberg , wanted to take music to another level of modernity.
Western...