Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg was born on September 13, 1874, in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna, a neighborhood then home to much of the city's Jewish population. His father, Samuel, ran a small shoe shop, and his mother, Pauline, came from Prague and gave piano lessons. The family had little money and no particular musical standing, yet the boy began violin lessons at eight and was soon composing short duets to play with friends ^[1].

When Samuel Schoenberg died in 1890, the sixteen-year-old left school and took a job as a bank clerk to help support the household. Music remained an obsession pursued in the evenings. He taught himself cello, played in amateur ensembles, and absorbed scores wherever he could find them. His only sustained formal instruction came from the composer and conductor Alexander Zemlinsky, whom he met in the mid 1890s through an amateur orchestra called Polyhymnia. Zemlinsky gave him lessons in counterpoint, and the two became close friends ^[1][2].

The question of who was Arnold Schoenberg before fame is answered largely by this period of self-education. He earned money orchestrating operettas and conducting workers' choruses while writing his first mature works. The string sextet Verklaerte Nacht (Transfigured Night), composed in 1899 on a poem by Richard Dehmel, brought together Brahmsian craft and Wagnerian chromaticism in a single luminous span. A Viennese concert society initially rejected it, partly because of one unclassifiable chord, but the piece eventually became his most performed work ^[2][3].

In 1901 Schoenberg married Mathilde Zemlinsky, his teacher's sister, and moved to Berlin, where he worked briefly at the Ueberbrettl cabaret and taught at the Stern Conservatory with support from Richard Strauss. There he began the enormous cantata Gurre-Lieder, scored for five vocal soloists, narrator, several choruses, and a very large orchestra. Financial pressure delayed its orchestration for a decade; when it finally premiered in Vienna in 1913 it received one of the greatest ovations of his life ^[2][3].

Back in Vienna from 1903, he gathered private pupils, among them Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who joined him in 1904 and remained devoted associates. The trio later came to be called the Second Viennese School, a label linking them to the earlier Viennese classicism of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Gustav Mahler became an influential defender, attending premieres and quieting hostile audiences even when he admitted he did not fully understand the newer scores ^[1][3].

Between roughly 1906 and 1909 Schoenberg's harmonic language moved rapidly beyond the boundaries of key. The Chamber Symphony No. 1 (1906) compressed a four-movement design into one dense movement built on chords stacked in fourths. With the final movement of the Second String Quartet (1908), which adds a soprano singing lines by Stefan George, and the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11 (1909), he crossed into music without a tonal center, a practice often described as free atonality, though he preferred the term pantonality ^[2][4]. Audiences rebelled. A 1913 concert in Vienna's Musikverein featuring music by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern collapsed into fistfights and became notorious as the Skandalkonzert ^[3].

Any account of Arnold Schoenberg achievements begins with two innovations. The first was the leap into atonality itself, realized in works such as Erwartung (1909), a half-hour monodrama for soprano and orchestra composed in about two weeks, and Pierrot Lunaire (1912), twenty-one settings of translated Albert Giraud poems for a reciter and five instrumentalists. Pierrot introduced a wide audience to Sprechstimme, a notated speech-song delivery halfway between talking and singing, and it toured Europe to intense controversy and fascination ^[2][4].

The second innovation came after the First World War, during which he served intermittently in the Austrian army despite chronic asthma. Convinced that atonal freedom needed a constructive principle, he worked out the method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another, usually shortened to the twelve-tone or dodecaphonic method. A composition is built from an ordered row containing all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, which can be transposed, inverted, and reversed. The Suite for Piano, op. 25, completed in 1923, was among the first works to use the technique throughout, and the Variations for Orchestra, op. 31 (1928), applied it on a symphonic scale ^[1][4].

Schoenberg was also a formidable theorist and writer. His Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony, 1911) remains a standard text, and later volumes on counterpoint, form, and composition grew out of decades of teaching. In 1918 he founded the Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna, which presented new music under strict rules: rehearsals were thorough, programs were not announced in advance, applause was forbidden, and critics were barred. Nor was music his only outlet. Around 1908 to 1912 he painted seriously, producing intense self-portraits and imagined faces he called visions; Wassily Kandinsky admired them and included his work in the first Blue Rider exhibition in 1911 ^[3][5].

Schoenberg's first marriage passed through a public crisis in 1908 when Mathilde left him for a time for the young painter Richard Gerstl, who had taught the couple painting. She returned to her husband, and Gerstl took his own life that autumn. The turmoil coincided with, and by many accounts colored, the composer's break with tonality in the George songs of op. 15 ^[3][5]. Mathilde died in 1923. The following year Schoenberg married Gertrud Kolisch, sister of the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, whose quartet championed his chamber music. The couple had three children, Nuria, Ronald, and Lawrence, in addition to the two children, Gertrud and Georg, from his first marriage ^[1].

He was a man of systems and superstitions. He designed his own chess variant for four players, built card games and tools by hand, and feared the number thirteen throughout his life, a condition sometimes described as triskaidekaphobia. Born on the thirteenth, he numbered the measures of some manuscripts 12, 12a, 14, and he altered the spelling of the opera Moses und Aron so the title would not contain thirteen letters ^[3][6].

Religion followed a long arc. Raised Jewish, he converted to Lutheran Protestantism in 1898, a common step for ambitious Viennese Jews of the era. Rising antisemitism in the 1920s, including an incident at the Mattsee resort where Jewish guests were unwelcome, pushed him back toward Jewish identity. In July 1933, in a Paris ceremony witnessed by the painter Marc Chagall, he formally returned to Judaism ^[1][6].

In 1926 Schoenberg succeeded Ferruccio Busoni as director of a master class in composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, the most prestigious teaching post of his career. It ended abruptly. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the Academy moved to purge Jewish members, and Schoenberg left Germany that spring, traveling through France before sailing for the United States in October 1933 ^[1][6].

He taught first at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston, but the New England winters aggravated his asthma, and in 1934 he moved to Los Angeles. He held positions at the University of Southern California and then, from 1936 until mandatory retirement in 1944, at the University of California, Los Angeles, where the music building was later named Schoenberg Hall. His American pupils ranged from film composers to John Cage and Lou Harrison, and his neighbors in Brentwood included George Gershwin, a friend and regular tennis partner who painted his portrait. Schoenberg became a United States citizen in 1941 ^[1][7].

The American years produced work in both twelve-tone and, occasionally, tonal idioms: the Violin Concerto (1936), the Fourth String Quartet (1936), the Piano Concerto (1942), and the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1942), a wartime denunciation of tyranny set to Byron. A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), a seven-minute cantata for narrator, men's chorus, and orchestra, responded directly to the Holocaust and closes with the Hebrew prayer Shema Yisroel. His opera Moses und Aron, begun in Berlin, remained unfinished at his death, its two completed acts now standard repertory. Retirement on a small pension forced him to keep teaching privately. He died in Los Angeles shortly before midnight on July 13, 1951, a Friday the thirteenth, which admirers noted with grim irony given his lifelong fear of the number ^[1][6][7].

Few figures divide musical opinion as sharply. To supporters, Schoenberg rescued composition from exhausted conventions and gave it a rigorous new grammar; to detractors, he led concert music away from its audience. Both camps agree on his influence. The twelve-tone method, extended into total serialism by Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Milton Babbitt after 1945, dominated avant-garde composition for a generation, and even Igor Stravinsky, long viewed as his opposite pole, adopted serial techniques in the 1950s ^[4][7].

His institutional afterlife is unusually well organized. His widow and children founded Belmont Music Publishers to manage his catalog, and his manuscripts, paintings, letters, and even his self-built gadgets are preserved at the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna, opened in 1998 after the collection moved from Los Angeles ^[5]. His teaching books still circulate in conservatories, and Verklaerte Nacht, Pierrot Lunaire, and Gurre-Lieder hold secure places in the repertoire even where the later serial works remain a harder sell.

Readers looking for essential Arnold Schoenberg facts can put it plainly: an almost entirely self-taught Viennese bank clerk became the most consequential musical theorist of his century, invented a compositional system still studied today, painted well enough to exhibit with Kandinsky, and taught two of modernism's greatest composers. Any Arnold Schoenberg biography ends with a paradox he identified himself: he insisted he was a conservative who had been forced to become a radical, a traditionalist extending the logic of Bach, Mozart, and Brahms one step further than the public wished to follow ^[2][4].