Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian and American modernist composer, music theorist, and teacher associated with developing variation, the emancipation of

1874–1894: Upbringing#

Arnold Schönberg was born on 13 September 1874 at Obere Donaustraße 5 in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt (historically a Jewish ghetto), into a lower-middle-class Jewish family. His father, Samuel, a shoe shopkeeper from Szécsény, Hungary, had moved to Vienna via Pozsony (Pressburg; now Bratislava). His mother Pauline Nachod was from a Prague family belonging to the Old New Synagogue. He began violin at eight and soon started writing music autodidactically by arranging and imitating what he played or heard, like military band repertoire, for informal performance. Juvenilia survive from as early as 1882, sometimes only as fragments or parts. They include a birthday march and arrangements of Gustav Pick’s Fiakerlied and Vincenzo Bellini’s “Ite su colle”. He composed violin duets after Ignaz Pleyel and Giovanni Battista Viotti, and advanced to string trios (for two violins and viola) without clear models.

1894–1907: Early life and success#

While largely self-taught, Schoenberg began studying counterpoint with Alexander von Zemlinsky around 1894. In 1898, he converted to Lutheran Christianity, in keeping with patterns of Jewish assimilation. This did not displace his Jewish identity, which remained integral to his self-understanding amid rising antisemitism through the 1910s. In his twenties he supported himself orchestrating operettas while composing his own music, like the string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night, 1899), later arranged for orchestra and among his most popular works. It is program music inspired by the narrative of Richard Dehmel’s poem by the same name. Schoenberg married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde in October 1901. They lived in Berlin from 1901 to 1903 and had two children, Gertrud (1902–1947, who in 1921 married Schoenberg’s pupil Felix Greissle) and Georg (1906–1974). Early works won Gustav Mahler’s favor, and Gurre-Lieder drew Richard Strauss’s attention. Schoenberg, initially dismissive of Mahler, was converted by the “thunderbolt” of the Third Symphony, viewing it with devotion as a work of genius. After early setbacks, Schoenberg won some public acceptance in 1907 with the tone poem Pelleas und Melisande in Berlin, though much of his (and his pupils’) music met hostility. The Chamber Symphony No. 1 premiered unremarkably in 1907.

Habits fray#

In 1907–1908, Schoenberg composed his String Quartet No. 2, dedicated to "" (my wife). Around the same time (c. 1908–1910), he also produced roughly two-thirds of his small painting output of about sixty-five oils. His wife left him that summer for painter Richard Gerstl, who died by suicide after her return that November. In the quartet, Schoenberg quoted the street song "" (Oh, dear Augustin) and traced a Symbolist ascent from ordinary life to an exalted, otherworldly realm. Its final two movements extend chromatic harmony toward atonality, which was emerging amid a wider historical shift. As in a choral symphony, they add soprano and set Stefan George’s poems "" (Litany) and "" (Rapture) from (The Seventh Ring). Schoenberg likely first encountered George’s work in 1904 at the (Ansorge Society), founded to unite poetry and music through recitation and performance, but obtained the poems from his composition pupil Karl Horwitz. The final poem opens with the speaker’s recognition, “I feel the air of other planets”. As it unfolds, the “bright beloved shadow shade " is “extinguished in a deeper radiance”. The speaker is dissolved into the cosmic harmony and sees the “trembling” ground below, “white and soft as whey”. The music, inspired by the elusive “tone” Schoenberg described hearing in George’s modern, hyperexpressive verse, uses harmonies he later described in Harmonielehre as "” (fluctuating) and "" (suspended). Mahler was unable to grasp this music and worried about who would carry on his patronage of Schoenberg. During his wife’s absence, Schoenberg also composed "" (You lean against a silver willow), the thirteenth song in the cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens, 1907–1909), based on the collection of the same name by George. This was perhaps his first composition without traditional reference to a key.

New ways#

In 1909, particularly with the third of the Three Piano Pieces and the fifth of the Five Pieces for Orchestra, Schoenberg composed with relative abandon, almost in the manner of stream of consciousness. Meanwhile, Strauss distanced himself, turning to a more conservative idiom after Elektra premiered in 1909.

Reflection#

During the summer of 1910, Schoenberg wrote his Harmonielehre (Harmony study). That year, he met Edward Clark, an English music journalist working in Germany, who became his only English student. Clark later, as a BBC producer, helped introduce the music of Schoenberg and his pupils, and Schoenberg himself, to Britain. In May 1911, Schoenberg and his pupils attended Mahler’s funeral in Grinzing. The last of the Six Little Piano Pieces, from June 1911, echoes the death knell in veneration of the dead with bell-like funeral tolling. The harmonies reach toward resolution (as if) in E major, a key long associated with spirituality, but the melody only briefly touches this (key)note.

Bavaria#

In July, a neighbor’s antisemitic abuse and aggression caused Schoenberg to quit work and take his family to stay with Zemlinsky on Lake Starnberg. (Vienna was the “City of Songs by Murdered Artists”, Schoenberg wrote Guido Adler.) Mathilde’s brother was conducting operettas in nearby Munich. Schoenberg exchanged letters with Wassily Kandinsky before visiting him and other painters Gabriele Münter and Franz Marc in Murnau am Staffelsee.

Expressionist circles#

Clark helped Schoenberg, convinced of Vienna’s fundamental hostility, move to Berlin in late September 1911. Schoenberg settled at the Villa Lepke in Berlin–Zehlendorf in October. At the time, he belonged to a circle of artists and intellectuals including Herwarth Walden, founder of Der Sturm (The Storm), as well as poet and critic Else Lasker-Schüler, painter Lene Schneider-Kainer, and writer Franz Werfel. From December, his paintings also featured alongside those of Kandinsky and Marc in exhibitions of Der Blaue Reiter, which toured Germany. In addition, he quickly wrote Herzgewächse for inclusion in their almanac.

Pierrot as self#

In 1912, , actress ’s agent, sought a suitably composer and chose Schoenberg. Since 1910, she had toured Germany performing selections from Albert Giraud’s Pierrot lunaire: rondels bergamasques in Otto Erich Hartleben’s expressionist translation as recitation songs. The music she commissioned, mainstream Romantic Lieder by Heinrich Schenker pupil Otto Vrieslander, proved “obviously not strong enough”, pianist Eduard Steuermann recalled. Girard’s cycle is an allegory of his return to Parnassianism after the Decadent and Symbolist movements (or, perhaps, his attempt to infuse Parnassianism with elements of Symbolism). Schoenberg identified with Pierrot: “We are all such moonstruck “, he reflected in 1916, invoking Hanswurst, a Viennese analogue. He likely saw Girard’s narrative as a cautionary tale against modernist excess or decadence: He chose and reordered twenty-one poems equally into three sections, tracing Pierrot’s inspiration and intoxication, descent into darkness, and journey home. For the music, he devised the now standard five-player Pierrot ensemble (flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin/viola, cello, and piano). In the preface, he asked the reciter, in (speaking voice), to realize pitch only fleetingly. In an apparent epilogue suggesting that his experiences or the passage of time have made home irretrievable, Pierrot reminiscences on an “ancient scent from fairy-tale times”. For this wistful ending, Schoenberg evokes closure in E major, as before in venerating Mahler, while melodically outlining a Viennese trichord. That year, he wrote an essay remembering Mahler, whom he called a saint, and began receiving a stipend from the Mahler Foundation. Also in 1912, Vienna Conservatory director offered posts to Schoenberg and Franz Schreker to renew what he saw as Robert Fuchs’s and Hermann Graedener’s stale milieu. Schoenberg declined that June, though he maintained local ties (and had taught a private theory course there the year before), citing his “aversion to Vienna” in a letter to Berg. He felt content despite some economic anxiety. It could have been bad for them both, he wrote Schreker two months later.

Recalibration#

Schoenberg’s output slowed after Pierrot as he explored new methods. He planned his oratorio Die Jakobsleiter from as early as 1912 as the finale of an unrealized Mahlerian choral symphony. Its self-written libretto bridges Christian and Judaic sources, and its hexachord ostinato represented emerging structural thinking (perhaps prefiguring his later style) as he sought a unifying principle, leaving many works sketched or unfinished. He later saw the work as a key step on his path toward twelve-tone technique. Gurre-Lieder ’s belated February 1913 Vienna premiere drew a fifteen-minute standing ovation plus a laurel crown. But when the Chamber Symphony No. 1 was performed alongside Berg’s, Webern’s, and Zemlinsky’s music at the (31 March 1913), people left amid applause, and police intervention during audience brawls forced Schoenberg to quit conducting Berg’s Altenberg Lieder. He also began work on Four Orchestral Songs (1913–1916). The first sets George’s translation of Ernest Dowson’s Symbolist sonnet “Seraphita” to music and features post-Mahlerian orchestration, including a line for six clarinets recalling Brahms, Wagner, and Mozart in its lyricism. Its subject was from Honoré de Balzac’s 1834 eponymous novel Séraphîta, which had also inspired Die Jakobsleiter. The third song sets Rainer Maria Rilke.

World War I#

Amid the August experience of 1914, as World War I began with the Battle of the Frontiers, Schoenberg fell into what he later called “war psychosis”, writing Alma Mahler of an imminent “reckoning” that would subjugate French “kitschmongers” Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky. He kept a weather diary, believing that cloud forms could predict the outcome. Thomas Mann touted the exhilarated public mood that November in his essay "” (Thoughts in Wartime). On Berlin’s home front, Schoenberg enjoyed a respite from music critics, he wrote Zemlinsky in October 1915, but was discouraged. Financial strain deepened as pupils vanished, prompting a return to Vienna in that month.

1915–1918: Habsburg home front and World War I service#

On Austria-Hungary’s home front, Schoenberg soon came to see the war’s horror, partly by reading Karl Kraus. By late 1915 he was conscripted (asthma no longer exempted him), and he selected the 4th Infantry Regiment “Hoch- und Deutschmeister”, entering service on 15 December. In early 1916, he trained as an officer in Bruck an der Leitha. Organizations and musicians, including Berg, Webern, and possibly Béla Bartók, sought his military discharge. For a soldiers’ party, he composed Die eiserne Brigade (The Iron Brigrade, 1916), a tonal spoof march for piano quintet. Schoenberg saw “only one solution” to the war, Berg wrote his wife that August: “the , just like the United States of America.” He never saw combat, though rumors suggested that might change, and carried out his duties with loyalty to the Habsburg monarchy until supporters quietly secured his discharge in October 1916. He later joked that these were his happiest years, since he need not be the “notorious Schoenberg”. In one of his 1930s notebooks, he recalled being asked if he was and answering, “Nobody wanted to be, someone had to be, so I let it be me.” He asserted emancipated dissonance’s historical and expressive necessity, and this anecdote may show his own sense of historical necessity.

Society for Private Musical Performances#

In March 1918, he moved to Mödling, near the Vienna Woods. That year, he founded the Society for Private Musical Performances in Red Vienna to present early 20th-century classical music unencumbered by limited rehearsals, unsympathetic conductors, unreceptive audiences, and hostile critics. The Society gave 353 performances, sometimes weekly, to paying members. Schoenberg barred his own works for the first year and a half. Concert programs featured works by Alexander Scriabin, Mahler, Max Reger, Berg, Claude Debussy, and Webern. The Society went defunct amid the Austrian hyperinflation.

Mattsee#

In summer 1920, after the Society’s third season, Schoenberg took his family to Mattsee, near Salzburg, where his brother was the mayor’s son-in-law, to work on Die Jakobsleiter. Resorts mostly welcomed paying guests despite rural antisemitism, but Mattsee posted a public notice demanding Jews leave immediately, an ominous precedent years before Hitler’s rise and Austria’s Nazification. Schoenberg, a Protestant convert proud of his Jewish heritage, was enraged. On June 30, the Neue Wiener Presse reported in “The Baptismal Certificate of the Composer”:

Twelve-tone principle#

He wrote Alma Mahler in July 1921 that he had been working on " s omething completely new!”. He added with irony, “the German Aryans who persecuted me in Mattsee will have this new thing (especially this one) to thank for the fact that even they will still be respected abroad for 100 years”, as “they belong to the very state that has just secured … hegemony in the field of music.” (In 1959, pupil Josef Rufer recalled him saying, “I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years”, but the precision of this quote has been disputed.) In 1923, Schoenberg announced the twelve-tone technique as a governing principle he was developing into his own compositional method. Berg, Webern, and pupil Hanns Eisler adopted it, and Roberto Gerhard began studying with him around this time. His earlier works still had to be assimilated before his new ones could be, as their “natural forerunners”, he wrote that year to arts patron Werner Reinhart, adding that he aimed more at continuing “properly-understood” tradition than at being a “bogey-man”. After Mathilde died in October 1923, he married Gertrud Kolisch (1898–1967, sister of his pupil, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch) in August 1924. They had three children: Nuria Dorothea (born 1932), Ronald Rudolf (born 1937), and Lawrence Adam (born 1941). Schoenberg used pitches G and E (German: Es, i.e., “S”) as a musical cryptogram (G ertrud S choenberg ) in the Suite for septet, Op. 29 (1925).

1925–1933: Weimar-era Berlin#

In 1925, during the Weimar Republic, Schoenberg was appointed to lead the composition master class at Berlin’s Prussian Academy of Arts when Ferruccio Busoni died in 1924. Due to health issues, Schoenberg couldn’t leave Vienna and start teaching there until 1926. His pupils then included Nikos Skalkottas (1927–1931) and Natalia Pravosudovich (from 1929; she wrote a memoir about her studies with him). Schoenberg later recalled that from 1922 to 1930, he felt a loss of influence over younger composers, who explored rapidly changing trends of the Golden Twenties: jazz-influenced styles, machine music, New Objectivity and (utility music), , and neoclassicism. Widespread opposition was unsettling, even if he saw his critics’ arguments as unconvincing. It left him feeling somewhat isolated and caused him to reflect on his artistic aims. He criticized Weimar-era culture for what he saw as sales-oriented, superficial popular culture, while nonetheless assimilating it. In Three Satires (1925–1926), he mocked the neoclassical style of Stravinsky (“Modernsky”) as pastiche (“Just like Papa Bach!”). In related essays, he criticized folklorist composers (likely Bartók) for applying complex methods to “naturally primitive music”, and “middle-road” composers (Ernst Krenek and maybe Berg) for writing triads in post-tonal music, framing these tendencies as a doctrinal betrayal. Krenek, a student of Schreker and Paul Bekker who had written atonal music and wanted to study with Schoenberg, began to stress music’s social potential. In 1927, he finished Jonny spielt auf (Jonny strikes up a tune ). An autobiographical (artist-opera), it became Weimar culture’s propotypical (opera of the time). It centers on Jonny, an African American jazz musician (originally portrayed in blackface) who triumphs over European traditions epitomized by the intellectual composer Max. In awe of the sublime, Max sings the opening line, “Du schöner Berg!” (You beautiful mountain). Krenek was likely satirizing Schoenberg. Schoenberg wrote but did not execute a reply to Krenek’s separate barbs about “an individual who … invents rules”. Instead, he and his second wife likely answered Krenek in their one-act comic twelve-tone Zeitoper, Von heute auf morgen (From Today to Tomorrow, 1928–1929), about what it means to be modern. She wrote the libretto under the pseudonym Max Blonda, perhaps after the role of Max in Krenek’s opera. The opening line, “Schön, war es dort!” (It was lovely there), may refer to the beautiful, even sacred mountains. (In the 1930s, Krenek returned to the fold, completing the first full-length twelve-tone opera, Karl V.)

1933–1934: Migration#

Schoenberg continued as professor until the Nazis seized power in 1933. While visiting France, he was warned that returning to Germany would be dangerous. He formally returned to Judaism at a Paris synagogue, viewing his heritage as ineluctable in opposition to Nazism. Though this return might seem sudden, he wrote Berg in October 1933, it was the result of an exceedingly long process. He and his family then migrated to the United States, though he considered England and the Soviet Union. His first teaching post was at the Malkin Conservatory (Boston University). After arriving on 31 October 1933, he adopted the spelling “Schoenberg” instead of “Schönberg”, calling it “deference to American practice”. In 1934, he applied for a harmony and theory position at the New South Wales State Conservatorium in Sydney. Vincent Plush found the application in the 1970s. It bore two notes with different handwriting: “Jewish” and “Modernist ideas and dangerous tendencies”, the latter marked E.B. (Edgar Bainton). Schoenberg also explored the idea of emigrating to New Zealand. His secretary and pupil Richard Hoffmann, nephew of his mother-in-law, Henriette Kolisch, lived there from 1935 to 1947. Since childhood, Schoenberg had been fascinated with islands, especially New Zealand, possibly due to its scenic postage stamps. He abandoned the idea as his health declined in 1944.

1934–1951: Los Angeles#

He moved to Los Angeles, where he taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, each of which later named facilities in his honor, including UCLA’s Schoenberg Music Building and USC’s Schoenberg Hall. He was appointed visiting professor at UCLA in 1935 on the recommendation of Otto Klemperer, music director and conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1936, he was promoted to professor, with a $5,100 annual salary. In 1937, he paid $18,000 for a Spanish Colonial home at 116 North Rockingham in Brentwood Park, near the UCLA campus. It was an idyllic, low-density suburb with a nearby park and neighboring horses, and he often enjoyed walks with his family, as he recalled taking in the Vienna Woods. Directly across was Shirley Temple’s house, where he befriended fellow composer (and tennis partner) George Gershwin. The Schoenbergs were able to employ domestic help and began holding Sunday afternoon gatherings that were known for excellent coffee and Viennese pastries. Frequent guests included Otto Klemperer (who studied composition privately with Schoenberg beginning in April 1936), Edgard Varèse, Joseph Achron, Louis Gruenberg, Ernst Toch, and, on occasion, well-known actors such as Harpo Marx and Peter Lorre. Composers Leonard Rosenman and George Tremblay and the Hollywood orchestrator Edward B. Powell studied with Schoenberg at this time. During this late period, he composed several notable works, including the difficult Violin Concerto, Op. 36 (1934/36), the Kol Nidre, Op. 39, for chorus and orchestra (1938), the Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41 (1942), the haunting Piano Concerto, Op. 42 (1942). Along with twelve-tone music, Schoenberg also returned to tonality with works during his last period, like the Suite for Strings in G major (1935), the Chamber Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 38 (begun in 1906, completed in 1939), the Variations on a Recitative in D minor, Op. 40 (1941). During this period his notable students included John Cage and Lou Harrison. In 1941, he became a U.S. citizen. He was the first composer in residence at the Music Academy of the West summer conservatory in Montecito, California. He was interested in Hopalong Cassidy films, which Paul Buhle and David Wagner (2002, v–vii) attribute to the films’ left-wing screenwriters, though Schoenberg had previously called himself a bourgeois turned monarchist. As the world learned of the Holocaust, he memorialized its victims in A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46 (1947).

Era: 20th Century
Lived: 1874–1951
From: Austria, United States, Austria–Hungary, Germany
Born in: Vienna · died Los Angeles
Known as: classical composer, painter, musicologist, music theorist, writer, conductor
Instruments: piano
Genres: 20th-century classical music, opera, atonality, serialism, classical music, Expressionism