Arnold Schoenberg

• Born: September 13, 1874
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Austria)
• Died: July 13, 1951
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Austrian-born composer and music theorist

Through his musical compositions and his advanced theories on atonal music and the twelve-tone technique, Schoenberg was a significant influence on the music of the twentieth century.

Area of achievement: Music

Early Life

Arnold Schoenberg(AHR-nuld SHURN-behrg) was born in Vienna on September 13, 1874, and was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family. His father kept a shoe shop, and neither one of his parents was musical. Schoenberg’s early training began with violin lessons, and he first composed violin duets. Although his friend, David Joseph Bach, gave him lessons in music, later Schoenberg was largely self-taught. He had to leave school early to work as a bank clerk; he studied music, philosophy, and literature on his own. While playing in an amateur orchestra, he befriended its conductor, Alexander von Zemlinsky, who became his teacher and a firm supporter of his music.

Life’s Work

In 1897, Schoenberg’s early string quartet received public performances in Vienna; his next compositions were more dissonant and rejected for performance or met with protests at performances. He supported himself by conducting choral societies and orchestrating operettas, while beginning work on his massive oratorio Gurrelieder (1913). He married Zemlinsky’s sister in 1901, and the couple moved to Berlin, where Schoenberg worked for a cabaret theater and later, upon the recommendation of the composer Richard Strauss, obtained a teaching position.

Schoenberg returned to Vienna in 1903 and resumed teaching, at first in classes and then privately. In 1904, he accepted two students, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, who would adopt and develop in their own compositions his theoretical ideas. Both were fiercely loyal supporters and advocates of him and of his music. At this time, Schoenberg and Zemlinsky formed a society for the performance of new music; Gustav Mahler was impressed by the string sextet, Verklärte Nacht (1899; Transfigured Night), and became Schoenberg’s supporter. The society performed his tone poem, Pelleas und Melisande (1903). Schoenberg’s compositions were becoming increasingly dissonant and demanding for the listener, and each new work was met by protest, by uproar, or by incomprehension from audiences.

In 1908, Schoenberg met the expressionist painters Oskar Kokoschka and Richard Gerstl and took up painting in an expressionistic style. Reflecting the expressionist style is Schoenberg’s one-act musical monodrama, Erwartung (1924; Expectation). The following year, he met the painter Wassily Kandinsky, who was interested in Schoenberg’s music and ideas, and Schoenberg contributed a musical composition and an essay to the art magazine Der blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). His musical compositions became highly dissonant, chromatic, and atonal. After failing to obtain a professorship in Vienna, he moved again to Berlin in 1911. He lectured and composed Pierrot lunaire(1912); his compositions, including Gurrelieder, began to be well received.

Schoenberg served brief periods of military service in World War I, but he was able to begin in 1944 Die Jakobsleiter (1961; Jacob’s Ladder), a large-scale biblical oratorio. Peace brought new opportunities for conducting and fresh interest in his music. After the war, he resumed teaching composition in Vienna. An outcome of his composition seminar was the foundation of the Verein für musikalische Privatauffürungen (Society for Private Musical Performances). Between 1919 and 1921, the society presented 117 concerts of well-prepared performances of 154 compositions of modern music to interested private audiences. In 1923, Schoenberg’s wife died, and the following year he married Gertrud, the sister of his pupil Rudolf Kolish, a violinist, who was an important performer of his chamber music.

From 1920 to 1923, Schoenberg advanced his theories and practice of atonality to their ultimate consequences, with his invention of serialism (the twelve-tone technique, or composing with a tone row). Schoenberg’s serial works, along with those of his pupils Webern, Berg, and others, comprise what is called the Second Viennese School.

In 1925, Schoenberg was invited to take over Ferruccio Busoni’s master class in composition at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. For seven years in this teaching position, he enjoyed the most financial security and the best living conditions of his life. He composed prolifically and had many performances of his early and his new compositions.

With the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, Schoenberg, who had been experiencing anti-Semitism personally and professionally toward his compositions since the 1920’s, lost his post in Berlin and in May fled with his family to France.

Schoenberg had converted to Lutheranism in 1898; although he did not remain a serious Christian, in his personal struggles on behalf of his artistic mission, religion had been a strong support. With the crisis caused by Nazi anti-Semitism and his exile from Germany, in Paris he formally returned to the Jewish faith on July 24, 1933. In the decades following, his artistic and his religious beliefs seemed to merge. He claimed a true artist must be dedicated to art with the idealism, duty, integrity, and spirituality of a priest approaching an altar. His sense of belonging to a Jewish tradition parallels his self-consciousness about his place in the Western musical tradition. Despite the fact that atonalism and serialism seem a complete break from Western music, Schoenberg believed he was continuing and extending its tradition.

Schoenberg’s arrival in the United States to take up a teaching position at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston was greeted enthusiastically in the U.S. press. His health suffered from the New England winters, and after two summer months at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, in September, 1934, he and his family moved to Los Angeles for the advantages of the climate.

Schoenberg soon attracted private students, and in 1935 and 1936 he lectured at the University of Southern California. In 1936, he became a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His situation at UCLA was not as rewarding as the one in Berlin. His students were not as musically advanced, and he found little audience for his music. In addition, the news from Europe, about the dangerous situation his friends and family who lived there were in, and his inability to help them caused him great anxiety. Responding to his renewed Jewish faith and the events of the war, he composed Kol nidre (1938), for speaker, chorus, and orchestra, intended for synagogue services.

In 1944, Schoenberg’s health went into serious decline. For many years he had suffered from asthma, and troubles with his eyes increased. On reaching age seventy in that year, he was forced to retire from UCLA. His pension was so small that he had to resume private teaching. He was invited to lecture at the University of Chicago in 1946.

He suffered a major heart attack in 1946 and, except for teaching at Santa Barbara in 1948, lived the remainder of his life as an invalid at home. With the events of World War II, Schoenberg took great interest in the creation of the state of Israel. In response to the Holocaust, he wrote A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), a work for narrator, men’s chorus, and orchestra.

He continued composing, mostly short religious works, and assembled his important collection of essays, Style and Idea (1950). He was able to see an increased interest in his music, and in 1947 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Four months before his death on July 13, 1951, he was elected honorary president of the Israel Academy of Music.

Significance

Schoenberg had a profound influence on the music of the twentieth century. From a late-Romantic style, he progressively freed his music from constraints of conventional melody, harmony, and tonality in his atonal compositions. His theory and practice of serialism (or twelve-tone technique), called the Second Viennese School, was a dominant international style of composition after World War II, although many composers and audiences rejected its repudiation of the familiar melody-based and harmony-based classical music. Even if serialism is a dated musical style, Schoenberg left a lasting legacy in his theoretical writings, in his textbooks, and in the example of his devotion to the highest artistic and spiritual ideals in music.

Bibliography

Brand, Juliane, and Christopher Hailey, eds. Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformation of Twentieth Century Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Leading scholars describe Schoenberg’s relationship to and impact on the arts and culture of the twentieth century.

Haimo, Ethan. Schoenberg’s Serial Odyssey: The Evolution of His Twelve-Tone Method, 1914-1928. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Clearly presents the evolution of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique and its use in compositions.

MacDonald, Malcolm. Schoenberg. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. A standard life and works, in which a biographical survey is followed by chapters on Schoenberg’s musical style and compositions.

Ringer, Alexander L. Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Jew. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. A series of essays exploring how Schoenberg’s Jewishness affected his music and thought.

Schoenberg, Arnold. Style and Idea. Edited by Leonard Stein. Enlarged ed. London: Faber, 1984. This collection of Schoenberg’s writings is essential for understanding the man, his ideas, and his music.

Stuckenschmidt, Hans H. Schoenberg: His Life, World, and Work. Translated by Humphrey Searle. London: Calder, 1977. The standard biography of Schoenberg with good attention to the cultural and historical background.