Arnold Schönberg

Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna on 13 September 1874 into a modest Jewish family in the Leopoldstadt district. His father, a shoe merchant, died when he was fifteen, and Arnold had to leave school to work as a bank clerk. He learned violin at eight, then cello, and composed little duos and trios with friends. He had almost no formal musical training: he learned composition by reading an encyclopaedia, playing chamber music and studying the scores of Brahms and Wagner.

Around 1894 he met the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, who became his only real teacher, giving him counterpoint lessons, and his friend. In 1899 Schoenberg composed Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) for string sextet, after a poem by Richard Dehmel: a passionately Romantic work in the line of Wagner, rejected by a concert society because of a chord deemed “non-existent”. In 1901 he married Mathilde von Zemlinsky, his teacher’s sister.

To earn a living he orchestrated operettas and conducted the orchestra of a literary cabaret in Berlin, the Überbrettl. Back in Vienna in 1903, he began teaching composition. His pupils included Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who became great composers in their own right. Together they formed what came to be called the “Second Viennese School”. Mahler, then director of the Opera, supported Schoenberg, though he admitted he did not always understand his music.

Around 1908, in his String Quartet No. 2, Schoenberg took a decisive step: he abandoned tonality, the system of organising notes around a main note that had governed Western music for centuries. In his Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909) and the monodrama Erwartung (1909), all notes are of equal importance. This music is called “atonal”, a word he disliked. In 1912 he composed Pierrot lunaire, a cycle of twenty-one melodramas in which the voice uses Sprechgesang, a “speech-song” between speaking and singing.

His music caused scandals. On 31 March 1913 in Vienna a concert of his works and those of his pupils turned into a riot: the audience hissed, laughed and fought, and the police had to intervene; it became known as the “Skandalkonzert”. Schoenberg was also a painter: he produced many pictures, especially self-portraits and “visions”, exhibited with Kandinsky’s Blue Rider group. During the First World War he was called up for a few months in the Austrian army.

After several years of silence, in 1923 he presented his “method of composing with twelve tones”: the twelve notes of the chromatic scale are arranged in a “row”, which serves as the basis for the whole work and can be inverted or played backwards. The Suite for Piano Op. 25 is one of the first fully serial works. This method, twelve-tone composition, profoundly influenced twentieth-century music. In 1925 he became professor of composition at the Berlin Academy of Arts. He also began the opera Moses und Aron, which he never finished.

In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, he was dismissed from his post because he was Jewish. He emigrated to France, where he formally returned to Judaism, then to the United States. He taught in Boston and then in Los Angeles, at the University of California (UCLA) from 1936, where his pupils included John Cage. In 1947 he composed A Survivor from Warsaw, a harrowing testimony to the Holocaust. Superstitious and terrified of the number 13, he died in Los Angeles on Friday 13 July 1951, aged seventy-six (7 + 6 = 13), as he had feared.