Arnold Schoenberg

EARLY LIFE

Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg was born in Vienna, Austria, on September 13, 1874.

Arnold came from a strict Jewish family who had moved to Austria from Hungary. He learned to play the violin as a child and later taught himself the cello.

CAREER

In his twenties, Schoenberg earned a living by orchestrating operettas, while composing his own works.

Schoenberg’s early works are mostly Late Romantic. His string sextet piece Verklärte Nacht ("Transfigured Night") can be played by six string instruments or by a whole orchestra and has very beautiful harmonies which go quickly from one key to another.

Almost entirely self-taught as a composer, Schoenberg modeled his work on the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. The two influences came together in Schoenberg's first two numbered string quartets (1905 and 1908) and in his first chamber symphony (1906).

Arnold Schönberg in Payerbach, 1903

Gradually Schoenberg’s music changed. It became so chromatic that it was no longer in any key at all. In 1909 Schoenberg produced his first atonal works -Three Piano Pieces, Five Orchestral Pieces, and a one-act opera Erwartung (Expectation). Pierrot Lunaire, 21 recitations with chamber accompaniment, followed in 1912.

Schoenberg conducted the Vienna Concert Society in a concert of expressionist music on March 31, 1913. It so shocked the audience that they began to riot.

Arnold Schoenberg is credited in 1923 with the invention of serialism, or 12-tone music, though it was used earlier by Charles Ives and others. The serial repetition of tones or other elements of music, serialism is atonal because there is no feeling of being in any key, due to the equal use of every pitch.

Schoenberg became preoccupied with serialism during the 1920s and 1930s. In this period he produced such serial works as his Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (1928), Piano Pieces, Opp. 33a & b (1931) and the first two acts of his masterpiece, the opera Moses und Aron.

Arnold Schoenberg, 1927, by Man Ray

In 1926 Schoenberg went to Berlin, to teach at the Prussian Academy of Arts. With the rise of the Nazi Party, Schoenberg's works were labelled degenerate music and because he was a Jew, he was dismissed in 1933.

Schoenberg went first to Paris and then moved to the United States, teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1936 to 1944.

In 1941, Schoenberg became a citizen of the United States.

The major serial works of Schoenbeg's last years are a violin concerto and the Fourth Quartet (both 1936), a piano concerto (1942), a string trio (1946), and the unfinished Moderner Psalm (1950).

In 1947 Schoenberg wrote A Survivor from Warsaw in commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

His Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony) (1911) was widely influential, as were several later musical theory textbooks

Arnold Schoenberg, Los Angeles, 1948

PERSONAL LIFE

In October 1901, Schoemberg married Mathilde Zemlinsky, the sister of the conductor and composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, with whom Schoenberg had been studying since about 1894.

He and Mathilde had two children, Gertrud (1902–1947) and Georg (1906–1974).

Mathilde died in October 1923, and in August of the next year Schoenberg married Gertrud Kolisch (1898–1967), sister of his pupil, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch

Gertrud wrote the libretto for Schoenberg's one-act opera Von heute auf morgen under the pseudonym Max Blonda.

Schoenberg was a painter of considerable ability, whose works were considered good enough to exhibit with other members of the expressionist Blue Rider group in 1912.

Arnold Schoenberg, self-portrait, 1910

In 1898 Schoenberg converted to Christianity in the Lutheran church. Thirty five years later, in 1933, after long thought, he returned to Judaism, because he realised that "his racial and religious heritage was inescapable, and to take up an unmistakable position on the side opposing Nazism. He would self-identify as a member of the Jewish religion later in life.

DEATH

Arnold Schoenberg suffered from Triskaidekaphobia, which is the fear of the number 13. As 7+6=13 he feared he would die aged 76. And he did: Schoenberg passed away in Los Angeles on Friday, July 13, 1951, at 13 minutes to midnight.

Schoenberg's ashes were later interred at the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna on June 6, 1974.