1874–1951 · Austria, United States · 20th century
Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was an Austrian and American composer, teacher and music theorist, one of the leading figures of musical expressionism. He created twelve-tone technique — a method of composing without the usual tonal centres — and led the Second Viennese School. For a player, this is a rare chance to hear what twentieth-century music sounds like without familiar keys.
Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg was born on 13 September 1874 in Vienna's Leopoldstadt district, once a Jewish ghetto. His mother, Pauline Nachod, who came from Prague, taught piano; his father, Samuel Schoenberg, kept a shop. Schoenberg had no systematic musical training and was essentially self-taught: even as a child he already tried composing on his own, imitating what he played or heard — including the repertoire of military bands. The only person from whom he took real lessons — in counterpoint — was his future brother-in-law Alexander von Zemlinsky; in 1901 Schoenberg married Zemlinsky's sister Mathilde.
From 1901 to 1903 Schoenberg lived in Berlin, teaching a composition class at the Stern Conservatory, and then returned to Vienna, where he taught at a music school. Among the first of his works heard in public was the String Quartet in D major, performed in Vienna in December 1898; in his twenties he earned a living orchestrating operettas while composing his own music in the tradition of late nineteenth-century German music — including the string sextet Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (1899).
The same tradition continued in the tone poem Pelleas und Melisande (1903), the oratorio Gurre-Lieder, and the First String Quartet (1905); Schoenberg's name began to become known, and composers such as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss recognised his music. From 1904 he began giving private lessons in harmony, counterpoint and composition, and in 1906 he wrote his First Chamber Symphony.
In the summer of 1908 Schoenberg's wife Mathilde left him for the painter Richard Gerstl; a few months later, after she returned to her husband and children, Gerstl took his own life. For Schoenberg this period coincided with a rethinking of his musical aesthetic: he wrote his first atonal works — the song "Du lehnest wider eine Silberweide", No. 13 in his cycle on poems by Stefan George, Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten (1907–1909), and the String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10 (1907–1908), whose final movement adds a soprano voice setting poems by the same poet. That same year, 1909, he also wrote Erwartung, and in the Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16, he applied for the first time his method of tone-colour melody (Klangfarbenmelodie).
Schoenberg completed his first major theoretical text, Harmonielehre, in the summer of 1910; it was published in 1911. In 1912 he wrote the vocal-instrumental cycle Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, on poems by Albert Giraud, using the technique of Sprechgesang — recitation halfway between speech and singing. In the 1910s his music was popular among Berlin's expressionists, and during these same years Schoenberg exhibited his own paintings alongside Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc at exhibitions of the Der Blaue Reiter group.
In the early 1920s Schoenberg formulated a principle of composition in which all twelve tones of the chromatic scale are used, related only to one another — twelve-tone technique; he first applied it in the Serenade, Op. 24, written between 1920 and 1923. This method proved the most influential for European and American classical music of the twentieth century. Until 1925 Schoenberg lived mainly in Vienna, after which he became a professor of composition in Berlin, at the Prussian Academy of Arts.
Throughout these years Schoenberg was actively teaching and trained a whole generation of composers — among them Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Ernst Krenek, Hanns Eisler and Roberto Gerhard; together they formed the circle known as the Second Viennese School. In 1935, by then in California, John Cage became his private pupil. Alongside composing, teaching and conducting, Schoenberg also wrote books, textbooks and articles on music theory.
In 1918, back in Vienna, Schoenberg set up a members-only concert series, the Society for Private Musical Performances, meant to let new, early-twentieth-century music be heard away from rushed rehearsals, unsympathetic conductors and hostile reviewers. It ran to 353 concerts in total, with programmes built around Mahler, Reger, Debussy, Berg and Webern, while Schoenberg kept his own pieces off the bill for its first eighteen months. Runaway inflation in Austria eventually brought the Society to an end.
In 1933, after the Nazis came to power, Schoenberg lost his post in Berlin and emigrated to the United States. There he taught first at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston, from 1935 at the University of Southern California, and from 1936 at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
One of the most significant projects of these years was the unfinished opera on a biblical subject, Moses und Aron, begun as early as the early 1930s. The entire opera is built on a single twelve-tone row: the part of Moses is not sung but declaimed using Sprechgesang, while the part of Aron is given to a tenor.
Mathilde, Schoenberg's first wife, died in October 1923. In August 1924 he married Gertrud Kolisch — the sister of his violinist pupil, Rudolf Kolisch; they had three children — Nuria, Ronald and Lawrence. Their daughter Nuria later, in 1955, became the wife of the composer Luigi Nono.
Schoenberg died on 13 July 1951 in California and was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery.
Schoenberg's career as a composer is usually divided into three periods: until 1908 his music grew out of late Romanticism — the traditions of Brahms and Wagner; then came years without a tonal centre, often called free atonality; and from the early 1920s, twelve-tone technique, a method in which a piece is built on twelve equal tones. This division is itself fairly arbitrary, since the music within each period is stylistically quite varied. What unites all three periods is a device Schoenberg called "developing variation", which he traced back to Brahms — the constant development and interweaving of motifs.
The scores for voice and piano published on dana-piano.kz come from Op. 15, a cycle of George settings called Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten — one of the pieces through which Schoenberg first began writing without a conventional key, between 1907 and 1909. Their difficulty on the site ranges from "Intermediate" to "Advanced", so it is worth starting with the simpler numbers and moving towards the harder ones.
Schoenberg first applied twelve-tone technique in the Serenade, Op. 24, and considered it a continuation of tradition rather than a break with it; the method became the most influential one for European and American classical music of the twentieth century. Among the pupils who each took up twelve-tone technique in their own way were Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Hanns Eisler — together with their teacher they formed the Second Viennese School. Besides music, Schoenberg painted and exhibited alongside Wassily Kandinsky in the Der Blaue Reiter group, and his treatise Harmonielehre, written in 1910 and published in 1911, was his first major theoretical work.
In his last, American years Schoenberg did not abandon twelve-tone technique, but at times returned to tonal music: in 1935 he wrote the Suite for Strings in G major, and in 1939 completed the Chamber Symphony No. 2 in E-flat minor, Op. 38, begun as far back as 1906.