{geni:occupation} Composer
{geni:about_me} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg

http://www.schoenberg.at

Arnold Schoenberg (pronounced [ˈaːɐ̯nɔlt ˈʃøːnbɛɐ̯k]; 13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. He used the spelling Schönberg until after his move to the United States in 1934 (Steinberg 1995, 463), whereupon he altered it to Schoenberg "in deference to American practice" (Foss 1951, 401), though one writer claims he made the change a year earlier (Ross 2007, 45).
Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, is among the major landmarks of 20th-century musical thought; at least three generations of composers in the European and American traditions have consciously extended his thinking or, in some cases, passionately reacted against it. During the rise of the Nazi Party in Austria, his music was labeled, alongside jazz, as degenerate art[citation needed].
Schoenberg was widely known early in his career for his success in simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify pioneering innovations in atonality that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century art music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, a widely influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation, and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.
Schoenberg was also a painter, an important music theorist, and an influential teacher of composition; his students included Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, and later John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, Leon Kirchner, and many other prominent musicians. Many of Schoenberg's practices, including the formalization of compositional method, and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically, are echoed in avant-garde musicalthought throughout the 20th century. His often polemical views of music history and aesthetics were crucial to many of the 20th century's significant musicologists and critics, including Theodor Adorno, Charles Rosen, and Carl Dahlhaus. His thought also had a considerable influence on the pianists Rudolf Serkin, Artur Schnabel, and Eduard Steuermann, and, later, Glenn Gould.
Schoenberg's archival legacy is collected at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna.
Contents [show]
[edit]Biography

Arnold Schoenberg was born into a lower middle-class Jewish family in the Leopoldstadt district (in earlier times a Jewish ghetto) of Vienna, at "Obere Donaustraße 5". His father Samuel, a native of Bratislava, was a shopkeeper. Although his mother Pauline, a native of Prague, was a piano teacher, Arnold was largely self-taught. He took only counterpoint lessons with the composer [http://www.geni.com/people/Alexander-von-Zemlinsky/6000000002802124818 '''Alexander von Zemlinsky'''], who was to become his first brother-in-law (Beaumont 2000, 87).
In his twenties, Schoenberg earned a living by orchestrating operettas, while composing his own works, such as the string sextet Verklärte Nacht ("Transfigured Night") (1899). He later made an orchestral version of this, which became one of his most popular pieces. Both Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler recognized Schoenberg's significance as a composer; Strauss when he encountered Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder, and Mahler after hearing several of Schoenberg'searly works.
Strauss turned to a more conservative idiom in his own work after 1909 and at that point dismissed Schoenberg. Mahler adopted him as a protégé and continued to support him even after Schoenberg's style reached a point which Mahlercould no longer understand; Mahler worried about who would look after him after his death. Schoenberg, who had initially despised and mocked Mahler's music, was converted by the "thunderbolt" of Mahler's Third Symphony, which heconsidered a work of genius. Afterward he "spoke of Mahler as a saint" (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 103; Schoenberg 1975, 136).
In 1898 Schoenberg converted to Lutheranism. He would remain Lutheran until 1933.
In October 1901, he married Mathilde Zemlinsky, the sister of the conductor and composer Alexander Zemlinsky, with whom Schoenberg had been studying since about 1894. Mathilde bore him two children, Gertrud (1902-1947) and Georg (1906-1974). Gertrud would marry Schoenberg's pupil Felix Greissle in 1921 (Neighbour 2001). During the summer of 1908, his wife Mathilde left him for several months for a young Austrian painter, Richard Gerstl. This period markeda distinct change in Schoenberg's work. It was during the absence of his wife that he composed "You lean against a silver-willow" (German: Du lehnest wider eine Silberweide), the thirteenth song in the cycle Das Buch der HängendenGärten, Op. 15, based on the collection of the same name by the German mystical poet Stefan George. This was the first composition without any reference at all to a key (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 96). Also in this year, he completed one of his most revolutionary compositions, the String Quartet No. 2, whose first two movements, though chromatic in color, use traditional key signatures, yet whose final two movements, also settings of George, daringly weaken thelinks with traditional tonality. Both movements end on tonic chords, and the work is not fully non-tonal. Breaking with previous string-quartet practice, it incorporates a soprano vocal line.

During the summer of 1910, Schoenberg wrote his ''Harmonielehre'' (''Theory of Harmony'', Schoenberg, 1922), which remains one of the most influential music-theory books. From about 1911, Schönberg belonged to a circle of artistsand intellectuals who included Lene Schneider-Kainer, Franz Werfel, Herwarth Walden and the latter's wife, Else Lasker-Schüler.

Another of his most important works from this atonal or pantonal period is the highly influential Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, of 1912, a novel cycle of expressionist songs set to a German translation of poems by the Belgian-French poet Albert Giraud. Utilizing the technique of Sprechstimme, or melodramatically spoken recitation, the work pairs a female vocalist with a small ensemble of five musicians. The ensemble, which is now commonly referred to as the Pierrot ensemble, consists of flute (doubling on piccolo), clarinet (doubling on bass clarinet), violin (doubling on viola), violoncello, speaker, and piano.

Wilhelm Bopp, director of the Vienna Conservatory from 1907, wanted a break from the stale environment personified for him by Robert Fuchs and Hermann Grädener. Having considered many candidates, he offered teaching positions to Schoenberg and [http://www.geni.com/people/Franz-Schreker/6000000009441293497 '''Franz Schreker'''] in 1912. At the time Schoenberg lived in Berlin. He was not completely cut off from the Vienna Conservatory, having taught a private theory course a year earlier. He seriously considered the offer, but he declined. Writing afterward to Alban Berg, he cited his "aversion to Vienna" as the main reason for his decision, while contemplating that it might have been the wrong one financially, but having made it he felt content. A couple of months later he wrote to Schreker suggesting that it might have been a bad idea for him as well to accept the teaching position (Hailey 1993, 55–57).

World War I brought a crisis in his development. Military service disrupted his life when at the age of 42 he was in the army. He was never able to work uninterrupted or over a period of time, and as a result he left many unfinished works and undeveloped "beginnings". On one occasion, a superior officer demanded to know if he was "this notorious Schoenberg, then"; Schoenberg replied: "Beg to report, sir, yes. Nobody wanted to be, someone had to be, so I let it be me" (Schoenberg 1975, 104) (according to Norman Lebrecht (2001), this is a reference to Schoenberg's apparent "destiny" as the "Emancipator of Dissonance").

Later, Schoenberg was to develop the most influential version of the dodecaphonic (also known as twelve-tone) method of composition, which in French and English was given the alternative name serialism by René Leibowitz and Humphrey Searle in 1947. This technique was taken up by many of his students, who constituted the so-called Second Viennese School. They included Anton Webern, Alban Berg and Hanns Eisler, all of whom were profoundly influenced by Schoenberg. He published a number of books, ranging from his famous ''Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony)'' to ''Fundamentals of Musical Composition'' (Schoenberg 1967), many of which are still in print and used by musicians and developing composers.

Schoenberg's grave is in the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna.

Schoenberg viewed his development as a natural progression, and he did not deprecate his earlier works when he ventured into serialism. In 1923 he wrote to the Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart: "For the present, it matters more to me if people understand my older works ... They are the natural forerunners of my later works, and only those who understand and comprehend these will be able to gain an understanding of the later works that goes beyond a fashionable bare minimum. I do not attach so much importance to being a musical bogey-man as to being a natural continuer of properly-understood good old tradition!" (Stein 1987, 100; quoted in Strimple 2005, 22).

Schoenberg's first wife died in October 1923, and in August of the next year he married Gertrud Kolisch (1898-1967), sister of his pupil, the violinist [http://www.geni.com/people/Rudolf-Kolisch/6000000002764344147 '''Rudolf Kolisch'''] (Neighbour 2001; Silverman 2010, 223). Gertrud wrote the libretto for Schoenberg's one-act opera ''Von heute auf morgen'' using the pseudonym Max Blonda. At her request Schoenberg's (ultimately unfinished) piece, ''Die Jakobsleiter'' was prepared for performance by Schoenberg's student Winfried Zillig. After her husband's death in 1951, she founded Belmont Music Publishers devoted to the publication of his works (Shoaf 1992, 64). Arnold used the notes G and E♭ (German: Es, i.e., "S") for "Gertrud Schoenberg", in the Suite, for septet, Op. 29 (1925) (MacDonald 2008, 216).

Following the 1924 death of composer Ferruccio Busoni, who had served as Director of a Master Class in Composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, Schoenberg was appointed to this post the next year, but because of health problems was unable to take up his post until 1926. Among his notable students during this period were the composers Roberto Gerhard, Nikos Skalkottas, and Josef Rufer.
Schoenberg continued in his post until the election of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in 1933. While vacationing in France, he was warned that returning to Germany would be dangerous. Schoenberg formally reclaimed membership in the Jewish religion at a Paris synagogue, then traveled with his family to the United States (Friedrich 1986, 31). His first teaching position in the United States was at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston. He moved to Los Angeles, wherehe taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, both of which later named a music building on their respective campuses Schoenberg Hall (UCLA Department of Music [2008]; University of Southern California Thornton School of Music [2008]). He settled in Brentwood Park, where he befriended fellow composer (and tennis partner) George Gershwin and began teaching at UCLA. He lived there the rest of his life. Composers Leonard Rosenman and George Tremblay studied with Schoenberg at this time.

During this final 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), and his memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46 (1947). He was unable to complete his opera Moses und Aron (1932/33), which was one of the first works of its genre to be written completely using dodecaphonic composition. In 1941, he became a citizen of the United States. During this period, his notable students included John Cage, Lou Harrison, and H. Owen Reed.

Schoenberg experienced triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13), which possibly began in 1908 with the composition of the thirteenth song of the song cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten Op. 15 (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 96). Mosesund Aron was originally spelled Moses und Aaron, but when he realised this contained 13 letters, he changed it. His superstitious nature may have triggered his death. According to friend Katia Mann, he feared he would die duringa year that was a multiple of 13 (quoted in Lebrecht 1985, 294). He dreaded his sixty-fifth birthday in 1939 so much that a friend asked the composer and astrologer Dane Rudhyar to prepare Schoenberg's horoscope. Rudhyar did thisand told Schoenberg that the year was dangerous, but not fatal.

But in 1950, on his seventy-sixth birthday, an astrologer wrote Schoenberg a note warning him that the year was a critical one: 7 + 6 = 13 (Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, quoted in Lebrecht 1985, 295). This stunned and depressed the composer, for up to that point he had only been wary of multiples of 13 and never considered adding the digits of his age. He died on Friday, 13 July 1951, shortly before midnight. Schoenberg had stayed in bed — sick, anxious and depressed all day. In a letter to Schoenberg's sister Ottilie, dated 4 August 1951, his wife Gertrud reported, "About a quarter to twelve I looked at the clock and said to myself: another quarter of an hour and then the worst is over.Then the doctor called me. Arnold's throat rattled twice, his heart gave a powerful beat and that was the end" (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 521). Gertrud Schoenberg reported the next day in a telegram to her sister-in-law Ottilie that Arnold died at 11:45 pm (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 520).

Music

Works and ideas. Schoenberg's significant compositions in the repertory of modern art music extend over a period of more than 50 years. Traditionally they are divided into three periods though this division is arguably arbitraryas the music in each of these periods is considerably varied. The idea that his twelve-tone period "represents a stylistically unified body of works is simply not supported by the musical evidence" (Haimo 1990, 4), and important musical characteristics—especially those related to motivic development—transcend these boundaries completely. The first of these periods, 1894–1907, is identified in the legacy of the high-Romantic composers of the late nineteenthcentury, as well as with "expressionist" movements in poetry and art. The second, 1908–1922, is typified by the abandonment of key centers, a move often described (though not by Schoenberg) as "free atonality". The third, from 1923 onward, commences with Schoenberg's invention of dodecaphonic, or "twelve-tone" compositional method. Schoenberg's most well-known students Hans Eisler, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, followed Schoenberg faithfully through eachof these intellectual and aesthetic transitions, though not without considerable experimentation and variety of approach.
Beginning with songs and string quartets written around the turn of the century, Schoenberg's concerns as a composer positioned him uniquely among his peers, in that his procedures exhibited characteristics of both Brahms and Wagner, who for most contemporary listeners, were considered polar opposites, representing mutually exclusive directions in the legacy of German music. Schoenberg's Six Songs, Op. 3 (1899–1903), for example, exhibit a conservative clarity of tonal organization typical of Brahms and Mahler, reflecting an interest in balanced phrases and an undisturbed hierarchy of key relationships. However, the songs also explore unusually bold incidental chromaticism, and seem to aspire to a Wagnerian "representational" approach to motivic identity. The synthesis of these approaches reaches an apex in his Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (1899), a programmatic work for string sextet that develops several distinctive "leitmotif"-like themes, each one eclipsing and subordinating the last. The only motivic elements that persist throughout the work are those that are perpetually dissolved, varied, and re-combined, in a technique, identifiedprimarily in Brahms's music, that Schoenberg called "developing variation". Schoenberg's procedures in the work are organized in two ways simultaneously; at once suggesting a Wagnerian narrative of motivic ideas, as well as a Brahmsian approach to motivic development and tonal cohesion.



Arnold Schoenberg second string quartet, fourth movement, played by the Carmel Quartet with soprano Rona Israel-Kolatt.
Schoenberg's music from 1908 onward experiments in a variety of ways with the absence of traditional keys or tonal centers. His first explicitly atonal piece was the second string quartet, Op. 10, with soprano. The last movement of this piece has no key signature, marking Schoenberg's formal divorce from diatonic harmonies. Other important works of the era include his song cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, Op. 15 (1908–1909), his Five Orchestral Pieces,Op. 16 (1909), the disturbing Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 (1912), as well as his dramatic Erwartung, Op. 17 (1909). The urgency of musical constructions lacking in tonal centers, or traditional dissonance-consonance relationships, however, can be traced as far back as his Kammersymphonie, Op. 9 (1906), a work remarkable for its tonal development of whole-tone and quartal harmony, and its initiation of dynamic and unusual ensemble relationships, involving dramatic interruption and unpredictable instrumental allegiances; many of these features would typify the timbre-oriented chamber music aesthetic of the coming century.


In Schoenberg's Piano Piece op.31 tone row form P1's second half has the same notes, in a different order, as the first half of I10: "Thus it is possible to employ P1 and I10 simultaneously and in parallel motion without causing note doubling."(Leeuw 2005, 154–55) Play (help·info)


Featuring hexachordal combinatoriality between its primary forms, P1 and I6, Schoenberg's Piano Piece op.33a tone row Play (help·info) contains three perfect fifths, which is the relation between P1 and I6, and a source of contrast between, "accumulations of 5ths," and, "generally more complex simultaneity" (Leeuw 2005, 155–57). For example group A consists of B♭-F-C-B♮ while the, "more blended," group B consists of A-F♯-C♯-D♯.
In the early 1920s he worked at evolving a means of order which would enable his musical texture to become simpler and clearer, and this resulted in the "method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another" (Schoenberg 1984, 218), in which the twelve pitches of the octave (unrealized compositionally) are regarded as equal, and no one note or tonality is given the emphasis it occupied in classical harmony. He regarded it as the equivalent in music of Albert Einstein's discoveries in physics. Schoenberg announced it characteristically, during a walk with his friend Josef Rufer, when he said, "I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of Germanmusic for the next hundred years" (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 277). This period included the Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (1928); Piano Pieces, Opp. 33a & b (1931), and the Piano Concerto, Op. 42 (1942). Contrary to his reputation for strictness, Schoenberg's use of the technique varied widely according to the demands of each individual composition. Thus the structure of his unfinished opera Moses und Aron is unlike that of his Fantasy for Violin and Piano,Op. 47 (1949).
Ten features of Schoenberg's mature twelve-tone practice are characteristic, interdependent, and interactive (Haimo 1990, 41):
Hexachordal inversional combinatoriality
Aggregates
Linear set presentation
Partitioning
Isomorphic partitioning
Invariants
Hexachordal levels
Harmony, "consistent with and derived from the properties of the referential set"
Metre, established through "pitch-relational characteristics"
Multidimensional set presentations
[edit]Controversies and polemics
Understanding of Schoenberg's twelve-tone work has been difficult to achieve owing in part to the "truly revolutionary nature" of his new system, misinformation disseminated by some early writers about the system's "rules" and "exceptions" which bear "little relation to the most significant features of Schoenberg's music", the composer's secretiveness, and the widespread unavailability of his sketches and manuscripts until the late 1970s. During his life,he was "subjected to a range of criticism and abuse that is shocking even in hindsight" (Haimo 1990, 2–3).
After some understandable early difficulties, Schoenberg began to win public acceptance, with works such as the tone poem Pelleas und Melisande at a Berlin performance in 1907. At the Vienna première of the Gurre-Lieder on 13 February 1913, he received an ovation that lasted a quarter of an hour and culminated with Schoenberg's being presented with a laurel crown (Rosen 1996, 4; Stuckenschmidt 1977, 184). Much of his work, however, was not well received. His Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E major Op. 9, premièred unremarkably in 1907; when it was played again, however, in a 31 March 1913 concert, which also included works by Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Alexander von Zemlinsky, thunderous applause contended with hisses and laughter during Webern's Six Pieces, Op. 6; though Zemlinsky's Four Maeterlinck Songs calmed the audience somewhat (according to a contemporary newspaper report), after Schoenberg's Op. 9 "onecould hear the shrill sound of door keys among the violent clapping, and in the second gallery the first fight of the evening began." Later in the concert, during a performance of the Altenberg Lieder by Berg, fighting broke outafter Schoenberg interrupted the performance to threaten removal by the police of any troublemakers (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 185). Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, which were to have concluded the concert, had to be canceled after a police officer was called in (Rosen 1996, 5). After this, Schoenberg's music made a break from tonality.
The deteriorating relation between contemporary composers and the public led him to found the Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen in German) in Vienna in 1918. He sought to providea forum in which modern musical compositions could be carefully prepared and rehearsed, and properly performed under conditions protected from the dictates of fashion and pressures of commerce. From its inception through 1921, when it ended because of economic reasons, the Society presented 353 performances to paid members, sometimes at the rate of one per week. During the first year and a half, Schoenberg did not allow any of his own works to be performed(Rosen 1975, 65). Instead, audiences at the Society's concerts heard difficult contemporary compositions by Scriabin, Debussy, Mahler, Webern, Berg, Reger, and other leading figures of early 20th-century music (Rosen 1996, 66).
Schoenberg's serial technique of composition with twelve notes became one of the most central and polemical issues among American and European musicians during the mid- to late-twentieth century. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing to the present day, composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Milton Babbitt have extended Schoenberg's legacy in increasingly radical directions. The major cities of the United States (e.g., Los Angeles, New York, and Boston) have had historically significant performances of Schoenberg's music, with advocates such as Babbitt in New York and the Franco-American conductor-pianist Jacques-Louis Monod. Schoenberg's students have been influential teachers at major American universities: Leonard Stein at USC, UCLA and CalArts; Richard Hoffmann at Oberlin; Patricia Carpenter at Columbia; and Leon Kirchner and Earl Kim at Harvard). Musicians associated with Schoenberg have had a profound influence upon contemporary music performance practice in the USA (e.g., Louis Krasner, Eugene Lehner and Rudolf Kolisch at the New England Conservatory of Music; Eduard Steuermann and Felix Galimir at the Juilliard School). In Europe, the work of Hans Keller, Luigi Rognoni, and René Leibowitz has had a measurable influence in spreading Schoenberg's musical legacy outside of Germany and Austria.
Schoenberg was not fond of Igor Stravinsky. In 1926 he wrote a poem titled "Der neue Klassizismus" (in which he derogates Neoclassicism and obliquely refers to Stravinsky as "Der kleine Modernsky"), which he used as text for the third of his Drei Satiren, Op. 28 (H. C. Schonberg 1970, 503).
[edit]Extramusical interests

Schoenberg was a painter of considerable ability, whose pictures were considered good enough to exhibit alongside those of Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 142). He was interested in Hopalong Cassidy films, which Paul Buhle and David Wagner (2002, v–vii) attribute to the films' left-wing screenwriters—a rather odd claim in light of Schoenberg's statement that he was a "bourgeois" turned monarchist (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 551–52).
[edit]Writings

1922. Harmonielehre, third edition. Vienna: Universal Edition. (Originally published 1911). Translation by Roy E. Carter, based on the third edition, as Theory of Harmony. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. ISBN 0-520-04945-4.
1959. Structural Functions of Harmony. Translated by Leonard Stein. London: Williams and Norgate Revised edition, New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company 1969. ISBN 0-393-00478-3.
1964a. Arnold Schoenberg Letters, selected and edited by Erwin Stein, translated from the original German by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. London: Faber. Paperback reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. ISBN 9780520060098.
1964b. Preliminary Exercises in Counterpoint. Edited with a foreword by Leonard Stein. New York, St. Martin's Press. Reprinted, Los Angeles: Belmont Music Publishers 2003.
1967. Fundamentals of Musical Composition. Edited by Gerald Strang, with an introduction by Leonard Stein. New York: St. Martin's Press. Reprinted 1985, London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0571092764
1975. Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Edited by Leonard Stein, with translations by Leo Black. New York: St. Martins Press; London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-520-05294-3. Expanded from the 1950 Philosophical Library (New York) publication edited by Dika Newlin. The volume carries the note "Several of the essays...were originally written in German (translated by Dika Newlin)" in both editions.
1979. Die Grundlagen der musikalischen Komposition. Ins Deutsche übertragen von Rudolf Kolisch; hrsg. von Rudolf Stephan. Vienna: Universal Edition (German translation of Fundamentals of Musical Composition).
1984. Style and Idea: Selected Writings, translated by Leo Black. Berkeley: California University Press.
[edit]Works

See also: List of compositions by Arnold Schoenberg
[edit]Quotations


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[edit]By Schoenberg
"My music is not lovely" (quoted by Theodor Adorno in his essay "Art and the Arts", 1966, reproduced in Clausen 2008, 387).
"My music is not modern, it is merely badly played" (Genette 1997, 102).
"My works are 12-tone compositions, not 12-tone compositions" (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 349).
"I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!" (Schoenberg 1975, 137)
"...if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art." (Schoenberg 1984, 124)
[edit]By others
Richard Strauss on Schoenberg, written by Schoenberg himself: "Dear Sir, I regret that I am unable to accept your invitation to write something for Richard Strauss's fiftieth birthday. In a letter to Frau Mahler (in connection with Mahler Memorial Fund) Herr Strauss wrote about me as follows: "The only person who can help poor Schoenberg now is a psychiatrist ...". "I think he'd do better to shovel snow instead of scribbling on music-paper...". (Schoenberg– letter to an unknown correspondent, Berlin, 22 April 1914) (Schoenberg 1964,[page needed])
"Non, ce n'est pas de la musique... c'est du laboratoire" (translation: "That isn't music … it's lab-work") (Maurice Ravel) (Mahler 1960,[page needed]).
[edit]See also

Biography portal
Arnold Schönberg Prize
[edit]References

Adorno, Theodor. 1967. Prisms, translated from the German by Samuel and Shierry Weber London: Spearman; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Anon. 2002. "Arnold Schönberg and His God". Vienna: Arnold Schönberg Center.(Accessed 1 December 2008)
Beaumont, Antony. 2000. Zemlinsky. London: Faber. ISBN 057116983X Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0801438035.
Buhle, Pal, and David Wagner. 2002. Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies. New York: The New Press. ISBN 1565848195
Clausen, Detlev (2008). Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674026186.
Friedrich, Otto. 1986. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's [sic]. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0060156260. Reprinted, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-20949-4.
Genette, Gérard. 1997. Immanence and Transcendence, translated by G. M. Goshgarian. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801482720.
Greissle-Schönberg, Arnold, and Nancy Bogen. [n.d.] Arnold Schönberg’s European Family (e-book). The Lark Ascending, Inc. (Accessed 2 May 2010)
Foss, Hubert. 1951. "Schoenberg, 1874–1951" Musical Times 92, no. 1 (September): 401–403.
Hailey, Christopher. 1993. Franz Schreker, 1878–1934: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521392556.
Haimo, Ethan. 1990. Schoenberg's Serial Odyssey: The Evolution of his Twelve-Tone Method, 1914–1928. Oxford [England]: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-3152-60-6.
Lebrecht, Norman. 1985. The Book of Musical Anecdotes. New York: Simon and Schuster; London: Sphere Books. ISBN 0029187109
Lebrecht, Norman. 2001. "Why We're Still Afraid of Schoenberg". The Lebrecht Weekly (8 July).
Leeuw, Ton de. 2005. Music of the Twentieth Century: A Study of Its Elements and Structure, translated from the Dutch by Stephen Taylor. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 9053567658. Translation of Muziek van de twintigste eeuw: een onderzoek naar haar elementen en structuur. Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1964. Third impression, Utrecht: Bohn, Scheltema & Holkema, 1977. ISBN 9031302449.
MacDonald, Malcolm. 2008. Schoenberg. The Master Musicians Series. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195172010.
Mahler, Alma. 1960. Mein Leben, with a foreword by Willy Haas. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.
Neighbour, O[liver] W. (2001), "Schoenberg [Schönberg], Arnold (Franz Walter)". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
Rosen, Charles. 1975. Arnold Schoenberg. New York: Viking Press. ISBN 0670133167 (pbk) ISBN 0670019860 (cloth). Reprinted 1996, with a new preface. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226726436
Ross, Alex. 2007. And the Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ISBN 9780374249397
Schonberg, Harold C. 1970. The Lives of the Great Composers. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0393021467 (Revised ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 1980. ISBN 0393013022 Third ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. ISBN 0393038572)
Schoenberg, Arnold. 1922. Harmonielehre, third edition. Vienna: Universal Edition. (Originally published 1911). Translation by Roy E. Carter, based on the third edition, as Theory of Harmony. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. ISBN 0-520-04945-4.
Schoenberg, Arnold. 1959. Structural Functions of Harmony. Translated by Leonard Stein. London: Williams and Norgate Revised edition, New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company 1969. ISBN 0-393-00478-3.
Schoenberg, Arnold. 1964. Arnold Schoenberg Letters, selected and edited by Erwin Stein, translated from the original German by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. London: Faber. Paperback reprint, Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1987. ISBN 9780520060098.
Schoenberg, Arnold. 1967. Fundamentals of Musical Composition. Edited by Gerald Strang, with an introduction by Leonard Stein. New York: St. Martin's Press. Reprinted 1985, London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0571092764
Schoenberg, Arnold. 1975. Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Edited by Leonard Stein, with translations by Leo Black. New York: St. Martins Press; London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 0-520-05294-3. Expanded from the 1950 Philosophical Library (New York) publication edited by Dika Newlin. The volume carries the note "Several of the essays...were originally written in German (translated by Dika Newlin)" in both editions.
Schoenberg, Arnold. 1984. Style and Idea: Selected Writings, translated by Leo Black. Berkeley: California University Press.
Steinberg, Michael. 1995. The Symphony: A Listener's Guide. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-506177-2 (cloth) ISBN 0-19-512665-3 (pbk)
Shoaf, R. Wayne. 1992. "Satellite Collections in the Archive of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute". Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 15, no. 1 (June): 9–110.
Silverman, Kenneth. 2010. Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage. ISBN 9781400044375.[Full citation needed]
Strimple, Nick. 2005. Choral Music in the Twentieth Century. Portland, Oregon & Cambridge, UK: Amadeus. ISBN 1574671227
Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. 1977. Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work. Translated from the German by Humphrey Searle. New York: Schirmer Books.
UCLA Department of Music. [2008]. "Facilities and Maintenance". (Accessed 1 December 2008)
University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. [2008]. "Performance Halls and Studios". (Accessed 1 December 2008)
Worldspace Radio. 2007. Maestro "Concert Hall Presentation". 13 July 2007; Featured piece.[citation needed]
[edit]Further reading

Auner, Joseph. 1993. A Schoenberg Reader. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-09540-6.
Boulez, Pierre. 1991. "Schoenberg is Dead" (1952). In his Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, collected and presented by Paule Thévenin, translated by Stephen Walsh, with an introduction by Robert Piencikowski, 209–14. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0193112108.
Brand, Julianne, Christopher Hailey, and Donald Harris (editors). 1987. The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected Letters. New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company. ISBN 0-393-01919-5.
Byron, Avior. 2006. "The Test Pressings of Schoenberg Conducting Pierrot lunaire: Sprechstimme Reconsidered". Music Theory Online 12, no. 1 (February). http://www.societymusictheory.org/mto/issues/mto.0....1.byron_frames.html
Everdell, William R.. 1998 The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Eybl, Martin. 2004. Die Befreiung des Augenblicks: Schönbergs Skandalkonzerte von 1907 und 1908: eine Dokumentation. Wiener Veröffentlichungen zur Musikgeschichte 4. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau. ISBN 3-205-77103-6.
Gur, Golan. 2009. "Arnold Schoenberg and the Ideology of Progress in Twentieth-Century Musical Thinking". Search: Journal for New Music and Culture 5 (Summer). Online journal (Accessed 17 October 2011).
Hyde, Martha M. 1982. Schoenberg's Twelve-Tone Harmony: The Suite Op. 29 and the Compositional Sketches. Studies in Musicology, series edited by George Buelow. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. ISBN 0-8357-1512-4.
Kandinsky, Wassily. 2000. "Arnold Schönberg als Maler/Arnold Schönberg as Painter". Journal of the Arnold Schönberg Center, no. 1:131–76.
Meyer, Esther da Costa. 2003. "Schoenberg's Echo: The Composer as Painter". In Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider, edited by Fred Wasserman and Esther da Costa Meyer, foreword by Joan Rosenbaum, preface by Christian Meyer.London and New York: Scala. ISBN 1-85759-312-X
Rollet, Philippe (ed.). 2010. Arnold Schönberg: Visions et regards, with a preface by Frédéric Chambert and Alain Mousseigne. Montreuil-sous-Bois: Liénart. ISBN 978-2-35906-028-7.
Shawn, Allen. 2002. Arnold Schoenberg's Journey. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-10590-1.
Weiss, Adolph. 1932. "The Lyceum of Schonberg", Modern Music 9, no. 3 (March–April): 99–107.
Wright, James K. 2007. Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. Bern: Verlag Peter Lang. ISBN 9783039112876.
Wright, James and Alan Gillmor (eds.). 2009. Schoenberg's Chamber Music, Schoenberg's World. New York: Pendragon Press. ISBN 9781576471302.
[edit]

Arnold Schönberg: My Evolution

(1949)

Of the seventy-five years of my life I have devoted almost ninety per cent to music. I began studying violin at the age of eight and almost immediately started composing. One might accordingly assume that I had acquired very earlya great skill in composing. My uncle Fritz, who was a poet, the father of Hans Nachod, had taught me French very early; there was not, as has happened in many child-prodigy-producing families, any music-enthusiast in mine. All mycompositions up to about my seventeenth year were no more than imitations of such music as I had been able to become acquainted with – violin duets and duet-arrangements of operas and the repertory of military bands that played in public parks. One must not forget that at this time printed music was extremely expensive, that there were not yet records or radios, and that Vienna had only one opera theatre and one yearly cycle of eight Philharmonic concerts. Only after I had met three young men of about my own age and had won their friendship did my musical and literary education start. The first was Oscar Adler, whose talent as a musician was as great as his capabilities in science. Through hirn I learned of the existence of a theory of music, and he directed my first steps therein. He also stimulated my interest in poetry and philosophy and all my acquaintance with classical music derived from playing quartets with hirn, for even then he was already an excellent first violinist. My second friend at that time was David Bach. A linguist, a philosopher, a connoisseur of literature, and a mathematician, he was also a good musician. Hegreatly influenced the development of my character by furnishing it with the ethical and moral power needed to withstand vulgarity and commonplace popularity. The third friend is the one to whom I owe most of my knowledge of the technique and the problems of composing: Alexander von Zemlinsky. I have always thought and still believe that he was a great composer. Maybe his time will come earlier than we think. One thing is beyond doubt, in my opinion: I donot know one composer after Wagner who could satisfy the demands of the theater with better musical substance than he. His ideas, his forms, his sonorities, and every turn of the music sprang directly from the action, from the scenery, and from the singer's voices with a naturalness and distinction of supreme quality. I had been a "Brahmsian" when I met Zemlinsky. His love embraced both Brahms and Wagner and soon thereafter I became an equally confirmed addict. No wonder that the music I composed at that time mirrored the influence of both these masters, to which a flavor of Liszt, Bruckner, and perhaps also Hugo Wolf was added. This is why in my Verklärte Nacht the thematic construction is based on Wagnerian "model and sequence" above a roving harmony on the one hand, and on Brahms' technique of developing variation – as I call it – on the other. Also to Brahms must be ascribed the imparity of measures, as, for instance, in measures 50–54, comprising five measures, or measures 320–327, comprising two and one-half measures. [...] True, at this time I had already become an admirer of Richard Strauss, but not yet of Gustav Mahler, whom I began to understand only much later, at a time when bis symphonic style could no longer exert its influence on me. But it is still possible that his strongly tonal structure and his more sustained harmony influenced me. Therewere not many unusual melodic progressions demanding clarification through the harmony in my work. Qualities of this kind may be found in my First String Quartet, Op. 7, and in the Six Songs with Orchestra, Op. 8, while the earlier symphonic poem Pelleas and Melisande suggests a more rapid advance in the direction of extended tonality. Here are many features that have contributed towards building up the style of my maturity, and many of the melodies contain extratonal intervals that demand extravagant movement of the harmony. [...] The climax of my first period is definitely reached in the Kammersymphonie, Op. 9. Here is established a very intimate reciprocation between melody andharmony, in that both connect remote relations of the tonality into a perfect unity, draw logical consequences from the problems they attempt to solve, and simultaneously make great progress in the direction of the emancipation ofthe dissonance. This progress is brought about here by the postponement of the resolution of "passing" dissonances to a remote point where, finally, the preceding harshness becomes justified. This is also the place to speak of the miraculous contributions of the sub-conscious. I am convinced that in the works of the great masters many miracles can be discovered, the extreme profundity and prophetic foresight of which seem superhuman. In all modesty, I will quote here one example from the Kammersymphonie. I have discussed it thoroughly in my lecture "Composition with Twelve Tones", solely in order to illustrate the power behind the human mind, which produces miracles for which we do not deserve credit. If there are composers capable of inventing themes on the basis of such a remote relationship, I am not one of them. However, a mind thoroughly trained in musical logic may function logically under any circumstances. Externally, coherence manifests itself through an intelligible application of the relationship and similarity inherent in musical configurations. What I believe, in fact, is that if one has done his duty with the utmost sincerity and has worked out everything as near to perfection as he is capable of doing, then the Almighty presents him with a gift, with additional features of beauty such as he never could have produced by bis talents alone. My Two Ballads, Op. 12, were the immediate predecessors of the Second String Quartet, Op. 10, which marks the transition to my second period. In this period I renounced a tonal center – a procedure incorrectly called "atonality". In the first and second movements there are many sections in which the individual parts proceed regardless of whether or not their meeting results in codified harmonies. Still, here, and also in the third and fourth movements, the keyis presented distinctly at all the main dividing-points of the formal organization. Yet the overwhelming multitude of dissonances cannot be counterbalanced any longer by occasional returns to such tonal triads as represent a key.lt seemed inadequate to force a movement into the Procrustean bed of a tonality without supporting it by harmonic progressions that pertain to it. This dilemma was my concern, and it should have occupied the minds of all my contemporaries also. That I was the first to venture the decisive step will not be considered universally a merit – a fact I regret but have to ignore. This first step occurred in the Two Songs, Op. 14, and thereafter in the Fifteen Songs of the Hanging Gardens and in the Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11. Most critics of this new style failed to investigate how far the ancient "eternal" laws of musical aesthetics were observed, spurned, or merely adjusted to changedcircumstances. Such superficiality brought about accusations of anarchy and revolution, whereas, on the contrary, this music was distinctly a product of evolution, and no more revolutionary than any other development in the history of music. In my Harmonielehre (1911), I maintained that the future would certainly prove that a centralizing power comparable to the gravitation exerted by the root is still operative in these pieces. In view of the fact that, for example, the laws of Bach's or Beethoven's structural procedures or of Wagner's harmony have not yet been established in a truly scientific manner, it is not surprising that no such attempt has been made with respect to "atonality". What a composer can contribute to the solution of this problem, even if his mind is capable of research, is not of much consequence; he is too much prejudiced by the intoxicating recollection of the inspiration that enforcedproduction. Nevertheless, just such psychological details might open an avenue of approach towards an explanation. I have mentioned before that the accompanying harmony came to my mind in a quasi-melodic manner, like broken chords. A melodic line, a voice part, or even a melody derives from horizontal projections of tonal relations. A chord results similarly from projections in the vertical direction. Dissonant tones in the melody, that is, tones of a more remote relationship to the occasional center, cause difficulties of comprehension. Such remotely related tones are likewise an obstacle to intelligibility. The main difference between harmony and melody line is that harmony requires faster analysis, because the tones appear simultaneously, while in a melodic line more time is granted to synthesis, because the tones appear successively, thus becoming more readily graspable by the intellect. In other words, melody, consisting of slowly unfolded progressions of tones, offers more time for comprehension of the relationships and logic than harmony, where analysis has to function many times as fast. This may be at least a psychologicalexplanation of the fact that an author who is not supported by traditional theory and, on the contrary, knows how distasteful his work will be to contemporaries, can feel an aesthetic satisfaction in writing this kind of music. One must not forget that – theory or no theory – a composer's only yardstick is his sense of balance and his belief in the infallibility of the logic of his musical thinking. Nevertheless, since I had been educated in the spirit ofthe classical schools, which provided one with the power of control over every step, in spite of my loosening of the shackles of obsolete aesthetics I did not cease to ask myself for the theoretical foundation of the freedom of my style. Coherence in classic compositions is based – broadly speaking – on the unifying qualities of such structural factors as rhythms, motifs, phrases, and the constant reference of all melody and harmony features to the centerof gravitation – the tonic. Renouncement of the unifying power of the tonic still leaves all the other factors in Operation. Usually when changes of style occur in the arts, a tendency can be observed to overemphasize the difference between the new and the old. Advice to followers is given in the form of exaggerated rules, originating from a distinct trend "pater le bourgeois", that is, "to amaze mediocrity". Fifty years later, the finest ears of the bestmusicians have difficulty in hearing those characteristics that the eyes of the average musicologist see so easily. Though I would not pretend that my piano piece Opus 11, No. 3, looks like a string quartet of Haydn, I have heardmany a good musician, when listening to Beethoven's Great Fugue, cry out: "This sounds like atonal music." I now find that some of the statements in my Harmonielehre are too strict, while others are superfluous. Intoxicated by the enthusiasm of having freed music from the shackles of tonality, I had thought to find further liberty of expression. In fact, I myself and my pupils Anton von Webern and Alban Berg, and even Alois Hába believed that now music could renounce motivic features and remain coherent and comprehensible nevertheless. True, new ways of building phrases and other structural elements had been discovered, and their mutual relationship, connection, and combination could be balanced by hitherto unknown means. New characters had emerged, new moods and more rapid changes of expression had been created, and new types of beginning, continuing, contrasting, repeating, and ending had come into use.Forty years have since proved that the psychological basis of all these changes was correct. Music without a constant reference to a tonic was comprehensible, could produce characters and moods, could provoke emotions, and was notdevoid of gaiety or humor. Time for a change had arrived. In 1915 I had sketched a symphony, the theme of the Scherzo of which accidentally consisted of twelve tones. Only two years later a further step in this direction was taken. I bad planned to build all the main themes of my unfinished oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter, out of the six tones of this row. [...] When I took the next step in this transition towards composition with twelve tones, I called it it"working with tones". This became more distinct in some of the piano pieces of Op. 23. [...] The closest approach happened in the Serenade, Op. 24, which, besides, already contains one really twelve-tone piece, the Sonett Nr. 217von Petrarca, the fourth movement. [...] Still closer to twelve-tone composition is the variation movement. Ist theme consists of 14 notes, because of the omission of one note, B, and the repetition of other notes. [...] Here, forthe first time, the "consequent" consists of a retrograde repetition of the "antecedent". The following variations use inversions and retrograde inversions, diminutions and augmentations, canons of various kinds, and rhythmic shifts to different beats – in other words, all the technical tools of the method are here, except the limitation to only twelve different tones. The method of composing with twelve tones substitutes for the order produced by permanent reference to tonal centres an order according to which, every unit of a piece being a derivative of the tonal relations in a basic set of twelve tones, the "Grundgestalt" is coherent because of this permanent reference to the basic set. Reference to this set offers also the justification of dissonant sounds. Contemporary music has taken advantage of my adventurous use of dissonances. Let us not forget that I came to this gradually, as a result of a convincing development which enabled me to establish the law of the emancipation of the dissonance, according to which the comprehensibility of the dissonance is considered as important as the comprehensibility of the consonance. Thusdissonances need not be a spicy addition to dull sounds. They are natural and logical outgrowths of an organism. And this organism lives as vitally in its phrases, rhythms, motifs and melodies as ever before. In the last few years I have been questioned as to whether certain of my compositions are "pure" twelve-tone, or twelve-tone at all. The fact is that I do not know. I am still more a composer than a theorist. When I compose, I try to forget all theories and I continue composing only after having freed my mind of them. lt seems to me urgent to warn my friends against orthodoxy. Composing with twelve tones is not nearly as forbidding and exclusive a method as is popularly believed. lt is primarily a method demanding logical order and organization, of which comprehensibility should be the main result. Whether certain of my compositions fail to be "pure" because of the surprising appearance of some consonant harmonies – surprising even to me – I cannot, as I have said, decide. But I am sure that a mind trained in musical logic will not fail even if it is not conscious of everything it does. Thus I hope that again an act of grace may come to my rescue, just as it did in the case of the Kammersymphonie, and unveil the coherence in this apparent discrepancy.


Arnold Schoenberg (pronounced [ˈaːʁnɔlt ˈʃøːnbɛʁk]; 13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian and later American composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. He used the spelling Schönberg until after his move to the United States in 1934 (Steinberg 1995, 463), whereupon he altered it to Schoenberg "in deference to American practice" (Foss 1951, 401), though one writer claims he made the change a year earlier (Ross 2007, 45).
Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, is among the major landmarks of 20th century musical thought; at least three generations of composers in the European and American traditions have consciously extended his thinking or, in some cases, passionately reacted against it. During the rise of the Nazi Party in Austria, his music was labeled, alongside jazz, as degenerate art.
Schoenberg was widely known early in his career for his success in simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify pioneering innovations in atonality that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century art music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, a widely influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation, and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.
Schoenberg was also a painter, an important music theorist, and an influential teacher of composition; his students included Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, and later John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, and many other prominent musicians. Many of Schoenberg's practices, including the formalization of compositional method, and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically, are echoed in avant-garde musical thought throughout the 20th century. His often polemical views of music history and aesthetics were crucial to many of the 20th century's significant musicologists and critics, including Theodor Adorno, Charles Rosen, and Carl Dahlhaus. His thought also had aconsiderable influence on the pianists Rudolf Serkin, Artur Schnabel, and Eduard Steuermann, and, later, Glenn Gould.
Schoenberg's archival legacy is collected at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna.
Contents [show]
[edit]Biography

Arnold Schoenberg was born into a lower middle-class Jewish family in the Leopoldstadt district (in earlier times a Jewish ghetto) of Vienna, at "Obere Donaustraße 5". His father Samuel, a native of Bratislava, was a shopkeeper. Although his mother Pauline, a native of Prague, was a piano teacher, Arnold was largely self-taught. He took only counterpoint lessons with the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, who was to become his first brother-in-law (Beaumont2000, 87).
In his twenties, Schoenberg earned a living by orchestrating operettas, while composing his own works, such as the string sextet Verklärte Nacht ("Transfigured Night") (1899). He later made an orchestral version of this, which became one of his most popular pieces. Both Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler recognized Schoenberg's significance as a composer; Strauss when he encountered Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder, and Mahler after hearing several of Schoenberg'searly works.
Strauss turned to a more conservative idiom in his own work after 1909 and at that point dismissed Schoenberg. Mahler adopted him as a protégé and continued to support him even after Schoenberg's style reached a point which Mahlercould no longer understand; Mahler worried about who would look after him after his death. Schoenberg, who had initially despised and mocked Mahler's music, was converted by the "thunderbolt" of Mahler's Third Symphony, which heconsidered a work of genius. Afterward he "spoke of Mahler as a saint" (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 103; Schoenberg 1975, 136).
In 1898 Schoenberg converted to Lutheranism. He would remain Lutheran until 1933.
During the summer of 1908, his wife Mathilde left him for several months for a young Austrian painter, Richard Gerstl. This period marked a distinct change in Schoenberg's work. It was during the absence of his wife that he composed "You lean against a silver-willow" (German: Du lehnest wider eine Silberweide), the thirteenth song in the cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, Op. 15, based on the collection of the same name by the German mystical poet StefanGeorge. This was the first composition without any reference at all to a key (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 96). Also in this year, he completed one of his most revolutionary compositions, the String Quartet No. 2, whose first two movements, though chromatic in color, use traditional key signatures, yet whose final two movements, also settings of George, daringly weaken the links with traditional tonality. Both movements end on tonic chords, and the work is not fully non-tonal. Breaking with previous string-quartet practice, it incorporates a soprano vocal line.
During the summer of 1910, Schoenberg wrote his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony, Schoenberg 1922), which remains one of the most influential music-theory books. From about 1911, Schönberg belonged to a circle of artists and intellectuals who included Lene Schneider-Kainer, Franz Werfel, Herwarth Walden and the latter's wife, Else Lasker-Schüler.
Another of his most important works from this atonal or pantonal period is the highly influential Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, of 1912, a novel cycle of expressionist songs set to a German translation of poems by the Belgian-French poet Albert Giraud. Utilizing the technique of Sprechstimme, or melodramatically spoken recitation, the work pairs a female vocalist with a small ensemble of five musicians. The ensemble, which is now commonly referred to as the Pierrot ensemble, consists of flute (doubling on piccolo), clarinet (doubling on bass clarinet), violin (doubling on viola), violoncello, speaker, and piano.
Wilhelm Bopp, director of the Vienna Conservatory from 1907, wanted a break from the stale environment personified for him by Robert Fuchs and Hermann Grädener. Having considered many candidates, he offered teaching positions to Schoenberg and Franz Schreker in 1912. At the time Schoenberg lived in Berlin. He was not completely cut off from the Vienna Conservatory, having taught a private theory course a year earlier. He seriously considered the offer, buthe declined. Writing afterward to Alban Berg, he cited his "aversion to Vienna" as the main reason for his decision, while contemplating that it might have been the wrong one financially, but having made it he felt content. A couple of months later he wrote to Schreker suggesting that it might have been a bad idea for him as well to accept the teaching position (Hailey 1993, 55–57).
World War I brought a crisis in his development. Military service disrupted his life when at the age of 42 he was in the army. He was never able to work uninterrupted or over a period of time, and as a result he left many unfinished works and undeveloped "beginnings". On one occasion, a superior officer demanded to know if he was "this notorious Schoenberg, then"; Schoenberg replied: "Beg to report, sir, yes. Nobody wanted to be, someone had to be, so I let it be me" (Schoenberg 1975, 104) (according to Norman Lebrecht (2001), this is a reference to Schoenberg's apparent "destiny" as the "Emancipator of Dissonance").
Later, Schoenberg was to develop the most influential version of the dodecaphonic (also known as twelve-tone) method of composition, which in French and English was given the alternative name serialism by René Leibowitz and Humphrey Searle in 1947. This technique was taken up by many of his students, who constituted the so-called Second Viennese School. They included Anton Webern, Alban Berg and Hanns Eisler, all of whom were profoundly influenced by Schoenberg. He published a number of books, ranging from his famous Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony) to Fundamentals of Musical Composition (Schoenberg 1967), many of which are still in print and used by musicians and developing composers.


Schoenberg's grave in the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna.
Schoenberg viewed his development as a natural progression, and he did not deprecate his earlier works when he ventured into serialism. In 1923 he wrote to the Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart: "For the present, it matters more to me if people understand my older works ... They are the natural forerunners of my later works, and only those who understand and comprehend these will be able to gain an understanding of the later works that goes beyond a fashionable bare minimum. I do not attach so much importance to being a musical bogey-man as to being a natural continuer of properly-understood good old tradition!" (Stein 1987, 100; quoted in Strimple 2005, 22)
Following the 1924 death of composer Ferruccio Busoni, who had served as Director of a Master Class in Composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, Schoenberg was appointed to this post the next year, but because of health problems was unable to take up his post until 1926. Among his notable students during this period were the composers Roberto Gerhard, Nikos Skalkottas, and Josef Rufer.
Schoenberg continued in his post until the election of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in 1933. While vacationing in France, he was warned that returning to Germany would be dangerous. Schoenberg formally reclaimed membership in the Jewish religion at a Paris synagogue, then traveled with his family to the United States (Friedrich 1986, 31). His first teaching position in the United States was at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston. He moved to Los Angeles, wherehe taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, both of which later named a music building on their respective campuses Schoenberg Hall (UCLA Department of Music [2008]; University of Southern California Thornton School of Music [2008]). He settled in Brentwood Park, where he befriended fellow composer (and tennis partner) George Gershwin and began teaching at UCLA. He lived there the rest of his life. Composers Leonard Rosenman and George Tremblay studied with Schoenberg at this time.
During this final 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), and his memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46 (1947). He was unable to complete his opera Moses und Aron (1932/33), which was one of the first works of its genre to be written completely using dodecaphonic composition. In 1941, he became a citizen of the United States. During this period, his notable students included John Cage, Lou Harrison, and H. Owen Reed.old Schoenberg that the year was dangerous, but not fatal..
[edit]Music

[edit]Works and ideas


Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke Op. 11, no. 1hmsian approach to motivic development and tonal cohesion.




Op. 47 (1949).