Arnold Schönberg was born to an
Ashkenazi Jewish family in the
Leopoldstadt district (in earlier times a Jewish
ghetto) in
Vienna, at
"Obere Donaustraße 5" Although his mother Pauline, a native of
Prague, was a
piano teacher (his father Samuel, a native of
Bratislava, was a
shopkeeper), Arnold was largely self-taught, taking only
counterpoint lessons with the composer
Alexander von Zemlinsky, who was to become his first brother-in-law (Beaumont 2000, 87). In his twenties, he lived by orchestrating
operettas while composing works such as the string sextet
Verklärte Nacht ("Transfigured Night") in
1899. He later made an
orchestral version of this, which has come to be 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's early works. Strauss turned to a more conservative idiom in his own work after 1909 and at that point dismissed Schoenberg, but Mahler adopted Schoenberg as a protégé and continued to support him even after Schoenberg's style reached a point which Mahler could no longer understand, and 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 3rd symphony, which he considered a work of genius, and afterwards "even spoke of Mahler as a saint" (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 103; Schoenberg 1975, 136). Despite his Jewish background, in 1898 he converted to
Lutheranism. He would remain Lutheran until 1933.
Schoenberg began teaching harmony, counterpoint and composition in 1904, using
Heinrich Bellermann's treatise
Der Contrapunkt as his text. His first students were
Paul Pisk, Anton Webern, and
Alban Berg; Webern and Berg would become the most famous of his many pupils.
The summer of 1908, during which his wife Mathilde left him for several months for a young Austrian painter,
Richard Gerstl (who committed
suicide after her return to her husband and children), 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, and the first piece 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, settings of poems by the German mystical poet
Stefan George, weaken the links with traditional tonality daringly (though both movements end on tonic chords, and the work is not yet fully non-tonal) and, breaking with previous string-quartet practice, incorporate a soprano vocal line.
During the summer of 1910, Schoenberg wrote his
Harmonielehre (
Theory of Harmony, Schoenberg 1922), which to this day remains one of the most influential music-theory books.
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 speak-singing recitation, the work pairs a female singer with a small ensemble of 5 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-singer, and
piano.
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 excelled as a teacher of music (teaching students such as
John Cage), partly through his method of engaging with, analyzing, and transmitting the methods of the great classical composers, especially
Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and
Brahms, partly through his focus on bringing out the musical and compositional individuality of his students. 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 still used by musicians and developing composers.
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 reasons was unable to take up his post until 1926. Anti-Semitic attacks in the
Zeitschrift für Musik swiftly ensued. 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, when he was dismissed and forced into exile. He emigrated to
Paris, where he reaffirmed his
Jewish faithhttp://www.schoenberg.at/4_exhibits/asc/gott_2002/asc_gott_e.htm and then to the
United States. His first teaching position in the United States was at the
Malkin Conservatory in Boston. He was then wooed to
Los Angeles, where he 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.
http://www.music.ucla.edu/Facilities/index.htmlhttp://www.usc.edu/schools/music/about/halls/index.html He settled in
Brentwood Park, where he befriended fellow composer (and tennis partner)
George Gershwin and began teaching at
University of California, Los Angeles, where he resided for the rest of his life.
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
naturalized citizen of the United States.
Schoenberg experienced
triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13), which possibly began in 1908 with the composition of op. 15, no. 13 (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 96).
Moses und 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 during a year that was a multiple of 13 (quoted in Lebrecht 1985, 294). He so dreaded his sixty-fifth birthday in 1939 that a friend asked the composer and
astrologer Dane Rudhyar to prepare Schoenberg's
horoscope. Rudhyar did this and told Schoenberg that the year was dangerous, but not fatal. But in 1950, on his seventy-sixth birthday, the Viennese musician and astrologer
Oskar Adler 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 became obsessed with this idea and many friends report that he frequently said: "If I can only pull through this year I shall be safe." On Friday, July 13, 1951, Schoenberg stayed in bed—sick, anxious and depressed. 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 11:45pm (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 520).
Arnold Schoenberg was grandfather of the lawyer
E. Randol Schoenberg. His daughter, Nuria Dorothea, married fellow composer
Luigi Nono in 1955.
