Schoenberg, Arnold

Schoenberg, Arnold (är`nôlt shön`bĕrkh), 1874–1951, Austrian composer, b. Vienna. Before he became a U.S. citizen in 1941 he spelled his name Schönberg. He revolutionized modern music by abandoning tonality and developing a twelve-tone, "serial" technique of composition (see serial music). Except for periods in Berlin (1901–3; 1911–18), he lived in Vienna until 1925. In 1918 he founded his famous private seminar in composition and the Society for Private Musical Performances, at which neither critics nor applause were allowed. Though he himself had little formal instruction in music, teaching was a major activity throughout his life. Among his many students the most noted were Alban Berg and Anton von Webern. He taught at the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin from 1925 to 1933, when he fled the Nazis, emigrated to the United States, and taught for a year at the Malkin Conservatory, Boston. He then went to Hollywood and was professor of music at the Univ. of Southern California (1935–36) and the Univ. of California at Los Angeles (1936–44).

In his early works—Verklärte Nacht (1899), a string sextet; Gurrelieder (1900–1), a cantata for chorus and orchestra; and Pelleas und Melisande (1902–3), a symphonic poem—Schoenberg expanded the chromatic style established by Wagner and Mahler. His later works are thinner in texture and highly contrapuntal. In 1908 in a set of piano pieces and the song cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, to poems of Stefan George, he completely abandoned tonality (see atonality). His use of Sprechstimme, halfway between song and speech, caused a sensation at the first performance in 1912 of the song cycle Pierrot Lunaire. The twelve-tone technique he devised, used to some extent in five piano pieces and a Serenade in 1923, was first employed throughout a work in the Suite for Piano (1924). Though he did not invent serial technique, he established it as an important organizational device in music. His other works include two chamber symphonies (1906; 1906–40) and Variations for Orchestra (1928); string quartets, a woodwind quintet (1924), and Suite for 7 Instruments (1926); a violin concerto (1936) and a piano concerto (1942); the monodrama Erwartung (1909) and an unfinished opera, Moses und Aron (1932–51; produced 1957), considered his masterpiece; Ode to Napoleon (1942), to Byron's poem, for male speaker, piano and strings; A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), for narrator, chorus and orchestra; and Fantasia (1949), for violin and piano.

Bibliography

See his Style and Idea (tr. 1951) and Structural Functions of Harmony (tr. 1954); biographies by H. H. Stuckenschmidt (tr. 1959), A. Payne (1968), and W. Reich (tr. 1971); studies by G. Perle (rev. ed. 1968), B. Boretz (1968), C. Rosen (1981), and A. Shawn (2002).

---

Schoenberg, Arnold (Franz Walter)

Arnold Schoenberg.

(credit: Pictorial Parade)

(born Sept. 13, 1874, Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire—died July 13, 1951, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.) Austrian-born U.S. composer. He was raised as a Catholic by his Jewish-born parents. He began studying violin at age eight and later taught himself cello. While working as a bank clerk, he studied composition with Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942); Schoenberg soon wrote his first string quartet (1897), which was acclaimed. With Richard Strauss's help he obtained a teaching post in Berlin, but he soon returned to Vienna, having composed his gigantic cantata Gurrelieder (1901, orchestrated 1913). In 1904 Alban Berg and Anton Webern began their studies with him, which would profoundly shape their later artistic careers. About 1906 Schoenberg came to believe that tonality had to be abandoned. During his subsequent period of “free atonality” (1907–16) he created remarkable works such as the monodrama Erwartung (1909), Five Orchestral Pieces (1909), and Pierrot lunaire (1912). From 1916 to 1923 he issued almost nothing, being occupied with teaching and conducting but also seeking a way to organize atonality. He eventually developed the 12-tone method (see serialism), in which each composition is formed from a special row or series of 12 different tones. In 1930 he began work on a three-act opera based on a single tone row; Moses und Aron remained unfinished at his death. The rise of Nazism moved him to reassert his Jewish faith and forced him to flee to the U.S., where he remained, teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles (1936–44). Though never embraced by a broad public, he may have exercised a greater influence on 20th-century music than any other composer.