Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian and American composer, teacher, musicologist, conductor, and writer. A leading figure in musical Expressionism, he founded the Second Viennese School and developed the twelve-tone method and serial technique.
He was born Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg in Vienna on September 13, 1874, into a Jewish family. His mother, Pauline Nachod, taught piano, while his father, Samuel Schoenberg, owned a shop. Largely self-taught as a musician, Arnold took lessons in counterpoint from his brother-in-law Alexander von Zemlinsky. He earned money arranging operettas while developing his own compositions.
Schoenberg’s first publicly performed work was the String Quartet in D major, composed in 1897 and performed at Vienna’s Musikverein in 1898. His early music drew on the German musical traditions of the late nineteenth century. Among the works from this period are Transfigured Night (1899), Pelleas and Melisande (1903), Gurre-Lieder (completed in its orchestral form in 1911), and his First String Quartet (1905). His First Chamber Symphony followed in 1906.
From 1901 to 1903, Schoenberg lived in Berlin and taught composition at the Stern Conservatory. After returning to Vienna, he taught at a music school and began giving private lessons in harmony, counterpoint, and composition. In 1908 he began writing atonal works. The Second String Quartet (1907–08), which adds a soprano voice in its final movement to poems by Stefan George, marked a major change in his style. In the Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909), he used a new approach he called Klangfarbenmelodie, or tone-color melody.
Schoenberg published his theoretical work Theory of Harmony in 1911. The next year he composed Pierrot Lunaire, a vocal and instrumental cycle that uses Sprechgesang, a form of vocal delivery between speech and singing. In the 1910s, his music was performed in Berlin among Expressionist artists and at gatherings of the literary New Club.
In the early 1920s, Schoenberg developed his method of composition with twelve related tones, later widely known as the twelve-tone method. He first experimented with it in the Serenade (1920–23). In 1925 he became professor of composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. His teaching shaped a generation of composers, including Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Ernst Krenek, Stefania Turkewich, Hanns Eisler, and Roberto Gerhard. John Cage became his private student in California in 1935.
From 1933, Schoenberg taught in the United States: first at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston, then at the University of Southern California from 1935 and the University of California, Los Angeles, from 1936. Alongside teaching and composing, he organized concerts, conducted performances, and wrote books, textbooks, theoretical studies, and articles. His later works include the Violin Concerto (1934–36), the Piano Concerto (1942), and the unfinished opera Moses and Aaron, begun in the early 1930s and built around a single twelve-tone series.
Schoenberg died in Los Angeles on July 13, 1951, aged 76, and was buried in Vienna’s Central Cemetery. The International Society for Contemporary Music named him an honorary member.