Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian and American modernist composer, music theorist, and teacher associated with developing variation, the emancipation of the dissonance, and twelve-tone composition. He taught composition in Vienna and at the Prussian Academy of Arts (1925–1933), resigning in anticipation of Nazi Germany's civil–service restrictions. He defiantly reaffirmed his Judaism before immigrating to the United States, where he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (1936–1944).
Early works like Verklärte Nacht (1899) and Gurre-Lieder (1900–1903, orch. 1910–1911) represented a synthesis of Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner, while Richard Strauss influenced Pelleas und Melisande (1902–1903). Schoenberg mentored Anton Webern and Alban Berg, among others tied to the Second Viennese School, and they began writing atonal, expressionist music. He visited extremes of emotion in his String Quartet No. 2 (1907–1908) and Erwartung (1909), and used word painting structurally in Herzgewächse (1911, published with his other works in Der Blaue Reiter Almanach in 1912) and Pierrot lunaire (1912). As opposition and antisemitism gradually deepened his sense of outsider, Jewish identity, he underwent a spiritual turn inspired partly by Gustav Mahler, began Die Jakobsleiter (planned from 1912), and sought a large-scale governing principle like tonality.
He arrived at twelve-tone technique by 1923 and structured works like Moses und Aron (planned from 1923) and the Variations for Orchestra (1926–1928) by extending the logic of developing variation to row-derived intervallic motives (or cells), sometimes in tonally suggestive ways and often organized through combinatorial hexachords. Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene (1929–1930) showed his interest in film, and the Chamber Symphony No. 2 (1939) his continued interest in tonal composition. With U.S. citizenship (1941) and U.S. entry into World War II, he satirized fascist leaders in his twelve-tone Ode to Napoleon (1942, after Byron), quoting Beethoven's fate motif alongside "" before concluding with an E-flat-major triad.
Post-war Vienna beckoned with honorary citizenship, but Schoenberg was ill, as depicted in his (1946). As the world learned of the Holocaust, he memorialized its victims in A Survivor from Warsaw (1947). The Israel Conservatory and Academy of Music elected him honorary president in 1951. His innovative music was influential and widely debated, shaping at least three generations of composers, including Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez. His aesthetic and music–historical views influenced musicologists Theodor W. Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus. The Arnold Schönberg Center collects his archival legacy.
Biography 1874–1894: Upbringing Arnold Schönberg was born on 13 September 1874 at Obere Donaustraße 5 in Vienna's Leopoldstadt (historically a Jewish ghetto), into a lower-middle-class Jewish family. His father, Samuel, a shoe shopkeeper from Szécsény, Hungary, had moved to Vienna via Pozsony (Pressburg; now Bratislava). His mother Pauline Nachod was from a Prague family belonging to the Old New Synagogue.
He began violin at eight and soon started teaching himself to write music by arranging and imitating what he played or heard, like military band repertoire, for informal performance. Juvenilia survive from as early as 1882, sometimes only as fragments or parts. They include a birthday march and arrangements of Gustav Pick's Fiakerlied and Vincenzo Bellini's "Ite su colle". He composed violin duets after Ignaz Pleyel and Giovanni Battista Viotti, and advanced to string trios (for two violins and viola) without clear models.
1894–1907: Early life and success
While largely self-taught, Schoenberg began studying counterpoint with Alexander von Zemlinsky around 1894. In 1898, he converted to Lutheran Christianity, in keeping with patterns of Jewish assimilation of the time. This did not displace his Jewish identity, which remained integral to his self-understanding amid rising antisemitism through the 1910s.
In his twenties he supported himself orchestrating operettas while composing his own music, like the string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night, 1899), which he later arranged for string orchestra and remains among his most popular works. It is program music inspired by the narrative of Richard Dehmel's poem by the same name. Schoenberg married Zemlinsky's sister Mathilde in October 1901. They lived in Berlin from 1901 to 1903 and had two children, Gertrud (1902–1947, who in 1921 married Schoenberg's pupil Felix Greissle) and Georg (1906–1974).
Early works won Gustav Mahler's favor, and Gurre-Lieder drew Richard Strauss's attention. Schoenberg, initially dismissive of Mahler, was converted by the "thunderbolt" of the Third Symphony, viewing it with devotion as a work of genius. After early setbacks, Schoenberg won some public acceptance in 1907 with the tone poem Pelleas und Melisande in Berlin, though much of his (and his pupils') music met hostility. The Chamber Symphony No. 1 premiered unremarkably in 1907.
1907–1911: Crises and breakthroughs
Habits fray In 1907–1908, Schoenberg composed his String Quartet No. 2, dedicated to "" (my wife). In the quartet, Schoenberg quotes the street song "" (Oh, dear Augustin) and traced a Symbolist ascent from ordinary life to an exalted, otherworldly realm. Its final two movements extend chromatic harmony toward atonality, which was emerging amid a wider historical shift. As in a choral symphony, they add soprano and set Stefan George's poems "" (Litany) and "" (Rapture) from (The Seventh Ring). Schoenberg likely first encountered George's work in 1904 at the (Ansorge Society), founded to unite poetry and music through recitation and performance, but obtained the poems from his composition pupil Karl Horwitz.
The final poem opens with the speaker's recognition, "I feel the air of other planets". As it unfolds, the "bright beloved shadow [shade]" is "extinguished in a deeper radiance". The speaker is dissolved into the cosmic harmony and sees the "trembling" ground below, "white and soft as whey". The music, inspired by the elusive "tone" Schoenberg described hearing in George's modern, hyperexpressive verse, uses harmonies he later described in Harmonielehre as "" (fluctuating) and "" (suspended). Mahler was unable to grasp this music and worried about who would carry on his patronage of Schoenberg.
Around the same time (c. 1908–1910), Schoenberg produced roughly two-thirds of his small painting output of about sixty-five oils.Kallir 1984, p. 40. His wife left him that summer for painter Richard Gerstl, who died by suicide after her return that November. During his wife's absence, Schoenberg also composed "" (You lean against a silver willow), the thirteenth song in the cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens, 1907–1909), based on the collection of the same name by George. This was perhaps his first composition without traditional reference to a key.
New ways In 1909, particularly with the third of the Three Piano Pieces and the fifth of the Five Pieces for Orchestra, Schoenberg composed with relative abandon, almost in the manner of stream of consciousness. Meanwhile, Strauss distanced himself, turning to a more conservative idiom after Elektra premiered in 1909.
Reflection
During the summer of 1910, Schoenberg wrote his Harmonielehre (Harmony study). That year, he met Edward Clark, an English music journalist working in Germany, who became his only English student. Clark later, as a BBC producer, helped introduce the music of Schoenberg and his pupils, and Schoenberg himself, to Britain.Forkert (2023), p. 144
In May 1911, Schoenberg and his pupils attended Mahler's funeral in Grinzing. The last of the Six Little Piano Pieces, from June 1911, echoes the death knell in veneration of the dead with bell-like funeral tolling. The harmonies reach toward resolution (as if) in E major, a key long associated with spirituality, but the melody only briefly touches this (key)note.
Bavaria In July, a neighbor's antisemitic abuse and aggression caused Schoenberg to quit work and take his family to stay with Zemlinsky on Lake Starnberg.; (Vienna was the "City of Songs by Murdered Artists", Schoenberg wrote Guido Adler.) Mathilde's brother was conducting operettas in nearby Munich. Schoenberg exchanged letters with Wassily Kandinsky before visiting him and other painters Gabriele Münter and Franz Marc in Murnau am Staffelsee.
1911–1915: Wilhelmine Berlin
Expressionist circles Clark helped Schoenberg, convinced of Vienna's fundamental hostility, move to Berlin in late September 1911.Forkert (2023), p. 144 Schoenberg settled at the Villa Lepke in Berlin–Zehlendorf in October. At the time, he belonged to a circle of artists and intellectuals including Herwarth Walden, founder of Der Sturm (The Storm), as well as poet and critic Else Lasker-Schüler, painter Lene Schneider-Kainer, and writer Franz Werfel. From December, his paintings also featured alongside those of Kandinsky and Marc in exhibitions of Der Blaue Reiter, which toured Germany. In addition, he quickly wrote Herzgewächse for inclusion in their almanac.
Pierrot as self In 1912, , actress 's agent, sought a suitably composer and chose Schoenberg. Since 1910, she had toured Germany performing selections from Albert Giraud's Pierrot lunaire: rondels bergamasques in Otto Erich Hartleben's expressionist translation as recitation songs. The music she commissioned, mainstream Romantic Lieder by Heinrich Schenker pupil Otto Vrieslander, proved "obviously not strong enough", pianist Eduard Steuermann recalled.
Girard's cycle is an allegory of his return to Parnassianism after the Decadent and Symbolist movements (or, perhaps, his attempt to infuse Parnassianism with elements of Symbolism). Schoenberg identified with Pierrot: "We are all [such] moonstruck []", he reflected in 1916, invoking Hanswurst, a Viennese analogue. He likely saw Girard's narrative as a cautionary tale against modernist excess or decadence:
He chose and reordered twenty-one poems equally into three sections, tracing Pierrot's inspiration and intoxication, descent into darkness, and journey home. For the music, he devised the now standard five-player Pierrot ensemble (flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin/viola, cello, and piano). In the preface, he asked the reciter, in (speaking voice), to realize pitch only fleetingly.
In an apparent epilogue suggesting that his experiences or the passage of time have made home irretrievable, Pierrot reminiscences on an "ancient scent from fairy-tale times". For this wistful ending, Schoenberg evokes closure in E major, as before in venerating Mahler, while melodically outlining a Viennese trichord. That year, he wrote an essay remembering Mahler, whom he called a saint,; and began receiving a stipend from the Mahler Foundation.
Also in 1912, Vienna Conservatory director offered posts to Schoenberg and Franz Schreker to renew what he saw as Robert Fuchs's and Hermann Graedener's stale milieu. Schoenberg declined that June, though he maintained local ties (and had taught a private theory course there the year before), citing his "aversion to Vienna" in a letter to Berg. He felt content despite some economic anxiety. It could have been bad for them both, he wrote Schreker two months later.
Recalibration