- Person
- Arnold Schoenberg
- Lived
- 1874–1951
- Field
- Composition
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
In 1933 the Nazi regime drove Arnold Schoenberg from his post as head of the composition master class at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. After formally returning to Judaism in Paris, he sailed for the United States, arriving on 31 October 1933. His first teaching job was at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston, and he adopted the spelling Schoenberg in deference to American practice. In 1934 he moved on to Los Angeles.
He taught first at the University of Southern California and then at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was appointed visiting professor in 1935 on the recommendation of the conductor Otto Klemperer. In 1936 he became a full professor, and he taught there until 1944. He became an American citizen in 1941, and both universities later named buildings in his honour: UCLA's Schoenberg Music Building and USC's Schoenberg Hall.
Among his students in California were John Cage and Lou Harrison, who became leading figures in American experimental music. Others included the film composer Leonard Rosenman, the composer George Tremblay and the Hollywood orchestrator Edward Powell, and Klemperer himself took private composition lessons from him. He was also the first composer in residence at the Music Academy of the West in Montecito.
Exile was also productive. In Los Angeles Schoenberg wrote the Violin Concerto, the Piano Concerto, the Ode to Napoleon, Kol Nidre and A Survivor from Warsaw, and he wrote new textbooks for his American students. His home in Brentwood hosted Sunday gatherings for émigré musicians such as Edgard Varèse and Ernst Toch, and George Gershwin became a friend and tennis partner.
His influence spread through his pupils. Leonard Stein, Richard Hoffmann, Patricia Carpenter, Earl Kim and Leon Kirchner went on to teach at USC, UCLA, Oberlin, Columbia and Harvard, passing his methods to new generations. Exile, which cost him so much, brought European modernism directly into American classrooms.
Why it matters
Schoenberg's teaching in Los Angeles helped seed a generation of American composers and made the US a centre of musical innovation.
About Arnold Schoenberg
Viennese composer who broke with traditional harmony, invented the twelve-tone method, and returned to Judaism in defiance of the Nazis, writing Moses und Aron and A Survivor from Warsaw.
More about Arnold Schoenberg
- Schoenberg's harmony textbook is still studiedArnold Schoenberg wrote his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony) in 1910, a teaching book that musicians still study more than a century later.
- Arnold Schoenberg created the twelve-tone methodIn 1923 Arnold Schoenberg announced his method of composing with twelve tones, a new way of organising music that shaped composition for half a century.
- Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire created a lasting ensembleSchoenberg's 1912 Pierrot lunaire, 21 poems for a half-sung reciter and five players, created the 'Pierrot ensemble' that composers still write for today.
- Schoenberg's society gave 353 performances of new musicIn 1918 Arnold Schoenberg founded Vienna's Society for Private Musical Performances, which gave 353 carefully rehearsed performances of new music for its members.
- Schoenberg taught Alban Berg and Anton WebernArnold Schoenberg's Vienna pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern became major composers in their own right, forming with him the Second Viennese School.
- Schoenberg's Transfigured Night became a beloved classicArnold Schoenberg's string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), written in 1899 when he was 25, remains one of the most performed works of its era.
- Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw honoured the murderedArnold Schoenberg's 1947 A Survivor from Warsaw, for narrator, men's chorus and orchestra, ends with prisoners singing the Shema as they face death.
- Schoenberg's Moses und Aron wrestled with an unseen GodArnold Schoenberg's opera Moses und Aron, composed 1930–32, dramatises the Jewish idea of a God who cannot be pictured, through the clash of two brothers.
Sources
- Arnold Schoenberg Wikipedia
- Arnold Schönberg Music and the Holocaust (World ORT)
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