- Person
- Arnold Schoenberg
- Lived
- 1874–1951
- Field
- Composition
- From
- Austrian-American
The story
Arnold Schoenberg had almost no formal training himself. Apart from counterpoint lessons with Alexander von Zemlinsky, he taught himself to compose, and in his twenties he earned a living orchestrating operettas. Yet he became one of the most influential teachers in the history of music.
In the autumn of 1904 he began taking private composition pupils in Vienna. Anton Webern, who had been gripped by Schoenberg's music while studying musicology at the university, may have been his first; Alban Berg arrived around the same time, and the two met as fellow students. Both had already written a great deal of music in a late Romantic style, but they felt Schoenberg gave them direction and discipline. The three became lifelong friends.
Under his guidance both developed into composers of the first rank. Berg went on to write the opera Wozzeck and a celebrated Violin Concerto, first performed in 1936. Webern created a compressed, crystalline style that composers such as Pierre Boulez championed after 1945. Together the three became known as the Second Viennese School, a name that set them in a line after Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, sometimes called the First Viennese School.
Schoenberg's teaching was never only about his own methods. As his textbooks show, it was highly traditional, insisting that students master harmony, counterpoint and the classical masters first. Scholars have argued that the Second Viennese School grew less from his twelve-tone system than from the influence of his creative example. Berg and Webern followed him into atonality and, each in his own way, into twelve-tone composition.
The circle widened over the years to include Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, Rudolf Kolisch, Eduard Steuermann, Roberto Gerhard, Nikos Skalkottas and Viktor Ullmann, and later pupils in Berlin and the United States. Through them, and through their own students, Schoenberg's teaching shaped musicians across Europe and America.
Why it matters
Through Berg, Webern and later students, Schoenberg's teaching shaped the course of twentieth-century music far beyond his own works.
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.
- In America Schoenberg taught John Cage and Lou HarrisonAfter fleeing Nazi Germany, Arnold Schoenberg taught in Los Angeles, becoming a UCLA professor in 1936; his students included John Cage and Lou Harrison.
- 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
- Second Viennese School Wikipedia
- Anton Webern Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.