A self-taught boy from the Leopoldstadt
Arnold Schönberg was born on 13 September 1874 in the Leopoldstadt, the old Jewish quarter of Vienna, into a lower-middle-class Jewish family. His father, Samuel, kept a shoe shop and had come to Vienna from Szécsény in Hungary by way of Pressburg; his mother, Pauline Nachod, came from a Prague family belonging to the city’s ancient Old New Synagogue. He began the violin at eight and soon taught himself to compose by arranging and imitating whatever he played or heard, from military marches to operatic arias.
He had almost no formal training. Around 1894 he began studying counterpoint with the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, the closest thing he ever had to a teacher. In 1898, in keeping with a common pattern of assimilation among Viennese Jews, he converted to Lutheran Protestantism. It did not erase his sense of being a Jew, which sharpened as antisemitism around him grew.
Transfigured Night
In his twenties Schoenberg supported himself by orchestrating operettas while writing his own music. His string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night, 1899), inspired by a poem of Richard Dehmel, fused the lush chromaticism of Wagner with the tight motivic craftsmanship of Brahms; in its later version for string orchestra it remains one of his most loved works. In 1901 he married Zemlinsky’s sister, Mathilde, and they had two children. The huge cantata Gurre-Lieder and the tone poem Pelleas und Melisande won the attention of Richard Strauss and the devotion of Gustav Mahler, who became his champion.
Schoenberg was also a gifted teacher, and in Vienna he gathered around him pupils who would become composers of the first rank, above all Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Together they became known as the Second Viennese School.
The emancipation of dissonance
Between 1907 and 1909 Schoenberg crossed a line no major composer had crossed. In the last movements of his String Quartet No. 2, a soprano sings Stefan George’s words about feeling the air of other planets, and the music floats free of any home key. In the song cycle The Book of the Hanging Gardens, the Five Pieces for Orchestra and the nightmarish one-woman opera Erwartung, he abandoned tonality altogether, what critics called atonality, a word he disliked. He spoke instead of the emancipation of the dissonance: chords once heard as tension needing resolution could now stand on their own.
These were years of personal crisis too. In 1908 Mathilde left him for the painter Richard Gerstl, who killed himself after she returned. Schoenberg painted feverishly himself, producing most of his roughly sixty-five oil paintings, and exhibited with Kandinsky’s Blue Rider group. In 1912 came Pierrot lunaire, a cycle of twenty-one moonstruck poems for a reciter using Sprechstimme, half speech, half song, and five players. Its ensemble became a standard formation of modern music. Audiences were often hostile: at the so-called Skandalkonzert in Vienna on 31 March 1913, fights broke out and the police were called.
The twelve-tone method
After serving briefly in the Austrian army during the First World War, Schoenberg founded the Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna in 1918, which gave 353 carefully rehearsed performances of new music to paying members, free from hostile critics and under-rehearsed performances. Meanwhile he searched for a new principle to replace the organising power of tonality. By 1923 he had found it: the method of composing with twelve tones related only to one another.
In a twelve-tone piece the composer arranges all twelve notes of the chromatic scale into a fixed series, or row, and builds the whole work from that row and its mirror forms, upside down, backwards, and transposed, so that no note dominates as a key centre. Works such as the Variations for Orchestra (1928) and the Piano Pieces, Op. 33 showed what it could do. After Mathilde’s death in 1923 he married Gertrud Kolisch, sister of the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, in 1924; they had three children. In 1925 he was called to Berlin to succeed Ferruccio Busoni as head of a master class in composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts.
“I am a Jew”
Antisemitism repeatedly forced Schoenberg to confront who he was. In the early 1920s, while on summer holiday in the Austrian lakeside resort of Mattsee, he and his family were told that Jews were not welcome and had to prove they were not Jewish; although he was by then a Protestant, he chose to leave. The experience shook him. In 1923, when he heard that antisemitism was tolerated at the Bauhaus, he wrote to his friend Wassily Kandinsky that he had learned a lesson he would never forget: whatever else he was, he was a Jew.
Jewish themes now moved to the centre of his work. In the play Der biblische Weg (The Biblical Way, 1923–27) he imagined a temporary national home for the Jewish people. In the opera Moses und Aron, composed between 1930 and 1932, he set the confrontation between Moses, who grasps an unimaginable, unrepresentable God but cannot speak, and his eloquent brother Aaron, who can communicate only through images. The opera breaks off after its second act with Moses crying out that he lacks the word; Schoenberg never completed the third act.
Exile and return
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Schoenberg lost his post at the Prussian Academy as the new regime drove Jews out of public institutions. Warned while in France not to return to Germany, he went to Paris, and on 24 July 1933 he formally returned to Judaism there, in a ceremony witnessed by the painter Marc Chagall among others, an act of solidarity with his persecuted people. He told his pupil Webern that he had long since resolved to be a Jew and that he now considered work for the Jewish nation more important than his art. He drafted a political programme calling for unity among Jews and, in the 1930s, for an independent Jewish state.
He arrived in the United States on 31 October 1933, changed the spelling of his name to Schoenberg, and after teaching at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston moved to Los Angeles. He taught at the University of Southern California and then at UCLA, where he was professor from 1936 to 1944, became an American citizen in 1941, and played tennis with his neighbour George Gershwin. Among his American pupils were John Cage and Lou Harrison. In Germany his music was branded degenerate; the 1938 Degenerate Music exhibition in Düsseldorf used his circle as an example of the alleged Jewish spirit in music.
A Survivor from Warsaw
In California Schoenberg wrote some of his most powerful works, including the Violin Concerto, the Piano Concerto and the Ode to Napoleon (1942), a twelve-tone attack on tyranny set to Byron’s poem. In 1938, the year of Kristallnacht, he composed an English setting of the Yom Kippur prayer Kol Nidre for chorus and orchestra.
As the scale of the Holocaust became known, he wrote A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), a searing seven-minute work for narrator, men’s chorus and orchestra. The narrator recalls a group of Jewish prisoners beaten and counted off for the gas chambers; at the climax the men burst into the Shema Yisrael, the central declaration of Jewish faith, sung in Hebrew. In 1950 he set Psalm 130 in its original Hebrew and dedicated it to the State of Israel, and in April 1951 he accepted the honorary presidency of the Israel Academy of Music in Jerusalem, writing that those who issued from such an institution must be truly priests of art.
Friday the Thirteenth
Schoenberg had a lifelong fear of the number thirteen; he was born on the 13th and dreaded years that were multiples of it. In 1950, when he turned seventy-six, an astrologer warned him that the digits added up to thirteen. He died in Los Angeles on Friday, 13 July 1951, at about a quarter to midnight. Moses und Aron remained unfinished, as did the oratorio Die Jakobsleiter. In 1974 his ashes were brought back to Vienna and interred at the Central Cemetery.
He was a difficult, proud and combative man who felt misunderstood for most of his life, and yet his devotion to his students was legendary, and his textbooks on harmony and composition are still used. He saw himself not as a destroyer of tradition but as its heir, carrying the logic of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms to its next stage.
Legacy
Few composers have changed music as fundamentally. The twelve-tone method and the serialism that grew from it dominated advanced composition for decades after his death, shaping Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Milton Babbitt and generations of university composers. Thinkers from Theodor Adorno to Thomas Mann, whose novel Doktor Faustus borrowed his method for its fictional composer, wrestled with his ideas.
His music has never become popular in the way that of Mahler or Stravinsky has, and many listeners still find it difficult; critics continue to debate his legacy. But works such as Verklärte Nacht, Pierrot lunaire and A Survivor from Warsaw are performed worldwide, and his archive is preserved at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna. His journey, from assimilated convert to a composer who answered Nazism by declaring himself a Jew and setting the Shema at the heart of his memorial to the murdered, makes him one of the defining Jewish artists of the twentieth century.
Sources & further reading
Arnold Schoenberg, Wikipedia · Arnold Schoenberg, Milken Archive of Jewish Music · Arnold Schönberg, Music and the Holocaust (World ORT) · Document attesting Schoenberg’s return to Judaism, 24 July 1933, Wikimedia Commons · Arnold Schoenberg embraces his faith, Lapham’s Quarterly · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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