Arnold Schoenberg

• 1. Introduction

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  Arnold Schoenberg was born on the 13th of September 1874 at Obere Donaustraße 5 in Vienna's Leopoldstadt, a district that had historically served as a Jewish ghetto. He died on the 13th of July 1951, a Friday, shortly before midnight. That date was not coincidental to those who knew him. Schoenberg had spent years dreading the number thirteen, and an astrologer's last-minute warning about his seventy-sixth birthday, where the digits seven and six sum to thirteen, had left him stunned and depressed in his final months.

  In the decades between that birth in Leopoldstadt and that death in Los Angeles, Schoenberg transformed Western music so fundamentally that three generations of composers found themselves reckoning with what he had done. He arrived at twelve-tone technique by 1923, a method he described as composing with twelve tones related only to one another, and the reverberations reached Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Milton Babbitt. Yet one of the most persistent questions about Schoenberg is also one of the most uncomfortable: nearly a century and a half after his birth, his music has still not entered the standard repertoire. How did the man widely regarded as the most important composer of the twentieth century remain, in the words of one biographer, unloved by the public?

  The answers run through a Jewish ghetto in Vienna, an antisemitic resort near Salzburg, a pair of university campuses in Los Angeles, and a Friday night in July 1951 when a man lay in bed, sick and anxious, watching the clock.

• 2. Self-Taught in Leopoldstadt

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  Samuel Schoenberg, a shoe shopkeeper from Szécsény, Hungary, had made his way to Vienna via Pozsony before his son Arnold arrived. Arnold's mother Pauline Nachod came from a Prague family with roots in the Old New Synagogue. The household was lower-middle-class, and formal musical education was not available to the young Arnold in any sustained way.

  He began violin at eight and almost immediately began writing music by arranging and imitating what he played or heard, including military band repertoire. Juvenilia survive from as early as 1882, sometimes only as fragments. Among these early pieces are a birthday march and arrangements of Gustav Pick's Fiakerlied and Vincenzo Bellini's "Ite su colle". He went on to compose violin duets modeled after Ignaz Pleyel and Giovanni Battista Viotti, then advanced to string trios for two violins and viola, working without clear models.

  He began formal study of counterpoint only around 1894, with Alexander von Zemlinsky. The relationship proved lasting: Schoenberg married Zemlinsky's sister Mathilde in October 1901. In his twenties, he supported himself orchestrating operettas while composing his own music. The string sextet Verklärte Nacht, finished in 1899, drew on Richard Dehmel's poem of the same name and combined Brahmsian motivic development with Wagnerian narrative, a synthesis that placed Schoenberg unlike any of his contemporaries. It would later be arranged for full orchestra and become among his most popular works.

• 3. The String Quartet That Changed Everything

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  In 1907-1908, Schoenberg composed his String Quartet No. 2, dedicated "Meiner Frau", meaning my wife. At the same time, his wife Mathilde left him for the painter Richard Gerstl. She returned that November; Gerstl died by suicide after her return.

  The quartet carries that biographical weight beneath its surface. Schoenberg quoted the Viennese street song "O du lieber Augustin" in its opening movements, then traced a Symbolist ascent from ordinary life toward an exalted, otherworldly realm. The final two movements add a soprano voice setting Stefan George's poems "Litanei" and "Entrückung" from his collection Der Siebente Ring. Schoenberg had likely first encountered George's work in 1904 at the Ansorge Society, founded to unite poetry and music through recitation and performance, but obtained these particular poems from his composition pupil Karl Horwitz.

  The last poem opens with the line "I feel the air of other planets". As it unfolds, the "bright beloved shadow" is "extinguished in a deeper radiance", and the speaker sees the "trembling" ground below, "white and soft as whey". The music uses harmonies Schoenberg later described in his Harmonielehre as "schwebende", meaning fluctuating, and "aufgehoben", meaning suspended. The last movement has no key signature. Gustav Mahler, who had championed Schoenberg's earlier work, could not grasp this music and worried about who would carry on as Schoenberg's patron.

• 4. Pierrot and Expressionist Berlin

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  In 1912, an actress's agent sought a suitably unconventional composer for a cycle the actress had been touring since 1910: selections from Albert Giraud's Pierrot lunaire in Otto Erich Hartleben's expressionist German translation. The music she had commissioned, mainstream Romantic Lieder by a pupil of Heinrich Schenker, was, as pianist Eduard Steuermann recalled, "obviously not strong enough". The agent chose Schoenberg.

  Schoenberg identified personally with the figure of Pierrot, the moonstruck clown. "We are all such moonstruck Wursteln", he reflected in 1916, invoking Hanswurst, the Viennese comic analogue. 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 instrumentation he devised what became the standard Pierrot ensemble: flute or piccolo, clarinet or bass clarinet, violin or viola, cello, and piano. In the preface, he asked the reciter to use Sprechstimme, a speaking voice that realizes pitch only fleetingly.

  The wistful final poem has Pierrot reminiscing on an "ancient scent from fairy-tale times". Schoenberg evokes closure in E major, the key he had associated with spirituality and veneration since the Six Little Piano Pieces he wrote after attending Mahler's funeral in Grinzing in May 1911. Harold C. Schonberg later wrote that Pierrot lunaire inhabits "a ghostly, miniature, imagery-ridden world full of blood symbolism" and called it as seminal a work as Le Sacre du Printemps, Joyce's Ulysses, and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

• 5. The Twelve-Tone Discovery

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  In July 1921, Schoenberg wrote to Alma Mahler that he had been working on "something completely new!". He added, with characteristic irony, that the German Aryans who had persecuted him at Mattsee that summer would have this new thing to thank for the fact that even they would still be respected abroad for one hundred years, since "they belong to the very state that has just secured... hegemony in the field of music."

  The year before, Schoenberg had taken his family to Mattsee near Salzburg, where his brother was the mayor's son-in-law. The resort posted a public notice demanding Jews leave immediately. Schoenberg, a Protestant convert who remained fiercely proud of his Jewish heritage, was enraged. The Neue Wiener Presse reported that although he could prove he was a Protestant, he chose to leave rather than argue with the community council.

  By 1923, Schoenberg announced twelve-tone technique as a governing compositional principle: all twelve pitches of the octave are treated as equal, with no single note or tonality elevated above the others. Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and Hanns Eisler adopted it. Roberto Gerhard began studying with him around this time. In letters to arts patron Werner Reinhart, Schoenberg insisted that his earlier works had to be assimilated before his new ones could be understood as their "natural forerunners", and that he aimed more at continuing "properly-understood" tradition than at being a "bogey-man". He also used the system for private purposes: in the Suite for septet, Op. 29 of 1925, he encoded the pitches G and E, the German musical letter Es standing for S, as a cryptogram for his new wife Gertrud Kolisch, whom he had married in August 1924.

• 6. Exile and Los Angeles

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  While visiting France in 1933, Schoenberg was warned that returning to Germany would be dangerous. He formally returned to Judaism at a Paris synagogue. Though the public reaffirmation might have seemed sudden, he wrote Berg in October 1933 that it was the result of an exceedingly long process. He and his family then immigrated to the United States, arriving on the 31st of October 1933. He adopted the spelling "Schoenberg" instead of "Schönberg", calling it "deference to American practice".

  After a brief teaching post at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston, he moved to Los Angeles. He was appointed visiting professor at UCLA in 1935 on the recommendation of Otto Klemperer, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1936, he was promoted to professor at an annual salary of $5,100. He bought a Spanish Colonial home at 116 North Rockingham in Brentwood Park for $18,000 in 1937, living directly across from Shirley Temple's house and befriending fellow composer and tennis partner George Gershwin.

  Sunday afternoon gatherings became known for excellent coffee and Viennese pastries. Frequent guests included Klemperer, Edgard Varèse, and on occasion actors such as Harpo Marx and Peter Lorre. Among his students at this time were John Cage and Lou Harrison. In 1942, he wrote the Ode to Napoleon, a twelve-tone setting of Byron's poem that satirized fascist leaders and quoted both Beethoven's fate motif and "La Marseillaise", concluding with an E-flat-major triad. As the world learned of the Holocaust, he memorialized its victims in A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46, in 1947. He became a U.S. citizen in 1941.

• 7. Triskaidekaphobia and a Friday in July

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  Katia Mann, a friend of Schoenberg's, recalled that he feared he would die during a year that was a multiple of thirteen. This may have begun as early as 1908, when he composed the thirteenth song of Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten. He had dreaded his sixty-fifth birthday in 1939 so much that a friend asked the composer and astrologer Dane Rudhyar to prepare his horoscope. Rudhyar said the year was dangerous but not fatal.

  In 1950, on his seventy-sixth birthday, another astrologer sent him a note pointing out that seven plus six equals thirteen. This stunned and depressed him, because up to that point he had only feared multiples of thirteen, not the sum of his digits. He had not considered this possibility before.

  He died on Friday, the 13th of July 1951, shortly before midnight. He had stayed in bed all day, sick, anxious, and depressed. His wife Gertrud later explained in a letter to her sister-in-law Ottilie, dated the 4th of August 1951, that about a quarter to twelve she looked at the clock and told herself that in another quarter of an hour the worst would be over. Then the doctor called her. Arnold's throat rattled twice, his heart gave a powerful beat, and that was the end. He was fifteen minutes short of midnight. His ashes were later interred at the Vienna Central Cemetery on the 6th of June 1974.

• 8. A Legacy Without a Public

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  Schoenberg's pupils fanned out across universities and conservatories after his death. Richard Hoffmann taught at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Leonard Stein taught at UCLA, USC, and the California Institute of the Arts. Earl Kim and Leon Kirchner taught at Harvard University. Rudolf Kolisch, Eduard Steuermann, and Louis Krasner shaped performance practice at the New England Conservatory of Music and the Juilliard School. Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen extended his ideas in increasingly radical directions in Western Europe.

  Yet the public remained resistant. Christopher Small, writing in 1977, observed that many music lovers even then found difficulty with Schoenberg's music. Writer Stephen Walsh, in his 2018 biography of Claude Debussy, concluded that Schoenberg may be the first great composer in modern history whose music has not entered the repertoire almost a century and a half after his birth. Schoenberg himself had anticipated a different outcome. He expected audiences to grow accustomed to serial music the way they had grown accustomed to earlier unfamiliar styles. He looked forward, as one scholar put it, to a time when grocers' boys would whistle serial music in their rounds.

  The Arnold Schönberg Center now holds his archival legacy. His unfinished opera Moses und Aron, one of the first works of its genre written entirely in dodecaphonic composition, was prepared for performance by Winfried Zillig at Gertrud Schoenberg's request after his death. His wife also founded Belmont Music Publishers to ensure his works remained in print, and the Israel Conservatory and Academy of Music elected him honorary president in 1951, the year he died.