Arnold Schoenberg
“Somebody had to be, and nobody wanted to be, so I took it on.” — replying, during his military service, to the question of whether he was ‘that notorious Schoenberg’
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Those beside him ⏳🌊
- TeacherAlexander von Zemlinsky
Practically the only teacher he ever had, and the brother of his first wife, Mathilde, he remained a musical comrade for life.
- PatronRichard Strauss
In the Berlin years he arranged a stipend and a teaching post for him and suggested “Pelleas und Melisande” as a subject, but the two later drifted apart.
- PatronGustav Mahler
Though he admitted he did not fully understand the music, he defended it in public, and Harmonielehre was dedicated to him.
- PupilAlban Berg
He became a pupil in 1904 together with Webern, and with their teacher they formed the Second Viennese School.
- FriendshipWassily Kandinsky
A painter friend with whom he exchanged views on art by letter from 1911, though their relationship soured in 1923 over the question of antisemitism.
- FamilyGertrud Kolisch
His second wife, married in 1924, who wrote an opera libretto and shared his road into exile.
I. The autodidact of Leopoldstadt · 1874–1899 (age 0–25)
(Birth) He was born in September 1874 in Leopoldstadt, Vienna, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today’s Austria). His father, Samuel, a Jew from Hungary, kept a small shoe shop; his mother, Pauline Nachod, was a piano teacher from Prague. After him came a sister, Ottilie, and a brother, Heinrich, who would later become a bass singer. At eight he began learning the violin, and he first tried his hand at composition by writing duets modeled on the pieces he was learning. (Breadwinner) When his father died at the end of 1889, the sixteen-year-old left the Realschule and became an apprentice clerk at a bank. By day he balanced ledgers; by night he played chamber music with his friend Oskar Adler and picked up the rudiments of harmony. The cello he taught himself. When the bank failed in 1895 and he lost his job, he is said to have felt rather relieved, and from then on he made his living conducting workers’ choruses. (Zemlinsky) Nearly all the formal training he ever received amounted to a few months of counterpoint with Alexander von Zemlinsky, whom he met in the amateur orchestra “Polyhymnia.” Vienna at the time was split between Brahmsians and Wagnerians, but he studied both men deeply. His String Quartet in D major of 1897 stood in Brahms’s shadow, and that same year Brahms died. The following year he left Judaism and converted to Protestantism (Lutheranism). (Verklärte Nacht) In the autumn of 1899, while staying in Payerbach with Zemlinsky and his sister, he wrote the string sextet Verklärte Nacht, on a poem by Richard Dehmel, in just three weeks. It told of a man who accepts a woman carrying another man’s child, and at the time he was in love with Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde. The Vienna Tonkünstlerverein refused to perform the piece, because, as he later recalled, it contained a single chord not found in the textbooks.
In the summer when his love for Mathilde was ripening, he turned Dehmel’s poem of forgiveness and transformation into a single-movement chamber work. One rejected chord foreshadows the revolution to come.
- The piece unfolds in five sections, following the course of the poem in which two people walk through a moonlit wood. The opening, where viola and cello step slowly downward (descending), sounds like footsteps on the way to a heavy confession.
- Where the woman’s confession ends and the man replies, the music turns from a dark D minor to a warm D major. The broad singing line of the cello signals that change.
- The “chord not found in the textbooks” he gave as the reason for the rejection was an inverted ninth chord (a chord stacked up to the ninth above the root), with the ninth placed in the bass. Listen closely to the tense chords of the confession passage.
- The final section closes with high harmonics (the transparent sound made by lightly touching the string) and gentle broken chords (arpeggios), sounding like the moonlight of the “bright night” the poem speaks of.
- Originally written for six strings (violin·viola·cello, two of each), the piece appeared in versions for string orchestra in 1917 and 1943. Many listeners like to compare the tension of the chamber version with the richness of the orchestral one.
II. Cabaret and two patrons · 1900–1907 (age 26–33)
(Livelihood) In October 1901 he married Mathilde, and that December he moved to Berlin to conduct at Ernst von Wolzogen’s literary cabaret, the “Überbrettl.” Money was scarce, so he filled thousands of pages orchestrating other people’s operettas. In January 1902 his daughter Gertrud was born. Gurre-Lieder, the large-scale work he had begun in 1900, lay unfinished for years amid this life. (Strauss) The one who helped him in Berlin was Richard Strauss. Having seen the score of Gurre-Lieder, Strauss recommended him for the Liszt Stipend and arranged a teaching post at the Stern Conservatory. It was also Strauss who suggested Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande as a subject. Schoenberg made it his symphonic poem Op.5, unaware that Debussy’s opera of the same title had premiered in Paris that same year. (Pupils) In 1903 he returned to Vienna and lived by teaching. The next year Alban Berg and Anton Webern became his pupils. Rather than have students imitate his own style, he had them analyze the scores of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. The bond among the three lasted their whole lives and would later be called the “Second Viennese School.” In 1906 his son Georg was born. (Mahler) Gustav Mahler, director of the Vienna Court Opera, admitted that he did not fully understand Schoenberg’s music, yet he stood by him. When String Quartet No. 1, Op.7, and Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op.9, were met with jeers at their 1907 premieres, Mahler is said to have confronted the hecklers. The Chamber Symphony, which compresses a symphony into a single movement for fifteen solo instruments, was music in which the thread of tonality was stretched to its limit.
This is the piece whose premiere Mahler defended against a jeering audience. It distills the confidence of a period when he stretched the thread of tonality to its limit.
- Just after the start, the horn sounds a signal that leaps upward in fourths (rising fourths). Instead of ordinary chords built in thirds, chords stacked in fourths form the backbone of the whole piece.
- The four movements of a symphony (fast·scherzo·slow·finale) are compressed into one unbroken movement. Listen for where the quick, lively scherzo section and the slow section begin, and the structure comes into view.
- Each of the fifteen solo instruments moves like a protagonist, making the sound extremely dense. Among performers it is counted as a notoriously hard piece to balance.
- In 1935 he rearranged the piece for full orchestra (Op.9b). The sharp-edged transparency of the solo-ensemble version and the heft of the orchestral one are worth comparing.
III. The air of another planet · 1908–1913 (age 34–39)
(Crisis) In the summer of 1908, Mathilde left him for the young painter Richard Gerstl. Gerstl was a neighbor who had painted the couple’s portraits and was teaching Schoenberg to paint. Persuaded by Webern and others, Mathilde returned to her children, and Gerstl, left alone, took his own life that November at the age of twenty-five. (Quartet) String Quartet No. 2, Op.10, completed around this time, was dedicated to his wife. Into the second movement crept the folk song “O du lieber Augustin,” whose words end with “all is lost,” and in the final movement a soprano sings, in a poem by Stefan George, “I feel the air of another planet.” At the December premiere the hall was overrun with laughter and jeers. (Atonality) From then on he began to write without tonality. After The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Op.15, and Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op.16, he spent just seventeen days in 1909 writing Erwartung, Op.17, a monodrama for a woman who finds her lover’s body in a forest at night. In the same period he painted self-portraits that came to be called “Gazes.” In 1911 Kandinsky heard one of his concerts and wrote to him, beginning a friendship, and his paintings were hung in the “Blaue Reiter” exhibition as well. (Loss) Mahler is said to have helped the debt-ridden composer by quietly buying his paintings. When Mahler died in May 1911, Schoenberg set his memory of the funeral in the last of his little piano pieces, Op.19, and dedicated his Harmonielehre, published that year, to Mahler. In the autumn he moved to Berlin again, and in 1912, on a commission from the actress Albertine Zehme, he wrote Pierrot lunaire, Op.21. (Acclaim) The Vienna premiere of Gurre-Lieder in February 1913 brought the greatest ovation of his life, yet he is said to have bowed only to the performers, not to the audience. A month later a concert he conducted was halted when fistfights broke out in the hall during Berg’s songs.
Completed in 1908, when his household nearly fell apart, and dedicated to his wife. The moment of leaving the world of tonality is recorded within a single piece.
- In the middle of the second movement (scherzo), the tune of “O du lieber Augustin,” known to every Viennese, bursts out in twisted form. Because its original words end with “all is lost,” many hear in it the crisis of that summer.
- In the third and fourth movements a soprano enters to sing poems by Stefan George. Simply putting a voice into a string quartet was radical for its time.
- The fourth movement, “Entrückung,” opens with the line “I feel the air of another planet.” In the string introduction before it, no central note (tonic) can be felt, so the music sounds as though its feet have left the ground.
- Having drifted so, the music comes to rest at the end on an F♯ major chord. This moment, where a piece that leaves tonality closes in a key, sounds like a farewell to the old world.
He wrote it the year after moving to Berlin, on a commission from a cabaret performer. The cabaret sensibility he had absorbed in his Überbrettl days met the language of atonality.
- He divided 21 poems by Albert Giraud into three parts of seven each. He called the work “three times seven poems.”
- It is performed in Sprechstimme (speech-song), halfway between singing and speaking. The pitches are written in the score, but each must be abandoned the moment it is touched, so interpretations differ widely from singer to singer.
- Five players perform, switching between flute and piccolo, clarinet and bass clarinet, and violin and viola. This scoring later came to be called the “Pierrot ensemble” and became a standard lineup of contemporary chamber music.
- In No. 8, “Nacht,” the low instruments stubbornly repeat a short three-note motif. The darkness of the poem, in which giant black moths blot out the sunlight, becomes sound itself.
- No. 18, “Der Mondfleck,” is built as a palindrome (a structure symmetrical front to back), with the music running backward from its midpoint. It mirrors Pierrot spinning round and round, trying to brush a white spot off his back.
IV. Twelve tones after the silence · 1914–1925 (age 40–51)
(War) When the First World War broke out, he at first believed in the cause of the German-speaking world. He was called up twice, in 1915 and 1917, and an anecdote survives that when an officer asked whether he was that notorious Schoenberg, he replied, “Somebody had to be, and nobody else wanted to, so I took it on.” The oratorio “Die Jakobsleiter,” begun around this time, was never finished. He had not yet found the new order that could hold free atonality together. (The society) In 1918 he settled in Mödling, outside Vienna, and founded the ‘Society for Private Musical Performances.’ Critics were barred, applause and booing forbidden, and new works were thoroughly rehearsed and played several times. The programs ranged evenly across Mahler, Debussy, Reger, Bartók, Stravinsky and others, while his own pieces were, if anything, rare. Inflation forced the society to close in 1921. (Mattsee) In the summer of 1921, at the resort of Mattsee near Salzburg, he was told that Jews could not stay, and he had to leave. That he had converted more than 20 years earlier made no difference. In 1923, hearing that anti-Jewish sentiment ran through the Bauhaus, he sent Kandinsky a cutting letter and broke off the friendship. From this time on he became conscious of being, above all, a Jew. (12 tones) In the same period he refined a method of building an entire piece from a fixed order (a row) in which each of the twelve tones within the octave is used once. It was then that he told his pupil Josef Rufer he had discovered something that would ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years. The Suite for Piano, Op.25 was written in this method from beginning to end. In October 1923 Mathilde died after an illness, and the following year he married Gertrud, the sister of the violinist Rudolf Kolisch and twenty-four years his junior.
After a silent period of searching for a new order, this is the first work he completed in the 12-tone technique from beginning to end.
- Made up of prelude·gavotte·musette·intermezzo·minuet·gigue, it borrows the frame of the dance suite of Bach's day. The newest method, in effect, poured into the oldest form.
- Of the twelve-tone order (the row) that makes up the piece, the last four notes are B·C·A·B♭. In German note names, that is BACH (B-A-C-H) read backward.
- The “Musette” unfolds over a drone, a single note sounding continuously like the musette, a kind of bagpipe. Listen for the low note repeated as if pinned in place.
- With its dance rhythms alive, it is lighter than you might expect. Glenn Gould's sharp, springy playing and Maurizio Pollini's balanced reading are often compared.
V. From the academy to exile · 1926–1933 (age 52–59)
(The academy) In January 1926 he succeeded the late Ferruccio Busoni as head of the composition master class at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. The pay was generous, and he had to teach only half of each year. Pupils such as Nikos Skalkottas and Roberto Gerhard gathered from many countries. In this period, enjoying financial security for the first time, he wrote the Variations for Orchestra, Op.31; when Furtwängler gave its premiere in 1928, the Berlin audience answered with boos. (Opera) His wife Gertrud, under the pen name ‘Max Blonda,’ wrote the libretto for the 1-act comic opera “Von heute auf morgen.” A satire on a couple chasing fashion, it was the first opera written in the 12-tone technique. From 1930 he threw himself into “Moses und Aron.” The conflict between Moses, who holds fast to a God beyond words, and his eloquent brother Aron, who would convey that God in an image the people can see, echoed the composer's own anguish at feeling that his ideas could not reach the public. He wrote through Act 2 but never set Act 3 to music. From the autumn of 1931 into the following year he stayed in Barcelona, partly to treat his asthma, and his daughter was born there. (Exile) In March 1933, just after the Nazis took power, when the academy's president Max von Schillings announced at a meeting that Jewish influence would be eliminated, Schoenberg walked out. In May he left for Paris with his family, and in July he returned to Judaism at a Paris synagogue. One of the witnesses was the painter Marc Chagall. In October, having secured a post at a small conservatory in Boston, he crossed the Atlantic.
A major work from his years of stability at the Berlin academy, it is his first large-scale orchestral piece in the 12-tone technique. He inscribed Bach's name throughout.
- It consists of an introduction, a theme, nine variations and a finale. Once the introduction ends, the cellos quietly present the theme for the first time.
- In the introduction the trombone first sets out B♭-A-C-B, the BACH (B-A-C-H) figure. The figure returns far more distinctly in the finale.
- The instrumentation shifts sharply from variation to variation. Follow the contrast between variations where a few solo instruments converse as in chamber music and those where the full orchestra surges.
- The 1928 Berlin premiere caused an uproar. A few years later Schoenberg explained the piece himself in a radio talk, trying to win listeners over.
VI. The exile of Brentwood · 1934–1944 (age 60–70)
(The West) His health suffered during his first Boston winter, and in 1934 he moved to warmer Los Angeles. In 1935 he became a professor at the University of Southern California (USC), the next year at UCLA, and he bought a house in Brentwood. Two more sons were born in America, filling the house with three children. He loved tennis, and George Gershwin was a frequent partner; Gershwin even painted his portrait. In 1941 he became an American citizen. (The classroom) Teaching in halting English, he made his American students build up from the basics of harmony and counterpoint. John Cage was among his pupils. Cage later recalled that when he admitted he had no feeling for harmony, Schoenberg said he would always run into a wall, and Cage replied that he would spend his life beating his head against that wall. For his students he also wrote a tonal piece, the “Suite for String Orchestra.” (Anger) The important works of this period were the “Violin Concerto,” Op.36, dedicated to Webern, and String Quartet No. 4, Op.37. “Kol Nidre,” Op.39, set to the prayer for the Day of Atonement, and the “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte,” Op.41, which sets Byron's poem on a tyrant's fall and takes aim at Hitler, carry his faith and his anger at the news coming out of Europe. In 1937 he orchestrated Brahms's Piano Quartet No. 1; this was a man who left lectures and essays presenting Brahms not as a conservative but as a ‘progressive.’ (Retirement) In 1944, on turning seventy, he was obliged by UCLA rules to retire. Having served only 8 years, he received a pension of barely $30 a month, and his children were still young. The next year he applied to the Guggenheim Foundation for support to finish his incomplete works, but was turned down. He made his living from private lessons.
Completed in his Californian exile, it was dedicated to Webern, his pupil from Vienna. The bond with a Europe grown distant lingers in that dedication.
- It is fiendishly difficult for the soloist. Schoenberg is said to have remarked that he was delighted to add another ‘unplayable’ work to the repertoire and would wait until little fingers grew longer.
- At the opening of the 1st movement, the solo violin presents the theme in a mix of short, clipped notes and long, drawn-out ones. It is 12-tone music, yet if you follow the line of the melody, many passages sing like a Romantic concerto.
- The 2nd movement is gentle, as its marking ‘graceful andante (Andante grazioso)’ directs; the 3rd movement surges with march-like rhythms before leading into a long cadenza (a passage where the soloist alone displays virtuosity).
- It was premiered in 1940 by Louis Krasner, who had also premiered Berg's concerto, with Stokowski conducting. Today Hilary Hahn's recording (2008) is often cited as the performance that brought the piece back to attention.
VII. The thirteenth day · 1945–1951 (age 71–77)
(Loss) In September 1945, in an Austria where the war had ended, Webern was killed when an American soldier shot him by mistake. Berg had already died in 1935, so he had now lost both of his pupils from the Vienna years. In 1949 the city of Vienna made him an honorary citizen, but he never went back. (Heart) In August 1946 a severe heart attack stopped his pulse, and he was revived by an injection straight into the heart. Of the “String Trio,” Op.45, written soon after his recovery on a commission from Harvard University, he told his students that it held his illness and its treatment. Amid broken, tangled figures, a melody like a Viennese waltz glimmers through now and then. (Testimony) In 1947, on a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation, he wrote “A Survivor from Warsaw,” Op.46. He wrote the text himself, drawing on the testimony of those who had survived the ghetto. The same year, learning that Thomas Mann's novel “Doctor Faustus” had its protagonist invent the 12-tone technique, he protested vehemently, and Mann added a note at the end of later editions acknowledging the technique as Schoenberg's. (13) All his life he feared the number 13. He was conscious of having been born on the 13th, and in 1950, when he turned seventy-six, he is said to have grown even more anxious when someone pointed out that 7 and 6 add up to 13. On Friday, July 13, 1951, he died at his home in Los Angeles, a few minutes before midnight. His wife Gertrud reported that his last word was ‘harmony.’ His remains were moved to Vienna's Central Cemetery in 1974.
In the year after his heart stopped and started again, faced with news of the slaughter, he wrote a testimony in music barely 7 minutes long. His faith and anger after exile are condensed here at their briefest and most intense.
- It opens with a piercing trumpet signal like a reveille. The narrator begins the testimony with the words ‘I cannot remember everything.’
- The narration is in English, but the German sergeant's orders are shouted in German, and the final prayer is in Hebrew. The very mingling of three languages lays bare the violence of the situation.
- When the sergeant orders a count of the fallen, the voices calling out the numbers grow faster and faster. The text says it sounded ‘like a stampede of wild horses,’ and the orchestra surges just as hard.
- In the midst of it, the men's chorus sings the Hebrew prayer “Shema Yisrael (Hear, O Israel),” and the piece ends. At the 1948 premiere in Albuquerque, the audience called for it to be played again at once, and it was.
Lesser-known stories
(Strauss) Richard Strauss is remembered as a patron of the young Schoenberg, but the relationship did not last. In a 1913 letter to Alma Mahler about a grant from the Mahler Foundation, Strauss wrote that only a psychiatrist could help poor Schoenberg now, and that he would do better to shovel snow than scribble on manuscript paper. Hearing these words through Alma, Schoenberg kept his distance from Strauss thereafter. Unlike the widely known help of the Berlin years, this episode survives mainly in the letters and in testimony from Alma's circle. (Hollywood) In 1935, through the writer Salka Viertel, he met the MGM producer Irving Thalberg and was offered the score for the film “The Good Earth.” He asked for $50,000 along with the right to set even the pitch of the actors' lines, and the deal fell through. It was a time when musicians arriving from Europe made their living scoring Hollywood films, but he did not take that road. The episode is recorded in Viertel's memoir. (Inventions) He was also a deft inventor. In 1909 he designed a music typewriter and applied for a patent, and in the 1920s he devised ‘coalition chess,’ in which four players form two sides, and made the pieces himself. A tool for ruling staves, books he bound by hand and cards he drew himself also survive. These objects long remained at the Schoenberg Institute at the University of Southern California, and became widely known only after they moved to the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna in 1998.
Glossary 📚🔎
Tonality
(Literally) Joseong (調性) means ‘the nature (性) of jo (調)’, jo meaning ‘key.’ A key is the order formed by the note at the center of a piece and the notes around it. (In music) A system in which one note is made the center (the tonic) and the remaining notes are arranged so that they are drawn toward it. A piece in C major feels finished when it returns to ‘do’ at the end. When the last note of a song at karaoke sounds comfortable, as if it has come home, that is tonality at work. Schoenberg moved precisely toward doing away with this center.
Chromatic scale
(Literally) Baneumgye (半音階) means a ladder (階) of notes rising and falling by half steps (半音). (In music) Press the white and black keys of a piano in turn without skipping a single one, and an octave yields twelve notes. The chromatic scale uses all twelve of them. It is like climbing a staircase without missing a single step. After Wagner, as chromaticism came into wide use, the tonal center grew steadily blurrier, and Schoenberg followed it all the way to the end.
Atonality
(Literally) Mujo (無調) means ‘without key.’ (In music) Music with no tonic, so that no note is fixed as the ‘home to return to.’ Even when a tense chord (a dissonance) appears, it moves on without resolving into a restful one. Think of a game of tag with no one who is ‘it,’ where everyone runs about on equal footing. Schoenberg himself disliked the word atonal and proposed calling it ‘pantonality’ instead, meaning that it embraces every key.
12-tone technique
(In music) A method in which one fixes in advance an order (a row) that uses each of the octave’s twelve notes once, then builds an entire piece from that order and from its backward and upside-down forms. It gives the twelve notes equal rights, so that no single note becomes the center. It resembles a rule by which twelve classmates set a speaking order and no one may go twice before everyone has had a turn. Schoenberg systematized it in the early 1920s, and through Berg and Webern it exerted a great influence on 20th-century music.
Tone row
(Literally) Eumnyeol (音列) means notes (音) set out in a single line (列). In English it is called a tone row or series. (In music) In 12-tone technique, the order of twelve notes that serves as a piece’s material. Besides the prime form first chosen, one may use the retrograde, read from the end; the inversion, turned upside down; and the retrograde inversion, which combines the two; and all of these can be transposed to other pitches. Imagine punching in your phone passcode backward, or entering it with the gaps between the digits reversed in direction. (Elsewhere) Series commonly refers to a television serial or a set of books.
Sprechstimme
(Literally) The German Sprechstimme combines sprechen (‘to speak’) and Stimme (‘voice’), meaning ‘speaking voice.’ (In music) A vocal delivery somewhere between song and speech. The score notates pitch and rhythm, but rather than sustaining a note, the singer touches it and at once glides up or down as in speech. It is like the way your voice rises and falls almost in song when you read a storybook vividly to a younger sibling. It was first used in earnest in Pierrot lunaire, and how close to singing it should come still varies from singer to singer.
Canon
(Literally) Canon comes from the Greek for ‘rule’ or ‘measuring rod.’ The name arose because one voice imitates another according to a strict rule. (In music) A form in which one voice begins a melody and another, a little later, follows with the very same melody. In a round, when each singer takes up the tune of the one ahead a few beats late, that is a canon. Schoenberg was fond of intricate canons in which the following voice sings the melody inverted or backward. (Elsewhere) In English, canon refers to the officially recognized scriptures of a religion (the scriptural canon), and among fans of novels and films it also means ‘official lore.’