Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg: The Man Who Dismantled the Key

He died on Friday, 13 July 1951, at 11:45 at night — fifteen minutes short of the fourteenth. Schoenberg had feared the number thirteen all his life, and his friend Katia Mann recorded that he expected to die in a year that was a multiple of it; he was seventy-six. The coincidence is the sort of thing an editor would strike from a novel. It is also almost the only neat detail in a life spent making music deliberately harder to listen to.

Leopoldstadt

He was born on 13 September 1874 in Vienna's Leopoldstadt, into a lower-middle-class Jewish household. His father Samuel kept a shoe shop and had come from Hungary; his mother Pauline came from a Prague Jewish family. There was no conservatory, no prodigy narrative, no institutional apprenticeship. Schoenberg was very largely self-taught, and the single significant exception was Alexander von Zemlinsky, with whom he began studying counterpoint around 1894.

The relationship became familial: he married Zemlinsky's sister Mathilde in October 1901, and they had two children before the marriage ended in 1923. In 1924 he married Gertrud Kolisch, sister of the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, and had three more.

Verklärte Nacht and the End of Tonality

The early Schoenberg is not the difficult one. *Verklärte Nacht* (1899), a string sextet, is late-Romantic music of unembarrassed lushness, and it is still the work of his that audiences reach for first. The vast *Gurre-Lieder* was drafted between 1900 and 1903 but not orchestrated until 1910–11; *Pelleas und Melisande* followed in 1902–03. What these works share is an attempt to hold Brahms and Wagner in the same hand — the German tradition's two supposedly incompatible halves — and the strain of doing so is audible.

Something had to give, and what gave was the key signature. The String Quartet No. 2 of 1907–08 adds a soprano in its later movements, and around her the music lets go of its tonal centre. It is one of the few thresholds in music history that a listener can hear being crossed.

Free Fall

The years from 1908 to roughly 1922 are the atonal, expressionist Schoenberg: no key, no system, nothing but the composer's ear as authority. *Das Buch der hängenden Gärten* (1908–09), the *Five Orchestral Pieces* (1909) and *Erwartung* (1909) all belong to it. So does *Pierrot lunaire* (1912), in which the voice neither speaks nor sings but occupies a notated middle ground Schoenberg called Sprechstimme. *Pierrot* is the period's most influential single artefact.

It was also unsustainable. Free atonality supplied no principle for organising music on a large scale, and *Die Jakobsleiter*, begun in 1914, was never finished. The road out took most of a decade.

The Method

What emerged at the end of it was a rule. In the twelve-tone method, all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale are arranged into an ordered row, and the row and its transformations — inversion, retrograde, retrograde inversion, transpositions — supply the entire pitch content of a piece. No note is privileged; there is no home. The Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna dates the formalisation to 1923 and the Wind Quintet, Op. 26; the Suite for Piano, Op. 25, of the same year is the other founding document. The Center describes the aim as a method "independent of traditional harmony" that "could match the heritage of musical traditions formed in the German-speaking cultural sphere."

That last phrase is the point, and Schoenberg made it himself with more swagger: "I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years." He did not think he was destroying the tradition. He thought he was rescuing it.

The mature twelve-tone works followed: the *Variations for Orchestra* (1926–28), the opera *Moses und Aron*, begun in 1923 and left unfinished at his death, the *Ode to Napoleon* and Piano Concerto of 1942, and *A Survivor from Warsaw* in 1947.

Berlin, Exile, Los Angeles

He taught at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin from 1925 until 1933, when the Nazi state made his position untenable. His response was characteristically unhedged: he formally returned to Judaism at a Paris synagogue in 1933, treating his inheritance as the thing to be defended rather than shed. He emigrated to the United States, altered the spelling of his name from Schönberg to Schoenberg in deference to American practice, taught at the University of Southern California and then UCLA from 1936 to 1944, and became a citizen in 1941.

*A Survivor from Warsaw*, written in 1947, is the work of a man who had spent a quarter-century being told his music was a foreign infection in German culture, and who answered in the strictest twelve-tone language with a memorial no listener has ever found abstract.

Why Arnold Is Called a Genius

The quality involved is unusually easy to name: Schoenberg reasoned his way through a problem in musical logic that everyone else could hear but no one else could solve. Chromatic harmony had been eroding tonality for half a century; Schoenberg was the one who followed the erosion to its conclusion, lived for fifteen years in the wreckage without a system, and then constructed one from first principles. That is theoretical work of a kind more common in mathematics than in music, and it was carried out by a man with no formal conservatory training at all.

He was also, in Britannica's judgment, "one of the most influential teachers of the 20th century." Berg, Webern and Hanns Eisler came out of his studio and formed with him the Second Viennese School; Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez built their careers on the ground he cleared.

The honest counter-case is substantial. Despite a century of institutional advocacy, Schoenberg's music has never found a general audience, and the twelve-tone method has been attacked as a rationalist scheme imposed on hearing rather than derived from it — a system that solves a compositional problem while creating a listening one. His own boast about German supremacy for a hundred years reads badly now in more than one direction. And his most loved work, *Verklärte Nacht*, is the one written before he became Schoenberg. He changed what composers thought music could be. Whether he changed what audiences hear is still unsettled.

Legacy

He died in Los Angeles on 13 July 1951, with *Moses und Aron* — begun in 1923 and worked at for the rest of his life — still unfinished.

The Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna now holds his manuscripts, documents and photographs and publishes the record of how the method was made. His influence runs through post-war serialism, through film scoring, through anyone who has written music without a key signature and not felt the need to explain. He remains, three-quarters of a century on, among the most invoked and least programmed composers in the repertoire.

Achievements

• Notable work: Erwartung
• Notable work: Coalition Chess
• Worked as classical composer, painter and musicologist