Arnold Schoenberg

Biography

The first of Schoenberg’s works to be performed in public was a String Quartet in D major, played in the Musikverein in Vienna on 20 December 1898. The composer was twenty-four, and he was then earning his living by orchestrating operettas.

He was born on 13 September 1874 in Leopoldstadt, the former Jewish ghetto of Vienna. His mother, Pauline Nachod, came from Prague and gave piano lessons; his father, Samuel Schoenberg, had moved to Vienna from Hungary by way of Pressburg and kept a small shop. Arnold took up the violin at eight and began to compose on his own, imitating what he played and heard. After his father’s death in 1889 he had to earn a living, and in January 1890 he left school for a bank. He studied counterpoint briefly with Alexander von Zemlinsky, whom he had met in an amateur orchestra where he played the cello. The rest he learned, by his own account, from the scores of Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Bach and Mozart. In 1898 he converted to Protestantism.

In October 1901 he married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde. From 1901 to 1903 the family lived in Berlin, where Schoenberg ran a composition class at the Stern Conservatory, and back in Vienna he began to give private lessons. That is how Alban Berg and Anton Webern came to him. To these years belong the string sextet “Verklärte Nacht” (“Transfigured Night”, 1899), after a poem by Richard Dehmel, which has remained one of his most performed works, and the symphonic poem “Pelleas und Melisande”. Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss took notice of him.

Around 1908 his style changes sharply. In the String Quartet No. 2 (1907–1908) a soprano enters in the last two movements, singing poems by Stefan George, and tonality all but dissolves. Next come the Five Pieces for Orchestra, the monodrama “Erwartung” and “Pierrot lunaire” (1912): twenty-one poems by Albert Giraud, a vocal delivery between speech and song, an ensemble of five players. In the summer of 1908 Mathilde left him for the painter Richard Gerstl; after she returned, Gerstl took his own life. In those same years Schoenberg painted most of his roughly sixty-five oil paintings, and in December 1911 his work was included in the exhibitions of the Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), the Munich-based group of expressionist painters. Look at his “Self-Portrait from Behind” (1911): to my mind, the face turned away says more about him here than a direct gaze would.

In 1911 he moved to Berlin, and in 1915 he returned to Vienna. He was called up and trained as an officer but never saw combat, and in October 1916, after petitions on his behalf, he was discharged. The Vienna premiere of the “Gurre-Lieder” in February 1913 ended in fifteen minutes of applause, while the “Skandalkonzert” of 31 March that year, where his Chamber Symphony was played beside works by Berg, Webern and Zemlinsky, broke up in brawls.

In 1918, having settled in Mödling, he founded the Society for Private Musical Performances. During its existence 353 performances were given, and for the first year and a half Schoenberg kept his own pieces off the programmes. In the summer of 1920 at Mattsee, where he had rented lodgings, the resort authorities demanded that Jews leave, and he had to go, although he was a Protestant. In 1921–1923 he formulated the method of composing with twelve interrelated tones. The first piece in which he tried it is said to be the Suite for Piano, Op. 25; according to other accounts, it is the Serenade, Op. 24. In 1923 Mathilde died, and in August 1924 he married Gertrud Kolisch, sister of the violinist Rudolf Kolisch; they had three children.

In 1925 he took over the composition master class at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. He had things to say against fashion, too: the “Three Satires” (1925–1926) mock neoclassicism, and in the one-act “Von heute auf morgen” (“From Today to Tomorrow”) he and his wife, who wrote the libretto under a pseudonym, answered an opera by Ernst Krenek. In spring 1933, after the Nazis came to power, he lost his post. In Paris, on 24 July 1933, he returned to Judaism. That autumn he emigrated to the United States, took a position at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston, and began to spell his name “Schoenberg”.

From 1934 he lived in Los Angeles, teaching at the University of Southern California and, from 1936, at the University of California, Los Angeles; in 1941 he became an American citizen. There he wrote the Violin Concerto, “Kol Nidre”, the Piano Concerto and “A Survivor from Warsaw” (1947). Among his American pupils were John Cage and Lou Harrison. The opera “Moses und Aron”, begun in the early 1930s, was left unfinished.

Schoenberg died in Los Angeles on 13 July 1951. Since childhood he had feared the number thirteen, and he died on Friday the 13th. His remains were transferred to the Central Cemetery in Vienna on 6 June 1974.