Arnold Schoenberg: Biography

• Overview
• Discography
• Biography
• Related Artists

• Alban Berg

• Richard Wagner
• Gustav Mahler

• Milton Babbitt
• Luigi Nono
• Richie Beirach
• Hanns Eisler
• Lou Harrison
• Isang Yun
• Roger Sessions

Born:

Dec 31, 1969 in Austria

Died:

Jul 13, 1951 in Los Angeles, CA

Genres:

Music, Classical Music, Modern Classical Music

Decades Active:

1910's|1920's|1930's|1940's

Artistic Quality

High

Cultural Impact

High

Ratings Guide

Decades after his death, Arnold Schoenberg remains one of the most controversial figures in the history of music. From the final years of the nineteenth century to the period following the World War II, Schoenberg produced music of great stylistic diversity, inspiring fanatical devotion from students, admiration from peers like Mahler, Strauss, and Busoni, riotous anger from conservative Viennese audiences, and unmitigated hatred from his many detractors. Even today, opinions about Schoenberg's music are still polemical; in the composer's own words, the scandal has never ceased.

Born in Vienna on 13 September 1874, into a family that was not particularly musical, Schoenberg was largely self-taught as a musician. An amateur cellist, he demonstrated from early age a particular aptitude for composition. He received rudimentary instruction in harmony and counterpoint from Oskar Adler and studied composition briefly with Alexander Zemlinsky, his eventual brother-in-law. Schoenberg's diverse oeuvre includes tone poems and large-scale orchestral works, operas, choral, chamber, keyboard music, and songs. His music is further distinguished by an aesthetic that combines twentieth-century modernism with a late-Romantic sensibility and the influence of Classical forms.

The composer's early works bear the unmistakable stamp of high German Romanticism, perhaps nowhere more evident than in his first important composition, Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (1899). Schoenberg's music from the first decade of the twentieth century is marked by a particularly lush, even sensuous, sound, especially evident in choral and vocal works like Gurrelieder (1900-01) and The Book of the Hanging Gardens (1908-09). With works like the Five Orchestral Pieces (1909) and the epochal Pierrot lunaire (1912), Schoenberg embarked upon one of the most influential phases of his career. Critics reviled this "atonal" (Schoenberg preferred "pantonal") music, whose structure does not include traditional tonality. Still, the high drama and novel expressive means of Schoenberg's music also inspired a faithful and active following. Most notable among Schoenberg's disciples were Alban Berg and Anton Webern, both of whom eventually attained stature equal to that of their famous mentor. These three composers -- the principal figures of the so-called Second Viennese School -- were the central force in the development of atonal and twelve-tone music in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond.

Schoenberg's Suite for Piano (1921-23) occupies a place of central importance in the composer's catalogue as his first completely twelve-tone composition. Though the twelve-tone technique represents only a single, and by no means predominant, aspect of the composer's style, it remains the single characteristic mostly closely associated with his music. Schoenberg made repeated, though varied, use of the technique across the spectrum of genres, from chamber works like the String Quartet No. 4 (1936) and the Fantasy for Violin and Piano (1949) to orchestral works like the Violin Concerto (1935-36) and the Piano Concerto (1942), to choral works like A Survivor from Warsaw (1947).