Schoenberg, Arnold

(1874–1951)

   Among the 20th century’s major musical innovators, Schoenberg was largely self-taught. His first compositions, heavily influenced by Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942), who eventually married Schoenberg’s sister, were lushly tonal in the style of late19th-century Romanticism (Verklärte Nacht, 1899). However, in his Symphony Op. 9 of 1907 and the 1908 song cycle, The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Schoenberg set off in a radically new direction. Proclaiming “the emancipation of dissonance,” he rejected classical patterns of tonality, thus setting a norm for the First Vienna School, as he and his followers would later categorize their music. He grew equally dismissive of the lush ornamental excesses of Viennese Jugendstil (Young Vienna), and its musical equivalent in the music of Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner. He continued, however, to admire the work of Brahms for its use of brief snatches of rhythm and melody in larger harmonic structures.

   Schoenberg perfected the 12-tone style of musical composition, with which he was deeply associated after World War I. In it, the eight steps of the conventional major and minor musical scales are abandoned. It requires the use of each of the halftones of that scale in the series of rows that make up a musical work. By making all halftones equal, Schoenberg believed he was expanding the harmonic possibilities of music.

   Though they did influence the work of such Austrian composers as Alban Berg, these ideas found little favor among audiences in Vienna. From 1925 to 1933, Schoenberg conducted a master class at the Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin, where he had already spent extended periods of time. He then immigrated to the United States, where he taught, first in Boston, then in Los Angeles, until 1944. Schoenberg was also a talented painter with affinities to both late 19th-century Impressionism and Central European Expressionism. He left around 70 canvases.