Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian and American composer, music theorist, teacher and writer. He was among the first modernists who transformed the practice of harmony in 20th-century classical music, and a central element of his music was its use of motivic processes as a means of coherence. He propounded concepts like developing variation, the emancipation of the dissonance, and the "unity of musical space".
Schoenberg's early works, like Verklärte Nacht, represented a Brahmsian–Wagnerian synthesis on which he built. Mentoring Anton Webern and Alban Berg, he became the central figure of the Second Viennese School. They consorted with visual artists, published in Der Blaue Reiter, and wrote atonal, expressionist music, attracting fame and stirring debate. In his String Quartet No. 2, Erwartung, and Pierrot lunaire, Schoenberg visited extremes of emotion; in self-portraits he emphasized his intense gaze. While working on Die Jakobsleiter and Moses und Aron, Schoenberg confronted popular antisemitism by returning to Judaism and substantially developed his twelve-tone technique. He systematically interrelated all pitches of the chromatic scale in his twelve-tone music, often exploiting combinatorial hexachords and sometimes admitting tonal elements.
Schoenberg resigned from the Prussian Academy of Arts, emigrating as the Nazis took power; they banned his music, labeling it "degenerate". He taught in the US, including at the University of California, Los Angeles, where facilities are named in his honor. He explored writing film music and wrote more tonal music, completing his Chamber Symphony No. 2 in 1939. With citizenship and US entry into World War II, he satirized fascist tyrants in Ode to Napoleon, deploying Beethoven's fate motif and the Marseillaise. Post-war Vienna beckoned with honorary citizenship, but Schoenberg was ill as depicted in his String Trio. As the world learned of the Holocaust, he memorialized its victims in A Survivor from Warsaw. The Israel Conservatory and Academy of Music elected him honorary president.
His innovative music was among the most influential and polemicized of 20th-century classical music. At least three generations of composers extended its somewhat formal principles. His aesthetic and music-historical views influenced musicologists Theodor W. Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus. The Arnold Schönberg Center collects his archival legacy.
Biography
Early life
Arnold Schoenberg was born into a lower middle-class Jewish family in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna, at Obere Donaustraße 5. His father Samuel, a native of Szécsény, Hungary, later moved to Pozsony and then to Vienna, was a shoe-shopkeeper. He was married to Pauline Nachod, a Prague native whose family belong to the Altneuschul synagogue. Arnold was largely self-taught. He took only counterpoint lessons with the composer Alexander Zemlinsky, who was to become his first brother-in-law.In his twenties, Schoenberg earned a living by orchestrating operettas, while composing his own works, such as the string sextet Verklärte Nacht . He later made an orchestral version of this, which became one of his most popular pieces. Both Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler recognized Schoenberg's significance as a composer; Strauss when he encountered Schoenberg's Gurre-Lieder, and Mahler after hearing several of Schoenberg's early works.
Strauss turned to a more conservative idiom in his own work after 1909, and at that point dismissed Schoenberg. Mahler adopted him as a protégé and continued to support him, even after Schoenberg's style reached a point Mahler could no longer understand. Mahler worried about who would look after him after his death. Schoenberg, who had initially despised and mocked Mahler's music, was converted by the "thunderbolt" of Mahler's Third Symphony, which he considered a work of genius. Afterward he "spoke of Mahler as a saint".
In 1898 Schoenberg converted to Christianity in the Lutheran church. According to MacDonald this was partly to strengthen his attachment to Western European cultural traditions, and partly as a means of self-defence "in a time of resurgent anti-Semitism". In 1933, after long meditation, he returned to Judaism, because he realised that "his racial and religious heritage was inescapable", and to take up an unmistakable position on the side opposing Nazism. He would self-identify as a member of the Jewish religion later in life.
1901–1914: From tonality to atonality
1901–1908: Tonality enriched, extended, and suspended
In October 1901, Schoenberg married Mathilde Zemlinsky, the sister of the conductor and composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, with whom Schoenberg had been studying since about 1894. Schoenberg and Mathilde had two children, Gertrud and Georg. Gertrud would marry Schoenberg's pupil in 1921.In 1907–08, Schoenberg wrote the String Quartet No. 2. The first two movements use traditional key signatures but are enriched with chromaticism. In summer 1908, Mathilde left him for painter Richard Gerstl, who died by suicide upon her return that November. The last two movements extend the tonal language and, as in a choral symphony, set Stefan George poems to music for soprano and string quartet. Both end on the tonic, but the last suspends tonality.
1908–1914: Emancipation of the dissonance and atonality
Also during his wife's absence, Schoenberg composed "You lean against a silver-willow", the thirteenth song in the cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, Op. 15, based on the collection of the same name by George. This was his first composition without any reference to a key.During the summer of 1910, Schoenberg wrote his Harmonielehre, which remains one of the most influential music-theory books. From about 1911, Schoenberg belonged to a circle of artists and intellectuals who included Lene Schneider-Kainer, Franz Werfel, Herwarth Walden, and Else Lasker-Schüler.
In 1910 he met Edward Clark, an English music journalist then working in Germany. Clark became his sole English student, and in his later capacity as a producer for the BBC he was responsible for introducing many of Schoenberg's works, and Schoenberg himself, to Britain. Clark assisted Schoenberg to relocate from Vienna to Berlin in 1911.
One of his most important works from his atonal or pantonal period is the highly influential Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, of 1912, a novel cycle of expressionist songs set to a German translation of poems by the Belgian-French poet Albert Giraud. Utilizing the technique of Sprechstimme, or melodramatically spoken recitation, the work pairs a female vocalist with a small ensemble of five musicians. The ensemble, which is now commonly referred to as the Pierrot ensemble, consists of flute, clarinet, violin, violoncello, speaker, and piano.
, director of the Vienna Conservatory from 1907, wanted a break from the stale environment personified for him by Robert Fuchs and Hermann Graedener. Having considered many candidates, he offered teaching positions to Schoenberg and Franz Schreker in 1912. Although now living in Berlin, he was not completely cut off from the Vienna Conservatory, having taught a private theory course a year earlier. He seriously considered the offer, but he declined. Writing afterward to Alban Berg, he cited his "aversion to Vienna" as the main reason for his decision, while contemplating that it might have been the wrong one financially, but having made it he felt content. A couple of months later he wrote to Schreker suggesting that it might have been a bad idea for him as well to accept the teaching position.
World War I
brought a crisis in his development. Military service disrupted his life when at the age of 42 he was in the army. He was never able to work uninterrupted or over a period of time, and as a result he left many unfinished works and undeveloped "beginnings".On one occasion, a superior officer demanded to know if he was "this notorious Schoenberg, then"; Schoenberg replied: "Beg to report, sir, yes. Nobody wanted to be, someone had to be, so I let it be me". According to Norman Lebrecht, this is a reference to Schoenberg's apparent "destiny" as the "Emancipator of Dissonance".
Schoenberg drew comparisons between Germany's assault on France and his assault on decadent bourgeois artistic values. In August 1914, while denouncing the music of Bizet, Stravinsky, and Ravel, he wrote: "Now comes the reckoning! Now we will throw these mediocre kitschmongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God". Alex Ross described this as an "act of war psychosis".
The deteriorating relation between contemporary composers and the public led him to found the Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna in 1918. He sought to provide a forum in which modern musical compositions could be carefully prepared and rehearsed, and properly performed under conditions protected from the dictates of fashion and pressures of commerce.
From its inception until its dissolution amid Austrian hyperinflation, the Society presented 353 performances to paying members, sometimes weekly. During the first year and a half, Schoenberg did not let any of his own works be performed. Instead, audiences at the Society's concerts heard difficult contemporary compositions by Scriabin, Debussy, Mahler, Webern, Berg, Reger, and other leading figures of early 20th-century music.
Development of the twelve-tone method
Later, Schoenberg was to develop the most influential version of the dodecaphonic method of composition, which in French and English was given the alternative name serialism by René Leibowitz and Humphrey Searle in 1947. This technique was taken up by many of his students, who constituted the so-called Second Viennese School. They included Anton Webern, Alban Berg, and Hanns Eisler, all of whom were profoundly influenced by Schoenberg. He published a number of books, ranging from his famous Harmonielehre to Fundamentals of Musical Composition, many of which are still in print and used by musicians and developing composers.Schoenberg viewed his development as a natural progression, and he did not deprecate his earlier works when he ventured into serialism. In 1923 he wrote to the Swiss philanthropist Werner Reinhart:
For the present, it matters more to me if people understand my older works... They are the natural forerunners of my later works, and only those who understand and comprehend these will be able to gain an understanding of the later works that goes beyond a fashionable bare minimum. I do not attach so much importance to being a musical bogey-man as to being a natural continuer of properly-understood good old tradition!
His first wife died in October 1923, and in August of the next year Schoenberg married Gertrud Kolisch, sister of his pupil, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. They had three children: Nuria Dorothea, Ronald Rudolf, and Lawrence Adam. Gertrude Kolisch Schoenberg wrote the libretto for Schoenberg's one-act opera Von heute auf morgen under the pseudonym Max Blonda. At her request Schoenberg's piece, Die Jakobsleiter was prepared for performance by Schoenberg's student Winfried Zillig. After her husband's death in 1951 she founded Belmont Music Publishers devoted to the publication of his works. Arnold used the notes G and E for "Gertrud Schoenberg", in the Suite, for septet, Op. 29..
Following the death in 1924 of composer Ferruccio Busoni, who had served as Director of a Master Class in Composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, Schoenberg was appointed to this post the next year, but because of health problems was unable to take up his post until 1926. Among his notable students during this period were the composers Robert Gerhard, Nikos Skalkottas, and Josef Rufer.
Along with his twelve-tone works, 1930 marks Schoenberg's return to tonality, with numbers 4 and 6 of the Six Pieces for Male Chorus Op. 35, the other pieces being dodecaphonic.