Arnold Schoenberg

Friends of Arnold Schoenberg said he talked in “paradoxes”—a word that captures his character and music. He both loved and revolutionized the musical tradition of his time and place. He composed difficult music yet admired Johann Strauss and George Gershwin. He was a talented painter, a friend (and then non-friend) of Kandinsky. He was a Jew who predicted the Holocaust and became a Protestant, only to return to Judaism after he left Germany in 1933 to spend the last 18 years of his life in Los Angeles.

Schoenberg produced major works of all kinds. He was an extraordinary teacher who offered profound training in the traditional musical language of tonality that he was often accused of destroying. His students included the Europeans Alban Berg and Anton Webern, as well as the Americans John Cage and Lou Harrison.

Early Years: Tonality to Non-Tonal Music

Born in Vienna in 1874, Schoenberg grew up in the Jewish district of Leopoldstadt. His father’s death forced him to leave school to help support his family. Largely self-taught in composition (except for informal lessons with the Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky), he was soon championed by Gustav Mahler and the Rosé String Quartet, which had also premiered works by Johannes Brahms.

This quartet premiered Schoenberg’s first major work, the string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), despite its rejection by the most important musical society of Vienna for one traditionally “unpermitted” chord. It was followed by works such as the First String Quartet (1904–05) and the Chamber Symphony No. 1 (1906) which, like pieces of Wagner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss, move quickly from key to key, creating intensity through frequent use of dissonant harmonies, saving more consonant harmonies for the conclusion and a few other important moments. These consonant harmonies could sometimes begin to sound unrelated to the rest of the work, and it was Schoenberg who took the radical step of simply eliminating them, leaving only an elusive music never settling into any key at all: it was described as “atonal”—a term Schoenberg disliked. (During the First World War, when a fellow soldier asked Schoenberg if he was really the notorious Arnold Schoenberg, the composer replied, “No one else was willing, so I took on the job.”)

Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Two Cellos, Op. 4

This radical step came in 1908, a time of deep personal crisis. The following years were breathtakingly productive: working entirely by instinct, he wrote Erwartung (Expectation, 1909), the Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909), Pierrot lunaire (1912), and the unfinished oratorio, Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob’s Ladder)—all works with texts or programs that many musicians consider among his most powerful, emotionally intense compositions.

Middle Period: The Twelve-Tone Method 

From 1917 to 1923 Schoenberg published no new works: as a result of the First World War, he, like most major European composers, found himself in crisis. Stravinsky’s revolutionary The Rite of Spring had created a riot at its premiere in 1913. But after the war, Stravinsky moved into his neoclassical period, evoking earlier, pre-20th-century music just as he had used Russian folk songs before. In his own very different way, Schoenberg moved towards his own kind of neoclassicism in the Suite for Piano, Op. 25 (1921–23), based on Baroque dance suites. The Suite is also the first work based entirely on what came to be called a “twelve-tone row”: an ordering of all 12 notes of the chromatic scale which can become the source of all the material in a work. This is the compositional method that enabled Schoenberg to compose larger instrumental pieces without a program. A highly productive period followed, with the Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (1928), the String Quartet No. 3, Op. 30 (1927), and the unfinished opera Moses und Aron. 

Late Period: A Return to Tonality

Starting in the mid-to-late 1930s, Schoenberg returned to tonality in a few important pieces, such as the Chamber Symphony, Op. 38 (1939), while continuing to write twelve-tone works such as the String Quartet No. 4, Op. 37 (1936), Violin Concerto, Op. 36 (1936),  Piano Concerto, Op. 42 (1942), String Trio, Op. 44 (1946), and the vocal-orchestral work, A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46 (1947). These works tend to use rows more freely than before, with a twelve-tone work like Ode to Napoleon, Op. 41 (1943), ending on an E-flat major triad evoking the Eroica Symphony. Schoenberg never taught the twelve-tone method, famously saying, “There is a lot of great music still to be written in C major.” During his last years Schoenberg suffered ill health and left his final work, the Modern Psalms, unfinished at his death.

Schoenberg: Trio for Strings, Op. 45

LEGACY

Schoenberg’s place among the great masters is assured. His works have a strong global presence and have been performed by many of our greatest conductors, orchestras, pianists, and chamber ensembles. Pierrot lunaire was choreographed by Rudolph Nureyev, and in a 2014 prize-winning Canadian/German film adaptation of the work, simply entitled Pierrot Lunaire, Pierrot is presented as a transgender man.

Today, Schoenberg is simply one of the great masters, and yet his work remains controversial—a considerable tribute for a composer born 150 years ago. Performers and audiences find in his music something they can find nowhere else, something deeply emotional, occasionally tender or charming, sometimes harsh, but above all extraordinarily intense.

Watching and Listening

Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4, is an extraordinarily beautiful late-Romantic work—passionate and lyrical—recalling Wagner, Stauss, and Mahler. It is based on a work by the German poet Richard Dehmel: a man and woman walk through a moonlit forest; the woman confesses that she is pregnant with the child of another man; the man is able to accept and forgive, and their story ends in ecstasy. Later Schoenberg arranged it for string orchestra.

String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10, is Schoenberg’s decisive move beyond tonality. The opening movement is beautiful and tonal, the second a sardonic scherzo in which the folk song O, du lieber Augustine makes a brief appearance—a move reminiscent of Mahler. A soprano enters in the despairing third movement (the first appearance of a vocal part in a string quartet) and is answered in the fourth movement by the first atonal music of the whole work, written without a key signature, beginning in the middle of a nontonal nowhere, and leading to the re-entrance of the soprano singing, “I feel the air of other planets.”

Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, the quintessential work of Schonberg’s “free atonality” period, sets poems by Albert Giraud about the “moonstruck Pierrot”—the sad, white-faced clown of the commedia dell’arte. Schoenberg creates an unforgettable, eerie atmosphere, partly through use of Sprechstimme: the technique of half singing, half speaking. The instrumental sound is extraordinary—flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. Unique at the time, this combination has since become a standard ensemble, like the string quartet. Every song uses a different instrumental ensemble. Pierrot “sings” of eroticism and religion, violence and blasphemy, and then returns to his home at Bergamo. The work is often performed in costume and semi-staged.

String Trio, Op. 44, is a late work, written in 1946 at lightning speed after an almost fatal heart attack, which is portrayed by juxtapositions of violently contrasting sections using an extraordinary palette of different instrumental techniques. Violent outbursts, gentle melodies, and austere melodic fragments are held together by a drastically shortened recapitulation of the opening sections which finally comes to a magical, ethereal ending evoking a vision of things final.

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