Arnold Schoenberg, (the anglicized form of Schönberg—Schoenberg changed the spelling officially when he
became a U.S. citizen) (September 13, 1874 – July 13, 1951) was a
composer, born in Vienna,
Austria. He is particularly remembered as one of the first composers to embrace atonality, and for his twelve tone
technique of composition using tone rows.
Biography
Schoenberg was largely self-taught, taking lessons only with Alexander Zemlinsky who was to become his first brother-in-law. In his twenties, he lived by
orchestrating operettas while composing works such as the string sextet
Verklärte Nacht ("Transfigured Night") in 1899. He later made an orchestral version of this, which has come to be 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
Gurrelieder. Mahler adopted
Schoenberg as a protégé and worried about who would look after him after his death. Schoenberg was influenced by Mahler,
championed his work, and considered Mahler a "saint".
Another of his most important works from this period is Pierrot
Lunaire of 1912, a cycle of songs set to a text by Albert Giraud that was unlike
anything that preceded it. Utilizing the technique of Sprechstimme, or
speak-singing recitation, the work pairs a female singer, in a Pierrot costume, with a small orchestra of 5 (nowadays sometimes
6) musicians, who in each of the songs plays a different, and striking instrumental combination.
Later, Schoenberg was to create the twelve-tone method of composition (which later grew into serialism). This technique was taken up by many of his students, who consistuted the so-called Second Viennese School. They included Anton Webern, Alban Berg and
Hanns Eisler, who were greatly influenced by Schoenberg. Schoenberg
excelled as a teacher of music, partly through his method of engaging with, analyzing, and transmitting the methods of the great
classical composers, especially Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, partly through his focus on bringing out the musical and compositional individuality of his students.
He published a number of books, ranging from his famous Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony) to Fundamentals of Musical
Composition, many of which are still in print and still used by musicians and developing composers.
He was forced into exile by the Nazis in 1933,
settled in California and became a US citizen in 1941. He died in Los Angeles, California.
Music
Works and ideas
To understand why Schoenberg composed the music that he did, it is useful to begin with his own statement: "Had times been
'normal' (before and after 1914) then the music of our time would have been very
different."
Schoenberg, as a Jewish intellectual, was passionately committed to the concept of unshaken adherence to an "Idea" (such as
the concept of an inexpressible God) and the pursuance of Truth. He saw the development of music accelerating through the works
of Wagner, Strauss and Mahler to a state of saturation. If music was to regain a genuine and valid simplicity of expression, as
in the music of his beloved Mozart and Schubert, the language must be renewed.
These were the same years when the Western world discovered abstract
painting and psychoanalysis in the same city. Many intellectuals at
the time felt that thought had developed to a point of no return, and that it was no longer possible honestly to go on repeating
what had been done before. Between 1901 (Gurrelieder) and 1910 (Five Pieces for Orchestra) his music changed more rapidly than anyone else's at any other time. When he had
written his quartet opus 7 and his Chamber Symphony opus 9, he imagined he had arrived at a mature personal style which would
serve him for the future. But already in the second string quartet, opus 10 and the Three Piano Pieces opus 11, he had to admit
that the saturation of added notes in harmony had reached a stage when there was no meaningful difference between consonance and
dissonance. For a time Schoenberg's music became very concentrated and elliptical, as he could see no reason to repeat and
develop.
World War I brought a crisis in his development. Military service
disrupted his life. 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". After the war he worked at evolving a means of order which would enable his musical texture
to become simpler and clearer, and this resulted in the "method of composition with twelve tones" in which the twelve semitonal
intervals are regarded as equal, and no one note or tonality is given the emphasis it occupied in classical harmony. It was the
equivalent in music of Albert Einstein's discoveries in Physics, and
Schoenberg announced it characteristically, during a walk with his friend Josef Rufer, when he said "I have today made a
discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years".
This remark, much misquoted and misunderstood, was probably made with Schoenberg's customary wry and ironic humour, referring
to the collapse of the dominant political position of the German-speaking world in previous years, and also emphasising his
desire to stand with Mozart and Bach.
In the following years he produced a series of instrumental and orchestral works showing how his method could produce new
classical music which did not copy the past. The climax was to be an opera Moses und Aron, of which he wrote over
two-thirds but which he was unable to complete, perhaps for psychological reasons. The music ends at the point where Moses cries
out his frustration at being unable to express himself. There is little doubt that by this time Schoenberg had come to see
himself as a kind of prophet too.
When he settled in California, he wrote several works in which he returned
to keyed harmony, but in a very distinctive way, not simply re-using classical harmony. This was in accordance with his belief
that his music evolved naturally out of the past. One of his sayings was "my music is not really modern, just badly played."
Criticisms
However, much of his work was not well received. In 1907 his Chamber Symphony No. 1 was
premiered. The audience was small, and the reaction to the work lukewarm. When it was played again, however, in a 1913 concert which also included works by Alban
Berg, Anton Webern and Alexander Zemlinsky, some of the audience began to shout out abuse. Later in the concert, during a
performance of some songs by Berg, fighting broke out, and the police had to be called in.
Schoenberg's music had made a break from tonality, which greatly polarised
responses to it: his followers and students saw him as one of the most important figures in music, while critics hated his work,
on the whole.
Even today Schoenberg's method remains controversial, many people refusing to consider it as music at all. Those who do listen
to it unprejudiced sometimes come to love it deeply. Schoenberg himself was said to be a very prickly and difficult man to know
and befriend. In one of his letters he said "I hope you weren't stupid enough to be offended by what I said," and he rewarded
conductors such as Otto Klemperer who programmed his music by complaining repeatedly that they didn't do more. On the other hand,
among those who are considered his disciples he inspired absolute devotion. Even strongly individualistic composers such
as Alban Berg and Anton
Webern displayed an almost slavish selflessness and willingness to serve him.
Extramusical interests
Schoenberg was also a painter of considerable individuality, whose pictures were considered good enough to exhibit alongside
those of Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, and he wrote extensively: plays and poems, as well as essays not only about music but
about politics and the social/historical situation of the Jewish people.
Schoenberg suffered from triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number
thirteen); it is said that the reason his late opera is called Moses and Aron, rather than Moses and Aaron (the
correct spelling with two As) is because the latter spelling has thirteen letters in it. He was born (and, it turned out, died)
on the thirteenth of the month, and thought of this as a portent. He once refused to rent a house because it had the number 13,
and feared turning 76, because its digits add up to thirteen.
Books
- Brand, Julianne; Hailey, Christopher; and Harris, Donald, editors. The Berg-Schoenberg Correspondence: Selected
Letters. New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company. 1987. ISBN 0393019195.
- Schoenberg, Arnold. Structural Functions of Harmony. (Translated by Leonard Stein.) New York, London: W. W. Norton and
Company. 1954, 1969 (revised). ISBN
0393004783.
- Schoenberg, Arnold (translated by Roy E. Carter). Harmonielehre (translated title Theory of Harmony). Berkeley,
Los Angeles: University of California Press. Originally published 1911. Translation based on Third Ed. of 1922, published 1978.
ISBN 0520049454.
External links
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