Arnold Schoenberg Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna on September 13, 1874, into a Jewish family of modest means in the musical heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a teenager he learned violin and viola and began arranging and composing for amateur ensembles. Largely self-taught as a composer, he found crucial guidance under Alexander von Zemlinsky, who became his teacher, colleague, and later his brother-in-law. The intellectual and artistic ferment of fin-de-siecle Vienna shaped his aesthetic sensibility, and early friendships exposed him to the latest literature, philosophy, and visual art.

Early Career and Late-Romantic Works
Schoenberg's first successes grew from an intensified late-Romantic idiom. Works such as Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4, and the vast cantata Gurre-Lieder reveal sumptuous orchestration and ardent chromaticism that place him in the lineage of Wagner and Mahler while already stretching harmonic limits. Supported at times by Richard Strauss, who recognized his talent and helped him secure work in Berlin, Schoenberg also attracted the admiration of Gustav Mahler, who defended the younger composer's daring language in an often hostile public climate. The Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9, and the symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande show his drive toward concentrated form and motivic rigor.

Breakthrough to Atonality
Around 1908, 1909, Schoenberg moved decisively beyond traditional tonality. The String Quartet No. 2, with a soprano intoning Stefan George's verses, breaks the gravitational pull of key centers and opens the way to atonal expression. A burst of experimental masterpieces followed: the Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16; the monodrama Erwartung; and the cycle Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, which employs Sprechstimme to intertwine speech and song. This radical shift coincided with personal turmoil: his wife Mathilde Zemlinsky's brief affair with the painter Richard Gerstl ended tragically with Gerstl's suicide, a trauma that shadowed the composer's life and art. In the same period, Schoenberg painted actively and exhibited with artists associated with the Blaue Reiter; his connection with Wassily Kandinsky reflected a shared commitment to Expressionist intensity.

Teacher and the Second Viennese School
Schoenberg's pedagogical impact rivaled his compositional innovations. He nurtured the talents of Alban Berg and Anton Webern, whose music carried his ideas into new expressive and structural realms. Hanns Eisler also studied with him, later becoming a major voice in political and film music. In 1918 Schoenberg founded the Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein fur musikalische Privatauffuhrungen) in Vienna with colleagues and students, presenting modern works by Debussy, Mahler, Bartok, Ravel, and others in carefully rehearsed concerts shielded from hostile critics. The society, shaped by the disciplined efforts of Berg and Webern, fostered a culture of meticulous listening before collapsing under postwar inflation.

The Twelve-Tone Method
By the early 1920s Schoenberg sought a systematic means to organize atonal composition. He devised the twelve-tone, or dodecaphonic, method, ordering the chromatic scale into a row that could be transformed by inversion, retrograde, and transposition. The Suite for Piano, Op. 25, is a landmark of this approach, followed by works such as the Wind Quintet, Op. 26, and Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31. Far from a mechanical scheme, the method channeled intense expressivity through meticulously controlled structure. His Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony) and later writings would articulate the historical logic he saw behind these innovations.

Berlin Years and Dismissal
In 1926 Schoenberg accepted a prestigious post at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, leading a master class in composition. His circle there included former and future students, and his reputation as a rigorous teacher grew. The rise of National Socialism in 1933 ended this phase abruptly; as a Jewish modernist, he was dismissed from his position. In Paris that year he formally returned to Judaism before emigrating to the United States.

American Exile and Teaching
Settling first in the Los Angeles area, Schoenberg taught at institutions including the University of Southern California and later the University of California, Los Angeles. He influenced a new generation of composers, notably John Cage early in Cage's career, as well as Leon Kirchner and others who would carry aspects of his thought into differing idioms. In California he produced major late works: the Violin Concerto, Op. 36; the Piano Concerto, Op. 42; the String Trio, Op. 45, a searing reflection on illness and mortality; and A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46, a powerful testament to the trauma of the Holocaust. He also composed Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op. 41, melding political commentary with tight motivic craft.

Personal Life
Schoenberg married Mathilde Zemlinsky in 1901; they had children and shared a complex, sometimes difficult marriage until her death in 1923. In 1924 he married Gertrud Kolisch, sister of the violinist Rudolf Kolisch, whose quartet championed Schoenberg's chamber music. Their family life in Los Angeles brought relative stability. His daughter Nuria, born in 1932, would later marry the Italian composer Luigi Nono, linking Schoenberg's legacy to postwar European modernism. Throughout his life, Schoenberg grappled with questions of identity and faith, from his conversion to Protestantism in the 1890s to his return to Judaism in 1933 under the pressure of exile and antisemitism.

Writings, Controversies, and Influence
Beyond composition and teaching, Schoenberg wrote extensively. His Harmonielehre (1911) and later essays, gathered in volumes such as Style and Idea, delineate his philosophy of musical progress, motivic coherence, and the responsibilities of the modern artist. He publicly contested portrayals of his ideas, notably challenging Thomas Mann's use of twelve-tone technique in the novel Doctor Faustus. Despite frequent polemics, his music and thought forged a path followed, adapted, or resisted by virtually every significant 20th-century composer, from his own pupils Berg and Webern to Bartok, Stravinsky in his later serial period, and generations of postwar composers.

Death and Legacy
Schoenberg died in Los Angeles on July 13, 1951, after years of fragile health. By then he had transformed the landscape of Western art music: from the chromatic saturation of late Romanticism through the shock of free atonality to the disciplined order of the twelve-tone method. His works, Pierrot lunaire, the String Quartet No. 2, Moses und Aron (left unfinished), the Variations for Orchestra, and A Survivor from Warsaw, among others, stand as milestones of modern music. Through the Second Viennese School, the Society for Private Musical Performances, his Berlin master class, and his American teaching, Schoenberg shaped the practice and pedagogy of composition. The network of figures around him, Zemlinsky, Mahler, Strauss, Berg, Webern, Kandinsky, Eisler, Cage, and many more, marks his place at the intersection of the century's music, art, and ideas, a position from which his influence continues to radiate.

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Other people realated to Arnold: Theodor Adorno (Philosopher), Oscar Levant (Composer), Karl Kraus (Writer), Wassily Kandinsky (Artist), Leo Ornstein (Composer), La Monte Young (Composer), Karl Amadeus Hartmann (Composer), Alban Berg (Composer), Lou Harrison (Composer)

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