Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer and member of the Second Viennese School, along with his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern. He was one of the most influential and controversial figures of the 20th century, during the modern era of music. He enjoyed a multifaceted career throughout his life composing, teaching, performing, writing, and painting. As an individual, Schoenberg was never afraid of being disliked and did not care what the public thought of him and his music. His experiences with both WWI and WWII had a profound impact on him, troubling him greatly and inspiring him to find a way to express them. His revolutionary idea to treat all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale equally led to much public unrest and outrage in his time. Schoenberg’s musical style had undergone many changes throughout his lifetime, from the earliest works displaying post-Romantic elements all the way to the radically new twelve-tone method and beyond.

While many people today view him as a revolutionary in his novel, progressive approach, in reality he was not always like that. This is true particularly in his early years, when he was not unlike many of his contemporaries. At this time, he was largely under the influence of late-Romantic and early modern composers such as Wagner, Mahler, and Strauss, and was very fond of programmatic elements. This resulted in the use of Romantic/post-Romantic idioms and characteristics such as chromatic harmony and lush orchestration in works such as Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night).

However, his time spent composing in the post-Romantic style was not for long. In 1908, he composed his song cycle Das Buch der hängenden Garten (The Book of the Hanging Gardens). It was at this point that his compositional style had completely changed. Rather than sticking to the post-Romantic tonality of his early years, compositions in this time period (between 1908-1917) featured more Expressionist elements such as atonality, disjunct melodies (often spanning a very wide range - Klangfarbenmelodie or “tone colour melody”), Sprechstimme (pitched speaking), and polyphonic procedures marked by dissonance. These elements are more evident in works such as his song cycle Pierrot lunaire.

After 6 long years of silence and no new creative output (1917-1923), he finished developing what would become his famous (or rather infamous) twelve-tone method, where compositions of this period (1923-1933) featured applications of this new approach using the serial procedures that he developed himself. It was also at this time that he returned to more traditional Classical formal structures such as sonata, rondo, variations, and suite, as seen in works such as his Variations for Orchestra, op. 31.

During Schoenberg’s time in America (1933-1951), he embraced a greater stylistic diversity that included a more liberal approach to his twelve-tone method. While still the majority of his compositions during the last eighteen years of his life largely featured atonality, he did occasionally seek refuge and returned to his origins in tonal composition. Additionally, he felt a stronger connection to his Jewish faith, resulting in many of his compositions having religious themes or elements that are religion-based, as evidenced in works such as Kol Nidre (actually written for performance in the synagogue) and A Survivor from Warsaw (in memory of the victims of the Holocaust).

As you can see, Schoenberg’s innovations, and contributions span a wide variety of styles and genres, reflecting the evolution of a composer who is finding a way to express himself and trying to earn his place in the world, ultimately etching himself in history.