logo
livingroom

decorative bar

biographies


corner Last update of this page: August 28th 2008 corner
Arnold Schoenberg
(September 13, 1874 - July 13, 1951) Austria - U.S.A.

Arnold Schoenberg

Composer

separator

Arnold Schoenberg was born to an Ashkenazi Jewish family in the Leopoldstadt district (in earlier times a Jewish ghetto) in Vienna. His mother Pauline, a native of Prague, was a piano teacher (his father Samuel, a native of Bratislava, was a shopkeeper). Arnold was anyway largely self-taught, taking only counterpoint lessons with the composer Alexander von 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. Despite his Jewish background, in 1898 he converted to Lutheranism. He would remain Lutheran until 1933.

Schoenberg began teaching harmony, counterpoint and composition in 1904. The summer of 1908, during which his wife Mathilde left him for several months for a young Austrian painter, Richard Gerstl (who committed suicide after her return to her husband and children), marked a distinct change in Schoenberg's work.

It was during the absence of his wife that he composed "You lean against a silver-willow" (German: Du lehnest wider eine Silberweide), the thirteenth song in the cycle Das Buch der Hängenden Gärten, op. 15, based on the collection of the same name by the German mystical poet Stefan George; this was the first composition without any reference at all to a key (Stuckenschmidt 1977, 96).

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". So, at the age of 42 he found himself in the army. 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".

Later, Schoenberg was to develop the most influential version of the dodecaphonic (also known as twelve-tone) method of composition. This technique was taken up by many of his students, who constituted the so-called Second Viennese School. He published a number of books, ranging from his famous Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony) to Fundamentals of Musical Composition (Schoenberg 1967), many of which are still in print and still used by musicians and developing composers.

Schoenberg continued to teach until the election of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in 1933, when he was dismissed and forced into exile. He emigrated to Paris, where he reaffirmed his Jewish faith and then to the United States. His first teaching position in the United States was at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston.

He was then wooed to Los Angeles, where he taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, both of which later named a music building on their respective campuses Schoenberg Hall. He settled in Brentwood Park, where he befriended fellow composer (and tennis partner) George Gershwin and began teaching at University of California, Los Angeles, where he resided for the rest of his life. In 1941, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

His superstitious nature may have triggered his death. According to friend Katia Mann, he feared he would die during a year that was a multiple of 13. He so dreaded his sixty-fifth birthday in 1939 that a friend asked the composer and astrologer Dane Rudhyar to prepare Schoenberg's horoscope. Rudhyar did this and told Schoenberg that the year was dangerous, but not fatal. But in 1950, on his seventy-sixth birthday, an astrologer wrote Schoenberg a note warning him that the year was a critical one: 7 + 6 = 13.

This stunned and depressed the composer, for up to that point he had only been wary of multiples of 13 and never considered adding the digits of his age. On Friday, 13 July 1951, Schoenberg stayed in bed-sick, anxious and depressed. In a letter to Schoenberg's sister Ottilie, dated 4 August 1951, his wife, Gertrud, reported "About a quarter to twelve I looked at the clock and said to myself: another quarter of an hour and then the worst is over. Then the doctor called me. Arnold's throat rattled twice, his heart gave a powerful beat and that was the end".

separator

Source: excerpts from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Click on the letter S to go back to the list of names

corner © Matt & Andrej Koymasky, 1997 - 2008 corner