Schoenberg was born in Vienna into an orthodox Jewish family.
After his father's death, he was obliged to work in a bank from
1891 to 1895, but found time to pursue his musical development
through amateur chamber music performance and composition lessons
with Alexander von Zemlinsky. The early String quartet in D
from 1897 shows the influence of Dvorak and Brahms, and was
performed with success. But his next work initiated the
controversy that was to dog Schoenberg throughout his career. The
string sextet Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured night) — whose
Romantic character and impassioned richness of harmony and colour
are reminiscent of Wagner and Richard Strauss - was turned down by
the Vienna Music Association because of some unacceptably
dissonant chords.
Schoenberg married Zemlinsky's sister in 1901 and moved to
Berlin, where he subsidized composition of the symphonic poem
Pelleas und Melisande by orchestrating operettas in a cabaret
theatre. He was rescued from such drudgery when on Richard
Strauss's recommendation he was appointed to teach at Berlin's Stern
Academy. This was the beginning of Schoenberg's long career as a
great teacher. In 1903 he returned to Vienna to teach privately.
Alb an Berg and Anton Webern — who would, along with Schoenberg,
form the "Second Viennese School" — became his pupils the
following year.
This atmosphere of creative stimulation produced bold and rapid
developments in Schoenberg's style, with the First chamber symphony
pushing and the Second string quartet breaking the
limits of tonality ( the traditional method of composing a piece
of music in one particular key). The soprano that Schoenberg added
to the quartet sings words that appear symbolic and significant:
"I breathe the air from another planet."
Schoenberg returned to Berlin in 1912 to conduct the premiere
of Pierrot lunaire, a setting of 21 poems for speaker and
chamber ensemble. In this piece, a key work of the twentieth
century, the composer drew on the surrealist poems of Albert
Giraud, which express the worlds of subconscious violence,
madness, and desperate nostalgia that were implicit in the musical
worlds Schoenberg was exploring. The work makes a feature of
Sprechgesang, a type of vocal production between singing and
speech. Schoenberg's compositional experiments culminated in the
technique of serialism, an atonal method where the 12 notes of the
chromatic scale are used with equal emphasis. His first works in
this style date from 1923, two early examples being the Piano
suite and the
Suite for eight instruments.
In 1923 Schoenberg's wife died; ten months later he remarried.
From 1925 he taught at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin,
where he wrote the first two acts of the opera Moses und Aron,
as well as a number of instrumental works that re-established links with composers of the Classical period. In
1933, with the coining to power of" the Nazi Party, his Jewishness
made his position in Germany untenable and he left the country,
eventually to settle in Los Angeles. He spent the rest of his life
there, teaching for some time at the University of Southern
California. His later works show an enriching of his style to
encompass both tonal and serial techniques, as well as a renewed
concentration on Jewish elements in works such as A survivor from Warsaw (1947). During the
last year of his life he worked on meditative, religious works. He
died in Los Angeles in July 1951.
Schoenberg stands alongside Stravinsky as one of two giant
figures unsurpassed in their influence on twentieth-century music.
Although Schoenberg was the more overtly revolutionary, he
regarded his innovations as the continuation of a direct Classical
lineage, where originality first required the framework of
Classical forms in order to communicate coherently to the
listener.
