Composer
Arnold Schoenberg
The composer who broke music free from its home key entirely.
Arnold Schoenberg began his career writing lushly Late Romantic music and ended it as the composer most responsible for breaking Western music free from tonality - the sense of a home key that music resolves back to - a shift so consequential it reshaped what "classical composition" could even mean afterward.
Life in brief
Schoenberg was born in Vienna in 1874 to a Jewish family of modest means. He was almost entirely self-taught as a composer, apart from lessons with Alexander Zemlinsky, who later became his brother-in-law. He worked as a bank clerk and as an arranger of operettas while writing his first major works.
Around 1908 he crossed the line into atonality - music with no home key at all. The response was often hostile: a 1913 Vienna concert of his and his students' music broke down into a brawl. Yet he attracted devoted pupils, above all Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and together they became known as the Second Viennese School. He was also a gifted painter, who exhibited alongside Wassily Kandinsky.
In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, he was dismissed from his teaching post in Berlin. He reaffirmed his Jewish faith in Paris and emigrated to the United States, settling in Los Angeles, where he taught at UCLA - among his students was the young John Cage. Famously superstitious about the number 13, he died on Friday, July 13, 1951.
Music and style
Verklärte Nacht ("Transfigured Night"), an early work for string sextet, still sits inside the Late Romantic tradition, showing how firmly Schoenberg's roots were planted in the same soil as Mahler and Richard Strauss. Pierrot lunaire, written a decade or so later, shows him already deep into atonal territory, using a vocal technique halfway between speech and song (Sprechstimme). He later formalized his break from tonality into the twelve-tone technique, treating all twelve chromatic notes as equals with no single note allowed to dominate as a tonal center.
His music is dense and intense, packed with ideas and constantly developing
- he called the principle "developing variation" and traced it back to Brahms. However radical it sounds, he saw himself as the heir of the great German tradition, not its destroyer.
Key works
- Verklärte Nacht (1899) - a lush, Romantic tone poem for strings.
- Gurre-Lieder (1900 – 1911) - a gigantic cantata for huge forces.
- Five Pieces for Orchestra (1909) - early atonal orchestral music.
- Pierrot lunaire (1912) - 21 eerie, cabaret-like songs for voice and small ensemble.
- Suite for Piano, Op. 25 (1921 – 1923) - among his first fully twelve-tone works.
- A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) - a searing response to the Holocaust, for narrator, chorus, and orchestra.
- Moses und Aron - his unfinished opera.
Legacy
Schoenberg's influence extended far beyond composers who adopted his specific twelve-tone method - simply by demonstrating that tonality itself was optional, he opened the door to the wide range of harmonic experimentation that followed across the rest of the 20th century. Even composers who rejected his methods had to respond to them, and his expressionist sound has found a home in film scores for horror and suspense.
Where to start listening: Verklärte Nacht is the gentler entry point, still clearly Romantic in sound; Pierrot lunaire is the more demanding, fully atonal next step.