Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian and American modernist composer, music theorist, teacher, and writer who propounded the emancipation of the dissonance. He was active in Vienna and Berlin, and taught at the Prussian Academy of Arts (1925–1933). Facing Nazi Germany's civil-service restrictions, he resigned and defiantly affirmed his Judaism. Then he immigrated to the United States, teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles (1936–1944), where facilities bear his name. Early works like Verklärte Nacht (1899) and Gurre-Lieder (1900–1903, orch. 1910–1911) represented a synthesis of Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner, while Pelleas und Melisande (1902–1903) echoed Richard Strauss. Schoenberg mentored Anton Webern and Alban Berg, among others linked to the Second Viennese School, and the three began writing atonal, expressionist music. He visited extremes of emotion in his String Quartet No. 2 (1907–1908) and Erwartung (1909), and used word painting structurally in Pierrot lunaire (1912) and Herzgewächse (1911, published with his self-portraits in Der Blaue Reiter Almanach in 1912). Antisemitism gradually began to intensify his Jewish identity as he approached twelve-tone technique in Die Jakobsleiter (from 1914), which marked a spiritual turn and echoed Gustav Mahler's Eighth. He composed with twelve-tone technique in a motivic manner, akin to developing variation, as an orderly means of large-scale structural coherence. In twelve-tone works like Moses und Aron (from 1923) and the Variations for Orchestra (1926–1928), he systematically interrelated all pitches of the chromatic scale, often exploiting combinatorial hexachords and sometimes residues of tonality. He explored writing film music, as he had done idiosyncratically in Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene (1929–1930), and revisited tonal music, completing his Chamber Symphony No. 2 (1939). With citizenship (1941) and U.S. entry into World War II, he satirized fascist tyrants in his twelve-tone Ode to Napoleon (1942, after Byron), quoting Beethoven's fate motif and "La Marseillaise", and concluding with an E-flat-major triad. Post-war Vienna beckoned with honorary citizenship, but Schoenberg was ill as depicted in his String Trio (1946). As the world learned of the Holocaust, he memorialized its victims in A Survivor from Warsaw (1947). The Israel Conservatory and Academy of Music elected him honorary president in 1951. His innovative music was influential and widely polemicized. At least three generations of composers extended its principles. His aesthetic and music-historical views influenced musicologists Theodor W. Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus. The Arnold Schönberg Center collects his archival legacy.

Alfred Brendel - Portrait - 2024-10-29T00:00:00.000000Z

Expressionist Music - 2024-05-24T00:00:00.000000Z

Abbado: Schumann – Tchaikovsky - 2023-04-21T00:00:00.000000Z

Schoenberg: Pierrot lunaire - 2021-04-09T00:00:00.000000Z

Schoenberg: Gurre-Lieder (Live at Semperoper, Dresden) - 2020-11-20T00:00:00.000000Z

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