: One of the most controversial composers of the twentieth century who

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One of the most controversial composers of the twentieth century who was forced to leave Germany in 1933 for the United States. For some, his extension of tonality stands for the revolution of modern music; others judge his atonal compositions as bloodless constructs.

Yet the increasing popularity of his works and interest in his life confirms Schonberg’s position as a founder of a new classical music. Various facets of Schonberg’s legacy emphasize his creative powers: the style and quality of his paintings and inventions demonstrate a visionary and—more than five decades after his death—still modern mind. Schonberg’s work and life, with all the triumphs and downfalls, are a pattern for a biography full of struggles, shared by many Americans and Europeans in his time.

Unlike other famous artists, Schonberg was born in a family without any artistic ambitions. In spite of his devotion to music from early childhood—he began

composing and playing violin before he was nine—Schonberg never felt like a child prodigy. After the death of his father in 1889, the sixteen-year-old boy began an apprenticeship in the bank Werner & Company in Vienna. A few years later Schonberg used the bankruptcy of his employer to start his music career. In 1894 he became a member in the small orchestra Polyhymnia, in 1895 the conductor of the Meidling Men’s Choral Society and the choirmaster of a singers union of metal workers in Stockerau. Though the first public performances of his compositions— symphonic-orientated works like the Streichquartette (string quartets) in 1898— were not a remarkable success, the positive response of other artists and experts for Schonberg’s music was encouragement enough to continue striving. The reactions of the very conservative audience in Vienna for Schonberg’s music were seldom supportive, and occasionally brawls ensued between his admirers and critics.

Eventually, with the triumphal premiere of the Gurre- lieder (Songs of Gurre) in 1913, the young composer gained the long-desired success. Striding away from tradition, Schonberg combined a lyrical text and its strophic structure in the tradition of Johannes Brahms with the expanded orchestral language of Richard Wagner—until then an unthinkable melange of styles. Schonberg’s extraordinary concept of composing led in 1923 to the public introduction of his “method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another” (Freitag 1973, 100), meaning that this way of composing is not based on a common tonic note. The first composition strictly based on this method became the Klavier- suite op. 25 (Suite for Piano). Better known as twelve-tone music, Schonberg hoped to establish it as a new system of composing. Despite the impact of his twelve-tone music on modern classical music, it was not accepted by a broader audience.

Schonberg was also a very popular teacher. In 1911 he demonstrated his didactic ambitions by publishing the Har- monielehre (Theory of Harmony), a book on principles of composition addressed to young musicians. In its preface the notorious autodidact Schonberg confessed that he had learned by teaching his students, too. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Schonberg started to instruct a circle of young talents like Alban Berg and Anton Webern. They were followed in later years by other ambitious famuli, such as Theodor W Adorno, Josef Zmigrod (i.e., Allan Gray), and Hanns Eisler. To secure his livelihood he gave private lessons for almost fifty years, even after his retirement. In his own estimation, he taught more than a thousand students—and for the talented but poor, he even did so for free. For a couple of years stipends and highly acclaimed positions all over Europe (especially in Berlin) and—after his emigration—in the United States allowed Schonberg to establish a lifestyle in modest prosperity.

Despite his conversion to Protestantism in 1898, Schonberg found the way back to his Jewish roots.

He regained a sense of pride in being a Jew faced with growing antisemitism in Austria and Germany beginning in the twenties. But his attitude toward the religion of his ancestors for him was more than lip service. He felt that the rejection of his compositions and his understanding of music was a symptom of being different: “not a German or a European, maybe not even a man any longer” (“kein Deutscher, kein Europaer, ja vielle- icht kaum ein Mensch zu sein”)—but a Jew (letter to Wassily Kandinsky, April 19, 1923). In 1933 Schonberg, professor at the Berliner Akademie, emigrated via France to the United States. In 1936 he became a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he organized the Department of Music.

With his charming kindness and wit, Schonberg was always able to convince experts and patrons to support his career and ambitious projects. His close relation to the Wiener Secession encouraged the composer to express his emotions also on can- vas—which were greeted with more than polite respect, as a financially successful exhibition in 1910 at the Heller Gallery in Vienna demonstrated. The significance of the twelve-tone system for modern culture was realized by Thomas Mann, who used it as an inspiration for his novel Doktor Faustus (1947). Schonberg was outraged: The character Adrian Leverkuhn, the composer of Mann’s novel, was insane and suffered syphilis. After Mann added to the English edition the comment that the twelve-tone system was Arnold Schonberg’s own creation in 1950, the controversy between the two exiles, almost neighbors in Los Angeles, ended.

Stefan Zahlmann

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