Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)

The Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg was an intellectual violinist who developed his compositional notions by playing chamber music and through his association with the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky (whose sister Mathilde he married). He established a freelance practice as a teacher of composition, attracting to his circle Alban Berg and Anton Webern--the other two members of the Second Viennese School (the first school being that of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven)-- as the pioneers of what is now called serial composition. The most remarkable of Schoenberg's early works is Pierrot lunaire, a song cycle in which the singer declaims the text in Sprechstimme (song- speech).The richly expressionist string sextet Verklarte Nacht ("Transfigured Night"), following a poem about lovers walking in a cold forest, lies just at the outer limits of tonal practice. Shortly afterward he began to compose in the system he called "twelve-tone music." Schoenberg and his second wife, Gertrud (sister of the violinist Rudolf Kolisch), fled Nazism in 1933 and settled in Los Angeles, where he taught at the University of Southern California. In his teaching, books, and above all his music, Schoenberg formulated the ideas at the core of much of today's most serious composition.

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