Schoenberg, Arnold Franz Walter 1874-1951
Austrian-born composer, conductor and teacher

Schoenberg was born in Vienna. He learned the violin as a boy but was largely self-taught. In his twenties he earned his living by orchestrating operettas and from 1901 to 1903 he was in Berlin as conductor of a cabaret orchestra. The works of his first period were in the most lush vein of post-Wagnerian Romanticism and include the string sextet Verkl�rte Nacht (1899, 'Transfigured Night'), a symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande (1903) and the mammoth choral-orchestral Gurrelieder (1900-01; orchestrated by 1911). He was a notable teacher from his Berlin days until his last years, and his two most famous pupils, Anton von Webern and Alban Berg, joined him in Vienna in 1904.

His search for a new and personal musical style began to show in such works as the first Chamber Symphony (1907) and the second String Quartet (1908), which caused an uproar at their first Vienna performances through their free use of dissonance. His works written before World War I, including Erwartung (1909, 'Expectation') and Pierrot Lunaire (1912), may be described as Expressionist; extremely chromatic in harmony, with tonality almost obscured, they met with incomprehension and hostility.

During periods of compositional crisis Schoenberg turned to painting, and he exhibited with Wasily Kandinsky's group Der Blaue Reiter. During the war he was twice called up and discharged as physically unfit. From 1915 to 1922 he worked on the text and music for an oratorio, Die Jacobsleiter, which remained unfinished. Gradually Schoenberg saw the need to harness his totally free chromatic style, and he logically evolved the discipline known as the 'twelve-note method', dodecaphony, or serialism; its first use was in the Piano Suite Op 25 (1921-23).

Although he never formally taught this method or publicized his theory, it was adopted by Webern and many others. Schoenberg himself used thematic serialism both strictly and freely, and in some later works departed from it entirely, even returning to tonality. In the 1920s he made many tours, conducting his own works, and in 1925 succeeded Ferruccio Busoni as director of the composition masterclass at the Berlin Academy of the Arts. There he wrote his third String Quartet, Variations for Orchestra, a one-act opera, Von Heute auf Morgen ('From One Day to the Next'), a cello concerto and two acts of his greatest stage work, Moses und Aaron ('Moses and Aaron', unfinished).

When the Nazis came to power he left Berlin for Paris, where he formally rejoined the Jewish faith, and set sail for the USA (October 1933), never to return to Europe. In America, Schoenberg suffered from bouts of ill health, money troubles, and general misunderstanding and neglect of his work. Yet after settling in Los Angeles (1934) he wrote much fine music, became a popular teacher at the University of California, taught privately, and wrote a number of valuable textbooks on composition. The Violin Concerto (1935-36) and fourth String Quartet are complex twelve-note works, while the Suite for Strings (1934) and a Hebrew setting Kol Nidre (1938) are more traditionally tonal.

His isolation in an alien cultural atmosphere and his spiritual agony over the atrocities committed against his race in Europe are felt in such powerful works as the Piano Concerto (1942), Ode to Napoleon (1942) and A Survivor from Warsaw (1947). Sickness, financial cares and fear of neglect dogged Schoenberg's last years, but interest in his works was already increasing among a younger generation; a few years after his death his stature as a composer and teacher of immense influence was recognized, even if he never attained the popular audience with whom he strove to communicate.

Bibliography: A selection of Schoenberg's letters is available in E Stein (ed), Arnold Schoenberg Letters (translated by E Wilkins and E Kaiser, 1964). See also C Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music (translated by D Puffett and A Clayton, 1987); C Rosen, Schoenberg (1975); E Wellesz, Arnold Schoenberg (translated by W H Kerridge, 1921, reprinted 1971).