Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna in September 1874, the son of a shoemaker, and was largely self-taught as a musician — his only formal composition instruction came in his twenties from his future brother-in-law Alexander von Zemlinsky. His earliest works, including *Verklärte Nacht* (1899) and the *Gurrelieder* (composed 1900–11), worked within the chromatic late-Romantic language he had inherited from Wagner, Mahler and Strauss. He moved to Berlin briefly to work with Ernst von Wolzogen’s *Überbrettl* cabaret in 1901, then returned to Vienna and began teaching privately.

The shift from extended tonality into freely atonal writing took place around 1908, in the *Second String Quartet* and *Erwartung*. The technical breakthrough that occupied the next fifteen years — what Schoenberg called the *Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Which Are Related Only with One Another* — was first applied systematically in the works of the 1920s, including the *Suite for Piano* and the *Variations for Orchestra*. He gathered around him the pupils who became the Second Viennese School: Berg, Webern, Wellesz and many others. The rise of National Socialism forced his emigration in 1933; he settled in Los Angeles and taught at UCLA from 1936 to 1944.

Schoenberg returned to a more freely chromatic, sometimes tonal late style in his American years. He died in Los Angeles in July 1951. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his chamber and orchestral work in twentieth-century performance.