Arnold Schoenberg: biography, interesting facts, videos, creativity.

Arnold Schoenberg

Is it possible to check harmony with algebra? It turned out that you can. Arnold Schoenberg mathematically derived a new concept of writing music - the dodecaphony, which is based not on the impulses of the creative soul, but on an exact calculation, and turned out to be the creator of a new musical language of the 20th century.

A brief biography of Arnold Schoenberg and many interesting facts about the composer can be found on our page.

Short biography of Schoenberg

September 13, 1874 Arnold Schoenberg was born in the Viennese ghetto. His mother was a piano teacher, but Arnold began learning the basics of musical literacy and learning to play the violin on his own.

The early death of his father put a young man in front of the need to earn a living, and from 16 years after graduating from the gymnasium, he began working in a bank. However, he soon realized that music from passion became a destination. His first teacher was the famous Austrian composer A. von Zemlinsky, whose sister Arnold married in 1901. They had two children - a daughter and a son.

In Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century, the operetta ball was ruled, it was they who made Scönberg able to make money through orchestration. He taught at the music school and the conservatory, since 1904 - as a private teacher. In 1903, in the Vienna Opera, the composer met G. Mahler. Schoenberg was an ardent admirer and propagandist of the work of an unrecognized genius. He was attracted by the creative position of Mahler - uncompromising service to his talent, contrary to the opinion of society.

In 1907, he was seriously fascinated by painting, and his wife Matilda was a new friend of Schoenberg, the artist Richard Gershtl, for whom she even tried to leave her family. The passion did not last long, although during these few months the composer was preparing to commit suicide, and his friends negotiated with the fugitive, appealing to her human and maternal feelings. As a result, Matilda returned home, and her lover hanged herself.

In 1911, Schoenberg’s canvases were shown as part of the Munich expressionist exhibition. At the same time, his first book, The Doctrine of Harmony, is published. 4 more books and a collection of articles will be published in the 40-60s. During the First World War, the composer was called up for service and spent two years in the rear parts.

Matilda died in 1923, and a year later, the 50-year-old maestro married Gertrude Kolish. She was also a sister, but not his teacher, but his student. A daughter and two sons were born in this marriage. According to Schoenberg’s biography, in 1925 the composer was invited to teach at the Berlin Conservatory. However, work there lasted until 1933 — anti-Semitic sentiments developed in Germany, and Schönberg moved to the United States. In the New World, he found no interest in his work, although for 8 years he taught at the University of California. Despite his achievements in the field of new musical language - dodecaphony, Schoenberg taught his students whole life the basics of classical composition and the history of music. After retirement, the cash content of which was very modest, the composer was forced to earn additionally with private lessons. After the Second World War, his works were again widely performed. The last years of his life he spent in Los Angeles. In 1946 he suffered a heart attack, and on July 13, 1951, the maestro died.

Interesting facts about Schoenberg

• Biography of Schoenberg says that he is one of the few composers who wrote music not at the instrument, but at the table. Mozart, Berlioz, Shostakovich worked in the same way.
• The composer had a superstitious fear of the number 13, even though he was born on the 13th. However, he also died on the 13th, at the age of 76 (a total of 13) years. By the way, both of these 13th days fell on Friday. Even the 13th (or multiple to him) time of his works he considered unsuccessful.

• Despite the fact that Schoenberg had the glory of a scandalous composer and innovator, he was a modest, quiet and delicate person.
• The composer was a great tennis player.
• Two ballets were put to the music of Lunar Pierrot - in 1962 by Glen Tetley for his own troupe, in 2008 by Alexei Ratmansky for the Mariinsky Theater prima Diana Vishneva.
• Schoenberg changed his religion twice - in 1898 he was baptized into the Protestant faith, and in 1933 he again accepted Judaism.
• Schönberg’s daughter Nuria was the wife of the Italian composer Luigi Nono, who also used the dodecaphonic technique. In 1992, Nuria wrote a biographical book about her father.
• The light music of the "Happy Hand" is not the only work of its kind. A. Scriabin correlated music with color and wrote a light score for the instrument he invented. B. Bartok in the opera "Bluebeard's Castle", created two years earlier, also identified his characters and episodes of the plot with certain colors.
• Incomparably better known as a composer, Schoenberg was also a prolific expressionist artist. He created more than 300 paintings that took part in many exhibitions, among them - many self-portraits.
• Portraits of Schönberg were painted by R. Gerstl, O. Kokoshka, E. Schiele. One of the portraits was created by his fellow composer. D. Gershwin - Schoenberg met him by emigrating to America. They had a lot in common, besides the love of music, both painted pictures (they say that Gershwin is better) and played tennis with enthusiasm.

• March 31, 1913 in Vienna, a concert, later called "scandalous". That evening at the Philharmonic Society Schoenberg conducted his First Chamber Symphony, also the music of the composer's teacher A. A. von Zemlinsky and his students A. Webern and A. Berg. It was during the performance of Berg's "Five Songs for Soprano and Orchestra on the Texts of Peter Altenberg" that the indignation of the public began, which laughed and "boomed", hearing dissonant passages. Then something incredible happened - the fight started ... the organizer of the concert. At a subsequent trial, he did not deny it, noting, however, that he was provoked by a rival who had insulted him with a word. The fuse was thrown into the already heated atmosphere, and soon one part of the venerable Viennese public weighed each other over the face without sparing their strength, while the other part appealed to the police and demanded that the composers be sent for psychiatric treatment.
• The plot of "Pelleas and Melisande" by M. Meterlinka became a real hit of the early 20th century. In 1902 Claude Debussy wrote the opera of the same name. In the same year, Schönberg, on the advice of R. Strauss, began to create a symphonic poem, without even realizing that the work of Debussy was being prepared for staging in Paris.
• In December 1912, the composer only visited St. Petersburg, where he conducted "Pelleas and Melisande". After the 1930s, Schönberg in the USSR was not performed due to the inconsistency of his music with the official ideas about art. Interest in the study of his work was revived in our country only three decades later.
• The first production of the opera "Moses and Aaron" required 50 orchestral and 350 choral rehearsals.
• Max Blond - that was the pseudonym of the composer's second wife, Gertrude, under whom she wrote for him the libretto of the one-act opera “From Today to Tomorrow” (1928). The plot of the work is based on the relationship between a husband and wife.

• Schönberg’s pupils A. Berg, A. Webern, H. Eisler were followers of the composer’s musical style, establishing the so-called “Novovensk school”.
• One of the most prominent adherents of the dodecaphon system was the composer Pierre Boulez, who after the death of Schoenberg wrote a scandalous obituary. In it, he blamed the late composer for deviating from the widespread and exclusive use of this technique in the last period of creativity. Despite this article, Boulez was a popularizer of Schoenberg’s work and often conducted his writings.

Schoenberg's art

Schoenberg's work can be divided into three parts - romantic, expressionist and dodecaphonic. The first works are written in the German classical style. This music was a continuation of the romantic tradition of Wagner and Brahms - "Enlightened night" (1899), "Pelleas and Melisande"(1903). Soon Schoenberg realized that the use of traditional harmony had exhausted itself. From the Second String Quartet (1908) he began to work in the atonal, or, as the composer himself called, principle pantonal style. This allowed him to enter the world of the irrational, expressionist world .

In the early 1910s, he wrote the most important expressionist works. That was "Expectation"(1909) - created in just two weeks monodrama for the soprano on the libretto of the young doctor Maria Pappenheim. This work is virtually without a plot, because the listener is not immersed in events, but in the emotions of his heroine - fear, jealousy, despair. All that’s about tells whether reality, dream or fiction? The authors don’t give an answer. The scenography project was designed by the composer himself for the expected performances of “Expectations”, and the premiere took place only in 1924 in Prague.Lunar Pierrot"- the vocal cycle, the hero of which is the creator unrecognized and rejected by society. The peculiarity of this work is in the new principle of singing, which is rather a melodeclamation. Drama with music"Lucky hand"on his own libretto was written in 1913. This composition has many autobiographical features - the hero's wife left him, leaving confusion, pain and fear." Lucky Hand "- this is also the composer's experience in studying the phenomenon of synesthesia - the musical experiences of the hero are clearly connected with light and color. Oratorio "Jacob's Ladder"begun in 1917 - a grandiose intention of the composer, on which he worked for many years, constantly returning, complementing and correcting, but who was not considered complete.

After experimenting with atonal music, Schoenberg again began searching for a new method of composition. So, in the early 1920s, dodecaphony was created. The principle of this technique lies in the sequential use of 12 different notes, which are called a series. The series and its derivatives (inversion, crustacean, crustacean inversion) can also be transposed. "Five Pieces for Piano", completed in 1923, became the debut essay based on the principle of dodecaphony. By the end of the decade, Schönberg again returns to the works of large form, completely built on dodecaphony - Third String Quartet (1927) and Variations for orchestra (1928).

From the biography of Schoenberg, we learn that in 1930 the composer begins work on the opera "Moses and Aaron"by his own libretto. At first he planned to write an oratorio as close as possible to the text of the Bible. Realizing the inconsistency of the biblical exposition, Schönberg creates a more liberal interpretation. The first two acts were written by 1932, the music and the text for the third act were created in 1937, but remained incomplete. Despite this, essential elements of the story were completed by the end of the second act, which made it possible to stage the opera as a completely solid work. The premiere of the concert version took place in 1954, and the stage version in 1957.

Among the works created in emigration, one can mention the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, the Fourth String Quartet (both - 1936) and the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1942). In them, the dodecaphony develops, combined with tonal elements. In support of the European countries that fought against fascism, in 1941 it was written "Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte" on Byron's verses. One of the most emotional humanist works of Schoenberg was the cantata "Survivor from Warsaw", created in 1947. Her text, also written by the composer, is based on the memories of participants in the events of the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto by the Nazis.

Arnold Schoenberg music in the cinema

In 1975, a film was released on the opera "Moses and Aaron", which became one of the first appearances of Schoenberg’s music on the silver screen. Subsequently, the filmmakers turned to the composer’s works:

• "Bets are made" (1997);
• Lumière and Company (1995);
• "Between the Angel and the Demon" (1995);
• "New Wave" (1990).

One of the screenwriters of Simon Curtis’s “Woman in Gold” (2015) was Randol Schönberg, an American lawyer known for working with clients demanding the return of works of art taken from their families during the Holocaust. Randal is also the composer's grandson. Since the film is based on real events, one of its central characters is the lawyer himself, played by R. Reynolds. H. Mirren starred in the title role.

"Music should not decorate, it should be true and only ...". Arnold Schoenberg was not looking for success. First of all, he wanted to develop a musical form, to find new ways, not allowing the art of composition to decline, while remaining true to his creative outlook. History has shown that this is how all timeless geniuses thought. And that was how their fate was formed, full of complex relations with contemporaries and contradictory assessments.