Derek Parker sketches the life and career of Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian modernist composer whose controversial music is either regarded as a stake into the heart and practice of harmony in 20th-century classical music, a musical terror, or as pianist Pina Napolitano puts it, ’an invincible combination of intellect and passion, discipline and expressivity’ at the very centre of the development of the art in the 20th century.

In 1965 I was sleeping on the pavement outside Covent Garden Opera House, one of the more than 100 people queueing for tickets for the coming appearance of Maria Callas in Tosca. In the early morning a dispute broke out about places, which rapidly escalated. Out from the House came its major-domo, the robust and much-loved ex Guardsman, Sergeant Martin.  “Order! Order!” he shouted. “Behave yourselves or there’ll only be tickets for Moses und Aaron!”

The threat was a real one; very few people in the queue were interested in the first English performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s opera – though after it had opened with news that Peter Hall’s production contained orgies, simulated sex, bare bosoms, rivers of fake blood, and three naked virgins, tickets became a drug on the market. The music came second, and for many opera-goers, that was the place for it. Apart from which, the composer’s theories of ‘the emancipation of the dissonance’ and ‘the unity of musical space,’ even 70 years after his first works had been published, still bemused all but his most devoted followers.

Schoenberg was born in 1874 of Jewish parents; his father ran a little shoe-shop in Vienna. In the mysterious way musical talent declares itself, Arnold took to the violin when he was eight and almost immediately wrote a waltz and polka for himself and another young violinist. This was followed by duets, trios and – after Arnold had bought himself a battered cello and taught himself to play it – quartets. Forced to work in a bank when his father died, he was delighted when it failed, and encouraged by the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, he made a sparse living conducting operetta before moving to Berlin, where he conducted the orchestra at the Überbrettl, a cabaret for which he wrote several numbers.

They didn’t take, and back in Vienna, he became a freelance teacher whose pupils for counterpoint and harmony included Alban Berg and Anton Webern, completing a trio which blew up all public notions of tunefulness and melody. During the next few years Schoenberg wrote a number of works which, with the encouragement of Mahler, were performed but audiences greeted them with howls of derision and even anger. Encouraged by his friend the artist Kandinsky, he became a failed painter. But music was his destiny, and he developed his theories of dodecaphony, or twelve-tone serialism, in several works which include the well-known Pierrot Lunaire, for voice and chamber ensemble, and the oratorio Gurrelieder. 12After World War I, happily married to Zemlinsky’s daughter, and with a growing family, he gradually established himself in Europe as a teacher and propagandist for the ‘new music’.

Then, in 1934, no doubt partly due to the rise of the Nazis in Germany, he took himself and the family to America – first to Boston and New York, where he became a friend of George Gershwin, then to Hollywood, perhaps tempted by the example of other European émigrés such as Korngold, Steiner, and Waxman. Alas, we have been denied Schoenberg duets for Nelson Eddy and Jeanette Macdonald! Commissioned by MGM to write a score for the film of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, he demanded $50,000 and absolute control of how his music was used. MGM was not amused.

Old age was not kind to Schoenberg, and physical fragility bore down on him, though he continued to compose. Like it or loathe it, his music is at the very centre of the development of the art in the 20th century. His friend Kandinsky said of it in the 20s, that it ‘leads us into a realm where musical experience is a matter not of the ear but of the soul alone, and at this point the music of the future begins.’ Interested in the occult, Schoenberg insisted for some years that he would die on Friday the 13th. He did, in 1951. According to his wife, his last word was ‘harmony’.

–Derek Parker

This article was published in the October issue of Fine Music Magazine.