🕎✡️The Beautiful Music of Arnold Schoenberg, Master Composer - and Refugee

Magister Ludi in the flesh

Arnold Schoenberg was first of all a magisterial composer who wrote just gorgeous Classical and Romantic music, before developing his Expressionistic style.  But since the latter made him famous, students and the public are often exposed to his more jarring compositions, without the proper context, and miss out on much lovely music.  Here we set the record straight.

Modern Expressionism developed during and after WWI and WWII, two of the most violent, dislocating events in human history.  So it's no wonder the great artists of that time created art that was highly unconventional, and deliberately disturbing.  They were doing their jobs.  The artist is society's canary in the coal mine.  Schoenberg himself was a Jewish refugee from Nazi persecution; he came to the U.S. well before Kristallnacht - one of the lucky ones.  His great student Anton Webern, famous for his extremely spare Serialism, was tragically shot by an American sentry right at the end of WWII; a senseless accident.

Schoenberg was the greatest composer of the 20th Century in terms of his profound influence on all the others.  As an artist he felt a deep kinship with the painter Kandinsky, who also evolved beyond an early Classical style into a new, abstract Expressionism which explored the dislocation and alienation of the time.  Schoenberg became the leader of The New Viennese School of composers (as opposed to the Old Viennese School of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) which developed, out of Late Hyper-Romanticism, the broad harmonic language used in Modern Classical and Jazz.

Schoenberg was also a talented artist (see his self-portrait in the Wiki thumbnail, scroll down) with 65+ paintings, some of which exhibited in Der Blau Reiter, Vienna's avant-garde art studio and periodical.  He kept up an active correspondence and friendship with Kandinsky throughout his career, and was an admirer of Picasso, Klimt and Miro.  Schoenberg was personal friends with famous Viennese artists Leesa Schneider-Kainer (world traveler and early feminist) and Herwarth Walden (self-renamed after Thoreau's Walden), founder of Der Sturm, a major avant-garde journal of the time promoting modern artists, writers and musicians.

He was born in Vienna in 1874 into a family of Jewish shopkeepers, and grew up with Fin-de-Siecle influences such as Mahler, Ravel, Debussy, Proust and Freud.  But he also greatly admired classical composers and writers such as Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Goethe and Schiller.  Vienna is a cultural center, and at the turn of the century, was ‘the Paris of Eastern Europe’, before the dislocations of the great wars ended its preeminence as the Capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  The young Schoenberg, already brilliant as a student, became part of its Intelligentsia.

He took early composition lessons with Alexander Zemlinsky, who had been taught by the Fuchs brothers (also teachers of Copland’s first composing teacher, Rubin Goldmark).  By his twenties he was orchestrating operas for a living, and producing extraordinary works like his “Verklarte Nacht” (Transfigured Night) for String Section (see below).

His youthful masterpiece, the Oratorio Gurrelieder ("Songs of Gurre", a Danish chieftain) brought praise from Richard Strauss for its lush Romanticism (below).  But more importantly his early works of genius introduced him to Gustav Mahler, who became a mentor and a friend.  The Viennese Intelligentsia took potshots at Mahler, whose long, involved melodic lines and huge symphonies they didn't comprehend.  But Schoenberg became a fan after hearing Mahler's 3rd symphony in D Minor, and then Mahler's protégé.  He vigorously defended Mahler in Der Sturm and explained that his intricate melodies had to be understood as integral parts of the entire symphony, not just a single passage or movement.  He argued eloquently for Mahler's grand conceptions like Song of the Earth or Symphony No. 8, a mammoth piece which expanded the orchestra beyond Beethoven and Brahms' enlargements.  Mahler became his personal hero and Guru, and he likened him to Prometheus.

After serving in WWI, with distinction,  Schoenberg with Mahler's recommendation was offered Fuchs' old position as Music Director of the Vienna Conservatory, but turned it down to become Director of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin.  He only left when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Hence Schoenberg was already an established and widely acknowledged master of Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Impressionistic styles before fully developing his deeply personal brand of hyper-Romantic Expressionism.  The Grove Dictionary of Music describes him as “the modern Bach” for his further exploration and extension of complex contrapuntal forms.  But it was his early Classical and Romantic pieces which first made him famous in Europe.  Other composers hailed him as a worthy heir to the great German tradition of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Strauss and Mahler; and only later as the leader of the New Viennese School.

Here are several very beautiful a cappella counterpoint works of his in Renaissance/Baroque style, two sets of Drei Volkslieder, basically a suite of modern madrigals.  Note the sure and beautiful voice-leading and polyphony (the blending of independent voices:  polyphony means each part is a lovely melody by itself; voice-leading means they all fit together correctly in a web of euphonious harmony):

Volkslieder I, Es Gingen Zwei Gespielen Gut “Two Companions Fared Well”

Schein Uns, du Liebe Sonne "Shine on Us, Dear Sun"

Volkslieder II, Herzlieblich Lieb, durch Scheiden “Heartfelt Love, Through Parting”

Here he is teaching at UCLA, in the footage for a second set of these madrigals (scroll through for different screenshots):

UCLA's Schoenberg Hall is named after him.

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Transfigured Night (Verklarte Nacht) is a beautiful, deeply Romantic and personal String Section piece which reveals Schoenberg’s humanism.  It also brought him to Mahler's attention.  The music follows the narrative closely, starting with dark, brooding minor 6th chords but ending with a wonderfully affirmative coda in D major:

This unspoken narrative may have been for his first wife Mathilde, and serves as a program for the movements of the piece (poem by Dehmel):

Two people are walking through a bare, cold wood;
the Moon keeps pace with them and draws their gaze.
The Moon moves along above tall oak trees,
there is no wisp of cloud to obscure the radiance
to which the black, jagged tips reach up.
A woman's voice speaks:
"I am carrying a child, and not by you.
I am walking here with you in a state of sin.
I have offended grievously against myself.
I despaired of happiness,
and yet I still felt a grievous longing
for life's fullness, for a mother's joys
and duties; and so I sinned,
and so I yielded, shuddering, my sex
to the embrace of a stranger,
and even thought myself blessed.
Now life has taken its revenge,
and I have met you, met you."
She walks on, stumbling.
She looks up; the Moon keeps pace.
Her dark gaze drowns in light.
A man's voice speaks:
"Do not let the child you have conceived
be a burden on your soul.
Look, how brightly the universe shines!
Splendour falls on everything around,
you are voyaging with me on a cold sea,
but there is the glow of an inner warmth
from you in me, from me in you.
That warmth will transfigure the stranger's child,
and you bear it me, begot by me.
You have transfused me with splendour,
you have made a child of me."
He puts an arm about her strong hips.
Their breath embraces in the air.
Two people walk on through the high, bright night.

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Here is another early masterwork, this time for full orchestral and choral ensembles, the beautiful and Late Romantic Gurre-Lieder.  These youthful compositions of genius made Schoenberg rightly renowned and regarded as the modern successor to Beethoven, Brahms, Strauss and Mahler.

Gurre-Lieder “Songs of Gurre”, an amazing and gorgeous Symphonic Oratorio with Soloists and Chorus:

Starts out Impressionistically, almost like Debussy.  One is surrounded by the woods, water, flowers and nature, the impression is lush and wonderful.  Then it deepens and broadens into a more Germanic operatic production with a Libretto of 12 movements in Part I, a long apologia by Waldemar in Part II, and another 10 movements in Part III ending with the Joyful Hunt.  It's a medieval love-tragedy about Danish King Waldemar and his slain mistress whom he mourns.  Lovely to listen to, it’s basically a full-blown opera but with just the music and singing, Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra.  This is a masterful showcase of the composer's craft for full Symphonic and Choral forces, which made Schoenberg famous and recognized as part of the dynasty of great German composers from Bach to Strauss to the present.  Strauss himself praised it, and when it was premiered 1913 in Vienna it received a standing ovation, and literally crowned Schoenberg's laurels as Austria's foremost modern composer —  they put a laurel wreath on his head, though he feigned indifference to the admiration.  More important was the praise from Strauss, recalling Beethoven’s famous quote “only the praise of one who has known praise can give pleasure."

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Another lovely a cappella piece, more advanced than the Madrigals though, is the Impressionistic Peace On Earth written for a Christmas commission.  Still, it deploys comprehensible modern harmonies of 7ths, 9ths, 11ths and 13th chords in impeccable voice-leading.  Not easy for a choir to sing all these thick, rich chords accurately; quite complex, Jazzlike chromaticism.

Friede Auf Erden (Peace On Earth):

Note the frequent divisii of the parts, ultimately it's an eight-part Motet, quite difficult to do the Sectional rehearsals (each combination has to be checked).  There are beautiful chord progressions bookending the complexity, 9ths and 11ths, and it begins and ends quite peacefully and sumptuously with Major 7ths and 9ths.

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An early example of hyper-Romanticism, Chamber Symphony No. 1

Could almost be music for a movie.  Notice the G Major chord on Meas. 80 like a rose among thorns, at the intro to the 2nd movement.  And did the Star Trek theme borrow those Quartal Chords at the very beginning?  Maybe just a smidge.

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Chamber Symphony No. 2 in E Flat.  This also deeply influenced Hollywood movie music:

This is hyper-Romanticism in full bloom.  This kind of writing broadly influenced early Hollywood music, Old Man Warner was a fan.  All fairly understandable and tonal chords, but passionately pushing the boundaries of emotional and harmonic expression. 

Schoenberg fled Nazism for the US in 1933 and was lucky enough to get a teaching position at UCLA, recommended by the renowned conductor Otto Klemperer who had also been Mahler’s pupil, and a fellow German-Jewish refugee.  Klemperer had preceded Schoenberg into the US as Chief Conductor of the LA Philharmonic, and also Guest Conductor of the SF Symphony and the New York Phil (later led by Copland, Bernstein and MTT).  In Los Angeles during the war years and after, both Schoenberg and Stravinsky made a deep impression on Hollywood.  Their Expressionistic and dramatic music was widely copied by others for film scores.

Erwartung 4 Songs in Expressionist style, but quite tonal, Late Romantic.  Not to be confused with his great modern Opera of the same name (it means “awakening” — give the opera a bit of a listen, as well, and compare it to Gurrelieder — it’s also a monumental work but much darker).  Anyway the songs are a preview, and very listenable:

Some amazing piano accompaniment in there as well, florid and lyrical.  Some of it sounds a little like Debussy, French Sixths, German Sixths, and whole-tones.

String Quartet No 1 Analyses - a deep dive into the cultural context and musicology of this revolutionary piece:

String Quartet No 1 in D Minor​​​​​:

Just lovely voice-leading and counterpoint that really pushes the envelope of tonality.  Call it Hyper-Romantic, like the music of Scriabin.  A word here about tonality:  Schoenberg and most composers dislike the word 'atonal'.  It implies modern music is like paint randomly splattered on a naive canvas.  Nothing could be more untrue.  For one thing the greatest avant-garde artists, Picasso, Kandinsky, and Dali, were first of all masters of Classical representation.  That's what made their best abstract work so powerful and compelling.  Chromatic music is NOT atonal, after all Bach and Beethoven used it.  It just has many more tones than the conventional Triads.  It's more correct to call it polytonal or multi-tonal.  This dovetails nicely with polyrhythm, the simultaneous use of two or more rhythms even Bach wrote sometimes, and Chopin more thoroughly in etudes.  Alexander Scriabin wrote entire Sonatas with polyrhythmic movements, as well as with polychords, in fact one of them is named after him (see below).  A complex trichord pioneered by Schoenberg's New Viennese School led by himself, and his greatest students Alban Berg (who composed a lovely jazzlike Piano Sonata) and Anton Webern, is the Viennese Trichord.  More on that later, in Opus 11 below.  But for the above pieces suffice it to say the Overtone Series and the physics of sound are not banished.  All tonal relationships still exist and are valid.  Schoenberg's music, and modern music in general, just explore more distant relationships.  That doesn't mean the closer, easier relationships go away or are less beautiful.  As Schoenberg was fond of saying: "There is still quite a bit of good music to be written in the key of C."

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Below, a piece he wrote in the States for University orchestra String Sections, and it's just wonderful music (Schoenberg was a string player himself).  The first movement presents an overture morphing into a march, then segues into a vivacious Fugue, 5 obbligato parts, sometimes divisii into 6, 7 or 8 parts, not easy stuff!  The deeply felt Adagio has 9 parts.  The graceful Minuet has six, and the dynamic Gavotte has nine again.  Quite a workout for our orchestras, holding us to high standards.  Suite for String Orchestra in G Major:

And it's in G Major - a key, an actual Tonic key!  And you can hear it too, very nice to listen to!  This man just had intense feelings, is all.  And a very great deal to say, which stretches the boundaries of what we used to understand.  The Einstein of modern music, if you will.

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Orchestral Suite - III. Farben (Colors)

Schoenberg's amazing feat of Klangfarbenmelodie, 'tone-color melody' whereby the long, slow chord changes begin with the instruments themselves - in other words the instrumental timbres become a kind of 'chord change' as they slowly exchange the notes of the gradually evolving harmony.  Begins with a minor-major 9th chord, A, C, E, G#, B but in first inversion, with C in the bass (and G# in the tenor) and the root, fifth and 9th of the chord expressed as a Quartal chord in the upper parts (B, E, A).  Schoenberg - Colors (Summer Morning by a Lake). The initial chord slowly changes in a kaleidoscopic series of modulations (first one is to an 11th chord), so it's a popular misconception the whole piece is one long chord.  It is not, it's a series of quite complex contrapuntal modulations in 30 parts, with canonic horizontal structure and vertical Intervallic mixture.  It does stay within a specific chord scheme (vertical mixture) of Quartal harmonies with a Tertian bass structure, see the accompanying analysis:

The overall effect is quite beautiful, abstractly impressionistic, like colors shimmering on a lake (in the programmatic title).  But it isn't static, there are occasional flourishes and appoggiaturas - a heron fishing, birds calling - a kaleidoscope of nature.

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A curious biographical note:  Thomas Mann in the 30s wrote his tragic novel Doctor Faustus partly inspired by Schoenberg the idea, but quite unlike Schoenberg the man.  In it a Dr. Levekund, a talented composer, sells his soul to Mephistopheles in return for absolute mastery of all musical forms and for leading a new movement.  But there is a moral and physical price, a kind of musical Portrait of Dorian Grey.  Schoenberg was incensed by this, as he had come by his craft honestly:  Through intensely hard work and two very good teachers.  He wrote to Mann in LA demanding a retraction on the jacket, which he got:  en.wikipedia.org/… Mann apologized profusely and explained it was a mere artistic device, not meant to portray Schoenberg specifically.  As a non-musician Mann was probably thinking of the earlier Paganini, who was reputed to have sold his soul to the devil in return for his insanely virtuosic violin playing.  (Probably the whole thing was suggested by his publisher.  But Paganini himself took advantage of it to scare rivals in competitions.)

Now for something devilishly hard, but contrapuntally sublime, 3 Piano Pieces, Op. 11 (famously significant transitional music):

This opens with a G chord with a flat 9, then moves to a Gb 11th and augmented-chord counterpoint.  Then the same entire sequence is repeated a whole step down.  Weird, but not unusual in modern harmony or Jazz — 9ths and 11s are par for the course, and since Coltrane’s Giant Steps and Bill Evans, minor-Major 7ths and 9ths and other innovations are commonplace.  In fact Bill Evans popularized the Viennese Tritone or Quartal chord with uneven fourths (one perfect, the other augmented) that Schoenberg invented, and made it a standard Jazz chord, usually as a Dominant 13th stand-in (with the 3rd, 7th and 13th of the chord in some kind of Quartal inversion).  The harmony in Op. 11 often uses stacked augmented and diminished triads, similar to what Bartok had done but a little more chromatic.  These kind of compound chords are more easily analyzed as hexachords, vertical groupings of non-recurring chromatic sets, not unlike Scriabin’s Mystic Chord.  Nothing mysterious about it, Scriabin’s Lydian Quartal chord is based on the Overtone Series discussed above.  The effect as a whole in Op. 11 is organic and unified, with consistent use of counterpoint organizing horizontally, what the chords are expressing vertically.  This is the beginning of Schoenberg’s use of Serialism, though here it is not overt, and in Op. 11 still deeply rooted in the advanced Hyper-Romantic chords Scriabin and Bartok also discovered.  In other words to our modern ears, listening today we hear definite, if somewhat bent harmonies, not unlike avant-garde jazz, and it is certainly not an alien language, though it is pushing the boundaries and evolving towards a more systematic use of 12 equal tones both in chords and counterpoint.  What’s important to realize is this was an organic outgrowth of Hyper-Romanticism, in the same way Impressionism led to Expressionism and further abstractions.  And that these movements were not the work of amateurs but highly skilled artists who first thoroughly mastered Classical styles.

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In Los Angeles of the 1930s and 40s, Schoenberg and George Gershwin were friends, neighbors and tennis partners.  Shirley Temple was also a neighbor, and so was an unlikely fan, James Dean:  How Schoenberg changed Hollywood.  Schoenberg had famously defended Gershwin when the Boston Brahmin critics panned his great Concerto in F as "too jazzy".  Schoenberg pointedly retorted that Gershwin and Jazz were more truly artistic musical expressions than all their cavils and 'futile writings'.

The actor James Dean was an eager piano student and lover of modern music.  His teacher Leonard Rosenman was a Schoenberg pupil, and the New Yorker recounts this fascinating nugget:

James Dean, a modern-music fan, liked to tell an anecdote about Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto:  after Jascha Heifetz complained that he would need to grow a sixth finger to master the piece, Schoenberg supposedly said, “I can wait.”

The Music for the Planetarium Scene from Rebel Without a Cause was directly inspired by Schoenberg’s music; Leonard Rosenman was a Schoenberg disciple recruited by Dean for the picture:

Very effective, and you can hear how Hyper-Romanticism thoroughly merged into early movie music, of all things.  That certainly wasn't the composer's original intention, but he wasn't displeased by it.  Life imitates art.

Among Schoenberg's famous disciples, besides Ernst Toch, Rosenman and Otto Klemperer, in the 40s and 50s were Lou Harrison, an important composer of Just Intonation pieces and music theorist who studied non-Western music, Edgar Varese, a French composer who pioneered electronic music, and John Cage who experimented with almost everything, and contributed to synthesizer research and tape loops.  Schoenberg called Cage "an American inventor, of genius" but he also wrote some sincerely good music like Prepared Piano and aleatory music.  He also seriously researched the physics of sound at Bell Labs and this led to his piece 4:33 of silence music, demonstrating silence is impossible.  If a tree falls in the forest a million tiny creatures hear and feel its vibrations.

Here's a really interesting lecture by the composer himself - Arnold Schoenberg, My Evolution - this is the authorized inside scoop!

Larry Schoenberg (son) My Father's Music (a retrospective).  Larry still lives in LA.  Some of his Dad's manuscripts were lost in the Palisades fire.  Luckily copies still exist.  And most of the pieces are in print.

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Now for an example of fully polytonal music approaching Serialism, both harmonically and melodically.  After the war, late 1940s, Schoenberg was asked to write a piece commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

A Survivor From Warsaw:

This quasi-Oratorio uses Sprechstimme, ‘speaking voice’ to recount the sufferings of the doomed.  But what a different Oratorio from the bucolic Gurreleider!  A new and terrible world has supervened the nostalgias of the past.  The music moves from the fatalism of a Reveille march, to hyper-emotionality and extreme Expressionism as the plot tragically unfolds.  Schoenberg, as the pre-eminent surviving Jewish composer of the WWII Era, had to write this and other similarly wrenching music of the time.  It was his place in history, his role in the Zeitgeist.  The fact he wrote much beautiful music too, and using the tools Zemlinsky and Mahler gave him, midwifed the new, vibrantly dynamic language of modern harmony we all use now, speaks to his natural genius, and to his resilience as a refugee from the worst regime in human history.

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