Arnold Schoenberg Free Sheet Music Recordings, Program Notes and Biography

The Emancipator of Dissonance

On March 31, 1913, the grand hall of the Musikverein in Vienna was the scene of a musical riot. The concert, conducted by Arnold Schoenberg himself, featured new works by his students and a piece by his friend Gustav Mahler. As the strange, unsettling sounds of a song by Alban Berg filled the hall, the audience’s restlessness boiled over into open hostility. Hissing, shouting, and jeering erupted, and soon fistfights broke out among the tuxedo-clad attendees. The chaos was so great that the concert had to be abandoned before the final piece could be played. This notorious event, dubbed the Skandalkonzert, was a baptism by fire. It was the moment the world fully confronted the terrifying, exhilarating, and utterly new musical language Schoenberg had unleashed—a language that would tear down centuries of tradition and forever change the way we hear.

Self-Taught Beginnings in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

Arnold Franz Walter Schoenberg was born on September 13, 1874, in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna, the vibrant cultural capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family was lower-middle-class Jewish, and his musical education was anything but conventional. Unlike most major composers, he did not attend a prestigious conservatory. He was almost entirely self-taught, learning the violin and cello and devouring the scores of the great German masters from Bach to Brahms. His only formal instruction in composition came in the form of counterpoint lessons from the slightly older composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, who would become his close friend and, later, his brother-in-law.

Schoenberg’s early works showed a complete mastery of the late-Romantic idiom he had inherited. His 1899 string sextet, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), is a masterpiece of post-Wagnerian passion and soaring lyricism. Based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, the work is intensely emotional, pushing chromatic harmony to its absolute limits while still remaining within the bounds of traditional tonality. It was clear that Schoenberg could have been a brilliant successor to Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. But he was convinced that this musical language, after centuries of development, had been exhausted. He felt an historical imperative to lead music into a new, uncharted territory.

The Break with Tonality

The years between 1908 and 1913 were a period of astonishing creative ferment and personal crisis for Schoenberg. He concluded that the entire system of tonality—the hierarchical organization of music around a central "home" key, which had been the bedrock of Western music since the Baroque era—was no longer a valid means of expression for a modern artist. He took the radical step of abandoning it altogether.

This led to what is often called "atonality." Schoenberg preferred the term "pantonality," but the effect was the same: he composed music with no key center. He called this the "emancipation of the dissonance," meaning that dissonant sounds no longer needed to "resolve" to consonant ones; they could exist freely as legitimate and expressive sounds in their own right. This was a revolution. Works like his String Quartet No. 2 (1908) chronicle this transition; its final movement famously includes a soprano singing "I feel the air of another planet." The monodrama Erwartung (1909), a harrowing 30-minute exploration of a woman's psyche as she searches for her dead lover in a forest, plunged music into a new realm of psychological expressionism. The public reaction was overwhelmingly hostile, with critics and audiences alike treating him as either a madman or a charlatan.

Pierrot lunaire and the Second Viennese School

In 1912, Schoenberg composed the work that would become the quintessential masterpiece of his atonal period: Pierrot lunaire. This cycle of 21 "melodramas" for a female reciter and a small chamber ensemble is a landmark of 20th-century music. Based on surreal, sometimes grotesque poems, the music is eerie, captivating, and utterly unique. For the vocal part, Schoenberg invented a new technique called Sprechstimme (speech-song), where the singer approximates the written pitches in a style that is halfway between speaking and singing, creating a deeply unsettling effect.

Despite his reputation as a musical anarchist, Schoenberg was a profoundly influential teacher. He gathered around him a circle of devoted pupils, the most brilliant of whom were Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Together, these three composers formed what came to be known as the Second Viennese School (with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven being the First). While Berg infused Schoenberg's methods with a Romantic, dramatic sensibility and Webern distilled them into crystalline, aphoristic structures, both adopted their master's pathbreaking approach to harmony and form.

The Twelve-Tone Method

After a nearly decade-long period of creative silence following Pierrot lunaire, Schoenberg emerged in the early 1920s with yet another revolution. Atonality had given him expressive freedom, but he sought a new system to provide his music with the large-scale structural coherence that tonality had once offered. He found it in his "method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another," commonly known as the twelve-tone technique or serialism.

The method was a systematic way to ensure that no single pitch would dominate and suggest a key. The composer creates a "tone row" by placing all twelve notes of the chromatic scale in a specific, fixed order. This row, and its transformations (inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-inversion), serves as the basic melodic and harmonic material for the entire piece. His Piano Suite, Op. 25 (1923) was one of the first works to fully utilize this technique, and he would employ it for the rest of his life in works like the opera Moses und Aron and the Violin Concerto. He famously told a student, "I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next 100 years."

Exile in America

In 1926, Schoenberg was given a prestigious teaching post at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. However, his career there was cut short by the rise of the Nazi party. As an avant-garde modernist and a Jew, he was a prime target for their campaign against "degenerate art." In 1933, he was forced to flee, moving first to Paris, where he formally reconverted to the Judaism he had abandoned in his youth.

Later that year, he emigrated to the United States. He settled in Los Angeles in 1934, where he would live for the rest of his life. He taught composition at the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), influencing a new generation of American composers, including the young John Cage. He adapted to American life, even anglicizing the spelling of his name from Schönberg to Schoenberg. His later works, such as the Piano Concerto (1942), sometimes showed a surprising return to tonal elements, demonstrating that his method was not as rigid as his detractors claimed. He died in Los Angeles on July 13, 1951, leaving behind a legacy that is as controversial and debated today as it was during the Skandalkonzert nearly a century ago. He remains one of the most consequential figures in music history: a reluctant revolutionary who felt compelled by artistic necessity to lead music into a future it may not have been ready for.

References and Further Reading

• Rosen, Charles. Arnold Schoenberg. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

• Schoenberg, Arnold. Style and Idea: Selected Writings. Edited by Leonard Stein. University of California Press, 1984.

• Schoenberg, Arnold. Theory of Harmony (Harmonielehre). Translated by Roy E. Carter. University of California Press, 1983.

• Shawn, Allen. Arnold Schoenberg's Journey. Harvard University Press, 2002.

• Stuckenschmidt, H. H. Arnold Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work. Translated by Humphrey Searle. Schirmer Books, 1978.