Arnold Schoenberg :: essays research papers

Arnold Schoenberg was born on September 13, 1874, to a Judaic family in capital of Austria. He taught himself composition, with help in counterpoint from the Austrian composer horse parsley Zemlinsky, and in 1899 produced his first major browse, the tone poem Verklrte Nacht (Transfigured Night) for set up sextet. In 1901 he married Zemlinskys sister Mathilde, with whom he had two children. The couple locomote to Berlin, where for two years Schoenberg earned a living by orchestrating operettas and guiding a cabaret orchestra. In 1903 Schoenberg returned to Vienna to acquire. on that point he met his well-nigh successful students, the Austrian composers Anton Webern and Alban Berg, who became his close friends. In his compositions, Schoenberg employed far-reaching harmonies, a attri entirelye that later developed into atonality. Because of this, riots erupted at both premieres of his first two string quartets in 1905 and 1908. Such experiences led him often to feel persecuted by a public that could not understand his music. Schoenberg also began painting during these years and exhibited his work with a group of artists in the circle of the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. This flow rate was marked by tragedy when Mathilde had an affair with his painting teacher, who committed self-destruction after she returned to Schoenberg. In 1911, the year in which Schoenberg published his book possibleness of Harmony, he accepted a precept position in Berlin. There he composed one of his most influential works, Pierrot Lunaire (1912). He returned to Vienna in 1915. The interruptions occasioned by World War I, combined with Schoenbergs search for a way to ensure logic and unity in atonal music, prevented him from producing many works between 1914 and 1923. By 1923, however, he had completed the formulation of his twelve-tone manner of composition. Mathildes death that same year was a serious blow to Schoenberg, but in 1924 he met and married Gertrud Kolisch, the sister of an Austrian violinist. With the invitation in 1925 to teach composition at the Academy of Arts in Berlin, Schoenberg finally obtained a prestigious position, financial security, and a stable family life. In 1932, the year the couples girl was born, he completed the second act of his opera Moses und Aron (produced posthumously, 1957). Schoenberg and his family fled Nazi Germany to genus Paris in 1933. In 1934 they immigrated to the United States, and he accepted a teaching position in Boston. The next year, because of his health, they moved to Los Angeles, where his two youngest sons were born.