Arnold Schoenberg, born in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna on the 13th September 1874, suffered from triskaidekaphobia – the crippling fear of the number 13, a superstition that haunted him for much of his life. The composer avoided the number wherever possible, eventually replacing 13 in the bar count of his scores with 12a. He even misspelt the title of his opera Moses und Aron as the correct spelling of Aaron would have resulted in 13 letters.
On his 76th birthday, he was warned by astrologer Oskar Adler that as the two digits of his age now totalled 13, it would be a critically dangerous year for him. As fate would have it, Schoenberg died on Friday 13th July 1951. Sick, anxious and depressed, Schoenberg had stayed in bed all day. His wife Gertrud related, “About a quarter to midnight I looked at the clock and said to myself: another quarter of an hour and then the worst is over. Then the doctor called me. Arnold’s throat rattled twice, his heart gave a powerful beat and that was the end.”
Schoenberg much preferred the number 12, which he associated with perfection: 12 months in a year, 12 hours on a clock, 12 zodiac signs and – significantly – 12 notes in the chromatic scale. Schoenberg was a revolutionary, rejecting the lush romanticism of his early works for atonality, “the emancipation of the dissonance”. He went on to devise a method of composition that gave each of the 12 notes of the scale equal importance – dodecaphony – a twelve-tone serialism which he employed in his works. As the acknowledged leader of the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg became famous for his new controversial style which did not meet with public or critical acclaim, but his “serial” method became the foundation for musical modernism in the 20th century.
Being a Jew, Schoenberg’s music was banned as the Nazis took power, labelled as “degenerate”. He resigned from his teaching post at the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1933 and emigrated to the United States, settling in California where George Gershwin became a friend and tennis partner. Gershwin asked Schoenberg for lessons in composition. He declined, saying, “I would only make you a second-rate Schoenberg, and you are such a good Gershwin already.” Gershwin just wanted to write “something simple”, like a Mozart string quartet. “I am not a simple man,” Schoenberg replied.
Indeed, Schoenberg’s music is not simple to understand and many promoters still regard him as box office death, but he has plenty of advocates willing to persuade audiences that there’s little to be scared of.
1Verklärte Nacht, Op.4
Even people who profess not to like Schoenberg like Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). It’s an intense, passionate work, originally composed as a string sextet in 1899 and later arranged for string orchestra in 1917. It’s programmatic, a Lisztian tone poem as chamber music, setting the eponymous poem by the expressionist poet Richard Dehmel. Its lush Wagnerian harmonies and the erotic nature of Dehmel’s poetry scandalised the Viennese public.
A man and a woman are walking in the moonlit woods at night. The woman confesses that she is pregnant by another man; longing for motherhood, she sinned with a stranger and now, she is filled with regret and despair. The man consoles her. The Universe shines brightly, he says; their love will transform the child as it has transformed him, and it will be born as his own. The night is transfigured, and they walk on through the moonlight.
2Gurre-Lieder
A monumental cantata, Gurre-Lieder is like a cross between Wagner and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, dramatising an epic Nordic legend of love and death. Schoenberg began it in 1900, but it was not completed until 1911, by which time his compositional style had developed markedly towards atonality. Its early sections are sumptuous, with a highly chromatic harmonic language, the very peak of late Romanticism. The work requires huge forces: an enlarged orchestra, five solo singers, a narrator and a large chorus.
King Waldemar, despite being married to Helwig, is infatuated by the beautiful Tove and brings her to his court. Helwig has her rival murdered. Waldemar curses God and for his blasphemy is doomed to ride with his vassals throughout eternity in search of his lost love.
3Pierrot lunaire, Op.21
Pierrot lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot) is a melodrama commissioned by the actress Albertine Zehme, setting 21 poems by Albert Giraud that she had been reciting as part of her repertoire. Schoenberg responded with an atonal work for a small chamber ensemble and a reciter – usually a soprano – who delivers the text in Sprechstimme, a kind of speak-singing, an expressionist vocal technique that draws from operatic recitatives. “I believe I am approaching a new way of expression,” wrote Schoenberg in 1912. It requires adherence to specified rhythms and pitches but, in the composer’s words, “should not call singing to mind”.
With its vocal slithers and swoops, it can be a tough nut to crack and it was only seeing it performed by the fearless Patricia Kopatchinskaja – usually a violinist rather than a singer – as the moonstruck, jilted clown that it ‘clicked’ for me.
4Chamber Symphony no. 1 in E major, Op.9
Written in 1906, the First Chamber Symphony for reduced orchestra of ten winds and five strings was a pivotal moment, Schoenberg’s reaction against the “monster orchestras” of late-Romantic music. Concise and compact, it is in one 20-minute long continuous movement, and although its tonality is adventurous, using superimposed fourths and whole-tone scales, there are still recognisable melodic motifs or gestures based loosely around a home key of E major. It explores a new musical grammar, pointing the way the composer was turning.
Schoenberg conducted it as part of the famous “Skandalkonzert” of 1913, which programmed only works by the Second Viennese School.
5Five Orchestral Pieces, Op.16
Developing the “total chromaticism” of his Op.11 piano pieces, Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces was one of the first major orchestral works to completely forsake tonality. It received its premiere in 1912 at the Proms in London. Ernest Newman’s review in The Nation:
“It is not often that an English audience hisses the music it does not like, but a good third of the people at Queen's Hall last Tuesday permitted themselves that luxury after the performance of the five orchestral pieces of Schoenberg. Another third of the audience was only not hissing because it was laughing, and the remaining third seemed too puzzled either to laugh or to hiss; so that on the whole it does not look as if Schoenberg has so far made many friends in London.”
6String Quartet no. 2 in F sharp minor, Op.10
If Romanticism in music began with Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet saw its death knell. It’s a fascinating work that charts the composer’s dramatic change in direction. Deeply pained, it was dedicated to his wife, Mathilde, but at a time when Schoenberg had learnt of her affair with the artist Richard Gerstl (who had painted Arnold’s portrait). When Schoenberg confronted Mathilde, she briefly left him; her return led to the distressed Gerstl’s suicide.
The first movement actually starts conventionally, in the key of F sharp minor. Shadowy dissonance creeps in during the eerie Scherzo and then, in the third movement (E flat minor), up pops a soprano singing a setting of Stefan George’s Litanei including lines that reflect Schoenberg’s troubled state of mind: “Deep is the sadness that gloomily comes over me”. But in the finale, Schoenberg enters a whole new world – cool, passive, almost completely atonal – a vocal setting of George’s poem Entrückung (Rapture). Although there is no key, Schoenberg refers back to an F sharp major triad and develops ideas from previous movements, but we’ve been taken to a completely different place from where we were 30 minutes earlier.
7Violin Concerto, Op.36
Dedicated to his pupil, Anton Webern, the Violin Concerto was written in 1936, after Schoenberg had moved to America. It uses 12-tone technique and is neoclassical in form, but the solo writing has melodic moments and a dark, tragic quality, with fierce double- and triple-stops and left-hand pizzicati.
The work was premiered by Louis Krasner and the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, in 1940. Many of the audience walked out. “I am delighted to add another unplayable work to the repertoire,” Schoenberg commented. “I want the concerto to be difficult, and I want the little finger to become longer. I can wait.”
8Erwartung, Op.17
Schoenberg’s opera Erwartung (Expectation) takes the unusual form of a one-act monodrama. A woman is apprehensive, searching for her lover in the darkness. She discovers his dead body and calls for help, but there is no response. She chastises her dead husband, accusing him of being unfaithful to her before wandering off into the night. “The aim,” said the composer, “is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour.” It’s full of difficult intervals for the singer, making it a challenging work to perform.
9Pelleas und Melisande, Op.5
When Schoenberg began composing his symphonic poem based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s play in 1902, he was unaware that Claude Debussy’s opera was soon to premiere in Paris. Where Debussy deals in half lights and shadows, Schoenberg presents destructive passions in late Romantic style. He did consider turning it into an opera: “It would have differed from Debussy's. I might have missed the wonderful perfume of the poem; but I might have made my characters more singing.” The premiere was not a critical success: “Reviews were unusually harsh and one of the critics suggested that I be put into an asylum, with music paper kept out of my reach.”
10A Survivor from Warsaw, Op.46
One of Schoenberg’s later works, A Survivor from Warsaw was written in 1947 in tribute to the victims of the Holocaust. The composer had been profoundly moved by the story about a group of Polish Jews who began singing the “Schema Jisroel,” a traditional Jewish prayer, as they were being taken to a death camp. The Survivor is told through the eyes of a Sprechstimme narrator who speaks for the Jews who were discovered hiding in the Warsaw sewers.
