Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, painter, teacher, and writer. Among the most influential and innovative composers of the 20th century, he was the central figure of the Second Viennese School.

His formative early career was mostly in Vienna, where he melded the stylistically opposed German Romanticism of Brahms and Wagner. He was among the first modernist composers to write music of dense motivic relations penetrating the musical surface in unified fields. His String Quartet No. 2 (1907–1908) is famed for its atonality. As both a painter and composer his style was expressionist, notably in ''Erwartung'' (1909) and ''Pierrot lunaire'' (1912).

In the 1920s Schoenberg substantially developed his twelve-tone technique in music systematically interrelating all notes of the chromatic scale, often exploiting combinatorial hexachords. Confronting popular antisemitism, he returned to Judaism and explored Zionism, working on ''Die Jakobsleiter'' (1915–1922, unfinished) and ''Moses und Aron'' (1923–1937, unfinished). His twelve-tone music did not always eschew tonal inflection; his Suite, Op. 29 (1924–1926) features consonances and tonal melody. He taught at the Prussian Academy of Arts (1926–1933).

Schoenberg emigrated as the Nazis took power; they proscribed his (and his students') music as "degenerate". He taught in the US and later as faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (1936–1944), where facilities are named in his honor. He explored writing film music, as he had done idiosyncratically in ''Begleitungsmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene'' (1929–1930). He wrote more tonal music, as in his Chamber Symphony No. 2 (completed 1939).

With citizenship (1941) and US entry into World War II, he took aim at Hitler in ''Ode to Napoleon'' (1942, after Byron), drawing on Beethoven's fate motif and the . Post-war Vienna beckoned with honorary citizenship, but Schoenberg was ill as depicted in his String Trio (1946). He memorialized Holocaust victims in ''A Survivor from Warsaw'' (1947). The Israel Conservatory and Academy of Music elected him honorary president (1951).

At least three generations of composers extended the somewhat formalized harmony of his music. Many were passionately against it. Among his students were Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, and Nikos Skalkottas in Europe; in the US, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, Robert Gerhard, Leon Kirchner, Dika Newlin, and Oscar Levant. His aesthetic and music-historical views influenced musicologists Theodor W. Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus, as well as pianists Charles Rosen, Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Serkin, Eduard Steuermann, and Glenn Gould. The Arnold Schönberg Center collects his archival legacy. Provided by Wikipedia