Arnold Schoenberg, the innovative composer of the twentieth century
Arnold Schoenberg, in its entirety Arnold Franz Walter Schönberg, Schönberg also spell Schönberg, (born on September 13, 1874, Vienna, Austria), died on July 13, 1951, Los Angeles, California, EE. UU., Austrian-American composer who created new musical methods composition that implies atonality, knowserialism and the 12 tone row . He was also one of the most influential teachers of the twentieth century; Among his most important students were Alban Berg and Anton Webern . (Virtual, 2007)
Arnold Schönberg was the son of Samuel Schönberg (1838-1889), a natural hungary shoemaker, and Pauline Nachod (1848-1921), who grew up in Prague. His musical career began early: at age nine he was already a violinist and self-taught composer. After his father’s death, in 1889, he was forced to take care of his family’s well -being and began working as an employee apprentice at the Wiener Privatbank Werner & Co bank. During these years, he could only satisfy his passion for music looking from far away the outdoor concerts held in parks such as the Augarten or the Pater Wiener. He invested part of his salary in numerous opera functions and, among all, he always preferred Richard Wagner. (Musical, 2007)
According to his memoirs, Schönberg owes his persistent artistic development to three people: Oskar Adler, who transmitted basic knowledge of musical theory, poetry and philosophy; David Joseph Bach, who woke up in Schönberg a wide ethical and moral consciousness, as well as an opposition towards the common and popular; And finally Alexander Von Zemlinsky, who met Schönberg for his entrance as a cellist in the amateur orchestra “Polyhymnia”, in 1885. The orchestra director recognized the talent of Schönberg and, in 1898, helped him in the interpretation (successful) of the first string quartet in re minor in the Bösendorf room of Vienna’s music society. Despite the fact that Schönberg took composition classes with Zemlinsky for a few months, he considered having learned more through the study of the works of the great composers, especially those of Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Through Zemlinsky, Schönberg was able to take roots in the musical environment of Vienna and its surroundings. After his departure from his bank, he assumed the direction of the “Freisinn” choir of Mödling and the male song of Meidling’s song, as well as the master’s degree in the Choir of Metallurgicals of Stockerau (Virtual, 2007)
One of his first works took place in 1899, when Schönberg composed the Sexteto de rope. It was based on a poem by the same name as Richard Dehmel and was the first written program music piece for such a whole. Its programmatic nature and their harmonies outraged the conservative committees of the program. Consequently, it was not carried out until 1903, when it was violently rejected by the public. Since then it has become one of Schoenberg’s most popular compositions, both in its original form and in the subsequent versions of Schoenberg for rope orchestra. (Biographies, 2009)
After the end of the war, Schönberg founded the company for private musical interpretations in Vienna, which took the mission of offering new and/or significant works by Schönberg and its circle. The works of numerous composers, such as Béla Bartók, Ferruccio Busoni, Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Hans Pfitzner, Maurice Ravel, Max Reger, Aleksandr Skriabin, Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinski, were included in concert programs organized by the Society. The execution of symphonic works followed works for chamber orchestra, which continue to be interpreted to this day.
In 1923 he published a method of composition with twelve sounds (dodecaphonic music), a composition technique that he did not teach in another place and which he rarely spoke. After his wife’s death, Mathilde, on October 18, that year in Mödling, he married the daughter of his disciple Rudolf Kolisch, Gertrud Kolisch, on August 28, 1924. He had three children with her: Nuria (in 1932, who would later be the wife of the composer Luigi Nono), Ronald (1937) and Lawrence (1941).
They had to spend many years before Schönberg was a fully recognized composer. In 1925 he was summoned by composer Georg Schumann to the Academy of Arts of Prussia, where he took over the Master’s course in composition. He was withdrawn from the position by Nazi legislation in September 1933 due to racist motifs, which is why he again profess the Jewish faith he had abandoned in his youth. He emigrated to the United States a month later, (Mundo, 2014) after spending a year in Boston and New York, Schönberg was a professor for several years, at first at the University of Southern California and then at the University of California, in the Angels. In 1940 he obtained American nationality.
In the United States, Schönberg completed some of him’s best known works, among which are his rope curation N.º 4 (1936), Musicalization for the Prayer of Kol Nidre (1939), a piano concert (1942), as well as “a survivor in Warsaw (1947)” for speaker, male choir and orchestra, which deals with the experiences of a man in the Warsaw ghetto. At this time, four theoretical books for beginner models in composition, Structural Functions of Harmony (structural functions of harmony, 1954), preliminary exercises in Counterpoint (preliminary counterpute exercises, 1963) and fundamental funds of musical composition (foundations of the musical composition (the musical composition , 1967). (Center, 2015)
From 1948 to 1950 he maintained discrepancies with Thomas Mann about the novel of the latter Doktor Faustus, in which he alluded to dodecaphonic music. With the death of Schönberg, on July 13, 1951, three of his works of religious content were unfinished, specifically the Cantata La Escalera de Jacob », the Moses Opera and Aaron and the Cycle Modern Salmos Modern. However, Moses and Aaron obtained great success by representing two acts. The dramatic confrontation between prophet and priest constitutes one of the most expressive works of Schönberg’s work. On September 14, 1949 he received the citizenship certificate of his hometown, Vienna. He died in 1951 due to a heart condition, after having suffered a heart attack in 1946.
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