Arnold Schoenberg grew up in Europe’s most intense musical environment, the Vienna of Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. He was largely self-taught in music, though he found a mentor in the conductor and composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, whose sister became Schoenberg’s first wife. (His second wife also had a musical brother, the leader of an important string quartet that featured Schoenberg’s music.) A man of unusual versatility, Schoenberg produced important books on music theory, painted (and gave exhibitions of) pictures in expressionist style, and wrote the literary texts for many of his compositions.

His early music — notably Transfigured Night of 1899, still his best-known work — extended the late Romantic tradition of Brahms and Mahler. But Schoenberg soon came to feel that he was destined to carry this tradition through to its logical modern development, by way of increasing chromaticism and atonality. Listeners felt otherwise, and Schoenberg’s revolutionary compositions of the 1900s probably met with more hostility than any other works in the entire history of music. At the same time, they attracted the sympathetic interest of Mahler and Richard Strauss (see page 335), and drew a coterie of brilliant young students to Schoenberg.

Schoenberg’s music grew progressively more and more atonal, but he was nearly fifty before he developed the twelve-tone (or serial) system (see page 327). Of all the “new languages” for music attempted by the early avant-garde composers, serialism was the most radical and also the most fruitful. After World War II, even though some leading radicals rejected Schoenberg’s music, they still used his fundamental idea of a serial language for music.

As a Jew, Schoenberg was forced to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power, and he spent the rest of his life in Los Angeles, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1941. His unfinished opera Moses and Aaron of 1933 is both a Judaic epic and an allegory of the problem of modernist communication with the public. A Survivor from Warsaw was written in memory of the slaughter that occurred in the Warsaw Jewish quarter when the Nazis crushed the uprising there in 1943.

Arnold Schoenberg was a strange personality: gloomy, uncompromising, inordinately proud, and also highly superstitious. Of all the major composers, he was the first great teacher since Bach; besides his close associates of the Second Viennese School, he strongly influenced many other musicians who sought him out as a teacher. Near the end of his life he taught at UCLA.

Chief Works: An early “symphonic poem” for string sextet, Transfigured Night; Five Orchestral Pieces; two chamber symphonies, a piano concerto and a violin concerto; five string quartets ◼ Erwartung (Anticipation), an expressionist monologue for singer and orchestra; the unfinished opera Moses and Aaron ◼ A Survivor from Warsaw ◼ Songs, including The Book of the Hanging Gardens, to texts by the German symbolist poet Stefan George; Pierrot lunaire (Moonstruck Pierrot)

Encore: After Pierrot lunaire, listen to Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) and Five Orchestral Pieces.

Image credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images.