Who’s Afraid of Arnold Schoenberg? Coming to Terms With the Composer’s Music and Legacy

By Inge Kjemtrup | From the September-October issue of Strings Magazine

Arnold Schoenberg died almost 75 years ago, yet some concertgoers still express nervousness when they see his name on a program. They worry: will the music be unapproachable or unfathomable? In 2024, the 150th anniversary of Schoenberg’s birth, it’s time we set aside our fears and take a fresh look at a composer who opened so many musical doors. There are several excellent, in-depth biographies of Schoenberg, so here I will mainly give an overview of his life and music and look at some of his compositions for stringed instruments.

There’s no denying that much of Schoenberg’s music is intellectually demanding, yet its brilliance and otherworldly beauty make the effort of deep listening worthwhile. He was also an important teacher, who shared his musical understanding with generations of students, many of whom became composers or teachers themselves. Schoenberg felt a strong link to the Romantic era, as revealed in his lifelong veneration of Brahms, although he clearly saw himself as a harbinger of things to come. 

Arnold Schoenberg was born in 1874 in Vienna, the capital of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire. Arnold’s father, Samuel, was a shopkeeper in Leopoldstadt, a Jewish quarter of the city. Neither he nor Arnold’s mother, Pauline, were particularly musical, although they “enjoyed music, particularly singing.” Arnold began violin at age eight. At 11, he was sent to a Realschule, a comprehensive school that concentrated on sciences and languages. When his father died, the 16-year-old Arnold was forced to leave school, taking a job in a bank to support the family.

He escaped the bank’s daily grind thanks to a group of musical friends. Among them was the slightly older composer and conductor Alexander von Zemlinsky. Schoenberg later said, “I owe to him most of my knowledge of the technique and the problems of composing.” Schoenberg lacked Zemlinsky’s conservatory training, but he absorbed much, making up for lost time. Young Arnold also threw himself into playing cello in amateur orchestras. He began composing as well: many vocal works, along with a String Quartet in D (1897) that shows the strong influence of Dvořák and Brahms.

There’s an intensity about Schoenberg that radiates from even the earliest photos you see of him. That intensity can be heard in his music, too, including the string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) of 1899. It is based on a poem by Richard Dehmel about a woman who confesses to her beloved that the child she is carrying is not his. He assures her that their love will transcend this, and the child will be both of theirs. The racy theme, as well as the dissonance of the music, outraged attendees at the premiere in 1902. Today, the piece is one of his most performed.

“Schoenberg wrote Verklärte Nacht before he started atonal experiments,” remarks cellist Matthew Barley, who, along with violinist Viktoria Mullova and the Mullova Ensemble, presented a semi-staged version of the piece in London in 2023. “It’s still a tonal work and extremely Romantic, more in world of Strauss and Mahler. It’s a wonderful work.” Determined to bring listeners into an appropriately meditative state, the Mullova Ensemble performance began with smaller pieces, projections, and a dancer before Verklärte Nacht was played.

Schoenberg’s first numbered string quartet, in D minor, Op. 7, was written in 1905 and following his study of Beethoven. Composing it, he said, taught him “how to avoid monotony and emptiness; how to create variety out of unity; how to create new forms out of basic material.” 

The following year, he shook off the grip of Romanticism with the Chamber Symphony No. 1 in E, Op. 9. “The Chamber Symphony, scored for 15 solo instruments, swept away the dust and cobwebs that had burdened Schoenberg’s style until that moment,” writes Harvey Sachs in his superb biography of the composer. “The emotion is as intense as in his earlier works, but the doors and windows have been flung open and fresh air has entered the house.” Schoenberg said of the Chamber Symphony that it makes great progress “in the emancipation of the dissonance.”

The Chamber Symphony is an extremely challenging work to perform, says violinist Jagdish Mistry, who has been member of the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt, Germany, since 1994. “It’s a 20-minute piece with about an hour’s worth of music!” Mistry says, adding that the Ensemble Modern was originally formed in order to play the Chamber Symphony, forming an ensemble around the piece’s instrumentation.

Schoenberg was rarely short of ambition or ideas. His first foray into orchestral music was Gurrelieder, a huge piece for orchestra and singers. It took years to complete and to be performed. Sachs writes, “It’s true that his astonishing gift and radical ideas would have led him in any case into direct battle with the prevailing forces of his day, but he seems to have had an additional talent for making things worse than they used to be.”

Yet throughout his life, Schoenberg received encouragement and, often, financial support from leading musicians such as Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. The latter said he didn’t fully understand Schoenberg’s music but felt the younger man’s work pointed the way to the future.

Or perhaps to another dimension. The String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10, has a conventional four-movement structure, but has a singer in the third movement—“I feel air from another planet.” With satisfaction, Schoenberg wrote that with this piece, he had “renounced a tonal center.” The premiere, in December 1908, inspired jeers from the concertgoers and brickbats from the critics—not for the first time nor the last.

Schoenberg was undeterred. By 1921, he had found a new method of composing “with 12 tones related to each other.” Other composers, including Alexander Scriabin, had made use of a 12-tone method, but Schoenberg’s was more systematic. As Schoenberg biographer Bojan Bujić notes, the composer saw his approach as having deep historical roots. The earliest pieces employing this method include the Serenade, Op. 24, for string trio, two clarinets, mandolin, guitar, and baritone voice. The Serenade is jaunty and joyful and well worth a listen.

Thanks to a commission from the American heiress Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge (whose contribution to 20th-century music cannot be praised enough), Schoenberg’s Third String Quartet, Op. 30, was completed in 1927 and given a premiere in Vienna by the Kolisch Quartet. Listening to it, I find myself agreeing with Sachs’ comparison of Schoenberg and Stravinsky: “Schoenberg’s music sounded more radical, but its mode of expression never ceased to be Romantic, whereas Stravinsky rejected Romanticism yet opted for what most listeners found to be less-disconcerting sounds.” 

In 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power, the 59-year-old Schoenberg and his family moved to the United States. Bujić writes, “Schoenberg defined his position as that of a man who was nowhere at home: German nationalist musicians saw him as an internationalist, the National Socialists considered him a Cultural Bolshevik, the Communists rejected him as a bourgeois, the anti-Semites saw a Jew in him, yet the composers he considered closest to him were predominately Aryans.”

Those who welcomed the refugee to the US included George Gershwin: “America may well consider herself fortunate to have so distinguished a composer and teacher to choose this country for his home. It is my sincere hope that Schoenberg will stay a long, long time… Germany’s loss will be this country’s great musical gain. I consider it an honor and credit to America that Schoenberg prefers to continue his life work here.”

New York City was his first port of call. Schoenberg didn’t get along with the city nor its climate and relocated to Southern California.

Opinions differ on how well Schoenberg adjusted to his new country. In Los Angeles, he socialized with fellow expatriated Europeans and with Gershwin, a frequent tennis partner (there are home movies of the two composers on the court). But he still had to run the same gauntlet of skeptical critics in America that he’d endured in Europe. “He was out of place in America from day one,” says Mistry. “He discovered there’s another world out there, and he’s not the center of it.”

Perhaps that was by design. Invited to compose a film score, Schoenberg proposed the extremely high fee of $50,000. Furthermore, he stipulated that his score be used exactly as he wrote it. That offer was not accepted.

Two years after arriving in the US, Schoenberg completed the complex Violin Concerto, Op. 36. Jascha Heifetz declined to play it because of its difficulties; it was eventually performed by Louis Krasner with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. Other late Schoenberg compositions of interest to string players include the String Trio, Op. 45, and the single-movement Phantasy, Op. 45, for violin and piano.

The String Trio, Op. 45, is autobiographical. “It’s about his convalescence and his memory of what it is to have a heart attack,” says Mistry. “It’s a difficult piece to bring across to the audience. It’s full of waltzes, but waltzes that are very disembodied—memories of waltzes, you could say. It’s very tough music. I once spoke to Pierre Boulez about it, and he said, yes, that is one of the hardest pieces to understand because he’s working outside of his traditional structures.”

Schoenberg died in 1951. In looking at his legacy, one can’t forget what an extraordinary teacher he was. His students in Europe included Alban Berg and Anton Webern, Marc Blitzstein and Henry Cowell; in America, John Cage and Oscar Levant. 

His influence on his students was profound, though certainly not all adhered strictly to his ideas. “There were some pupils that managed to pare down his language into something more digestible,” says Mistry. “Webern condensed it, compressed it, and miniaturized it. Nikos Skalkottas studied with Schoenberg in Berlin in the early ’20s, and Schoenberg had a high regard for him. Skalkottas is a very good example of keeping the tonal complexity of the language but at the same time reducing that contrapuntal density so that it became understandable.”

So how to mark this anniversary year? Shed your preconceptions and listen to recordings, and perhaps even catch a concert (Verklärte Nacht will be much performed).

Bujić points out that Schoenberg’s music’s “perceived difficulty and strangeness often become barriers that prevent the music from being appreciated in its own right.” Mistry notes, “There’s no question: Schoenberg is absolutely pivotal. There is before Beethoven and after Beethoven, and there’s before Schoenberg and after Schoenberg, right? It will take another couple of hundred years before Schoenberg enters the canon the way Beethoven has.” Schoenberg influenced the direction of music’s future and, adds Mistry, quoting Elliott Carter, “we can only compose the way we do today because of Schoenberg.”

Schoenberg String Works: A Listening Guide

Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (1899)
The lushly late Romantic work for string sextet.

Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9
A breakthrough work in a single movement. “It’s a gateway piece for Schoenberg,” says violinist Jagdish Mistry. “You are between two worlds as the composer ditches triadic language, trying to build harmonies on fourths.” 

String Quartet No. 2 in F-sharp minor, Op. 10
With the addition of voice and a text, this work was a departure from the mainstream in 1908 but now seems relatively approachable.

Serenade for winds, strings, and voice, Op. 24
“A good fun piece that’s well written with dance-y movements,” says Mistry. 

Violin Concerto, Op. 36
Hilary Hahn’s recording brings clarity to this multilayered masterpiece. 

String Quartet No. 4, Op. 37
A dramatic Largo is framed by lyrical and bubbling movements.

String Trio, Op. 45
An eerie depiction of Schoenberg’s health drama.

Phantasy for violin with piano accompaniment, Op. 47
“It’s very lucid, not overladen, because Schoenberg composed the violin part first,” says Mistry.

Brahms Piano Quartet in G minor, arrangement for orchestra (1937)
Schoenberg finds just the right colors in his orchestration of Brahms’ piano quartet.