Schönberg in 1947
Florence Homolka, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons

Although he had few formal teachers, Arnold Schönberg imbibed the influence of Vienna's musical traditions from his youth. Born on September 13, 1874, to a Jewish family and trained as a banker, his early works were in a late Romantic style, and despite the innovations on which he was about to embark, he always saw himself as continuing the traditions of German Classical music.

In 1898, he converted to Protestantism and composed one of his first significant works, a string sextet called Verklärte Nacht, inspired by meeting Mathilde, the daughter of his violin teacher, whom he would marry in 1901.

In 1904, he moved to Vienna to teach and compose, and also met and befriended Gustav Mahler. A few years later, he composed “The Book of the Hanging Gardens,” a 15 part song cycle numbered 1-12, 12A, 14, and 15 (Schönberg was superstitious and thought the number thirteen was unlucky.) He became fascinated with the expressionist movement in art, befriending the painter Wassily Kandinsky, and started creating expressionist paintings himself.

Schönberg painted by Richard Gerstl
Richard Gerstl, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

His wife also became very good friends with a painter named Richard Gerstl, who often painted portraits of the Schönberg family. After getting to know Mathilde a bit too well, he took his own life when she broke things off and returned to Schönberg.

In 1926, Schönberg began teaching at the prestigious Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. His music took a radical turn as he abandoned tonality and invented a 12-tone technique called serialism. He considered this technique an inevitable step in the development of music and predicted that it would set the course of composition for the next century. Schönberg and his students, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, who adopted the serialist technique in their own music, called themselves the Second Viennese School, humbly seeing themselves as successors to the First Viennese School of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

Serialism keeps music devoid of tonality by using all twelve tones of the chromatic scale equally. This unnatural equality is produced using a tone matrix, a 12 x 12 grid each row or column of which is called a series, hence the name of the system. There are four steps to filling out the matrix:

C	F♯	G	E♭	D	A♭	A	F	E	B♭	B	C♯
F♯	C	C♯	A	A♭	D	E♭	B	B♭	E	F	G
F	B	C	A♭	G	C♯	D	B♭	A	E♭	E	F♯
A	E♭	E	C	B	F	F♯	D	C♯	G	A♭	B♭
B♭	E	F	C♯	C	F♯	G	E♭	D	A♭	A	B
E	B♭	B	G	F♯	C	C♯	A	A♭	D	E♭	F
E♭	A	B♭	F♯	F	B	C	A♭	G	C♯	D	E
G	C♯	D	B♭	A	E♭	E	C	B	F	F♯	A♭
A♭	D	E♭	B	B♭	E	F	C♯	C	F♯	G	A
D	A♭	A	F	E	B♭	B	G	F♯	C	C♯	E♭
C♯	G	A♭	E	E♭	A	B♭	F♯	F	B	C	D
B	F	F♯	D	C♯	G	A♭	E	E♭	A	B♭	C

• One begins a tone matrix by randomly (or not) lining up all twelve tones of the chromatic scale and putting them on the top line of a grid. This is called the prime series, or P₀. Show Me
• Then, down the left column, the tone row is written using the same intervals, but upside-down. This is called the inverse series, or I₀. Show Me
• Next, the tone row is transposed, so that the intervals remain the same, onto the second line. Since this is a transposition of the prime series, it is notated by a "P" and the number of semitones in the transposition: in this case, P₆. Show Me
• This process continues to fill out the entire matrix. Show Me

When composing in a serialist manner, a composer must use a full series before he or she is allowed to repeat a note. There are forty-eight possible series:

• The prime series, or any of its transpositions (i.e. any row going left-to-right).
• The inverse series, or any of its transpositions (i.e. any column going top-to-bottom).
• The retrograde series, or any of its transpositions (i.e. any row going right-to-left... the first row would be R₀).
• The retrograde-inverse series, or any of its transpositions (i.e. any column going bottom-to-top... the first column would be RI₀)

As the Nazis rose to power and their anthropological theories became government policy, Schönberg began working on a biblically-themed oratorio. This eventually became the opera “Moses und Aron,” (Schönberg intentionally misspelled Aaron to avoid having thirteen letters in the title), although the work was never finished.

In 1933, Schönberg was removed from his position at the Prussian Academy of Arts. He reverted to Judaism and emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Hollywood alongside Igor Stravinsky and George Gershwin, teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In the summer of 1951, Schönberg became ill. Since he was 76 years old, and 7 + 6 = 13, Schönberg spent the day in a state of high anxiety and died at 15 minutes to midnight on Friday, July 13.