Arnold Schoenberg's music is remembered more for its impact on our cultural history than for the quality of the music itself. This is a great injustice, as Schoenberg was one of our greatest composers.

Schoenberg started composing from the time he was a young boy, although he received no formal training until he was a teenager. He studied with Alexander Zemlinsky--a fine composer whose music is currently being re-discovered--and soaked up the heady atmosphere of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Schoenberg was twenty-five when he composed his first masterpiece, Verklaerte Nacht, a lush and passionate tone-poem for string sextet. Schoenberg's music from this early period was bathed in the extremely rich, sometimes even over-ripe harmonies that evolved from the innovative style of Richard Wagner's operas.

Other significant works from this period include the orchestral tone-poem Pelleas und Melisande (1903), the String Quartet No. 1 (1905), the Chamber Symphony No. 1 (1906) and Gurrelieder (1900-11). Gurrelieder was the culmination of Schoenberg's post-Wagnerian style--a massive, highly dramatic and brilliantly colorful work written for vocal soloists, chorus and an orchestra so huge that the composer had to have special music paper printed to be able to notate the entire ensemble on the page.

By the time Gurrelieder was premiered (to great success) in 1913, Schoenberg was exploring a new musical language. This journey began back in 1908, with his String Quartet No. 2. The first two movements of this Quartet were written in a complex tonal style not too far removed from his previous work. But with the third and fourth movements Schoenberg left the world of tonality entirely.

Schoenberg's leap into the world of atonality has often been interpreted as a violent break with tradition. However, by the end of the Romantic period, tonality--the central organizing principal of Western music--had already started to dissolve. There are many instances in Schoenberg's early work (including the first two movements of the Second Quartet) where the aurally-grounding sense of tonality is temporarily abandoned. Certainly he had taken a bold, even revolutionary step. And yet, even in his most "radical" works, Schoenberg carried on the many aspects of the musical traditions he had inherited from Brahms, Wagner and Mahler.

In those last movements of the Second Quartet, Schoenberg took the unusual step of adding a soprano to the string ensemble. He chose two poems by Stefan George (the first beginning, appropriately, "I breathe the air of another planet"), and built the musical structure around the texts. Tonality had always been a crucial aspect of musical organization; now Schoenberg needed to find alternative methods. Using a text or a story provided a structural framework, but finding a way to structure abstract music posed a significant challenge.

Schoenberg's response to this challenge was to create music of extreme moods and intense atmospheres, a style that has sometimes been labeled as "expressionism." Many of these pieces are extremely short, such as the Five Orchestral Pieces, Opus 16 (1909), or the extremely brief Six Little Piano Pieces, Opus 19 (1911). The opera, Erwartung (1909) is one of the greatest works from this period. In it, Schoenberg creates a large, continuous musical structure built upon the quickly-shifting emotions of the opera's single character.

Schoenberg was a great teacher as well as a master composer. Among his most illustrious students were Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Berg and Webern both followed in their teacher's atonal footsteps, though each developed their own individual style.

In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed a system for organizing atonal music. Known as the
"twelve-tone" technique, it provided control over the melodic and harmonic elements of a composition.

This technique was subsequently taken up by Berg, Webern and several generations of composers, including Igor Stravinsky.

Schoenberg taught at the Academy of Arts in Berlin beginning in 1925, but with the rise of Nazism was forced to leave his post. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, eventually settling in Los Angeles where he joined the faculty at UCLA. He wrote several important books on music, including a study of harmony (Harmonielehre, 1911), Fundamentals of Musical Composition (1948), and a series of insightful essays collected together as Style and Idea (1950).

Among his greatest "twelve-tone" works are the Suite for Piano (1923), the Third String Quartet (1927), the Variations for Orchestra (1928), the Violin Concerto (1932), the Fourth String Quartet (1936), the Piano Concerto (1942), and what is considered by many to be his masterpiece, the opera Moses und Aron (1932) which he left incomplete upon his death, in 1951.