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Updated: June 22, 2025
His pianoforte works include: Aquarellen, Opus 25; Variations and fugue, Opus 81; "Aus Meinem Tagebuch," Opus 82; Two sonatinas, Opus 89. He wrote over three hundred songs. Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna September 13th, 1874. He was self-taught until his 20th year. His first instruction was received from his brother-in-law, Alexander von Zemlinsky.
For just as Gustav Mahler might stand as an instance of musicianly temperament fatally outweighing musicianly intellect, so Arnold Schoenberg might stand as an example of the equally excessive outbalancing of sensibility by brain-stuff. The friendship of the two men and their mutual admiration might easily be explained by the fact that each caught sight in the other of the element he wanted most.
The little Erich Korngold in reality a plump, good-looking boy presents few problems for the critic. Whether or not the youth is helped by his teacher, as some say, there can be no doubt as to his precocious talent. His facility in composition is Mozartian. Nothing laboured, all as spontaneous as Schoenberg is calculating.
It is hardly necessary to consider here the fantastic fashionings of Erik Satie, the "newest" French composer. He seems to have out-Schoenberged Schoenberg in his little piano pieces bearing the alluring titles of Embryons desséchés, preludes and pastorales. Apart from the extravagant titles, the music itself is ludicrous qua music, but not without subtle irony.
But they are no longer proclaimed by those ultramoderns who dare to call Strauss an intermediate type. So rapidly doth music speed down the grooves of time. From Vienna comes Schoenberg; in Vienna lives and composes the youthful Erich Korngold, whose earlier music seems to well as if from some mountain spring, although with all its spontaneity it has no affinity with Mozart.
But, for the present, Schoenberg, the composer, is almost completely obscured by Schoenberg, the experimenter. For the present, he is the great theoretician combating other theoreticians, the Doctor of Music annihilating doctor-made laws. As such, his usefulness is by no means small. He speaks with an authority no less than that of his adversaries, the other and less radical professors.
There is, literally, no waste ornament or filling in his scores; every theme, every subsidiary figure, is set spinning so that you dream of fireworks spouting in every direction, only the fire is vitriolic and burns the tympani of the ears. Seriously, like all complex effects, the Schoenberg scores soon become legible if scrutinised without prejudice.
Whereas it is probable that Richard Strauss would have deteriorated no matter how friendly the age in which he lived, that Reger would have been just as much a pedant had he been born in Paris instead of in Bavaria, that Schoenberg would have developed into his mathematical frigidity wherever he resided, it is possible that Mahler's fate might have been different had he not been born in the Austria of the 1860's.
I told myself that it served me right, that I was too old to go gallivanting around with this younger generation, that if I would eat prickly musical pears I must not be surprised if I suffered from aural colic. Nevertheless, when certain of the Schoenberg compositions reached me from Vienna I eagerly fell to studying them. I saw then that he had adopted as his motto: Evil, be thou my good!
Every composer has his aura; the aura of Arnold Schoenberg is, for me, the aura of subtle ugliness, of hatred and contempt, of cruelty, and of the mystic grandiose. He is never petty. He sins in the grand manner of Nietzsche's Superman, and he has the courage of his chromatics. If such music-making is ever to become accepted, then I long for Death the Releaser.
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