Arnold Schönberg was one of the most important musical personalities of the previous century. Starting out with a final surge of the late romantic music, he took a radical step away from what was then regarded as the crisis of tonality with his move toward atonality. Some fifteen years later he developed the twelve-tone technique, which became an important prerequisite for the serial school of composition following the Second World War. With his pupils Berg and Webern, he founded the Second Viennese School, which made a major contribution to the development of modern music. However, and this is the reverse side of Schönberg’s developments in composing technique, Schönberg’s work created a huge gap between the intention of the composer and the concert audience, which neither wanted to meet his intellectual demands nor move away from its traditional listening habits. The surmounting or disregard of this discrepancy determines the creativity of modern composers to this day.
born on September 13, 1874 in Vienna
died on July 13, 1951 in Los Angeles,