Although numerous books and articles have examined Arnold Schoenberg’s religious thought, fewer have taken a close look at his core philosophical orientation. This chapter explores the composer’s philosophical milieu, musings and influences. Thinkers who began to set new coordinates for the new century sought to abolish the brand of metaphysics that had dominated German philosophy throughout the nineteenth century. While remnants of dialectical metaphysics were still circulating in Schoenberg’s Vienna, the cosmology it presupposed was rapidly fading out of fashion. This chapter traces Schoenberg’s philosophical alignment with the new ‘scientific worldview’ of proto-logical positivist Ernst Mach, his student David Joseph Bach (Schoenberg’s lifelong friend) and Schoenberg’s composition student Robert Neumann, an active member of the Vienna Circle (originally the Verein Ernst Mach).

The overabundance of examples in Schoenberg’s textbooks can often be overwhelming. When one solution might have sufficed to illustrate a particular concept, Schoenberg offered many. It was not uncommon for him to compose multiple alternative endings and ossia measures for a single solution, often devoid of aesthetic evaluation, and sometimes of explanatory text altogether. Readers of his texts are familiar with this quirk, but what was the point of such tireless exploration? Schoenberg believed that, through this systematic exploration of possibility, his students would gain the tools necessary to grapple with the unique problems of their own musical ideas. In turn, this emphasis on self-reliance and possibility fostered precisely the stylistic and creative diversity that we find among Schoenberg’s students, from Anton Webern to John Cage. Schoenberg’s emphasis on possibility encouraged a diverse pedagogical legacy that includes film composers, serialists, music theorists and even a composer who late in life saw no contradiction in adding punk rock performance to her résumé.

Though it goes against the common conception of Schoenberg as a no-nonsense adherent to high art and modernism, popular music played an important role in the composer’s life and work. This chapter will survey Schoenberg’s engagement with the popular music and popular-music culture by focusing on four dimensions of that engagement: Schoenberg’s early-period cabaret songs; the use of popular music in his mature works before 1933; his relationship to popular music while living in Los Angeles; and the role of popular music in Schoenberg’s theories.

Starting from the Russo-Japanese War until the height of the Cold War era, Schoenberg’s adult life coincided with various wars during the turbulent first half of the twentieth century. This chapter explores how Schoenberg navigated these events by surveying his correspondences with friends and pupils, his own writings and brief analyses of two overtly political compositions, Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, op. 41 (1942) and A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46 (1947). This chapter ends by considering the two war compositions as the composer’s statement and restatement against fascistic tendencies in Germany during World War II and, again, in the United States during the Cold War era.

This chapter, concerned with earliness as an aesthetic category, elicits a productive tension between Webern’s fascination for the ‘purely phenomenological’ dimensions of new-symbolist poetry and Jugendstil architecture on the one hand, and the impact Schoenberg’s ‘dialectic-material’ musical thought had on him as a student on the other – a tension that had crystallised as essentially irreconcilable in fin de siècle philosophical discourse yet in many ways formed the matrix through which much of Webern’s compositional imagination was shaped. From this perspective, it is argued that there is a need to reorient discussion of the works Webern produced under Schoenberg’s tutelage, from questions concerned with style towards a more comprehensive understanding of the ways in which the new stylistic means and devices Webern encountered during his studies with Schoenberg enabled the young composer to (re)voice his concern for presence and immediacy.

The androcentric tropes typical of modernist narratives distort Schoenberg’s story and the interpretation of his compositions by eliding his engagement with women and the feminine. Yet his social circle included a number of progressive women, including the educator Eugenie Schwarzwald and medical doctor Marie Pappenheim. This study considers two operas Schoenberg composed twenty years apart, each based on a libretto written by a woman and featuring a female protagonist who reflects the social situation of women in her milieu. Moreover, each opera was a vehicle for a distinctive compositional innovation, Erwartung (1909) marking the pinnacle of Schoenberg’s ‘intuitive aesthetic’ in its freely non-tonal, non-repetitive style, and Von heute auf morgan (1929) the first twelve-tone opera.

Tonality was a central concept and practice for Schoenberg, informing compositions thatspan the periods most often characterized as tonal, atonal and twelve-tone. Through to about 1908 Schoenberg’s musical language is based on tonality as largely understood and practised by Brahms and Wagner, and by composers closer to Schoenberg’s generation, including Wolf, Pfitzner, Zemlinsky, Reger, Mahler and Strauss. Subsequent works from about 1909 to 1921 avoid standard forms and harmonies but feature many tonally oriented gestures and phrases. Many of his twelve-tone compositions also contain structural traces of tonality, such as what he thought of as ‘tonic’ and ‘dominant’ forms of the row. Several of Schoenberg’s works after 1934 show him yielding to an urge to (in his own words) ‘compose tonal music’.

This chapter is an interview with Schoenberg’s daughter, Nuria Schoenberg-Nono. In the interview, Mrs Schoenberg-Nono recalls a domesticated Schoenberg: playing games and making school lunches for his children, doting on his wife Gertrud, and strolling through the wilds of a then-undeveloped west Los Angeles. She recounts Schoenberg constantly musing about teaching and the best way to reach even the most obtuse students, and how the generosity of the Schoenberg family was sometimes taken advantage of by acquaintances who liked to stop by on the way back from the beach for impromptu parties. In all, Nuria Schoenberg-Nono paints a portrait of Schoenberg is very different from his reputation as a ‘severe’ modernist; rather, in her memories, Schoenberg appears as a warm and kindly father and husband – and as sometimes delightfully quirky as well.

In the beginning, relations between Mahler and Schoenberg seem to have been somewhatstormy. In fact, there were not only frictions of character between Schoenberg and Mahler, but also substantial differences in their conception of composition. In contrast to the prevalent opinion expressed in the copious literature on the topic, the relationship between Schoenberg and Mahler resembled that of two composers who were fundamentally alien to each other musically, but who, through human solidarity, a common ethical view of uncompromising artistic coherence and a closeness that grew over the years, decided to approach each other compositionally as well. Several examples from Schoenberg’s works will be shown in the chapter to substantiate this thesis.

This chapter examines the long-held belief that Arnold Schoenberg endured dire financial hardship for most of his life, due in large part to his unwavering and highly principled commitment to modern music. Schoenberg can be compared to Mozart with regard to his money woes: both composers apparently struggled to support themselves and their families and were tragically under-appreciated and under-compensated during their lifetimes, despite the enormity of their artistic significance. In each case, however, the situation is more nuanced: for both composers, money came and went, for a variety of reasons. In the chapter, the popular mythos of Schoenberg’s ‘perpetual insolvency’ is contextualized and challenged by considering his constantly changing personal and professional circumstances, and the different ways in which he earned money.

This chapter takes an expansive view of Schoenberg as a writer to reflect the breadth of genres, topics, and purposes he pursued on paper, in addition to his textbooks on composition and music theory. Most of his writings are argumentative. Underwriting these arguments are not only biblical and enlightenment sources, but sources in contemporary life and thought. The chapter shows how the tension between enlightenment and contemporary perspectives vitalize Schoenberg’s language – what he says and how he says it. That so many of Schoenberg’s writings have managed to jump the translation gap successfully and have exerted influence on generations of English readers makes this chapter possible. A selection of such writings and topics spanning Schoenberg’s career are examined.