“I wonder sometimes who I am,” Arnold Schoenberg confessed in the opening of his “My Evolution” lecture to audience at UCLA in late November 1949. “When the Committee on Lectures and Drama announced my lecture in the newspapers, someone was afraid the readers might not know who I am. So they informed them as follows: ‘famous theoretician and controversial musical figure, known for the influence he has brought to bear on modern music.’ Up to now, I thought I compose for different reasons.”

More than 75 years later, the recording of the speech, archived by the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, captures the towering musical revolutionary who emancipated dissonance and created the 12-tone technique as both self-deprecating and with an impeccable sense of comedic timing. Listen a bit more closely to his words, and undercurrents of bitter irony become apparent: Having devoted his entire life to composing, Schoenberg recognized that his theories, the subsequent controversies, and “the influence he has brought to bear” overshadowed what he cared about most, his actual music.

As the world celebrates the 150th anniversary of Arnold Schoenberg’s birth, that paradox remains. Schoenberg’s importance across symphonic, chamber, and vocal music is unimpeachable. Every music theory student learns of his progression toward atonal music and the development of serialism and its 12-tone technique. Likewise, every composer since Schoenberg has had to address whether to incorporate tenets of serialism in their work. Still, many of his champions argue, Schoenberg’s music, a rich and varied catalog encompassing delicately crystalline chamber works to post-Romantic epics requiring hundreds of musicians, continues to be underperformed and underheard.

During the 24/25 season, the LA Phil celebrates the life and legacy of the composer who made Los Angeles his home over the last 17 years of his life with the Schoenberg at 150 festival. The series spotlights a selection of works that chart his evolution from the Romantic worlds of Wagner and Brahms toward 20th-century modernism, featuring chamber works Verklärte Nacht and his First String Quartet, the orchestral feast that is Gurrelieder, and his orchestration of the Brahms Piano Quartet No. 1, which was commissioned and premiered by the LA Phil under then-Music Director Otto Klemperer in 1937.

Schoenberg 150 Festival Dec 2024–Feb 2025 Intimate Schoenberg | DEC 3 Zubin Mehta conducts Gurrelieder | DEC 13 & 15  Ravel & Brahm's | FEB 13 - 16

SCHOENBERG IN LOS ANGELES 

Before Schoenberg set foot in California, his music had made its way into Los Angeles’ concert halls. Largely self-taught, he saw his output as an extension of 19th-century Austrian-Germanic traditions, not a rejection of them. His earliest works written around the turn of the century show his admiration for Wagner and Brahms, two rivals whose musical rift was ingeniously bridged by Schoenberg. He produced his first atonal work, the Five Pieces for Orchestra, in 1909, and it took a few more years for him to fully hone his 12-tone technique. 

Schoenberg had risen to the top of his profession and held a prestigious professorship at the Academy of Arts in Berlin when the LA Phil first performed one of his works, Verklärte Nacht, in 1926 with Walter Henry Rothwell conducting the composer’s arrangement for string orchestra. Around the same time, American composer Henry Cowell founded the New Music Society of Los Angeles and began presenting performances of works by Schoenberg as well as fellow members of the European avant-garde at the Biltmore Hotel. Schoenberg’s introduction at the Hollywood Bowl came in 1929 with British conductor Eugene Goossens leading the seminal Five Pieces for Orchestra.

Five years later, in fall 1934, Schoenberg, along with his wife, Gertrud, and 2-year-old daughter, Dorothea Nuria, arrived in Los Angeles. They came after spending a year in New York and Boston following their flight from Europe in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power. The climate, he found divine: “It is Switzerland, the Riviera, the Vienna woods, the desert, the Salzkammergut, Spain, Italy—everything in one place,” he effused. The music scene, however, compared less favorably to Europe’s cultural capitals.

“He was this éminence grise, one of the most famous composers at the time,” says Randy Schoenberg, the composer’s grandson whose father, Ronald Schoenberg, still lives in the Brentwood house where the family settled in 1936. “And then he’s joined by a lot of other composers over the next decade as everyone is fleeing the Nazis—Korngold, Stravinsky, and really the top composers of Europe. They all end up here in Los Angeles, and none of them are getting the type of attention that they deserved.”

Yet, Schoenberg found allies within the growing community of émigrés from Central Europe, among them Otto Klemperer, the newly appointed Music Director of the LA Phil. The two had known each other in Berlin, where Klemperer was director of the Kroll Opera. Klemperer hired Schoenberg to conduct a March 1935 LA Phil concert featuring Verklärte Nacht in between Brahms’ Symphony No. 3 and Bach transcriptions. The following December, Schoenberg also led the orchestra in a program of his own music at USC’s Bovard Auditorium.

Teaching became Schoenberg’s primary source of income, first at USC and from 1936 on at UCLA, where he became a professor emeritus and the main concert venue bears his name. Additionally, he offered private lessons at his Brentwood home to supplement his finances. “A lot of the people composing in Hollywood came to him for lessons, some for short periods of time, others for longer periods of time,” says Randy. “He taught at both universities. He had students of all different ranges and abilities. Some of them became very famous, like John Cage. Others, of course, were just there to take a class at UCLA and weren’t prepared for it at all.”

Even though Schoenberg devoted more of his time to teaching in the US, he continued to compose throughout the rest of his life. One of the first pieces he completed after immigrating, the Suite in G for String Orchestra, premiered under Klemperer’s baton at an LA Phil Saturday Evening Concert in May 1935. The music director later asked Schoenberg to orchestrate Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G minor and led the 1938 world premiere. Ironically, Schoenberg’s first commission in Los Angeles came from neither an orchestra nor an ensemble but rather the Fairfax Temple, for which he composed his version of the traditional Jewish service, Kol Nidre, Op. 39, for Yom Kippur in 1938.

Additional masterworks that came out of the Brentwood home included the Violin and Piano concertos, Survivor from Warsaw, the Fourth String Quartet, and Modern Psalm. Other pieces nodded to his new Souther California environment. The Fanfare for a Bowl Concert, based on themes from Gurrelieder, was commissioned by Leopold Stokowski for the 1945 Hollywood Bowl season (Schoenberg’s assistant Leonard Stein completed it posthumously and conducted its 1977 premiere at USC), and the Theme and Variations for Wind Band was a tonal work meant to capitalize on the popularity of wind bands around the country.

LISTENING TO SCHOENBERG

“One of the recommendations I have for listening to Schoenberg is to be willing to listen more than once,” says Lawrence, the younger of the composer’s two LA-based sons.

“Schoenberg doesn’t make it easy sometimes for the listener because he doesn’t repeat things over and over again. He’s constantly developing and presenting new ideas,” adds Randy. "But the result of that is you always find something new in his music no matter how many times you listen to it."

As celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Schoenberg bring renewed attention to his music, Randy and Lawrence hope audiences will take the opportunity to hear his music with open ears to find its richness of overflowing ideas and the beauty encoded within each score. “If a composer can’t write from the heart, he simply can’t write good music,” Schoenberg said.

In the closing remarks of his “My Evolution” lecture, Schoenberg stresses that his music is first and foremost his priority. “I am still more a composer than a theorist. And when I compose, I try to forget all theories, and I continue composing only after having freed my mind.”

For more information, including events, articles, and other celebrations of the composer’s anniversary, visit schoenberg150.at.