Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg abolished the key signature and then spent years working out what to put in its place. He was a Viennese shop assistant's son, largely self-taught, who began in a late-Romantic idiom so dense it collapsed under itself - Verklarte Nacht and the vast Gurre-Lieder are the end of that road. From around 1908 he wrote music with no tonal centre at all, which audiences rioted over, and Pierrot Lunaire in 1912 set a speaking voice against a chamber group in a manner nobody had heard. The problem was that free atonality gave no principle of construction, and he stopped composing almost entirely for eight years working on one. The twelve-tone method, announced in 1923, orders all twelve chromatic pitches in a row that governs the whole piece; he said it would ensure the supremacy of German music for another hundred years, which was both a boast and a misjudgement of what was coming. He taught Berg and Webern, was dismissed from the Prussian Academy in 1933 for being Jewish, formally returned to Judaism in Paris, and emigrated to Los Angeles, where he taught at UCLA. He was terrified of the number thirteen and died on the thirteenth. Moses und Aron, his opera, was left unfinished after two acts because he could not set the third, which is about the inadequacy of words. A Survivor from Warsaw, written in 1947, sets a narrator over an orchestra and ends with a men s chorus singing the Shema. He was also a painter of some seriousness and exhibited with Der Blaue Reiter at Kandinsky s invitation. He invented a system of chess for four players. His house in Los Angeles is preserved, and the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna holds his archive.

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