Arnold Schoenberg

Largely self-taught, guided early on by Alexander Zemlinsky, Arnold Schoenberg developed the chromatic language inherited from Wagner and Brahms in Verklärte Nacht, Pelleas und Melisande and Gurre-Lieder, before turning towards atonality around 1908. The Second String Quartet, in whose finale a soprano enters with the line "I feel the air of another planet", the Three Piano Pieces Op. 11, the Five Orchestral Pieces and Pierrot lunaire mark his transition away from traditional tonality. In the early 1920s he arrived at composing with twelve tones related only to one another, first realised complete in the Suite for Piano Op. 25 and developed further in the Variations for Orchestra and the unfinished opera Moses und Aron. Berg and Webern were his pupils, he published Harmonielehre in 1911, and John Cage was among his students in Los Angeles. He left Berlin in 1933 and settled in California in 1934, later teaching at UCLA. He died in Los Angeles in 1951. He painted as well, and four of his paintings were exhibited by the Munich Blaue Reiter group in 1911. Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand, the oratorio Die Jakobsleiter and the late cantata A Survivor from Warsaw belong to the same output as the instrumental works. Pierrot lunaire uses Sprechstimme, a vocal technique between speech and song. Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, Nikos Skalkottas and Lou Harrison were among his pupils, and he left Germany in 1933 after the Nazi regime removed him from his teaching position.