Arnold Schoenberg, the eldest of three children, was obliged to leave school at the age of 16 and seek employment following the death of his father. He worked as an apprentice in a bank until 1895, when he was able to take on various part-time jobs that allowed him to focus almost exclusively on music. In 1901, he married Mathilde Zemlinsky (sister of composer Alexander von Zemlinsky); the couple had two children. In 1924, one year after the death of Mathilde, he married Gertrud Kolisch; this second marriage would last until the composer’s death in 1951. The couple had three children, the eldest of which, Nuria, married Luigi Nono in 1955.

Notwithstanding a few counterpoint lessons with Zemlinsky, Schoenberg taught himself the rudiments of music theory by studying the scores of historical masterpieces and performing a wide range of chamber music repertoire, usually as a violinist but sometimes also on cello. These experiences, which informed his creative output throughout his career, would also provide the basis for many of the ideas later presented in his music theoretical treatises (on harmony, composition, aesthetics, etc.).

In 1903, he started teaching theory and counterpoint at the Eugénie Schwarzwald Private Girls’ School in Vienna. He would remain active as a teacher for the rest of his life, teaching both privately and at institutions including the Akademie der Künste in Berlin (1926) and UCLA (up to 1944). Long after concluding his instruction of Anton Webern and Alban Berg, with whom he established what would later be known as the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg continued to count major figures (including Hanns Eisler and John Cage, whom he taught at Summer seminars in 1919 and 1935, respectively) among his students. In addition to his teaching activities, his acute awareness of the need to promulgate musical modernity, first and foremost through performance, manifested in the creation of the Society for Private Musical Performances (“Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen“) in Vienna. The organisation was active from 1918 to 1921, when it was forced to disband, largely due to the collapsing Austrian economy.

Also in 1903, Schoenberg met Mahler in Vienna. He had a thorough knowledge of Mahler’s music, and professed the profound admiration he felt after having attended a performance of the Third Symphony. Curiously, Mahler’s departure for the United States in 1907 coincided with Schoenberg’s first steps towards the unknown, in the transitional period lasting until 1909 which saw the irreversible break-down of tonality through the dissolution of classical constructs: first harmony, and later (and more crucially), thematic points of reference. Notable works from this period include the String Quartet No. 2 (Op. 10), Drei Klavierstücke (Op. 11), 15 Poems fromThe Book of the Hanging Gardens (Op. 15), Five Pieces for Orchestra (Op. 16), and the monodrama Erwartung (Op. 17).

During his first sojourn in Berlin in 1901, Schoenberg met Richard Strauss, whose influence is manifest in the tone poem, Pelleas und Melisande (Op. 5). A second period spent in the city in 1911 gave rise to a meeting with Ferruccio Busoni, an ardent defender of modernity, with whom Schoenberg generally had a good rapport. However, it was with Kandinsky (whom he met in Munich) that Schoenberg would engage in a long (and illuminating) correspondence, lasting from 1911 to 1936. After a period of turbulence and subsequent relative calm which saw the composition of Pierrot Lunaire (Op. 21) and the Four Orchestral Songs (Op. 22), the years from 1915 to 1923 were marked by a downturn in the composer’s creative output (nonetheless yielding various transcriptions, notably of works by Mahler, Busoni and Reger). This was a time of deep reflection for Schoenberg, from which he would emerge with not only a clear vision of the basis of his twelve-tone technique and its application in future works, but also with new-found religious sensibilities which would inform future works, from the immense (unfinished) oratorio Die Jakobsleiter (1916) to the Psalms (Op. 50b and c) of his final years, as well as Moses and Aron (1932) and Kol Nidre (Op. 39; 1938).

The adoption of serial technique in 1923 may be seen as both a logical progression of the classical tradition and a manifestation of a messianic vision of the role of the creator, which overshadowed questions of the nature of its musical syntax that, in later years, Schoenberg would come to see as a constraint.

In 1933, Schoenberg re-embraced his Jewish faith (in Paris, on 25 October) which he had abandoned in 1898, and immigrated definitively to the United States, initially living in Boston, and then, for health reasons, moving to the West Coast. Despite adopting the anglicised spelling of his name (replacing ‘ö’ with ‘oe’) and doing all his writing in English, he would only receive American citizenship on 11 April 1941. His time in the United States was one of fruitful collaborations, despite occasional conflicts with figures such as Alma Mahler-Werfel, Thomas Mann, Berthold Brecht, Hans Eisler, and Theodor W. Adorno; the writing and role of the latter in the disagreement with Thomas Mann regarding Doctor Faustus were a source of recurrent tension. As for his neighbour, Igor Stravinsky, a relationship of mutual respect prevailed, albeit one that was predicated on the latter’s secretary, conductor Robert Craft, acting as an intermediary in all correspondence between the two men.

As the flurry of creative activity of 1933–which notably saw the composition of several pedagogical pieces (canons)–waned in intensity, Schoenberg’s style nonetheless continued to evolve, giving rise to the powerful late works, some of which hint at the possibility of a co-existence of his modernist style with a new form of tonality: e.g., Chamber symphony No. 2 (Op. 38), Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (Op. 41), etc.

Increasingly fatigued from severe health problems, Schoenberg was unable to attend the Darmstadt Summer Courses of 1949 (at which a portrait concert of his orchestral works took place), where the legacy of the movement which he carried to such heights was beginning to take shape.