Arnold Schoenberg

Schoenberg began in late-Romantic Vienna, blending Brahms and Wagner in early works like Verklärte Nacht (1899) and Gurre-Lieder (1900-1903). He mentored Webern and Berg as part of the Second Viennese School and pushed into atonal expressionism with pieces like Erwartung (1909) and Pierrot lunaire (1912). Growing antisemitism and a spiritual turn - partly inspired by Mahler - drove him toward a governing principle to replace tonality, and by 1923 he'd codified twelve-tone technique, structuring works like Moses und Aron and the Variations for Orchestra through intervallic cells and combinatorial rows. He fled Nazi Europe, reaffirmed his Judaism, and taught at UCLA from 1936. After the war he memorialized Holocaust victims in A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), wrote his String Trio while ill, and accepted honorary presidency of Israel's conservatory months before his death in 1951.