Arnold Schoenberg — Profile, Rankings & Fame Trend

Summary

Updated 2026-07-15

He shattered the gravitational pull of tonality and invented a system where all twelve notes stood equal — no home key, no resolution, just rigorous pattern. Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique divided the music world into disciples and enemies, but it reset the terms of what composition could mean in the 20th century.

Biography

About

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 combinatori…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg

said1936

My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers.

— As quoted in an interview with José Rodriguez (c. 1936) in Schoenberg‎ (1971) by Merle Armitage, p. 143

Arnold Schoenberg

said1929

If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears…

— quote from Glosses on the Theories of Others (1929); also in Style and Idea (1985), p. 313-314

Arnold Schoenberg

saidNov 1923

I find above all that the expression, "atonal music," is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying "the art of not falling," or swimming "the art of not drowning.

— "Hauer's Theories" (Notes of November 1923), in Style and Idea (1985), p. 210

Arnold Schoenberg

said9 May 1923