A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life

Book Description
Arnold Schoenberg's close involvement with many of the principal developments of twentieth-century music, most importantly the break with tonality and the creation of twelve-tone composition, generated controversy from the time of his earliest works to the present day. This authoritative new collection of Schoenberg's essays, letters, literary writings, musical sketches, paintings, and drawings offers fresh insights into the composer's life, work, and thought. The documents, many previously unpublished or untranslated, reveal the relationships between various aspects of Schoenberg's activities in composition, music theory, criticism, painting, performance, and teaching. They also show the significance of events in his personal and family life, his evolving Jewish identity, his political concerns, and his close interactions with such figures as Gustav and Alma Mahler, Alban Berg, Wassily Kandinsky, and Thomas Mann. Extensive commentary by Joseph Auner places the documents and materials in context and traces important themes throughout Schoenberg's career from turn-of-century Vienna to Weimar Berlin to nineteen-fifties Los Angeles.

From the Back Cover
"Not since O. E. Deutsch's work on Handel and Schubert has a major composer been treated to a documentary biography as impressive as this one. Auner's Schoenberg Reader is a splendid and essential volume of first-rate scholarship."-Walter Frisch, author of The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg

About the Author
Joseph Auner is professor of music at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society.


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The documents, many previously unpublished or untranslated, shed light on Schoenberg's interactions with contemporary cultural and intellectual trends and on the continuities and disruptions in his creative output over his long career. Chronologically organized from turn-of-the-century Vienna to Weimar Berlin to 1950s Los Angeles, the documents reveal the relationships between various aspects of Schoenberg's composition, music theory, criticism, painting, performance, and teaching. They also show the importance of events in his personal and family life, his evolving Jewish identity, his political concerns, and his close interactions with such figures as Gustav and Alma Mahler, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, Wassily Kandinsky, Theodor Adorno, Karl Kraus, and Thomas Mann. Each chapter is illustrated by photographs, examples of Schoenberg's self-portraits, and facsimiles of compositional sketches and manuscripts. Extensive commentary by Joseph Auner places the documents and materials in context and traces important themes throughout Schoenberg's career.


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