Jacob’s Ladder

Born in Vienna to a mother who was a piano teacher and to a father who was a cobbler and a shoe salesman, Arnold Schoenberg became one of the most innovative composers of the twentieth century. From the beginning of his career, Schoenberg struggled to find a harmonic system to replace what was perceived at the time as an obsolescent and decadent tonal language of major and minor keys. Around 1908, he abandoned the old tonal language completely in favor of atonal music that proclaimed the “emancipation of dissonance.” In 1925, he devised a new tonal system known as the twelve-tone technique, which proved one of the most influential developments in twentieth-century classical music. Schoenberg did not initially consider himself to be a Jewish composer; indeed, he converted to Christianity in 1898 (albeit to Lutheranism rather than to Catholicism, thus expressing not faith but an aspiration to disappear fully into Austrian culture). However, with the oratorio fragment Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob's Ladder, 1917), he began to engage seriously with Jewish themes. Affected by rapidly rising antisemitism, Schoenberg reembraced Jewishness by the end of the 1920s, and throughout the rest of his career he engaged Jewish themes extensively in such works as the unfinished opera Moses und Aron (abandoned 1933), an idiosyncratic orchestral setting of the Yom Kippur Kol Nidre prayer (1938), and A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), one of the first musical responses to the Holocaust. In addition to his spiritual recommitment to Jewishness, Schoenberg responded to the rise of Nazism with a militant embrace of Revisionist Zionism, and although he took refuge during the 1930s in Los Angeles, he thought seriously of making aliyah. In addition to his productivity as a composer, he spent the last two decades of his life teaching at University of California, Los Angeles, and giving private lessons to a whole generation of American composers. After World War II he was recognized internationally as a nearly prophetic figure for the postwar musical avant-garde.