1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg Quotes

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-born composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. With the rise of the Nazi Party, Schoenberg's works were labeled degenerate music, because they were modernist and atonal. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941.

Schoenberg's approach, bοth in terms of harmony and development, has been one of the most influential of 20th-century musical thought. Many European and American composers from at least three generations have consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately reacted against it.

Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify innovations in atonality that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century art music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, an influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term developing variation and was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea.

Schoenberg was also an influential teacher of composition; his students included Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, Nikos Skalkottas, Stefania Turkewich, and later John Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, Robert Gerhard, Leon Kirchner, Dika Newlin, and other prominent musicians. Many of Schoenberg's practices, including the formalization of compositional method and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically, are echoed in avant-garde musical thought throughout the 20th century. His often polemical views of music history and aesthetics were crucial to many significant 20th-century musicologists and critics, including Theodor W. Adorno, Charles Rosen, and Carl Dahlhaus, as well as the pianists Artur Schnabel, Rudolf Serkin, Eduard Steuermann, and Glenn Gould.

Schoenberg's archival legacy is collected at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. September 1874 – 13. July 1951
Arnold Schoenberg photo

Works

Style and Idea
Style and Idea
Arnold Schoenberg
Style and Idea
Style and Idea
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg: 20 quotes2 likes

Famous Arnold Schoenberg Quotes

“…if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.”

Arnold Schoenberg book Style and Idea

from New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea (1946); as quoted in Style and Idea (1985), p. 124
1940s

“I was never revolutionary. The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!”

Arnold Schoenberg

Schoenberg, Arnold. 1975, in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Edited by Leonard Stein, with translations by Leo Black. p. 137
after 1930

“I believe that he (Strauss) will remain one of the characteristic and outstanding figures in musical history. Works like Salome, Elektra and Intermezzo, and others will not perish.”

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg, (1946); as quoted in A Schoenberg reader - Documents of a life, edited by Joseph Auner, Yale University Press 2003, page 316-17
1940s

“I have just read your book [On the Spiritual in Art] from cover to cover, and I will read it once more. I find it pleasing to an extraordinary degree, because we agree on nearly all of the main issues..”

Arnold Schoenberg

In a letter to Wassily Kandinsky, 18 Dec. 1911; as quoted in Schönberg and Kandinsky: An Historic Encounter, by Klaus Kropfinger; edited by Konrad Boehmer; published by Routledge (imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa Group company), 2003, p. 15-16 note 49
1910s

“I am delighted to add another unplayable work to the repertoire.”

Arnold Schoenberg

On his Violin Concerto (Op. 36), as quoted in Schoenberg‎ (1971) by Merle Armitage, p. 149
Undated

“There is a great Man living in this country — a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one's self and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives.”

Arnold Schoenberg

Note of 1944; as quoted in the Charles Ives profile at Decca Classics http://www.deccaclassics.com/music/composers/ives.html <br class="br">1940s

Arnold Schoenberg Quotes about art

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

Arnold Schoenberg

quote from Glosses on the Theories of Others (1929); also in Style and Idea (1985), p. 313-314
1920s

“An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker — the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.”

Arnold Schoenberg

"An Artistic Impression" (1909) in Style and Idea (1985), p. 189
1900s

“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."”

Arnold Schoenberg

"Hauer's Theories" (Notes of November 1923), in Style and Idea (1985), p. 210
1920s

Arnold Schoenberg Quotes

“Market value is irrelevant to intrinsic value. … Unqualified judgment can at most claim to decide the market-value — a value that can be in inverse proportion to the intrinsic value.”

Arnold Schoenberg

"An Artistic Impression" (1909) in Style and Idea (1985), p. 190
before 1930

“I see the work as a whole first. Then I compose the details.”

Arnold Schoenberg

As quoted in an interview with José Rodriguez (c. 1936) in Schoenberg‎ (1971) by Merle Armitage, p. 149
after 1930
Context: I see the work as a whole first. Then I compose the details. In working out, I always lose something. This cannot be avoided. There is always some loss when we materialize. But there is compensating gain in vitality.

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

Arnold Schoenberg

As quoted in an interview with José Rodriguez (c. 1936) in Schoenberg‎ (1971) by Merle Armitage, p. 143
1930s

“Although our "gentle air" cannot improve the way hate and envy look, it does seem not to encourage firmness and decision. All is compromise; caution and refinement are everywhere. Everything has to "make a good impression" — whether or not it is any good: the impression is the main thing.”

Arnold Schoenberg

"About Music Criticism" (1909), in Style and Idea (1985), p. 196
1900s

“My works are 12-tone compositions, not 12-tone compositions”

Arnold Schoenberg

Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. 1977, in Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work; translated from the German by Humphrey Searle. p. 349.
after 1930

“My music is not modern, it is merely badly played”

Arnold Schoenberg

Genette, Gérard. 1997. Immanence and Transcendence, translated by G. M. Goshgarian. p. 102
Undated

“Hauer looks for laws. Good. But he looks for them where he will not find them.”

Arnold Schoenberg

"Hauer's Theories" (Notes of 9 May 1923), in Style and Idea (1985), p. 209
1920s

“There are no more geniuses, only critics.”

Arnold Schoenberg

"Those Who Complain about the Decline" (1923), in Style and Idea (1985), p. 203
1920s

“I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.”

Arnold Schoenberg

As quoted in "The Red Gaze"' in Expressionism (2004) by Norbert Wolf, p. 92
Undated

“Now we will throw these mediocre kitsch-mongers into slavery, and teach them to venerate the German spirit and to worship the German God.”

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg, in a letter to Alma Mahler, 1914 (after the outbreak of the First World War); as quoted in &quot;Impressions of War&quot; http://www.gramophone.co.uk/feature/impressions-of-war by Philip Clark, The Gramophone, 4 August 2014 <br class="br">Schoenberg&#x27;s quote regarding: &#x27;the bourgeois tendencies of musical reactionaries such as Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel&#x27; <br class="br">1910s

“My music is not lovely.”

Arnold Schoenberg

Quoted by Theodor Adorno in his essay &quot;Art and the Arts&quot;, 1966, reproduced in Clausen 2008, 387 http://books.google.com/books?id=JaVBgTmaSgYC&amp;lpg=PA387). <br class="br">Undated

Similar authors

Stefan Zweig photo
Stefan Zweig106
Austrian writer None
Elfriede Jelinek photo
Elfriede Jelinek50
Austrian writer None
Wolfgang Pauli photo
Wolfgang Pauli35
Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner None
Ludwig von Mises photo
Ludwig von Mises62
austrian economist None
Rudolf Steiner photo
Rudolf Steiner20
Austrian esotericist None
Erwin Schrödinger photo
Erwin Schrödinger67
Austrian physicist None
John Cage photo
John Cage43
American avant-garde composer None
Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein228
Austrian-British philosopher None
Peter Handke photo
Peter Handke9
Austrian writer, playwright and film director None
Arnold Schwarzenegger photo
Arnold Schwarzenegger52
actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heri… None