Virtually self-taught, attached to the Germanic tradition and self-professed conservative, Arnold Schoenberg nonetheless revolutionized the musical language established for centuries by creating atonalism, then serial dodecaphony, which exerted a strong influence in the 20th century. Born into a middle-class Jewish family, with a father of Hungarian descent who was a shoe merchant and a Prague-born mother who taught piano, Arnold Schönberg was born in Vienna's Leopoldstadt district on September 13, 1874. He began playing the violin at the age of eight, then turned to the cello, with a particular interest in chamber music. When his father died, the sixteen-year-old helped his family by working in a bank, arranging songs and orchestrating operettas. A self-taught musician, he learned to play and compose by reading books, before taking counterpoint lessons at the age of twenty-one with Alexander von Zemlinsky, who was his then partner in the Polyhymnia orchestra before becoming his future brother-in-law when Schönberg married Mathilde Zemlinsky in 1901. The author of a few piano pieces, a String Quartet in D major published in 1898, and the lieder that constituted his first opus numbers, Schönberg was part of the post-Romantic movement in the wake of Brahms and Wagner when he composed his first masterpiece in 1899, the string sextet Verklärte Nacht(Transfigured Night), based on a poem by Richard Dehmel, premiered by the Quatuor Rosé and three members of the Vienna Philharmonic on March 18, 1802. What was to become his most frequently performed work divided the public, and was the subject of two orchestrations, in 1917 and 1943. As a member of a choir, he became interested in vocal music and began composing the Gurre-Lieder for five solo voices, narrator, mixed choir and full orchestra. Although this monumental work was abandoned in 1903, then revived and completed in 1911, it was not performed until two years later, on February 23, 1913, under the direction of Franz Schreker. In the meantime, Schönberg moved to Berlin, where he opened a cabaret with three friends, and met Richard Strauss, who offered him a teaching post at a conservatory until his return to Vienna in 1903. In a tonal register, he composed the symphonic poem Pelléas et Mélisande after Maeterlinck, which he conducted in 1905, the String Quartet no. 1 op. 7 composed the same year, and the Chamber Symphony no. 1 (1906), whose dissonances were poorly received by audiences and critics alike. His style was as expressionist as his paintings, and he took up painting, mainly self-portraits. In 1911, he exhibited with members of the Der blaue reiter (The Blue Rider) movement. After his String Quartet No. 2 with soprano voice (1908), Schönberg abandoned all principles of tonality for his Klavierstücke op. 11 (1909) and op. 19 (1911). In 1912, his Five Pieces for Orchestra op. 16, premiered in London by Henry Wood, aroused controversy, but it was the cycle of twenty-one lieder Pierrot lunaire, after Albert Giraud, that provoked the ire of the critics at its Berlin premiere on October 16, 1912. The work, which follows the one-act, one-character monodrama Erwartung (not performed until 1924), is characterized by the use of Sprechgesang, or spoken song. Mobilized in the Austrian army during the First World War, Schönberg interrupted his activities as a teacher at the Vienna Academy and as a conductor. In 1917, he gave up composing the oratorio Jacob's Ladder, then founded the Society for Private Musical Performances, in order to be able to perform his own works and those of his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern, constituting the Second Vienna School. In a bid to put an end to free atonality, which he considered anarchic, the composer turned to dodecaphony, a method based on the twelve-tone system of the chromatic scale, used serially in any order, by inversion, mirrored or fragmented. After partial attempts, the first example of this technique is the Suite for piano op. 25 (1923), followed by the Wind Quintet op. 26 (1924), the String Quartet no. 3 (1927), the Variations for orchestra op. 21 (1928) and the Klavierstück op. 33a (1929). In 1925, Schönberg was appointed to a professorship at the Berlin Academy of Arts, only to be dismissed for his Jewish origins when Hitler came to power, despite his conversion to Protestantism as early as 1898. In 1933, he chose to return to Judaism, but abandoned the composition of the opera Moses and Aaron. Unable to secure a position, he accepted an invitation from Joseph Malkin, founder of the Boston Conservatory, and sailed for the United States. After a year, he settled in Hollywood and taught at the University of Southern California, then in Los Angeles from 1936 to 1944. In 1940, his Violin Concerto was premiered in Philadelphia by Louis Krasner, conducted by Leopold Stokowski. He resumed work on a Chamber Symphony No. 2, which he completed in 1939, and composed a Piano Concerto, premiered by Eduard Steuermann under Stokowski in New York on February 6, 1944. In 1941, the composer adopted American nationality and changed the spelling of his name to Schoenberg. Mandatorily retired at the age of seventy, he was refused a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation and had to give private lessons to support himself. In August 1946, following cardiac arrest brought on by an asthma attack, his life was saved by an injection. He then composed the magnificent String Trio op. 45. In 1951, he resumed writing the opera Moses un Aron, which he left unfinished. Superstitious about the number 13, he died on July 13, 1951 at the age of 76, but serialism outlived him and became a school of thought.