Schoenberg came from a lower middle-class background and was largely self-taught as a musician. He began composing at an early age, but he and his musician friends could not afford to attend concerts and heard little music apart from what they could play themselves. After a brief period as a trainee bank clerk and teller, he devoted himself entirely to his art. Throughout his life he continued not only to compose but also to write and paint. He kept the wolf from the door by orchestrating older pieces, including popular songs, and by working as a conductor and cellist. He appeared, for example, at the berbrettl cabaret in Berlin, where he and his new wife, the sister of the composer Alexander Zemlinsky, moved in 1901 and lived for two years before returning to Vienna. His genius was recognised by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Zemlinsky, all of whom encouraged him as best they could. His desire to extend the expressive possibilities of music and at the same time to lend them a rational underpinning eventually led him to abandon the Romantic style of his youth, to extend harmonic language ("free atonality": music not in any key) and, finally, to adopt what he termed "a method of composing with twelve notes which are related only to one another" ("twelve-note technique"). In doing so he spearheaded one of the main developments in modern music, the Second Viennese School, whose members also included his disciples Alban Berg and Anton Webern. (The "First Viennese School" lasted from around 1730 to 1780 and numbered Matthias Georg Monn and Georg Christoph Wagenseil among its members; it should not be confused with the Viennese Classicism of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.)

When the Nazis forced him to quit the Prussian Academy of Arts, denouncing him as a Jew and a leading exponent of "degenerate" art, Schoenberg emigrated to America in 1933, living and teaching first in Boston, then, on account of the climate, in Los Angeles, where in 1936 he accepted a professorship at the University of California (UCLA). Often misjudged, and beset by perpetual controversy, he was long regarded as a difficult composer whose works were calculated to drive away audiences, since many listeners failed to understand that, no matter how unusual they sounded, these works were grounded in tradition and subject to stringent rules. It was not mere "beauty" that Schoenberg sought in music, but "truth", hence his uncompromising insistence on following his own inner voice: "Art comes not from ability but from necessity." When someone asked him during the First World War whether he was "that controversial composer", he replied: "It had to be someone, and since no one else wanted it, I took on the job myself."

Harvey Sachs Biographical notes (c) 1996, by permission of Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg

A selection of major works:

Orchestral: 2 Chamber Symphonies, 5 Orchestral Pieces, 3 Pieces for Chamber Orchestra, Pelleas und Melisande (Tone Poem), Piano Concerto, Theme and Variations, Verkl`.rte Nacht (Transfigured Night) version for string orchestra, Variations for Orchestra, Violin Concerto

Chamber: Suite for Nine Instruments, Verkl`.rte Nacht (string sextet), 4 String Quartets, String Trio Instrumental solo: Klavierstx.cke (Piano Pieces), Suite for Piano

Vocal/Choral: Brettl-Lieder (Cabaret Songs), Gurrelieder, Die Jakobsleiter, Lieder, Moderner Psalm, Ode to Napoleon, Pierrot Lunaire, Psalm 130, 3 Satiren, Serenade, A Survivor from Warsaw

Stage works: Operas: Erwartung, Moses und Aron