Around the Music Festival

On September 13, Austrian Post issued a special stamp to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the birth of composer Arnold Schönberg. The face value is 1.50 euros. The design features a portrait of Schönberg painted by Richard Gerstl around 1907 and currently on display at the Wien Museum, and 180,000 copies were issued.

Schoenberg was born in Vienna in 1874. He began learning the violin at the age of eight, and later taught himself to play the cello. After his father died when he was 15, he worked in a bank for a while, but in 18 in 1995, he returned to music and initially made a living conducting amateur choirs, while also studying composition under Alexander von Zemlinsky.

After that, he worked as a conductor, composer and educator in Berlin and Vienna. In 1911, he published a work that summarized the composition theory he had been developing. He is known for having established the “12-tone technique”, a composition method that uses “12 notes that are only related to each other, abandoning tonality”, and for having led 20th century music to a dramatic development.

However, with the rise of Nazi Germany, he emigrated to the United States in 1934. He taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, and produced leading American contemporary composers such as John Cage and Lou Harrison from his school. He died in Los Angeles in 1951 due to an asthma attack.

PHOTO：Österreichische Post


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