Rethinking the Artist: Seven Touches on Arnold Schoenberg

This essay offers a somewhat different perspective on the famous 20th-century modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg, featuring his other abilities as an artist and teacher and fragmentarily highlighting those of his personal contacts, which seem to the author important for understanding Schoenberg’s personality, his creative ups and downs. The study also calls for a reboot of the knowledge about the Austrian and German intellectuals and artists of Jewish origin who, in the 1930s, after the Nazis came to power, were forced to leave the places where they grew up, acquiring modernist views, and seek a new, safer place by moving to the United States, in particular Los Angeles, which has become home to many of them. Little-known and forgotten facts about Schoenberg’s life, presented in the chapter, restore the atmosphere of the cultural life of Vienna in the early 20th century, as well as Los Angeles in the 1930s. Events after the composer’s death, related to the preservation of his memory at the academic level in Los Angeles, open a research niche that has not yet been explored or published. The chapter is not just another biography of the composer, but rather “touches” that, based on the latest sources and the memory of the place, give a fairly clear idea of the artist and are aimed at changing the existing paradigm about this outstanding figure.