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GEORG SCHÖNBERG (1906-1974)
His Life, in Brief
Born in Vienna, Georg (“Görgi”) Schönberg was the second child of composer Arnold Schönberg and
Mathilde von Zemlinsky, sister of composer Alexander, Schönberg’s mentor in composition. The couple
had been married in 1901, and their first child, Gertrud (“Trudi”), born the following year, became a
doting older sister. It is important to realize that most of Schönberg’s well-known works were composed
during the childhood and youth of the two children of this first marriage: Pelleas and Melisande (1903),
the First and Second String Quartets (1905 and 1907), the opus 11 Piano Pieces (1909), the Five Pieces
for Orchestra (1909), Erwartung (1909), Pierrot Lunaire (1912), Die glückliche Hand (1910-1913), and
Die Jakobsleiter (1917-1922). Further, the development of his famous (or infamous) Twelve Tone
System and the composition of his first serial works also belong to that period, as do the writing and
publication of his Harmonielehrer (1910-1911).
In 1911, Schönberg and the family moved to Berlin when he was engaged as a lecturer at the
Conservatory there; little Georg was soon enrolled in a local Volksschule. With the family’s return to
Vienna in 1915, Georg was placed in the Schwartzwaldschule. From time to time through the years,
Schönberg traveled to such places as Prague, St Petersberg, Amsterdam, and Leipzig to conduct
orchestras and give lectures, and on quite a few of those occasions, young Georg accompanied him, as
photographs of the two of them together testify.
In 1918, Schönberg and the family moved to Bernhardgasse 6 in Mödling, where Schönberg gave
lessons to the young composers who constituted his following and founded the Society for Private
Musical Performance. Georg was enrolled in the Mödling Gymnasium and remained there until 1922,
completing the 5th class; it is important to realize that Schönberg himself had never gone to a gymnasium,
nor in fact any institution of higher learning, including music school. In the Lebenslauf, Georg
summarized his time at the Mödling Gymnasium:
Nach der Volksschule besuchte ich das Gymnasium.
Es war nur ein Besuch, denn ich fühlte mich dort nie zu Hause.
Aber meine Erziehung und mein Vater verboten mir
Dies offen einzugestehen. Ich leistete Widerstand.
Passive Resistenz!
(After elementary school I went to the Gymnasium. / It was only a visit, for I never felt at home there. /
But both my good manners and my father forbade / That I should openly admit it. I rebelled, / Passive
resistance!) While there, Georg played soccer and was very popular with local fans both as a member of
the school team and of a private Mödling-based club.
At some time during his youth, Georg began studying horn, and a friendship developed with a
fellow horn student Fred Eggarter, who would later provide the text for Georg’s Sieben Balladen. In
1922, Georg began formal training on the horn at the Hochschule fur Musik und Darstellende Kunst in
Vienna. He apparently adored the horn, but if we are to believe the brief account in his Lebenslauf, not
the formal training:
Nach dem Gymnasium wurde ich gegen meinen Willen
Gezwungen die Musikakademie zu besuchen.
Lasst mich schweigen über mein Unvermögen
Musik in Töne zu pressen. Wir überstanden es beide,
Die Akademie und ich.
(After the Gymnasium I was forced / Against my will, to attend the Music Academy. / Let me remain
silent about my inability / To press music into tones.\We both survived it, / The academy and I. ) That
summer, the family went to stay at the Villa Spaun at Traunkirchen as guests of the Baron, and in the
written agreement, Schönberg stipulated that Georg be allowed to practice horn for three hours a day.
In November 1923, Mathilde died. Eight months later, tragedy struck again: Schönberg
remarried and moved to Germany with his new bride, Gertrude Kolisch, sister of his former pupil.
According to Susi, Georg’s daughter, this was like losing a father on top of a mother, and she gave it as
her opinion that Georg never fully recovered from this double blow.
Before leaving, Schönberg did what he could for Georg in practical terms. He made
arrangements for the young man to live with Schönberg pupil Olga Novakovich in Vienna and sent him a
small allowance to take care of his needs while he continued his studies at the Hocshchule. But Georg
became slovenly, slept late, and began spending a lot of time in caberets and at variety shows. He never
took his exams at the Hochschule and for a while tried his hand at acting.
Around this time, while visiting his sister, who was living in Mödling with her husband Felix
Greissle and their two small children, Georg met–or actually re-met--Anna Sax, who had worked as a
serving girl for his parents at Bernhardtgasse 6. The two fell in love and began living together in Vienna,
and then were married in 1929; Gertrud (“Susi”), their first and only child, was born that year.
Meanwhile, Schönberg had arranged for a Viennese music engraver to teach Georg musiccopying, and soon Georg was working free-lance for various music publishers. But then with the
beginning of the Great Depression, work became increasingly hard to come by in Vienna. Mention is
made of these increasingly hard times in the Lebenslauf:
Die ersten Jahre meiner Ehe vergingen wie üblich.
Unser Leben fristeten wir gar kläglich.
Bald war was da, bald litten wir Not.
Meistens wars das Letztere.
(The first years of matrimony went by as usual. / We barely kept body and soul together. / Sometimes we
had enough, often suffered want. / Mostly it was the latter.) So in 1932, Georg and Anna followed
Schönberg to Berlin and then to Paris, where “Papa” was able to obtain work for Georg as a music-copier.
Back in Austria in 1934, Georg and his brother-in-law Felix Greissle were able to eke out a meager living
as free-lance music-copiers–and so it would have gone on had not fate intervened once more in the guise
of the Anschluss, i.e., Nazi occupation of Austria. Despite the fact that Georg had been baptized and
brought up a Protestant, the Gestapo declared him to be a Jew, which meant that he could no longer
obtain note-copying work. Several opportunities to leave Austria presented themselves, but these were
for him alone, and he chose to remain with his little family.
But then, for a change, fate smiled on him. In 1940, a steady job came with fruit and vegetable
wholesalers Alexander and Christine Kiss as a bookkeeper and a relief truck driver, which involved
loading crates of produce at the railroad station and then unloading them at their distribution center in
Mödling. Georg made mention of this work in the Lebenslauf:
Im Kriege war ich Hilfsarbeiter und schleppte Lasten,
Lasten, die meinen Körper gestärkt,
Aber den Geist geschwächt hatten.
(During the war I was a laborer / And carried heavy loads, / Loads that strengthened my body, / But
weakened my spirit.) He also complained of it in a letter to Schönberg, while mail was still getting
through: “I work from Monday 6 a.m. until Saturday daily without a break until 9 or 10 pm at night,
sometimes even Sundays....I will certainly never be able to write musical notes again, for my hands are
too stiff and hard and at every turn I get a cramp.”
From time to time, during the 1940s, Georg received notifications from the Gestapo that he was
to be deported to Theresienstadt, which everyone in Mödling at that time surmised was the way-station to
something terrible, though no one knew quite what. His employer Alexander Kiss went to plead for him:
that everyone was in the army and that if Georg was taken away, there would be no one to drive his trucks
and his produce would rot. Anna, who was after all an Aryan, added her voice: that Jew or not, Georg
was her sole means of support. In 1944, Kiss was drafted into the army and sent to Russia, whereupon his
wife Christine took over the task of pleading each time that Georg received such a notice–and in this way
Georg managed to survive the war, indeed as the only documented Jew left in the area.
In 1944-45, Mödling and its environs came under heavy Allied bombardment because there were
factories making jet engines at nearby Vorderbrühl. On these occasions, parts of the Vorderbrühl bunkers
served as air raid shelters for the local populace, and Anna and Susi were allowed to take cover there, but
not Georg because the shelters were not open to Jews. One day in the spring of 1945, as he was cowering
near their apartment building, a bomb landed beside it and sent a huge piece of pavement up into the sky,
which came down right in the middle of their living room and rendered the place uninhabitable. Anna
and Susi were forced to take refuge with a sister of hers who lived nearby; Georg spent his meager
amount of free time in the apartment to guard their few possessions from looters. Not long after this, a
solution presented itself when Frau von Webern, wife of the composer, encountered Georg on the street
and offered him the apartment of her son-in-law, a member of the SS who had fled to Salzburg in advance
of the Russians.
Sometime toward the end of the war, Georg joined the Austrian Widerstand (“Resistance
Movement”). Then one day in 1945, word came that Russian troops were advancing toward Mödling,
and for a brief moment, Georg became a hero. The whole civilian population, including Anna and Susi,
had fled down into the bunkers terrified out of their wits. With the arrival of the Liberators, word came
that they were going to dynamite the place, suspecting that Nazi soldiers and munitions were concealed
there. Only Georg, the “documented Jew,” had the courage to go and reason with them and save all of
their skins, and to this day, he is known to a few older people thereabouts as Der Retter der Felsenhöhle
(the savior of the cave).
Georg was thirty-nine years old when the war ended. Once the truth came out about the Nazi
death camps, it must have been a relief to know that he had escaped that fate. But he also must have
wondered, as if awaking from a dream, what he had done with his life, and looking around him at the
Russian occupiers and the devastation caused by the war, he must have further wondered what was
coming next.
In 1945, Georg worked for the provisional mayor of Wien Meidling, issuing ration cards;
eventually music copying began to come in again, from individuals and then from publishers, principally
Universal Edition. In 1946-47, Georg was director of a local theatrical group consisting of children
related to resistance fighters, and they performed in a variety of makeshift places, basically singing songs,
telling stories, and reading poems. But there were also larger works like Nestroy’s Die Fruheren
Verhältnisse and a now-lost operetta by Georg titled Die Urwald Prinzessin with libretto by Joseph
Tambour. Songs by Georg, possibly of a political nature, seem to have been sung over the radio by opera
singer Georg Oggl in 1947 or 1948. Georg summarizes the war and post-war years in the Lebenslauf:
Sieben Jahre nahm mir der Krieg,
Sieben Jahre der Friede.
Unersetzlich vierzehn Jahre, mit nichts erfüllt,
Als mit Sorgen um das Tägliche.
(Seven years the war took from me / Seven years the peace. / Fourteen irreplaceable years, filled with
nothing / But the worries that came with every day.)
For the first four months of 1948, Georg worked as a nightwatchman in a factory in Vienna:
Nach dem Kriege wurde ich Nachtwächter!...
Und warum nicht? Das ist ein sehr schöner Beruf.
Um sechs begann mein Dienst,
Um sechs Uhr war er vorbei.
Und tagsüber konnte ich schlafen, schlafen.
Ach, wär ich nur niemehr erwacht!
(I became a night watchman!... / And why not? That is a wonderful profession. / At six o’clock my
service began. / At six o’clock it ended. / And all day long I could sleep, sleep. / Oh, if only I had never
awakened!)
After that, until 1953, he did office work and collections from vendors for the newspaper Neues
Östereich in Vienna; his reference to being a “kleiner beamter” (petty official) in the Lebenslauf must be
to this. Then in 1954, he began working full-time and exclusively for Universal Edition, which provided
a small salary for office work and individual payments for music copying, and thereby enabled him to
qualify for an old-age pension in 1970.
Meanwhile, Schönberg had died in Los Angeles in 1951. His daughter Trudi, Georg’s older sister,
had preceded him in 1948.
Georg lived on until 1974, when he succumbed to lung cancer. He is buried next to his wife
Anna in the Sax family plot in Giesshübl.
His Works
In his Lebenslauf, Georg wrote that he was drawn to poetry from early on and had tried his hand at
writing in the various theatrical genres, with and without music (“Schon früh zogs mich immer zur
Poesie. / So schrieb ich Dramen, Tragödien, / Lustspiele mit und ohne Musik”). So he may have begun
composing at a rather early age, quite possibly, as is the way with children, without realizing it. His
daughter Susi seems to think that he continued composing throughout his early years and into his
adulthood; certainly this seems to be borne out by his statement in Mein Lebenslauf that even during the
worst years of the Depression, there was a longing in him to become famous and to create great things
artistically (“Und immer war in mir der Wunsch / Berühmt zu werden, etwas Grosses zu schaffen.)
After examining the score of Mein Lebenslauf, editor Richard Brooks, himself a composer,
declared that it was the work of a mature artist and that there must have been a considerable body of other
works before it. Later in life, after Georg retired, Susi remembers him sitting at his desk tidying things
up, i.e., destroying things that he considered of no value. So it is possible that there were more works–
perhaps many more--than we have knowledge of.
Today, for one reason or another, only a handful of works by him are in existence: Sieben
Balladen, music to texts by his friend and fellow horn-player Fred Eggarter, which date from the mid
1930s; a lied und foxtrot titled Verkühle dich täglich, also dating from that time; Vier Klavierstucke,
which he himself dated from October 1944 to early 1945 and dedicated to Olga Novakovich; the cantata
Mein Lebenslauf, which we will cover in more detail below; a Bläserquartet for English horn, horn,
clarinet, and flute and Sechs Stücke für Bläserquartet, both possibly dating from the 1960s; and a
marschlied titled Hat der Traunstein einen Hut, also from those years.
The Bläserquartet was premiered in 1974 at the Stadttheater Mödling on the one-hundredth
anniversary of Arnold Schönberg’s birth, with musicians from Vienna performing; it was under the
sponsorship of the International Schönberg Gesellschaft. The circumstances are worth noting: Anna had
lent them playing cards, photos, and an album for their exhibit, but it seems that they had left her name
out of the catalog as a contributor, so the performance was intended as a compensation for that oversight.
The Sieben Balladen were premiered by The Lark Ascending as part of Chansons and Lieder I and II on
December 12, 2000, and April 29, 2001, with Peter Ludwig, bass baritone, and Peter Vinograde
accompanying on the piano. The Vier Klavierstücke was premiered by Peter Vinograde on February 5,
2004, at the Austrian Cultural Forum as part of The Lark Ascending program A Kingdom for a Song.
Mein Lebenslauf
According to Georg’s own words, this work dates from 1953: “Sieben Jahre nahm mir der Krieg,
Sieben Jahre der Friede” (Seven years the war took from me, / Seven years the peace.) It exists in a pianovocal score, with indications that he intended it to be performed with full orchestra and mixed chorus. In
this chamber version, we decided to use the same instruments as Schönberg chose for Pierrot Lunaire.
Mein Lebenslauf consists of ten major sections: I. Motto; II. Personal Data; III. Youth; IV. Aria;
V. The Song; VII. March; VIII. Intermezzo; IX. Finale; X. Chorale; and XI. Final Chorale. Either
through an oversight on the composer’s part or because he intended to insert something later but never got
around to it, or perhaps because he had something there and chose to delete it but forgot to renumber the
sections, there is no VI, and we have left it that way. Details of his life from birth through World War II
and the postwar years are given, largely by the soloist, with the Chorus acting as commentator, more often
than not in an ironic vein.
Interestingly, there is no mention in it of his principle source of income, music-copying. Also,
the war is spoken of with a kind of Brechtian irony so that not even the faintest idea of the sufferings that
Georg and his family endured is conveyed. Nor does he refer to the family except to say that he got
married; his father is mentioned only once in connection with the Gymnasium, and there is not even a hint
of his beloved mother.
Some Useful References
Bailey, Walter B. The Arnold Schoenberg Companion. Westport, CT : Greenwood Press, 1998.
Rosen, Charles. Arnold Schoenberg. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1996.Stuckenschmidt, Hans
Heinz. Arnold Schoenberg. Translated by Edith Temple Roberts and Humphrey Searle. New
York : Schirmer, 1978.
www.schoenbergseuropeanfamily.org