ABSTRACT
Arnold Schoenberg is one of those rare personalities that appear from time to time in the course of history, who both announce and develop in their work a radical change, a profound mutation in the thought and sensibility of a whole era. He disappoints and completely bewilders the journalist, for his opinions are not “sensational”. Schoenberg has managed to discourage some young people. In a special number of the magazine Musikblatter des Ansbruch, produced in Vienna in 1924 for Schoenberg’s 50th birthday, Hanns Eisler, a former pupil, went so far as to call him a “reactionary”. Schoenberg’s sense of belonging to a tradition and of working in the main stream of that tradition is alive in every phase of his evolution, even at his most boldly innovative. His teaching reflects the creative artist’s guiding ideas and the peculiar bias of his mind.
