Photo of Schoenberg (at right) with his wife Gertrude and Charlie Chaplin in Los Angeles courtesy of www.chaplin.pl.

Sospeso performs arrangements of cabaret songs by Schoenberg at the Sospeso Cabaret program on April 16, 2005 at studioseven.

The story, so often retold, clings in that void between fact and apocrypha:

He was born on the thirteenth of September; writer’s block usually hit on page thirteen. He deliberately misspelled a proper name in his opera’s title to avoid thirteen letters. He habitually took a sabbatical on the 13th of each month; between measures 12 and 14 of a given manuscript we might find a measure 12A. He feared his 76th year (7 + 6). On Friday the 13th of that year’s July, he stayed in bed all day, livid, at his Brentwood home. Shortly before midnight his wife tenderly admonished him: all his worries were for naught. It was thirteen minutes before midnight. He glanced at her and died.

Both his devotees and enemies—Schoenberg’s music is still controversial—might be satisfied to imagine the first dodecaphonist as a morbid triskaidekaphobe, for different reasons. The number 13 lies past the border of the twelve notes of the octave, through which chromatic music cycles, and recycles, like the wand on the face of a clock. In our mortal world, and in the ancients’, twelve gives way to one. For the composer’s detractors, there is poetic justice in the fate of drowning by numbers bestowed on a man who had forced music’s fluidity through a sieve with twelve holes. “I despair of twelve-toners,” Ned Rorem confesses in the Paris Diary; “they have lost the need for pleasure.”

For Schoenberg, twelve-tone composition was not a matter of law (the twelve tables) but of destiny (the twelve apostles). European musical practice had slowly institutionalized equal temperament during the renaissance, and in 1581 Vincenzo Galilei (Galileo’s father!) observed that an octave was made up of twelve equal semitones, seven of which—the white keys of the piano—trace the major scale, leaving five tones (the black keys) as extras in the wings, brought out, if at all, to bedim. As music history progressed, the extras became ever more prevalent onstage: the history of music from Haydn to Mahler, via Beethoven and Wagner, is a narrative of obfuscation. The logical conclusion to all this was Schoenberg’s: harmonic form ceases to function, and the diatonic scale is no longer a reference point. Each note is as important as the others, and this ideal is ensured by prohibiting the resounding of a pitch until its eleven colleagues have been allowed to speak. Thus the series. The Galileis, père and fils, are circumscribed: we’re out of orbit, we’ve escaped the pull of tonal gravity, we’re in the floating, directionless heaven of Schoenberg’s beloved Swedenborg. “I feel the wind of another planet,” Schoenberg instructs the soprano to sing, near the end of the second string quartet.

That was in 1908. He had converted to Lutheranism ten years before. He returned to Judaism in 1933, fleeing Berlin for Paris (like Walter Benjamin) and, finally, Los Angeles. He scrawled Mit Gott on the cover of one of his sketchbooks, but if his attachment to numerals resonated with numerology or cabalism, like Benjamin’s did, he was discreet about it. Schoenberg’s twelve is secular and arbitrary, and the number of steps in the chromatic scale is nothing more than the result of acoustics and of renaissance theorists. Surely part of his music’s drama is this violent clash between history’s lyricism and the strict rationality of an abstract ordering system: in its beauty we recognize a certain purposelessness, if not randomness; that would wait for another musician. In California, Schoenberg allegedly proclaimed a young student named John Cage “not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Might he have been speaking of himself?

Joshua Cody, from the book 10 + 5 = Gott: Die Macht Der Zeichen, published by the Jewish Museum Berlin, editors Daniel Tyradellis, Michal S Friedlander, and Signe Rossbach. (Copyright 2004.)