Schoenberg's Controversial Concert

Date: March 31, 1913 • Location: Berlin, Germany

Arnold Schoenberg conducted the Vienna Concert Society in a concert of expressionist music that so shocked the audience that they began to riot.

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian and US modernist composer, music theorist, and teacher associated with developing variation, the emancipation of the dissonance, and twelve-tone composition. He taught composition in Vienna and at the Prussian Academy of Arts (1925–1933), resigning in anticipation of Nazi Germany's civil–service restrictions. He defiantly reaffirmed his Judaism before immigrating to the United States, where he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (1936–1944).