In February 1948, from his exile in Los Angeles, Arnold Schönberg imagined his reputation in the 21^st century. In an angry letter to his fellow-exile Thomas Mann, he mocked up a dictionary entry of the future, written by a fictional academic, Hugo Triebsamen, who had learned of Schönberg’s life and work only through scattered fragments – through the legacy of his pupils, and at second hand:

In one of the few letters preserved by Anton v. Webern is mentioned the name of Arnold Schönberg. In this letter, which he wrote a few weeks before he died in the battle against the Russians, he speaks enthusiastically about this Schönberg, calls him the greatest living composer, whose merits will never be forgotten. How wrong he was with his prophecy! I went through six decades of the Encyclopaedia Americana without meeting even a mention of his name…

The feud between Mann and Schoenberg had begun with the publication, the previous year, of Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, Told by a Friend. Leverkühn, in the course of the novel, devises a new language for western music, modelled on the system of composing using all 12 tones of the chromatic scale that Schoenberg had formulated in the early 1920s, and which, by the late 1940s, under the description of ‘serialism’, was becoming a dominant trend in avant-garde classical music.

Schönberg was indignant at the idea that a mere novelist should present serialism as his own creation – effectively erasing him from history. Mann, for his part, was bemused and faintly alarmed at Schönberg’s vehemence. He agreed to append a clarification. A prefatory note duly appeared in the English translation of Doktor Faustus and in subsequent German editions:

It does not seem supererogatory to inform the reader that the form of musical composition delineated in chapter XXII, known as the 12-tone or row system, is in truth the intellectual property of a contemporary composer and theoretician, Arnold Schönberg…

Within weeks, however, Schönberg was fuming again. He made his anger public in a letter to the Saturday Review of Literature. Mann’s description of him as ‘a contemporary composer and theoretician’, he wrote, only served to belittle his name and standing. He had a point. Informed musicians, by the late 1940s, regarded Schönberg as one of the century’s pre-eminent minds, and Schönberg, after a lifetime of bruising intellectual and artistic struggle, accepted that estimation without demur. As the quarrel spluttered to an uneasy truce Schönberg was sardonic and defiant: ‘Yet in two or three decades, we shall see who is the contemporary of whom.’

Well, here we are in Schönberg’s 150^th anniversary year – far beyond the span of years that he believed would affirm his immortality – and the unhappy truth is that Triebsamen’s prediction has proved closer to reality than his creator’s. Yet within recent memory, Schoenberg’s ideas represented the dominant path in ‘serious’ music-teaching. Harvey Sachs, in his 2023 book, Schoenberg: Why He Matters, quotes Schönberg’s pupil Josef Rufer in the mid-1970s, asserting that ‘today, after more than 50 years, the entire musical world knows how right he was: this concept of composition with 12 notes has become the central moving force, the unceasing and still operative impulse of 20^th-century music’.

The next century, as it turned out, had other ideas. True, the Whig notion that music had evolved to a point at which tonal harmony was exhausted – and that Schönberg was (as Pierre Boulez put it) the Einstein whose breakthroughs defined the next logical stage in its evolution – remains current in some academic musical circles. In the world beyond, a wider and more democratic western culture has long since swerved around and past him. Every note of Gershwin, Ellington, Richard Rodgers and Lin-Manuel Miranda – of John Williams, the Beatles, Madonna and Taylor Swift – refutes the idea that Schönberg was indispensable.

Even for classical composers, serialism is now simply one item on a menu of stylistic choices. ‘Imagine me, if you will, an aspiring composer sitting in a classroom diligently counting backward from 12, tracing down combinatorial transformations,’ recalls the American composer John Adams in his memoir Hallelujah Junction. ‘Then imagine this same student emerging from his sombre seminar, walking cross the campus, and hearing from some dorm window the screaming, slashing, bending, soaring lawless guitar of Jimi Hendrix.’

And yet Adams named his largest orchestral work Harmonielehre, after Schönberg’s great harmony textbook of 1911. There was irony there, for sure – Adams’s stupendous maxi-minimalist symphony (composed in California in 1985) is a vibrant re-assertion of the power of tonal harmony, the principle for which Schönberg’s book served (as Alex Ross puts it) as ‘an autopsy’. But it was also a recognition that if, as a composer, you intended to deal seriously with the western classical tradition, Schönberg (like Wagner before him) had to be addressed.

Is that still the case? Adams’s Harmonielehre and Schönberg’s Violin Concerto of 1936 both received superb performances this summer in the 2024 BBC Proms; both were warmly reviewed, though the critic of the Guardian wrote of the Schönberg as an ‘unplayable’ work – and described a soloist (the famously adventurous Patricia Kopatchinskaja) treading ‘the thorniest of paths’. This 88-year old concerto, it seems clear, is still a problem piece. Harvey Sachs, meanwhile, took Schönberg’s pulse in the concert hall shortly before Covid: choosing six leading international orchestras (Berlin, Boston, London, New York, Philadelphia and Vienna) and discovering that in their 2018-19 seasons they played precisely one piece by Schönberg between them.

In his 150^th anniversary year, then, where do we take – or leave – Arnold Schönberg? There’s no easy answer; but then, Schönberg was not an easy individual. There’s something admirable, even inspiring, in Schönberg’s single-mindedness and his wounded pride. He showed unflinching moral courage in the face of political horrors, and towards those who thought that art demanded anything less than absolute commitment from its creators.

If Schönberg was wrong (and history does seem to be leaning that way), his errors were ones from which an entire artform has drawn stimulation. It’s good to ask questions, to test new paths; good, too, to believe that no artistic endeavour, if pursued with integrity, can ever end in total defeat. While writing this article I attended a concert by the BBC Singers in London: a gala celebrating the group’s centenary. The three new (or almost-new) works were congratulatory in tone and skilfully written, and the virtuoso singers handled them with ease. The plush harmonies slipped down easily, stylishly and forgettably.

Then they turned to Schönberg: his motet Friede auf Erden, composed in 1907. It begins with gentle words and textures of a kind that Mahler would have recognised. And then, gradually, the air chills, the choir grows agitated and angular lines grate and scrape against each other. The audience shifted in its seats, but the singers seemed to be coming alive – moving with the music, and admitting rawness, even stress, into voices that had spent the whole evening delivering polished, emollient warmth.

Friede auf Erden is 117-years old and it still sounded like the boldest thing we’d heard all night. If Schönberg stands for anything today, it’s surely the artist’s (and the prophet’s) eternal right to be awkward – to insist, without compromise, upon things that we might prefer not to hear. He could have chosen to do otherwise; part of his tragedy is that he knew that. In later life, he liked to tell a story about his experience in the Austro-Hungarian army in 1915. ‘Are you the notorious musician Arnold Schönberg?’ asked the officer who enlisted him. ‘Beg to report, sir, yes,’ replied Private Schönberg. ‘Someone had to be, and no-one else wanted to. So I took the job myself.’