7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7style. The music was received with wild enthusiasm by the
audience, but the embittered Schoenberg could no longer
appreciate or acknowledge their response.
In 1911, unable to make a decent living in Vienna, he
had moved to Berlin. He remained there until 1915, when,
because of wartime emergency, he had to report to Vienna
for military service. He spent brief periods in the Austrian
Army in 1916 and 1917, until he was finally discharged
on medical grounds. During the war years he did little
composing, partly because of the demands of army service
and partly because he was meditating on how to solve the
vast structural problems that had been caused by his move
away from tonality. Those meditations yielded a method
of composition in which 12 tones related only to one
another; Schoenberg’s Piano Suite, Opus 25, was his first
12-tone piece.
In the 12-tone method, each composition is formed
from a special row or series of 12 different tones. This row
may be played in its original form, inverted (played upside
down), played backward, or played backward and inverted.
It may also be transposed up or down to any pitch level.
All of it, or any part of it, may be sounded successively as
a melody or simultaneously as a harmony. In fact, all
harmonies and melodies in the piece must be drawn from
this row. Although such a method might seem extremely
restrictive, this did not prove to be the case. Using this
technique, Schoenberg composed what many consider his
greatest work, the opera Moses und Aron (begun in 1930).
For the rest of his life, Schoenberg continued to use the
12-tone method. Occasionally he returned to traditional
tonality, in works such as the Suite for String Orchestra (1934);
the Variations on a Recitative for Organ, Opus 40 (1940);
and the Theme and Variations for Band, Opus 43A (1943).
After World War I Schoenberg’s music won increasing
acclaim, although his invention of the 12-tone method