Arnold Shoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951). This Austrian pioneered dodecaphony, or the twelve-tone system, which treated all parts of the chromatic scale equally. Schoenberg’s early influences were Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, as evident in his Transfigured Night (1900) for strings. Yet by 1912, with the Sprechstimme (halfway between singing and speaking) piece Pierrot lunaire, he broke from Romanticism and developed expressionist pieces free from key or tone. His students, especially Alban Berg and Anton Webern, further elaborated on his theories. Fleeing Nazi persecution in 1933, he moved from Berlin to Los Angeles, where he completed A Survivor from Warsaw. The first two acts of his unfinished opera, Moses und Aron, are still frequently performed.

​Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten (1913–1976). Reviver of the opera in the U.K., most notably with Peter Grimes (1945), the story of a fisherman who kills two of his apprentices. Britten broke through with Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937), a tribute to his composition teacher, and wrote incidental music for works by his friend W. H. Auden. With his companion, the tenor Peter Pears, Britten founded the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and wrote operas such as Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, and Death in Venice. Britten’s non-operatic works include The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (1946) and War Requiem (1961), based on the anti-war poems of Wilfred Owen, who was killed during World War I.

​Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland “COPE”-lund (1900–1990). At first a modernist, he was the first American student of Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1920s, where he finished his Organ Symphony and Music for the Theater. By the 1930s, Copland turned to simple themes, especially the American West: El Salón Mexico was followed by the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring (1944), the last containing the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts.” Copland’s Third Symphony contained his Fanfare for the Common Man, while Lincoln Portrait featured spoken portions of Abraham Lincoln’s writings. Copland wrote several educational books, beginning with 1939’s What to Listen For in Music.

​Sergei Prokofiev

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953). He wrote seven symphonies, of which the First (“Classical,” 1917) is the most notable. While in Chicago, he premiered the opera The Love for Three Oranges, based on Italian commedia dell’arte. Prokofiev moved to Paris in 1922, where he composed works for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, including The Prodigal Son. In 1936 he returned to the USSR, where he completed the popular children’s work Peter and the Wolf and the score for the film Alexander Nevsky. When Stalin denounced Prokofiev as “decadent,” the composer was forced to write obsequious tributes to the premier. Prokofiev survived Stalin, but only by a few hours; both died on March 5, 1953.