Arnold Schoenberg, 1874-1951, bust portrait, facing slightly right.
Composer Arnold Schoenberg was born on this date in 1874. The Music Division is home to the Arnold Schoenberg Collection. Highlights of this collection include a correspondence between Schoenberg and his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern; a Wassily Kandinsky letter (Schoenberg exhibited his paintings with the Blue Rider group in 1912) that deals with the composer’s aesthetic philosophy; and correspondence with Rudolf Kolisch, Ernst Krenek, Gustav Mahler, Thomas Mann, Egon Wellesz, and Alexander Zemlinsky. Remember the twelve-tone pioneer with manuscripts from the Performing Arts Encyclopedia, including his Pierrot lûnair, Quartett für 2 Violinen, Viola und Violoncell, Streich-Quartett, and his arrangement of Bach’s Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele. Read articles about the Adagio for Strings and Harp and two leaves of sketches for his Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra in the Moldenhauer Archives in American Memory. View a webcast of the lecture, Arnold Schoenberg’s Creative Journey, 1897-1912, by Walter Frisch, Professor of Music at Columbia University, here.
Cadenzas for the first and last movements of the D minor piano concerto by Mozart. Clara Schumann
On this date in 1819, pianist/composer Clara Schumann, wife of Robert Schumann, was born. Schumann was famously and no doubt inaccurately portrayed by Katherine Hepburn to Paul Henreid’s Robert in the 1947 film Song of Love. Perhaps it would be better to remember her with the vividly inked manuscript, Cadenzas for the first and last movements of the D minor piano concerto by Mozart, and find her autograph page in the Bradbury Album in the Performing Arts Encyclopedia.