Episode Details

Arnold Schoenberg possessed one of the most mathematically rigorous minds in modern music, yet he was paralyzed by a fear of the number 13 and died on Friday, July 13, 1951, at 11:45 p.m. This episode traces the self-taught son of a Viennese shoe shopkeeper who learned music by mimicking military bands, synthesized Brahms and Wagner, and then, after his wife's 1908 affair with painter Richard Gerstl, stepped off the ledge into atonality.

We unpack the physical riot at the 1913 Scandal Concert, the invention of Sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire, and his surprising surge of war psychosis in 1914 that ended in tedious garrison duty and a spoof march. Then we break down the 12-tone technique he unveiled in 1923 as a democracy of notes, his belief it would secure German musical supremacy even as antisemitism drove him out, his 1933 return to Judaism in Paris, and his final chapter in Los Angeles playing tennis with Gershwin and living across from Shirley Temple.

• Why his 1898 conversion to Lutheranism was a survival strategy rather than a spiritual awakening
• The second string quartet's soprano and the moment music detaches from gravity
• How the 12-tone row works like a sonic Sudoku puzzle
• The 1921 incident in Mattsee that previewed the catastrophe to come
• A Survivor from Warsaw and the 1950 astrologer's letter that convinced him 76 was his fatal year