Arnold Schoenberg

:For the American music critic and journalist, see Harold Charles Schonberg.

Extramusical interests

Schoenberg was also a painter of considerable individuality, whose pictures were considered good enough to exhibit alongside those of Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, and he wrote extensively: plays and poems, as well as essays not only about music but about politics and the social/historical situation of the Jewish people.

Related Topics:
Franz Marc - Wassily Kandinsky

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Schoenberg suffered from triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number thirteen); it is said that the reason his late opera is called Moses and Aron, rather than Moses and Aaron (the correct spelling with two As) is because the latter spelling has thirteen letters in it. He was born (and, it turned out, died) on the thirteenth of the month, and thought of this as a portent. He once refused to rent a house because it had the number 13, and feared turning 76, because its digits add up to thirteen.

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In an interesting story, it is believed that he feared Friday, July 13, 1951, as it was the first Friday the 13th of his 76th year. He reportedly stayed in bed that day preparing for what he thought as his death day. After begging her husband to wake up and "quit his nonsense," his skeptical wife was shocked to find that her husband in fact had died that day he had long feared, as he uttered the word "harmony" and died. His time of death was 11:47 p.m., 13 minutes until midnight.

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