Mark Berry's biography of Schoenberg must be considered an excellent representative of its genre: it contains a concise introduction to the life, work, and thinking of one of the most prominent artists of the twentieth century; it offers a very good—and for large parts fascinating—read (what an era, what a personal fate!); and it is produced in a compelling and attractive way (with thirty-seven illustrations, the only shortcoming being that the paintings, unfortunately, all appear as black-and-white reproductions). As part of Reaktion's “Critical Lives” series, the book does not aim at a scientific community of expert musicologists but rather at a general audience, as well as students seeking first information and orientation. Berry, reader in music history at Royal Holloway, University of London, clearly wishes not only to stir interest in a composer who—due to his break with tonality in the still early years of the century—has a reputation of being difficult and inaccessible: it seems as if the author wants to ignite some of his own enthusiasm concerning Schoenberg within the reader. Freely, he declares himself a devotee “willing to travel across Europe for the express purpose of seeing rare stagings of Schoenberg's operas” (10).

This aesthetic partisanship never collides with scientific objectivity. And, moreover, it will be hard to find another biography of Schoenberg that succeeds in sketching out this life full of disruptions: the numerous, divergent (and partly even esoteric) ideological and spiritual influences shaping his approach to both art and life, and the artistic content of all his compositions and other productions (paintings, writings, etc.)—and all this in about two hundred pages. In his introduction, Berry makes an excuse for not treating all of Schoenberg's compositions to their deserved extent: “Some works will, alas, have to be passed with less discussion than others” (13). But an experienced Schoenberg listener will pay tribute to Berry's ability to convey the core of these often-complicated pieces of music in just a few lines.

There are only very few points that seem to deserve a more extensive or more detailed discussion. In my view, Berry might have spent some more time explaining the musician's first conversion toward Lutheranism rather than to Catholicism. It is true that converting Jews in Austria in general had a stronger tendency to choose a Protestant confession rather than Catholicism (the predominant creed). But the reasons for that may be sought in a variety of sometimes diverging factors. Thus, this religious leaning of Schoenberg may be interpreted not only as a declaration on behalf of particular aspects of German culture (explicitly on behalf of composers like Johann Sebastian Bach) but also as a profoundly political statement—perhaps in some kind of pan-Germanic direction, but definitively to be read before the background of the position of Austrian politicians regarding the role of the Catholic Church. Surely, there was no Kulturkampf in the same way and to the same degree as in Bismarck's Prussia, championing genuine German (i.e., Protestant) culture against ultramontane Catholic tendencies; but parties like Karl Lueger's Christlichsoziale Partei were founded on Catholic grounds that included a harsh antisemitism that was hardly bearable for Schoenberg from his very youth. So the political implications, as well as spiritual or maybe aesthetic considerations, of choosing the Protestant over the Catholic confession must be kept in mind.

Berry's book follows in eight chronologically ordered chapters the decisive moments of Schoenberg's life, borrowing their titles from paradigmatic turns either in the composer's aesthetic (e.g., “Emancipating the Dissonance” and “Composing with Twelve Notes Related Only to One Another”) or in his personal situation (e.g., “Goodbye to Berlin” or “Exile”). Within this clear structure, Berry develops a convincing narrative of an artistic evolution that may seem twisted at first sight for many a novice to Schoenberg's work (such as the nearly coinciding triumph of the late Romantic Gurre-Lieder and the utter scandal produced by a concert containing the first Chamber Symphony in 1913). Berry refers to secured musicological grounds for large parts, but also introduces the reader to his own research carried out in the preparation of this study, resulting in a striking finding concerning Schoenberg's last uttered word (not to be revealed here).