Arnold Schönberg, a defining figure of modernism and founder of the ‘Vienna School’, embodies an aesthetic turning point closely linked to the most horrific history of the 20th century: to convey the range of his genius, twelve stations are not too many.

A major 20th-century artist and radical innovator in musical thought, Arnold Schönberg was also a theorist and painter who, notably through his self-portraits, never ceased to deepen his synaesthetic explorations. Ariane Matiakh and Bertrand Bonello offer a kaleidoscopic ode to Schönberg, the artistic phenomenon.

He whose music opened a new aesthetic era, but whom the Nazi regime labelled a ‘degenerate’ composer, is revealed through the prism of the number 12: like the twelve notes of the chromatic scale on which dodecaphony is based, with twelve excerpts representative of his ever-transfiguring imagination, from Pelléas et Mélisande, Erwartung, Pierrot lunaire and his Piano Concerto... Orchestra, lied and piano will attempt to outdo each other in paying tribute to the full Schönbergian palette—that it may shine today and onward as brightly as in history past.