Special postage stamp ‘Arnold Schönberg’ issued

The Austrian postal service is honouring the composer Arnold Schönberg with a special postage stamp. The stamp, with a nominal value of €1.50, has been issued in a print run of 180,000, as the company announced on Thursday. The stamp was issued to mark the 150th anniversary of Schönberg's birth on 13 September 2024 and to honour ‘his extraordinary musical legacy’, the company said. The composer was a central figure of the Second Viennese School at the beginning of the 20th century and the inventor of twelve-tone technique.

The stamp shows a portrait of Schönberg painted by Richard Gerstl around 1907, which is now on display at the Wien Museum. The first copies of the stamps were presented to the composer's grandchildren, Arnie and Randy Schöneberg, and to the director of the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, Ulrike Anton, by the curator of the Austrian Post stamp archive, Susanna Hiegesberger.

Arnold Schönberg was born in Vienna in 1874. He began learning to play the violin at the age of eight and soon created his first compositions. After working at a bank, he devoted himself to music again. Alexander von Zemlinsky gave him composition lessons. From 1895, Schönberg worked as a choirmaster, conductor and composer, as well as a teacher in Berlin and Vienna. His ‘Theory of Harmony’, published in 1911, remains a fundamental work of music theory to this day. In 1921, he developed the method of ‘composing with twelve tones related only to each other’, known as the ‘twelve-tone technique’ and one of the most influential developments in music history in the 20th century. In 1933, Schönberg emigrated to the United States, where he continued to compose and teach until his death in 1951.