A tutelary figure of modernity, founder of the “Vienna School”, Arnold Schönberg embodies an aesthetic turning point, linked to the most tormented history of the twentieth century: twelve stations are not too many to approach such a phenomenon.

A major artist of the twentieth century and a radical renovator of musical thought, Arnold Schönberg was also a theorist and painter, and never ceased to explore his synaesthetic thinking, particularly through his self-portraits. Ariane Matiakh and Bertrand Bonello offer us a kaleidoscopic diffraction of the “Schönberg phenomenon”.

The man whose music ushered in an aesthetic era, but who was also branded a ‘degenerate’ composer by the Nazi regime, is revealed through the prism of the number 12: as the twelve sounds of the chromatic scale that founded the dodecaphonic system, and as twelve excerpts from works representative of his imagination in perpetual transfiguration: From Pelléas et Mélisande to Erwartung, from Pierrot lunaire to the Piano Concerto, the orchestra, the lieder and the piano will vie with each other in their commitment to bring out the full Schönbergian palette, before and in front of history.