SOURCE: "How Dead is Arnold Schoenberg?," in The New York Review of Books, April 22, 1965, pp. 6-8.

In the following essay, Thomson reviews Arnold Schoenberg Letters, finding notable the book's portrayal of Schoenberg as an artist.

In 1910 Arnold Schoenberg, then thirty-five, began to keep copies of all the letters he wrote. Many of these were about business—teaching jobs, the publication of his works, specifications for performance. He would seem around that time to have arrived at a decision to organize his career on a long-line view involving the dual prospect of his continuing evolution as a composer—for he was clearly not one to have shot his bolt by thirty—and of his counting on pedagogy, for which he had a true vocation, as his chief support.

His plan was to become a private teacher (privatdozent) at the Academy of Music and Fine Arts in Vienna, avoiding by...