Arnold Schönberg

Perfect Darkness

Gus and his pregnant girlfriend Anna are on holiday. During their nightly walk to a spot near the water, Anna makes a confession. Can the couple, amidst the wildness of nature and under a full moon, overcome the conflict? Will they reach their idyllic spot?

Arnold Schönberg: Moses und Aron

Moses und Aron is a three-act opera by Arnold Schoenberg with the third act unfinished. The 2015 Production was led by Romeo Castellucci in Paris. Moses und Aron was filmed for television by film director François-René Martin, in co-production with the Paris Opera, Bel air Media and Arte, with support from the CNC.

Transfigured – 12 Lives of Schoenberg

Twelve notes of the chromatic scale, twelve excerpts from Arnold Schoenberg’s iconic works: In excerpts from twelve of Arnold Schoenberg’s major works, the Orchestre de Paris, singers, and a pianist compete to faithfully capture the composer’s musical diversity in a production directed by Bertrand Bonello.

Moses and Aaron

A familiar Biblical tale transformed into a cinematic opera of seemingly endless possibility. In expressive, melodic tones, the fraternal pair debate God’s true message and intent for His creations, a conflict that leads their followers towards chaos and sin. Set almost entirely within a Roman amphitheater whose history lends every precise line-reading and gesture, every startling camera move and cut, a totalizing force.

From Today Until Tomorrow

Based on a rarely performed Schoenberg opera from 1929, From Today Until Tomorrow explores one night in a marriage. A husband and wife return from a party where she has flirted with another man while he has cast an appraising eye toward one of her acquaintances. Each dreams, briefly, of leaving the marriage for the excitement and mystery of a new lover.

Der Ort der Handlung

A German TV movie

Gurrelieder

Performance of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder by SBR, conducted by Mariss Jansons

Rules For a Film about Anabaptists

A political film about the policy of the anabaptists of Münster (1534) and the 'enemies of constitution' in West Germany (1976).

Simon Rattle conducts Schoenberg Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Sir Simon Rattle conducts Arnold Schönberg's Gurre-Lieder for the 75th anniversary of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra at Munich's Isar Philharmonic.

Pillar of Fire

Antony Tudor's 1942 ballet "Pillar of Fire" in a 1973 performance with American Ballet Theater.

Pierrot Lunaire

Invited by the conductor Premil Petrovic to stage Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a musical theater work from 1912 based on the poems of Albert Giraud, LaBruce transposed a strange and tragic episode of true crime onto the composition. Complementing the original atonal score is a narrative about a trans man who is outed by his girlfriend’s father and forbidden from seeing the young woman again. Crestfallen, the protagonist decides to prove the fact of his manhood by castrating a taxi driver and then revealing his newly transplanted member to the two of them. This story, which for LaBruce “serves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order,” is rendered in a visual style that nods to the era of Schoenberg’s melodrama. LaBruce cheekily appropriates the formal vocabulary of silent cinema with black-and-white photography, irises, and intertitles like “A cock, a cock, my kingdom for a cock!”

La Folle Journée de Nantes 2025 Villes phares : Vienne et Paris

Live from Nantes, a dazzling musical journey between Paris and Vienna. On the program: works by Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Schubert, Johann Strauss II (transcribed by Schoenberg), and Saint-Saëns.

Accomplice

An artist-criminal far from home asks his assistant to pirate a rare videotape before the German Post Office Authorities come to confiscate it.

One Night, One Life

In the film One Night. One Life, based on the cycle Pierrot Lunaire, Arnold Schönberg’s opus 21, director Oliver Herrmann has created a surreal, at times grotesque dream world set in a modern city, through which Pierrot moves like a spirit. In each new number she passes through different scenes and levels of the world around us: such as an abattoir, a peep-show, a station or a supermarket.

Engel und Puppe

Engel und Puppe is the first film by Italian filmmaker and writer Ellis Donda. Screened at Oberhausen in 1975, Engel und Puppe is a political adaptation of some lines from Rilke's Duino Elegies, featuring the French poet Jacqueline Risset and a young Rossella Or (soon to become an avant-garde theatre actress).

Dead Man's Memories

A policeman lunching with his daughter is present when a dead body washes up on shore. He investigates, leading him down a twisted and muddled path of nefarious connections reflecting, somewhat, his own life.

Debut, or, Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued

A young filmmaker named Julian stumbles on a hidden book tied to a vanished art forger and the perfect mystery for his next film pitch. But as coincidences mount and paranoia sets in, he begins to question what’s real, who’s watching him, and whether he’s directing the story or being directed by it.

The Language Of The New Music

This is a film about Ludwig Wittgenstein and Arnold Schoenberg; two men whose lives and ideas run parallel in the development of Viennese radicalism. Both men emerged from the turmoil of the Habsburg Empire in its closing days with the idea of analyzing language and purging it with critical intent, believing that in the analysis and purification of language lies the greatest hope that we have. They never met and might never have fully understood one another, because while the nature of their genius they found themselves alone breaking new ground of the very frontiers of their respective disciplines. But their work springs from the same soil and shares a common ethical purpose, so that their ideas and methods echo and illuminate those of each other to a remarkable degree.

Christoph Eschenbach @ National Forum of Music in Wrocław

As a child, Christoph Eschenbach was forced to flee Wrocław in 1945. On 25 April 2025, he returns to his home town to commemorate the end of the Second World War. For this solemn concert, the conductor has chosen to combine Arnold Schönberg's post-war work A Survivor from Warsaw with Johannes Brahms's German Requiem.

Erinnerung - ein Film mit Oskar Kokoschka

Moses und Aron

One of the greatest revolutions in the history of mankind happened around 3000 years ago: the transition from polytheism to monotheism through the prophet Moses. God revealed himself directly to Moses, instructing him in absolute truth. Moses was charged with leading the people of Israel to the Promised Land and escaping from Egyptian slavery. Moses came to embody the relationship between the human and divine truth. God’s call to Moses presented a new idea that exploded all previous religious concepts: ‘One God – unique, eternal, intangible, inconceivable’. Moses understands this concept, but is unable to express it, and therefore God appoints Moses’ brother Aaron as his spokesman. They are bound to fail: Aaron can only approach sharing the idea by compromising its meaning, whilst Moses is left to search fruitlessly for “the word I lack …” This production of Arnold Schoenbergs opera was filmed during the Ruhrtriennale 2009.