With the invitation in 1925 to teach composition at the Academy of Arts in Berlin, Schoenberg finally obtained a prestigious position, financial security, and a stable family life. In 1932, the year the couple's daughter was born, he completed the second act of his opera Moses und Aron (produced posthumously, 1957). Schoenberg and his family fled Nazi Germany to Paris in 1933. In 1934 they immigrated to the United States, and he accepted a teaching position in Boston. The next year, because of his health, they moved to Los Angeles, where his two youngest sons were born. After a year as a lecturer at the University of Southern California (1935), he taught at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1936 to 1944. He became a U.S. citizen in 1941. Schoenberg fell seriously ill in 1946, and at one point his heart stopped beating; this experience is reflected in his String Trio (1946), written after his recovery. In retirement he continued to teach and to compose. He died on July 13, 1951, in Los Angeles. Schoenberg's musical style progressed from late 19th-century romanticism to the twelve-tone technique. His early tonal works are reminiscent of the music of the German composer Johannes Brahms, but before long he assimilated the chromaticism of the German composer Richard Wagner. In works such as Verklrte Nacht Schoenberg achieved intensity of feeling through rich harmonies and long soaring melodies supported by a dense contrapuntal texture of short, constantly varying motives. Beginning about 1907 these traits became even more pronounced in his expressionist works, in which tonality was abandoned and musical form became compressed. The prime example from this period is Pierrot Lunaire; in this setting of macabre verse, the accompanying chamber ensemble employs a different combination of instruments for each of the 21 poem-based songs of the cycle, and the vocal soloist uses the Sprechstimme (German for "speech voice"), or ...
