This book tells the intellectual biography of Arnold Schoenberg. It has been written to try to understand how the composer provoked the deepest change in twentieth century European music. He would have preferred to call the new style \twelve-tone composition", but it later became known as twelve-tone serialism or dodecaphony. In the wide range of literature on this subject, especially academic literature, the question has been curiously ignored or it simply did not obtain the proper attention. The sharp distinction between the composer's life experiences and the evolution of his compositions did not help to understand the man and his music even.