Now I've got a little more time - though there are some excellent posts above which cover the same ground...
Schoenberg's problem is that he's become demonised in an almost Daily Mail fashion - for those who aren't familiar with his music and his ideas, it's all too easy to think of him as a mad scientist, a Frankenstein figure who experimented with things he should have left well alone, as an absolutist who desired that all should follow the course he had laid out. None of these things are true, but they are pernicious fallacies. So, John, even though I know that you are one of the most fair-minded listeners at GMG (the fact that you started this thread is testament to that), some of your OP is heavy with these fallacious implications, and you probably didn't even intend them to be there. They need unpacking, I think, so that we can be fair to Schoenberg. Take this line:
he is known as the father of 12 tone and atonal music, which to me is as silly as trying to get everyone to speak esperanto
This short sentence is quite loaded with implications, I think. For instance:
That Schoenberg was trying to get everyone to do as he did - very far from the truth. Schoenberg was proud of his 12 tone 'discovery', but he didn't teach it except to his most advanced students. Not did he force anyone to use it. The technique has its source deep down in Schoenberg himself; it grew from an inner need and was personal to him - Schoenberg knew that any application it had for others would need to be treated in an equally personal way.
That the technique is some kind of esperanto - an artificial language that all can (or, implied here, should) speak. Again, this doesn't bear scrutiny. If the technique was an esperanto one would expect all music which uses it to sound the same, whereas as listening bears out, even Schoenberg's closest colleagues, Berg and Webern, used it in very different ways and to radically different expressive ends.
That, being an esperanto, the technique is a foolish, idealistic construct - I think this is false, but I suppose that's a matter of opinion....
and that, as an esperanto, it is wholly artificial and synthetic. No, the 12 tone technique developed organically, out of inner compulsion, as a way to aid the creation of motivically and harmonically unified music in an extremely chromatic context....
and that, as an method or set of 'laws', it is inherently unmusical. I think this particular stance is a confused one: those who react badly to Schoenberg's music blame it on the fact that there is a 'formula' (ugh! - hardly!). There is also a formula for Arvo Part's music, however - an even more strict, limiting and prescriptive one than in Schoenberg's - and yet most people find Part's music both beautiful and expressively direct. No, the problem people have with Schoenberg, for my money, isn't that there's a system - it's simply that it's atonal.
So, in place of Schoenberg the meddling mad scientist, we have Schoenberg the supremely gifted composer, capable of writing late Romantic music with a power and expressive potency greater than almost anyone else's, and with a technical capability as fine as almost any composer in the preceding centuries. A composer who thought deeply, who pushed his music as far as it could go, and who for personal and very understandable reasons developed a method of composition which pleased him.
Now, that being said - we're still left with the problem that you don't like it!
Of course, there's no reason that you should like it, that's the first thing to say. Secondly, as I suggested with my first post, listening to Gurrelieder and Verklarte Nacht will convince you that Schoenberg knew how to compose, that he was no charlatan (another implication sometimes made). But it won't help you like the later works any more - or if it does, it will do so slowly.
So, you need also to hear the progression towards 'the technique' - the freely atonal works such as (and above all) the 5 Orchestral Pieces op 16. These are wild pieces, written with the sort of white hot inspiration that Schoenberg knew couldn't come that often and couldn't easily be sustained (which is why they are so short) - this is one of the reasons he developed 'the technique', in fact.
Then try something much later but equally blazing - A Survivor from Warsaw. The presence of the text will make this brief and terrifying piece all the more vivid.
Even later - the String Trio. This is supposedly one of Schoenberg's most complex and thorny works. Well, actually, it is, but that's only because it has such great expressive density. And in between the outbursts are the most limpid, radiant moments of beauty - music that is tangentially tonal, and among the most moving music Schoenberg wrote.
And jump back a little - the Accompaniment to a Film Scene. Nowadays, of course, the fact that 12 tone/atonal music is suitable for underscoring emotions of fear, terror, dread etc., is thrown at it as a limitation. But Schoenberg was delighted with the fact, and he packs all of that into this snazzy little piece.
