Searching for Schoenberg

Located it! Brentwood Country Mart on 26th Street, established 1948, where, apparently (according Dorothy Lamb Crawford's book A Windfall of Composers), composer Arnold Schoenberg called out to Marta Feuchtwanger that he did not have syphilis.

Schoenberg was angry that in his recent novel, Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann had ascribed the invention of 12-tone technique to Mann's hero, Adrian Leverkühn, and that Mann had made Leverkühn syphilitic. Feuchtwanger was grateful Schoenberg had called out in German.

Bertolt Brecht's house is a mile down the street. Brecht was no longer in the United States in 1948 (he'd left in 1947) but the fact does illustrate how all these artists lived within coo-ee of each other in Los Angeles.

For my article on the emigre composers in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s, please go to my blog post, A Culture in Exile, April 25 2013.