'Think like Thalberg': lessons from Hollywood for classical music

When I moved to Sydney in 1987 I got to know the city by memorizing its coves and bays. In Los Angeles since 2013, I’ve memorized where the studios are located. After all, locals often think of Los Angeles and Hollywood synonymously. Paramount is only a $10 cab fare away; Warner Bros is in the Valley. But in another sense I’ve learned a different geography. What I would call ‘classical music’s verities’ stand out more vividly now.

'Where the studios are located'. Fox and Paramount lie in this direction; Warner Bros and Universal are over the first hill. 

I had at first considered writing an article entitled ‘What Classical Music can learn from Hollywood; what Hollywood can learn from Classical Music’. I was going to include such ‘pearls’ as: ‘You’re never finished’. Film scripts, for example, are multi-coloured documents inserting rewrites way beyond the first day of shooting; how does that compare with classical music’s sketch, short score, orchestration..?

‘It Takes a Village’ (apologies to Hillary Clinton) occurred to me while sitting in our local cinema, the Vista, at the junction of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards (where D.W. Griffith filmed the silent epic Intolerance in 1915 before the roads were paved) and realizing that the audience was sitting through 15 minutes of end-credits. Such appreciation for everyone’s work! Classical music may have gotten over the idea of the lone genius starving in the garret. But in Hollywood you find the ‘sort of collaboration that once yielded cathedrals’, says Billy Mernit, a story-analyst whose classes on dialogue I’ve taken.

The distance I’ve travelled through this landscape also makes me sensitive to arguments about ‘New Music’. I’m reminded of a former piano teacher who said that when he came back to the piano after a long spell at the harpsichord all he could hear were the piano’s hammers. These days I notice the ‘shoulds’ in the programming debates. Companies should program New Music; people should listen to it.

Maybe it’s a worry that our classical music scene doesn’t seem to have a big-enough audience for the most future-bound music of our tradition but I wonder if there is another way of looking at this. Los Angeles suggests to me there is. ‘Should’ just isn’t in the vocabulary of anyone in the Green Room of ten million people that is Los Angeles County.

I guess people have been worrying about the decline in audience-appreciation for our modern repertoire since Henry Pleasants bemoaned the loss of singable themes in The Agony of Modern Music. Oliver Rudland wrote in a recent edition of Standpoint that composers stopped writing tunes because they lost their Christian faith. I don’t even think they have to write tunes (!).

But my favourite analysis is that of Richard Taruskin who, in a 2004 edition of The Musical Times, focussed on the idea (fallacious in his mind) that all that matters in a piece of music is the artist’s making of it (their ‘poiesis’), regardless of the audience’s capacity to hear. Taruskin traced what he called ‘the poietic fallacy’ back to 19^th century critics like Alexander Serov or Franz Brendel (remember them?), but in Schoenberg’s atonality and 12-tone music he felt that the audience had really been abandoned.

I know Schoenberg tried to help audiences comprehend his new music by emulating classical forms. But the classical forms couldn’t serve their previous clarifying purpose once a composer’s means of punctuating them (Tonality) was lost. That’s not a catastrophe, except that at some point after 1910 you could often detect an idea that composers didn’t have to worry themselves if the audience was left behind. The composer’s principal, if not sole, job was to extend the musical language; it was the audience’s problem if they were bewildered.

‘Most of the cuts were in the First Act’ says screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, of the Clint Eastwood film J. Edgar, ‘because we didn’t want the audience to get ahead of it.’ [italics added] ‘Subtext helps your audience to participate. It’s fantastic if your audience knows a bit more than your characters,’ [italics again] says Billy Mernit. What do these seemingly contradictory statements suggest? A filmmaker is constantly shifting their audience’s understanding, and the audience is granted enough of the basics to play along? I decided to collar Mernit, since I know him, and put some questions to him.

Billy Mernit is a former songwriter who has had his songs covered by people like Judy Collins and Carly Simon. These days he’s a story analyst for Universal Pictures, and is best known for his textbook, Writing the Romantic Comedy. Mernit gets to see and comment on each of the seemingly interminable drafts a screenplay goes through before the cameras roll. How important is consideration of audience to the film work?

‘The general rule of thumb is that with most writers, first draft is for you. Second draft is where you start to take into consideration who it’s for and who might respond to it,’ he says, when I catch up with him in the sculpture garden at UCLA, where he does some teaching. ‘In the Hollywood studio system it is almost scientific. One of the first questions any executive asks of a project is “what’s the demographic?” “who’s the intended audience?” “how do we expect to sell this thing?” because it’s in the studio system that you’re dealing with major money.

‘And by the way, back in the Silent Era, in the early days of Hollywood, a lot of the stuff that is now sort of codified, in its nascent form was responding to audience. In some of the earliest Silent Movies, like Chaplin two-reelers, audiences were going “give us more of that. We love that.” And only when the audience created the demand for things, did Hollywood say, “Hmm, if we put a woman in the picture with that comedian we’ll expand our audience” - things like that.’

So, could I take another Clintonian expression and turn it into one of my ‘lessons’ - ‘It’s the Audience, Stupid’?

‘Well, the slight confusion in the question, the thing that’s being conflated is ...it’s creator versus producer, meaning a creator may not be thinking of the audience; a screenplay might be a very personal endeavour. But the producers of a screenplay are thinking audience first and foremost.

‘I don’t want to be too glib about this because if you’re a story analyst who’s worth what they pay you, on a certain level there’s this naive, fundamental “does this get me excited?” You have to have a personal response to it. And that, by the way, goes with producers as well. You don’t necessarily get into producing unless you have a great love for movies, like a good story and want to be involved. So I’m responding as a human being, that’s the litmus test. If it grabs me and I’m thinking “I’ve gotta keep turning these pages”, I am the audience; with the producer’s hat on. I don’t think of things in terms of what’s commercial or not. It’s more “is there something in the story that speaks to some kind of audience beyond myself?” Everything should be personal, of course, and the most personal projects are quite often the most impassioned and unique, right? but it’s a communicative medium.’

A producer like 1930s whizkid Irving Thalberg (the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘last tycoon’) thought that the success of a movie was arbitrated solely by the audience, director Billy Wilder’s ‘wonderful people out there in the dark’. I wonder if the classical music fear of giving so much consideration to audience response is that we would lose out on masterpieces?

Says Mernit: ‘Well, it’s not like Mozart or Verdi or Vivaldi were writing extremely esoteric masterpieces that were being foisted on an unsuspecting public; they were using the popular vernacular. But the crucial difference is that Hollywood is not attempting to make the general public watch a Godard movie. You can have a Best Picture winner like 12 Years a Slave and it’s something that people can relate to, whereas much modern classical music - unless it’s Minimalist - is very difficult for most audience members to even hear. It’s as if you were making a movie with a strange lens on the projector.’

I find myself wondering if classical music would ever get to this level of deference to the public. After all A Composer’s Cohort, an article on the Opera America website, says, ‘...try not to worry about the reception....Whether the audience likes your piece is arbitrary but informative.’ I can’t help feeling that not only would this be a strange abdication of skill in the movie world which is premised on predicting hits (and often does), school teachers wouldn’t say, ‘I have no idea at what point I lose my students’ nor would sales personnel concede, ‘I have no idea when I’ve lost the buyer.’

And it’s not as if classical music was always in such an unknowing position. A classical composer knew that if you put an A minor chord after a G while you were in the key of C, an audience would experience interruption. Wagner knew that if he kept withholding resolution of the ‘Tristan chord’ we in the audience would lean in with yearning. And I’m convinced Tchaikovsky set his audience up so that they would burst into applause at the end of the march in the ‘Pathétique’ and feel all the more excruciatingly the wrench into the Adagio lamentoso which in fact ends the symphony.

Do classical music writers want to second-guess the audience? Do they want positive reinforcement of their vision that badly? I wonder what would happen for contemporary repertoire if the practitioners began to ‘Think like Thalberg’; if classical music had its equivalents of film producers, people in orchestras who could stand between a CEO and a Director of Artistic Planning, a CAO (Chief Artistic Officer) if you like, with the authority to say, ‘Look, the audience feels you’ve got ten minutes more music than thematic material. I saw them fidgeting at the preview we set up to test their responses.’

These are just some of the thoughts that have come to me from immersing myself in a different artistic milieu. But to come back to an earlier promise, what can Hollywood learn from classical music? I said above I was thinking of writing about each artform’s lessons for the other.

So far I only have one, but it’s big, and fairly reaffirming. Paradoxically it’s something about form. In Save the Cat, probably the most popular screenwriting text of today, the book that every second aspiring screenwriter working on WiFi in Starbucks has sitting by their elbow, the author Blake Snyder says ‘Act II begins on page 25. No, please. Don’t argue’. Yes, but I will. (By the way, since screenplays are formatted so that one page equals one minute of running time, this is even more restrictive than it sounds.)

Every second person working on a script. Actor Joey Marino studies a screenplay while working  in Bru Coffeehouse, Los Angeles

Classical music wouldn’t buy this. Classical Sonata Form, for example, is a 3-Act structure. It was a screenwriting teacher, Sydney’s Linda Aronson, who made me think about this. Classical Sonata Form contains exposition, development, and recapitulation. There are certain goals it must satisfy but look, there is a world of variation in the way Haydn, Beethoven, Mahler, Shostakovich and others even closer to our time went about it. Classical music proves you don’t have to be rigidly formulaic.

But screenwriting may not be as schematic as I think. I put this to Billy Mernit. ‘It gets moved around a lot,’ he says. ‘The A-teamers are not slaves to those kinds of restrictive formulas really.’ And then I think of Pulp Fiction - three acts functioning traditionally but out of real-life chronological order, containing enough that’s familiar for an audience to appreciate what’s fresh. Yes, even as I continue to try to learn from classical music, Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction’s screenwriter/director) proves you can create an innovative masterpiece that is also popular.

Gordon Kalton Williams

© 2015

This article first appeared in the 7 May edition of Symphony Australia’s The Podium under the title: A Different Geography: how LA has affected my musical thinking

Adams' good name (reprint from 2004)

Having finally seen Nixon in China (in San Diego last weekend), I thought I'd re-publish this article thought it first appeared in Australian concert programs in 2004.

Adams’ Good Name

John Adams. It’s a good solid New England name. An American is likely to think first of John Adams, the second president, George Washington’s successor. But Australians are more likely to have heard of the composer whose works have been increasingly performed in Australia in recent years. We saw the Australian premiere of El Niño, his new ‘take’ on oratorio, at the Adelaide Festival in 2002, in a concert version directed by his regular collaborator Peter Sellars, who had resigned as Festival Director months before. Harmonielehre was presented twice last year by Australian orchestras: by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and by the Sydney Symphony, who also in November 2003 gave the Australian premiere of Guide to Strange Places, the second of two works by Adams they have co-commissioned. Adams came out for the Australian premiere of Naïve and Sentimental Music in 2000 and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performed Adams’ The Wound Dresser in the Metropolis series some seasons ago. Anyone who saw the reaction of a young audience to Harmonielehre in Sydney in 1999 will realise that here is a living composer who can grab an audience like a Beethoven.

It’s kind of funny that Adams should have a profile in Australia. His career is in many respects a very American story. Born in what our friends across the Pacific refer to as ‘back East’, he had the upbringing of a typical east coast liberal Democrat, indeed remembers shaking Candidate Kennedy’s hand during the New Hampshire primaries in 1960. And of course northeastern USA is a kernel of American music, birthplace of Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, not to mention Charles Ives, whose music Adams honours in 2003’s My Father Knew Charles Ives – along with the music from his grandfather’s dance hall at Lake Winnipesaukee, which he remembers from boyhood.

There was Harvard, and then Adams, the young man, went west. He worked as a storeman and at the San Francisco Conservatory before becoming the San Francisco Symphony’s first New Music Advisor and later Composer-in-Residence, where he worked with Principal Conductor Edo de Waart (later to spend ten years as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Sydney Symphony), who premiered Harmonielehre and even suggested the idea for the choral symphony Harmonium (premiered in Australia under Hiroyuki Iwaki), and who recently gave the Australian premieres of Naïve and Sentimental Music and Guide to Strange Places.

Adams seems to have embraced a particular sort of Californian-ness. In a recent piece, The Dharma at Big Sur, premiered for the opening of Walt Disney Hall in October last year, he links himself with Bay Area luminaries Lou Harrison, Harry Partch and Jack Kerouac. California may not fully account for the spirit of joy in his music – northern California is a world away from the swimming pools and movie stars of southern California – but early on Adams decided he would not go down the serial path which beckoned young graduates in the 1970s. (If you go by statements by fellow minimalist Steve Reich, the example of the Second Viennese School just doesn’t track with the land of Chuck Berry and burgers.) Adams’ teacher at Harvard, however, had been Leon Kirchner, a pupil of the inventor of serialism Arnold Schoenberg (who himself famously ended up in California, playing tennis with Gershwin, while clinging steadfastly to the aesthetics of ‘old Europe’), and it is Schoenberg and Adams’ ambivalence to his legacy that is one of the subjects of Harmonielehre, his great 1985 symphony.

Symphony? Adams is a second-generation minimalist. While most composers disown labels, Adams was proud to own ‘minimalism’ when he spoke to me during pre-concert interviews in Sydney in February 2000; proud even that it was an American invention. And why not? Minimalism, so simple and repetitive as to drive some people loopy, has at least given back to classical music the possibility of audiences being able to follow musical process. But Adams has written few pieces in this quintessential minimalist vein. Shaker Loops (1983) is perhaps the only one regularly played. Here again the title reminds us of Adams’ absorption in American culture; as does his choice of texts. The words of Jack Kerouac do not actually appear in Dharma, but the poetry of Emily Dickinson appears in Harmonium, and The Wound Dresser (1988) uses a text by Walt Whitman set with a straightforwardness of line learnt from American songwriters like Gershwin or Richard Rodgers. On the Elektra/Nonesuch CD this example of Adams at one extreme is coupled very tellingly with one of his most beautifully-detailed minimalistic pieces, Fearful Symmetries.

But what makes Adams ‘second-generation’ is the way he has re-incorporated elements of the European tradition. Harmonielehre gets its title from the textbook on standard harmony that Schoenberg was writing in 1911 at the time of his launch into atonality, precursor of serialism. There are passages in Harmonielehre that remind one of Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) or the highly chromatic late music of Schoenberg’s mentor, Gustav Mahler. The arrival of Air Force One in the opera Nixon in China, produced at the 1992 Adelaide Festival, sounds like a cross between Phillip Glass and Wagner, complete with a Siegfried’s Sword leitmotif. But deeper than surface references is the re-evoking of cadential functions. Adams’ is not music that circles in a detached Eastern abandonment of time; it builds up tension to be released in massive climaxes. As a conductor, Adams found over the years that while conducting Terry Riley’s In C, arguably the founding piece of Minimalism, his versions starting getting faster and more anxious. The second movement of his Harmonielehre deals with the Anfortas wound, describing a characteristically European psychological state, but it’s possible that Adams was grappling with an Anfortas Wound of contemporary music, how not to be emotionally crippled by a musical tradition that must have an element of intellectual grit. Naïve and Sentimental Music (1997-98) was inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s 1795 essay of the same name, exploring the difference between spontaneous and cultivated expression.

For Adams is engaged. He deplores the term ‘CNN opera’ yet has found mythic resonance in stories we could find on cable. He became interested in writing Nixon in China when librettist Alice Goodman convinced him that it would be done not as parody, but as some sort of 20th-century heroic opera. As it must: the work looks at the one of the great meetings between East and West. He is currently working on Doctor Atomic, another opera, with the same collaborators, on the inventor of the atom bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Big subjects. His opera The Death of Klinghoffer, based on the hijacking by Palestinian terrorists of the Achille Lauro, seems to keep on proving the painful relevance of art. It attracted wide criticism during the first Gulf War, when it was felt to show too much sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Projected performances of the extract Three Choruses from Klinghoffer were cancelled by the Boston Symphony Orchestra after 9/11: the husband of one of the members of the chorus had died on Flight 11, and grieving performers could not give voice to some of the words. But at first the cancellation appeared to be a free speech issue, exciting considerable newspaper discussion and outrage.

Adams has since responded to September 11 with a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece called On the Transmigration of Souls, given its Australian premiere in Sydney earlier this year. It is a disturbing work using for text the mobile phone messages of victims and the words of the ‘Missing’ cards posted at the site. It almost seems to be looking back from the other side of life, and is paradoxically radiant and ethereal – though there is no gliding over the specific last words of the Flight 11 flight attendant: ‘I see water and buildings…’ One can only admire an artist who is prepared to step back into this sort of emotional cauldron. Adams was a risky choice for the New York Philharmonic to commission for this work, given the previous year’s controversy. But also inevitable. As Vincent Plush said in The Australian in January: ‘For some years now, Americans have looked to Adams as a kind of composer laureate, not yet the paterfamilias figure that died with Aaron Copland in 1990, but one of the same stature, nobility of declaration and clarity of purpose.’

Gordon Kalton Williams

Symphony Australia © 2004

For further information I published a more recent interview with John Adams (Traditional Terms) on 5 September 2013.

A Culture in Exile

A Culture in Exile - Classical musicians in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s

A number of times over the past few years, the contemporary German film director Werner Herzog has described Los Angeles as the most culturally substantial city in the United States. It’s why he and his wife decided to move here he will say, often citing the number of writers, philosophers, and mathematicians who are also in residence. 

Los Angeles skyline, photo: Navid Serrano

To anyone in classical music, Los Angeles has a further claim to cultural substance: in the 1930s and 40s, mostly because of Hitler, Los Angeles ended up with the highest concentration of great composers, writers and performers per square mile of any other place on the planet, probably at any time. Just think who lived here – Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, singers like Lotte Lehmann and instrumentalists such as Jascha Heifitz. Nearly all of them lived walking distance from Sunset Boulevard’s arc to the sea at Santa Monica. People ask whether Angelenos have profited from the time these greats spent among them, but it’s certainly inspired me as a newcomer. I’ve walked the streets with a copy of Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s A Windfall of Composers in hand and Carol Merrill-Mirsky’s Exiles in Paradise 1991 exhibition catalogue tucked under my arm. I’ve shared the same initial experience as the Stravinskys who marvelled at ‘the sun, the climate, the beautiful countryside, the charming homes...’

An Australian who wants to retrace the steps of a world-famous composer can walk up Caroline Street, South Yarra and know that that’s where Percy Grainger lived. Here, you can see the houses owned by even bigger names and meet their children, grandchildren and students. Phil Azelton, a music copyist I met, studied under Ingolf Dahl and remembers the day Dahl came in and told the class how sad he was that his good friend, Paul Hindemith, had died. I love the everyday-ness of it. I’ve shopped at the farmers’ market at the corner of Fairfax Ave and Third Street where Vera Stravinsky met Natalia Rachmaninov and invited her and her husband to tea with Igor and her and the Rubinsteins; where the Stravinskys took W.H. Auden to shop while he was working with Igor on The Rake’s Progress. Getting around the county on the Rapid Transit, around that huge amphitheatre which is the coastal plain backed by the Hollywood Hills, I know exactly what Otto Klemperer meant when he came here to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1933 and spoke of ‘distances such as we can hardly conceive of’. Even now, it takes on average two hours to get anywhere one-way.

But the city has also served as a kind of map by which to learn about other less well-known musicians.  I’d heard Hanns Eisler’s music in productions of Brecht, but never before delved much into his concert music. And I’ve wondered why Ernst Toch is so little represented in concert programs; his Symphony No.5 Jephta could easily sit alongside Barber’s First or Roy Harris’s Third as one of the great one-movement symphonies of the 20^th century. Toch didn’t go in for ‘systems’, but Schoenberg thought enough of him to let him know when he was retiring from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) so that Toch could go for the job. (Schoenberg didn’t go in for systems either, of course. One of the great anecdotes in Crawford’s book concerns Milhaud’s visit to Schoenberg upon returning from a post-war visit to Europe. So many post-war European composers are writing with twelve tones, he told Schoenberg, thinking Schoenberg would be pleased. ‘I hope they’re putting some music into it’, said Schoenberg.) Carol Merrill-Mirsky, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Hollywood Bowl Museum and Archives Director, mentions other less well-known musicians whose presence here contributed to the artistic activity of the city, people like Leon Levitch, an émigré from Yugoslavia who got interned in Italy, then upstate New York - ‘an excellent composer’ ‘who made his living here in Los Angeles as a piano tuner’.

But to go back to Toch. He had studied music despite the disapproval of his parents and learnt from ‘secret early study of Mozart’s scores’ the emotional wellsprings of music. You’d think that Toch’s music (‘from the heart – may it go to hearts’, as he described Poems to Martha) would equip him to write for the movies, the town’s principal industry. But he was not the only composer to be disillusioned by this experience.

Reading about these composers’ experiences with the film studios you sometimes see Old World sensitivities butting up against those of the New World. Crawford in her book suggests that the relative age of a composer when he arrived in Los Angeles was a factor in the success or not of his (and it was usually ‘his’) dealings with Hollywood. Franz Waxman, Frederick Hollander and Erich Wolfgang Korngold did well because they were comparatively young. But perhaps there’s more to it than age. Those three allowed that a film’s rhetoric trumped music’s when it came to making movies. Max Reinhardt, the great German director, said that Frederick Hollander could have been a dramaturg if he hadn’t been a composer. According to Hugo Friedhofer, Korngold could go to a director and say, ‘I feel that there’s a first act curtain there’, and ask if there was any more footage so his music could make more of the moment; he always got his way. The complaint of composer Alexandre Tansman – that the entire city of Los Angeles would await the latest offering from MGM – seems beside the point. Films were the principal storytelling medium of the town. But of course, present-day orchestral artistic administrators are wrestling with the idea of concerts that may not have ‘the music’ as their principal rationale.

Stravinsky hoped to get work in the movies when he moved here in 1940. A number of his concert works, such as Four Norwegian Moods, started out as film music that couldn’t be fitted into the final filmic result. You can still go past Stravinsky’s house up in West Hollywood. He had an easier time of living in Los Angeles than most and that may be because he had no problem prioritising the making of money. (The American composer, George Antheil, couldn’t quite believe Stravinsky’s way of ‘invariably turning idealistic musical conversations into mercenary channels.’) But Stravinsky also expected America to create ‘the new things in music’. According to a story by David Raksin (famous for the film score, Laura), Stravinsky could go along to a nightclub and be delighted to hear Oscar Peterson, Herb Ellis and Ray Brown while Pierre Boulez and Robert Craft, his companions (on the particular night Raksin was describing), ‘looked like two guys out of a Daumier drawing, disparaging something’. Thirdly, Stravinsky was used to emigrating and had already done so a couple of times.

There is great poignancy, however, in reading of the suffering of some of the other émigrés, the German-speakers mostly, in adapting to their new home. German novelists felt greatly the loss of German-speaking readers, for example, and many returned to Europe after the war. There’s ‘an element of personality that makes it possible for some people to assimilate’, says Merrill-Mirsky. ‘Bon-vivants like Rubinstein or Stravinsky could live anywhere.’ Of course, if I get homesick, I can walk to the ocean and look out in the direction of Australia. And I can stave off ‘heimweh’ by creating an Australian plant-species distribution map for Los Angeles county. I saw a huge Moreton Bay Fig in a garden on Burlingame Avenue, Brentwood on my way to the Schoenbergs’ house. Importantly, my homeland is not at war. Many were the émigrés in the 1940s who couldn’t quite appreciate the swaying of palm trees in balmy breezes while the streets they grew up in were being bombed into craters and childhood bonds with family and friends were being extinguished (or not – they just didn’t know). But, says Merrill-Mirsky a lot of the modern-day Angelenos who are taken with the story of this period are Jewish people, ‘because when you’re inundated with stories of the Holocaust this almost looks like a good news story. These are the few who made it, who came here, were successful, raised families, many of whom are still living here.’ At the beginning, in 1934, Schoenberg likened it to entering Paradise: ‘I...came from one country into another, where I am allowed to go on my feet, where my head can be erect, where kindness and cheerfulness is dominating, and where to live is a joy and to be an expatriate of another country is the grace of God.’

Living here and studying this period from an artistic point of view I get a huge sense of how deeply Schoenberg and his 12-tone technique were steeped in European culture. California offered its distractions (and Schoenberg was swayed enough by the climate to be obsessed about tennis and ping-pong) but apart from that, he maintained his path, or shall we say his voice, with granite-like integrity. I get a new sense of how much his music burned from inside, but also a sense of his courage, ‘his refusal to be whittled down to mortal size by adversity’, in David Raksin’s phrase.

Part of the workroom, Schoenberg's home. By permission, Ronald and Barbara Schoenberg.

I visited his son and daughter-in-law, Ronald and Barbara, retired California trial judge and professor of German literature and language respectively, at the Schoenberg family home in Brentwood. Ronald showed me his father’s workspace. When his father worked here, there was a board over the archway (the house is in a Spanish style), so that he could have privacy. There are still things on the desk that reveal little character details about Schoenberg – the box that once housed the chess set Schoenberg made for Ronald, a piece of paper with a method for scoring tennis. You get a sense of the broad creativity of a truly creative person. And you also get a sense of the person behind the monument. Ronald mentions that a visitor to the Schoenberg archive in Vienna objected to footage of Schoenberg laughing and smiling – ‘That shouldn’t be shown’ – but that’s also the Schoenberg the family saw, the smiling person was Dad. Barbara shows me a cabinet containing her composer father, Eric Zeisl’s memorabilia – a letter from Alma Mahler, a letter in French from Igor and Vera Stravinsky saying how shocked they were by Zeisl’s sudden death. She tells me about Zeisl’s radiant Requiem Ebraico. You get the sense that both Schoenbergs would wish for more performances of their parents’ music, but ‘Christian Tetzlaff is playing Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto with the Philharmonic next season’ says Barbara and they’re getting more and more people coming to look at the house these days. Many of them are Austrians or Germans. ‘They hover,’ she says. ‘If I’m out in the garden, I ask them if I can help, and they say, “Oh, no thank you”, and I can tell by the accent, so then I ask in German, and they say, “Is this where the composer Schoenberg lived?”’

Over torte and coffee, our conversation soon turned to US politics, which made me realise how thoroughly American the children of the émigrés have become. ‘Who is your favourite US president?’ I ask Ronald. ‘Until I read about them?’ he quipped. And we talk about traffic, the excruciating inconvenience of going east of the 405 after 4pm. Nevertheless, afterwards Ronald drives me to Wilshire Boulevard where I’ll have more transport options. On the way out, we pass O.J. Simpson’s place. He tells me about the crowds that used to go up there to gawk. In his father’s day, Shirley Temple lived across the road and his father hoped that the sightseers were coming to see the composer Schoenberg’s place. Down Bundy Drive, we pass the former home of cellist, Piatigorsky. ‘His wife died last year’, says Ronald. Last year? Have we only just emerged from this era of Los Angeles’ history? I wonder.

Ronald and Barbara Schoenberg, outside the family home

Which makes me muse about the lasting legacy of the ‘exiles in paradise’. Certainly, many of the most famous pieces of classical music’s 20^th century repertoire were composed in Los Angeles. Not all owe their existence to Los Angeles. But it’s interesting to note that Schoenberg’s Kol nidre, Toch’s Cantata of the Bitter Herbs, Korngold’s A Passover Psalm, Op. 30 and Prayer, Op.32 (the only pieces he composed ‘for myself’ during World War II), and Zeisl’s Reqiuem Ebraico all came about from commissions from Rabbi Jacob Sonderling of the Fairfax Temple. Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, Ode to Napoleon and String Trio were written in LA. So too, Stravinsky’s Circus Polka, Symphony in Three Movements and Agon. We still experience some of this period’s legacy in film scores of people like John Williams who worked with Franz Waxman and studied with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, or in the concert hall with André Previn who also studied with Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Yuval Sharon, Artistic Director of the opera company, The Industry, credits this period of LA’s history – this period when people like Klemperer and Schoenberg came here, and when UCLA and USC (the University of Southern California) were staffed by people of this quality - with why Los Angeles is so ripe for the sort of artistic experimentation he’s interested in. Because, he says, ‘there’s not just an audience, there’s an amazing audience here that has been developed through what’s already been here culturally.’

Local musicians, mezzo-soprano Bonnie Snell Schindler and conductor/pianist Jeffrey Schindler (known in Hobart for performances they’ve given with the Australian International Symphony Orchestra Institute) have a recital program called From Hitler to Hollywood. The concept is the music a bicycle messenger might have heard as he couriered an urgent package from Korngold’s place at Toluca Lake (right near Warner Bros) to Hanns Eisler on the beach at Santa Monica. Stopping at Gershwin’s, Schoenberg’s and the Werfels’ he might have heard such pieces as Alma Mahler-Werfel’s Ich Wandle unter Blumen, Schoenberg’s Gigerlette or Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars. Whether there has been a continuing influence of this period, this recital program proves there was a time when the Los Angeles basin gave rise to a most phenomenal outpouring of music. It looks like cultural substance to me.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2013
This article first appeared in the April 2013 edition of The Podium, the e-newsletter of Symphony Services International.

For another of my articles on German-speakers in a New World environment (this time, Central Australia), see my Victory over death and despair in a bygone age, 5 Nov 2012   



 

A walk down Wilshire

We walked to Western Avenue along Wilshire, LA's grand boulevard, starting out in Westlake,

to the other side of Macarthur Park;

passing past deja-vus of Australia;

and grand old buildings along the way

(with more grandeur in the distance).

Some old buildings - thank God - have new uses (Bullocks Wilshire department store now the Southwestern Law School),

but some have been demolished and all that remains is a vague tribute to the building footprint, a poster on a lamp-post,

or old direction to the carpark.

Yes, tragedy struck here, as the poster above says, Senator Robert Kennedy shot on the night of the California Primary, in 1968. Schoenberg's Kol nidre was premiered here too, in 1938, in the Coconut Grove nightclub.


In some places, the charm is provided by 1960s architecture

or echoes of what was there before.

On the site of the old Wilshire Colonnade

At least we can be be grateful that in this movie town, many old cinemas remain standing (if not showing films).

Quiz question

Which of the following composers was invited to present the 1938 Oscar for Best Film Score:

- Wolfgang Korngold
- Arnold Schoenberg
- Ernst Toch
- Hanns Eisler, or
- Alfred Newman?