Arnold Schoenberg

Newlin, Dika; Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz; Roberts, Edith Temple; Searle, Humphrey; Schoenberg, Arnold; Stein, Erwin; Rufer, Josef

doi:10.2307/895268

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“…After Their music would be performed, and they would have the opportunity to mingle with a select group of Schoenberg's distinguished musician friends over the Viennese refreshments. 86 Many comments from Schoenberg's American students echo Oscar Levant's praise for Schoenberg as "the greatest teacher in the world,"87 one who invested extraordinary care and energy in his work and whose methods were unique. But because he recognized that the ability to compose is inborn and cannot be taught, Schoenberg's attitude was paradoxical.…”

Section: Schoenberg-like Hindemith and Stravinsky-was Tempted To Invementioning

confidence: 99%

Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles

Crawford¹

2002

The Musical Quarterly

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Musical Quarterly. I only teach the whole of the art ... As a composer I must believe in inspiration rather than in mechanics. -Arnold SchoenbergArnold Schoenberg had just turned sixty when he made the sudden decision in mid-September 1934 to leave the East Coast for California. He had held the most prestigious post in his field in Germany, but he wrote his friends that in Los Angeles he faced "a completely blank page, so far as my music is concerned."1 The previous October he had been abruptly notified by the German government that his lifetime contract and salary in Berlin were terminated. With no other alternative, he had accepted a low salary to teach at the brand-new Malkin Conservatory in Boston, with adjunct teaching in Manhattan. Strenuous commuting in the harsh winter climate had severely damaged his health, and he had gone to the summer home of the Juilliard School of Music in Chautauqua, New York, to recover. Owing to the depression, all his efforts to obtain an adequate teaching salary at an established institution on the East Coast had come to nothing. Carl Engel, president of G. Schirmer (his American music publisher), had sent letters recommending Schoenberg as a lecturer to forty-seven institutions, but the results were meager.2 Prospects for the financial security he wanted looked so bleak that Schoenberg had even contacted Hanns Eisler and the conductor Fritz Stiedry about making connections for him in the Soviet Union. On 12 September, the day before his birthday, he wrote to Stiedry (still working in the USSR), "We are going to California for the climate and because it is cheaper."3 After he was temporarily settled in a rented Hollywood house with his wife, Gertrud, and toddler, Nuria, he expressed (in a letter to Anton Webern) his initial enthusiasm for the beauty of his surroundings: "It is Switzerland, the Riviera, the Vienna woods, the desert, the Salzkammergut, Spain, Italy-everything in one place. And along with that scarcely a day, apparently even in winter, without sun."4 He recovered his health and energy and could indulge his intense desire to play tennis. By 1935, Leonard Stein (who would be his teaching assistant from 1939 to 1942) Schoenberg in Los Angeles 7 recalled, Schoenberg was "fit and roly-poly," springy, full of vitality, and tanned a dark bronze.5 However, the resistance to modem music in Los Angeles that had driven Henry Cowell's New Music Society to San Francisco gave Schoenberg major problems. Upon his arrival in New York a year earlier, his first American employer, Joseph Malkin, had arranged extensive publicity, which led to several rec...

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Section: Schoenberg-like Hindemith and Stravinsky-was Tempted To Invementioning

confidence: 99%

Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles

Crawford¹

2002

The Musical Quarterly

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Arnold Schoenberg

Cited by 1 publication

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Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles

Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles

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