Kenneth Marcus,

University of La Verne, USA

Abstract

This essay explores contributions to the modernist movement in Southern California by exiled composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), with a focus on the twelve-tone cantata for speaker, male choir, and chamber orchestra, A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46. I argue that an important way for Schoenberg and other exiles in Southern California to find Heimat, or a sense of belonging, was through cultural hybridity: works that resulted from collaboration with other artists, either foreign or American. In order to survive as artists, the exiles had to reach out to American audiences, which meant adapting to American culture. This interest in hybridity resulted in part from what several scholars have called a “crisis of modernism,” which resulted from the collapse of democracies in the 1930s in Europe and the supposed decline of the cultural ideals that those democracies had upheld. During an era in which foreign artists in the United States were often viewed with suspicion, cultural hybridity provided a means of finding acceptance among American audiences.
A Survivor from Warsawis a remarkable work on several grounds. It integrates two events: the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 19, 1943, and the experience of Jews sent to the gas chamber of a Nazi death camp. The cantata is sung in Sprechstimme, and presents a tone row in which Jews and Nazis are in a dialectical conflict. The work concludes with a male choir singing the Hebrew hymn “Shema Yisrael” in unison while inmates march to the gas chambers. The text of the cantata draws on three languages: English, German and Hebrew; Schoenberg required the aide of another exile, rabbi Jacob Sonderling, to aide him in adapting the Hebrew text to music. For the English text, Schoenberg relied on an assistant from UCLA, Richard Hoffmann. As a montage of experience as well as of music, A Survivor from Warsaw is at once an indictment of Nazi atrocities and a plea for Jewish unity in the face of persecution and death.

Introduction

With the arrival of thousands of exiled artists during the 1930s and 1940, the arts and culture of Southern California would never be the same. This essay considers how composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), one of the first of the renowned exiles to move out West, contributed to Southern California modernism through culturally hybrid works. After fleeing Europe in 1933 and teaching in Boston and New York for almost one year, he decided his fate lay on the West Coast, where he remained for the rest of his life. In grappling with what scholars have called a “crisis of modernism,” he and other exiled artists brought their talents and skills to an area that one could justifiably call a veritable “Weimar on the Pacific.”1

That exile community was significant. Between 10,000 to 15,000 refugees came to Southern California between 1933 and 1941 out of 104,098 German and Austrian refugees who fled to the United States, either because they disagreed vociferously with the Nazi regime, or were of Jewish descent, or both. They included such luminaries as writers Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Vicki Baum; filmmakers Fritz Lang and William Dieterle; philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer; and composers Igor Stravinsky, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Ernst Toch, to name only a few. Collectively, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, the émigrés left a deep and lasting impression on the arts and culture of the region. According to historian Gerald Nash, these exiles “made a profound cultural contribution to the West and the nation. . . . Constituting the cream of the European intelligentsia, they brought an intellectual maturity and sophistication to the cultural life in the West that it had previously lacked.”2

Three concepts are important for the discussion that follows: Heimat, hybridity, and the crisis of modernism. In terms of Heimat, I will first illustrate the concept with a story. Perhaps not surprisingly, there was a perception in Los Angeles by the early 1940s that the city was overrun by German-speaking exiles. Certainly native-born American artists thought so, and even some of the exiles themselves. Otto Preminger (1906-86) arrived in 1935 after his escape from the Nazis and became a successful director in Hollywood. He was at a country club in Los Angeles playing cards with two other émigrés, who suddenly started speaking together in Hungarian. Preminger allegedly exclaimed, “Wait a minute! This is Los Angeles. This is the United States. We’ve come here from Europe, we’ve found physical safety here, this country has welcomed us to itself, this great city has welcomed us, we’ve found work in the motion picture industries and the universities and you’re sitting there speaking Hungarian. This is Los Angeles. Speak German!”3

Preminger’s humorous comment leads us to an important point. To what extent the émigrés could become productive artists in Southern California depended to a great extent on their concept of Heimat, or homeland. Although difficult to translate into English, the German term implies the putting down of roots, of a sense of belonging. The notion of Heimat held enormous influence over the experiences of émigrés, because it determined to what degree they belonged to a culture that to most of them had been utterly foreign. Difficult enough to achieve prior to World War II, that sense of belonging became far more difficult in the immediate postwar era of anticommunism and anti-foreign sentiment. Like many of his fellow exiles, Schoenberg had a deeply conflicted view of Heimat, or home, in Southern California. How did he resolve this dilemma? And how did he and his fellow exiles confront the problem of essentially representing the culture from countries that had forcefully rejected them? They could not escape the past, but to survive in exile as an artist meant to establish some measure of Heimat and thus, in effect, to fashion a new identity. In trying to achieve Heimat, then, how could Schoenberg position himself within the context of Southern California modernism?

In this essay I would like to explore an important way of finding Heimat as an exiled artist: through cultural hybridity.4 By “hybridity” I understand works that resulted not from a single artist but through collaboration with other artists, either foreign or native. This is not to suggest that artists prior to immigration did not engage in hybridity, which was a defining feature of modernism in general, but that the experience of being an émigré in some ways demanded collaboration. In direct contrast to their work in Europe or Mexico, the exiles had to reach out to American audiences, which meant adapting to American culture and often to work with other American artists. In short, to make modernism more relevant, one approach was to create hybrid works.

In part, this interest in hybridity resulted from what several scholars have called a “crisis of modernism.” That is, the tools with which modernist artists were equipped to deal with the world appeared by the 1930s to be at best fading or at worst an utter failure, especially in Weimar Germany. Europe was sliding into political and economic chaos, and artists had been able to do almost nothing to stop it. Even more ominous: by their characteristically critical stance to society and the state, they may even have abetted the decline. In short, modernist artists by the 1930s seem to have lost their way. “Was modernism no longer a viable option,” Ehrhard Bahr asks, “or could changes be implemented to prevent modernism from becoming reactionary?”5

One exile who proposed solutions was Schoenberg. While he has received substantial attention by musicologists, albeit far less for his American period, there are several reasons for historians and other scholars outside of musicology to consider the career of this artist. First, as one of the first internationally renowned exiles to come to Southern California, he quickly became a driving force for modernism in the region. Second, his main professional work was as a teacher to music majors and non-majors alike, first at the University of Southern California (USC) and then at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), so he was able to extend his ideas to the next generation: the gift that keeps on giving.6 Third, he made continued efforts to reach American audiences throughout his exile, which resulted in a series of culturally hybrid works, or pieces that integrated both American and European influences.

Although exile in the United States brought safety, it did not necessarily mean paradise. After having finally achieved the position of professor of musical composition at the Academy of the Arts in Berlin in 1926, Schoenberg found himself forced to flee Nazi Germany seven years later. Drawn to Southern California by the twin prospects of a pleasant, Mediterranean-like climate and professional opportunities, he faced harsh struggles involving his art, his economic survival, and even his identity.7 Similar to other exiles, he had to fashion a new identity in which cultural hybridity often played an important role.

Modernism and A Survivor from Warsaw

The émigrés arrived during a pivotal era for the arts in Southern California. From about 1905 to 1955, an interdisciplinary arts movement called Southern California Modernism comprised men and women who were experimenting with new means of artistic expression. Similar to the modernist movement in Europe, which had already begun by the 1880s, numerous artists in Southern California attempted a clear break with the past in terms of their art. We see these efforts in many different fields, notably in architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, photography, dance, and music. Cultural historian Philip Ethington notes that “Southern California Modernism ranks as one of the major contributions of Los Angeles to global culture,” by which he means that the products of this movement did not merely have a regional impact but rather an international one; further, that they saw their work in international terms, often drawing on cultural influences from outside American borders. We can thus call it a truly transnational movement. Southern California Modernism represented, according to Ethington, “a key example of the cultural creativity of cities.”8

For purposes of analysis, we can divide this movement into two distinct periods: early modernism and later modernism.9 The early period of this movement comprised such transformative figures as photographers Edward Weston and Toyo Miyatake, architects Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra; and painters Henrietta Shore, Margrethe Mather and Peter Krasnow. In the performing arts we find the husband-and-wife team of Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in dance; and Dane Rudhyar and Hugo Davise in composition. Together they showed a fascination with the physical environment of the Southwest as well as with Asian art and aesthetics—a result both of the geographic proximity to Asia and from interactions with Japanese or East Asian artists. As harbingers of the modernist ethos they broke new ground in their fields by bringing a modern sensibility to the arts in Los Angeles—a city that had often been viewed as culturally conservative.10

There was a clear shift between early modernism and later modernism, however, and it revolved chiefly around the experience of exile. Although cultural émigrés had been in Southern California long before the exiles of the 1930s and 40s, of course, the defining experience of exile was different. Whether from Europe or Mexico, many of these artists experienced political or religious persecution or both, and that persecution resulted to varying degrees in how they understood their art. As some of the most important artists of the twentieth century, their collective presence in Southern California made the region one of the main centers for modernism in the country.11

Leading this movement of later modernism was a newly arrived group of artists, many of whom had been defining figures of modernism and the arts in Europe and Mexico. In the visual arts they included filmmakers Otto Preminger and Michael Curtiz, and muralists Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. In the performing arts we find such visionaries as composers Arnold Schoenberg, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Ernst Krenek, all of whom had a critical role in composition and teaching. Similarly, in musical performance, conductor Ingolf Dahl and violinist Josef Szigeti were important contributors to the movement. Together they transformed the region’s modernist movement as much by their celebrity as by the works of art they created or performed.

One reason for Schoenberg’s powerful influence is that at the time of his arrival, few modernist composers lived in Los Angeles. There were highly accomplished composers, to be sure, such as Charles Wakefield Cadman and Gertrude Ross, who worked almost exclusively in a tonal or traditional format.12 The few modernist composers we can point to, notably Dane Rudhyar, George Tremblay, and Hugo Davise, had nowhere near the reputation that Schoenberg had, nor were they much interested in teaching, as Schoenberg most certainly was. That meant Schoenberg would become a magnet for music students and other professional musicians alike who avidly sought out “new music.”

One of the determining characteristics of new music during this period was the concept of dissonance. Since the nineteenth century composers had experimented increasingly with dissonant tones—those tones not part of the diatonic scale of a given key—and such experiments evolved into adamant assertions about the future of modern music. The need for new forms of expression, modernists proclaimed at the beginning of the twentieth century, meant the search for new sounds, or combinations of sounds, that had been previously seen as unacceptable. Thus the concept of atonality, or the absence of a recognizable key, was an essential part of this experimentation, and that experimentation was international. Around 1905, such figures as the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, Russian Aleksandr Skriabin, American Charles Ives, and Austrian Arnold Schoenberg found that dissonance increasingly came to define their music. Atonality, Schoenberg explained, “differed from all preceding music, not only harmonically but also melodically, thematically, and motivally.” Or according to musicologist Bryan Simms, atonality marked “a necessary expression of its time—the evolutionary outgrowth of a crisis in music at the turn of the century.”13

Evolving out of this experimentation with atonality was the method of twelve-tone composition. In the early 1920s, Schoenberg and his students experimented with the idea of a “tone row,” or set group of all twelve notes of the diatonic scale (C, C-sharp, D, D-sharp, and so on). While strictly maintaining the intervals between the notes, composers could vary a composition through such techniques as inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion—techniques that had been common in counterpoint since the Baroque era. In the absence of melody or harmony, the tone row provided a means of structural unity.14 The result was highly dissonant music that proved fascinating to some, deeply troubling to others, but nonetheless a defining approach to musical modernism. Since there were almost no modernist composers in Southern California when Schoenberg arrived, he was one of the first composers to apply the twelve-tone method in California.

As illustration, let us consider one piece: the twelve-tone cantata for speaker, male choir, and chamber orchestra, A Survivor from Warsaw, op. 46. Composed in July and August of 1947, it is a work of cultural hybridity on several different levels. First, it combines two separate events: the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 19, 1943, and sending Jews to the gas chamber of a death camp. Schoenberg may have been inspired to write it as a result of a letter he received from writer and composer Alma Mahler Werfel, a Viennese composer and socialite who like Schoenberg had fled the Nazis and was a close friend of the composer.15 The letter, which she received from a survivor, described memories by a Warsaw ghetto survivor, and Schoenberg decided to include it with his own readings on the Nazi death camps. We can think of the work thus as a montage of experience as well as of music.

Second, we see this cultural hybridity in terms of the text. The cantata is sung in Sprechstimme, which is both sung and spoken: a method that Schoenberg had long used in his pre-exile works. The effect is striking, since merely singing to a melody would lessen the impact of the words. It begins in Warsaw with a startling trumpet call by a Nazi bugler before moving into seven successive sections, each describing a particular scene. Immediately after the trumpet call (the “reveille motive”), the narrator’s anxious voice rings out: “The day began as usual: Reveille when it still was dark. Get out! Whether you slept or whether worries kept you awake the whole night. You had been separated from your children, from your wife, from your parents. You don’t know what happened to them—how could you sleep?” The piece presents a tone row in which Jews and Nazis are in a dialectical conflict, between the essence of innocence as opposed to the symbols of evil. The work transitions from the Warsaw Ghetto to a death camp, perhaps Auschwitz. It concludes with a male choir singing the Hebrew hymn “Shema Yisrael” in unison while inmates march to the gas chambers.

The text is one of the most striking features about the work. Schoenberg draws on three languages: English, German and Hebrew. Contrast comes from the collision of these languages; with the German text, the speaker almost spits out the words, which belong to prison guards and a Nazi officer. This is in clear contrast to the English and Hebrew texts, which naturally evoke a far more sympathetic treatment. The depiction of German as a language of brutality is a clear renunciation of Schoenberg’s native language. It is also a marked change from his pre-exile works, in which German verse was an inspiration; for the rest of his life in exile, he rarely set German verses to music.

A third aspect of its hybridity is that it relied on the input of others. In using English, German and Hebrew, Schoenberg needed the help of three different émigrés. Alma Mahler Werfel gave him the letter for the German text. For the English text, which the narrator uses to describe the scenes, he relied on his then assistant from UCLA, Richard Hoffmann, who was born in Vienna but lived several years in New Zealand (where his family had fled) and so was fluent in English. He helped Schoenberg with the rhythms and intonations of the text. For the Hebrew, Schoenberg drew on the knowledge of Rabbi Jacob Sonderling (1878-1964), with whom the composer developed a close, working relation. Rabbi Sonderling, who had emigrated from Hamburg, Germany in 1923 and later founded the Jewish Reform Temple on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, had commissioned an earlier work from Schoenberg, Kol Nidre, Op. 39. He also commissioned liturgical pieces from other Jewish émigré composers, notably Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Ernst Toch, which resulted in several culturally hybrid works.16

Schoenberg’s identity as both a Jew and an exile is essential to understanding his work in exile. Although born a Jew, he had converted to Protestantism as a young man and remained officially Protestant for almost all of his career in Europe. After a series of events in his personal life and long reflection on faith, he converted back to Judaism in July 1933 while in Paris (his wife Gertrud and painter Marc Chagall were two of the witnesses). The conversion stunned his closest followers. Religion was us­ually equated by modernists with an adherence to orthodoxy and tradition, which could pose serious restrictions for any true modernist. Yet here was their hero, declaring himself a Jew and claiming a passionate identification with the Jewish people, even willing to give up his art to save the Jews from what he felt was impending doom. Echoing the earlier concerns of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, Schoenberg sensed—correctly in hindsight—that the rabid anti-Semitism in Europe could only end in destruction.17

That act of conversion profoundly altered his identity of who he was, both as a person and as a creative artist. There thus arose in the midst of an increasing climate of war between America and Germany a severe dilemma that he shared with other exiles. In teaching a cultural product from those countries that had rejected him, Germany and Austria, he was essentially “doing propaganda” for the same countries that had elevated Hitler, Himmler, and Goering to positions of power. In other words, it was impossible for many exiles to separate their art from themselves, to separate their background from their present condition. As artists they had to continue to produce art, yet it remained to some extent within the prism of the Weimar Republic and German culture—the defining aspects that characterized their rise to cultural prominence. Although Schoenberg tried to resolve this dilemma to some extent, such as to substitute the term “German music” (deutsche Musik) with the more general term of “classical music” during his exile, he could never forget who he was and where he had come from.18 His Jewish colleagues in Los Angeles, among them Ernst Toch, Eric Zeisl, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, faced the same dilemma.

In describing the horrors of a Nazi death camp, Schoenberg to some extent wrote from experience. Among those he lost to the Nazis were his brother Heinrich and his cousin Arthur Schoenberg, who died in the Theresienstadt death camp. The work is as much a revenge against what the Nazis did as it is a voice for all Jews, indeed all humanity: never give up, and if they take your body, they will never take your soul. To resolve the crisis of modernism was to make modern music more relevant. As both a Jewish and modernist composer, Schoenberg confronted the deeds of his former country and attacked the inhumanity that the Nazis, and indeed all tyrannical regimes, personified.

The work, however, is not without its problems; I see at least three. First, Schoenberg uses two different tone rows for the two different groups: the Nazis and the prisoners. On a dramatic and musical level this makes sense: the two groups are directly opposed to each other, and the use of different themes reflects that difference. The harsh, Prussian dialect of the officer contrasts strongly with the anguish of the English-speaking narrator, which only further emphasizes that difference. The officer and guards appear utterly devoid of human sentiment. Yet isn’t one of the striking aspects about the camps that which unites the prisoner and those who imprison: their common humanity? Perhaps we can refer here to an old Mayan belief: “I am you, you are me—you are a reflection of me, and I am a reflection of you.”19 No matter how much we may wish to demonize the Nazis, or any torturers, they were not monsters, nor beasts, nor machines. They were people, perhaps with similar interests in music, in food, in recreation. In other words, is it not this common humanity that makes the death camps and the torturers that much more horrifying?

Second, A Survivor from Warsaw forever memorializes Jewish suffering in the camps. This is understandable, based on Schoenberg’s personal experience. Yet as we well know, Jews were not the only ones to die in the death camps. Out of the estimated eight million murdered, at least two million were not Jews but rather Communists, Socialists, gypsies, gays, Jehovah Witnesses, and many others. There is the example of one of the first concentration camps in Germany, which was outside Wuppertal in the Ruhr area in Schleswig-Holstein, built immediately after the Nazis came to power in 1933. Called Eutin concentration camp (referred to as an early camp, or wildes Konzentrationslager), it was built to round up not necessarily Jews but rather Communists, Social Democrats and labor unionists. The Nazis closed it down in 1934 because it was too close to the city, in part because inhabitants could clearly hear the cries of those being tortured.

And third, the cantata depicts very much a male experience. It is a male narrator, and an all male chorus. The German officer, of course, is male as well. The experiences of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and of the death camps, however, were certainly not restricted to men alone. This act of memory, then, is a limited act of memory, both in text and music. In Schoenberg’s defense, such a limitation was clearly a result of his responding to the suffering of male Jews—a group with whom he had the closest emotional connection on the one hand, but who also represented a faith in which patriarchy played a vital role. To achieve its maximum effect the cantata had to be direct in tone and appeal; any additions to the text or music would have possibly detracted from Schoenberg’s message, and hence his effort to position himself within Southern California modernism.

Despite these reservations, A Survivor from Warsaw remains an extraordinary achievement. Nor is there any doubt that it received an enthusiastic performance at its premiere. The first performance of the work did not take place in Los Angeles but, remarkably, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. German émigré conductor Kurt Frederick heard that Schoenberg was composing a piece on the Holocaust and asked Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned it, if Frederick could conduct the premiere. With the approval of both Schoenberg and Koussevitzky, the premiere took place with the Albuquerque Civic Symphony Orchestra on November 4, 1948. According to eyewitnesses, when the music ended, people sat in stunned disbelief. Slowly they began to applaud, and apparently would not stop until the orchestra repeated the work. Schoenberg had long been used to cold or lukewarm receptions to his music; A Survivor from Warsaw, by contrast, met with thunderous response. The composer himself was very surprised at the news, as he wrote to someone who witnessed the premiere: “I am very thrilled by the great success of my ‘Survivor from Warsaw’ in Albuquerque. . . that an audience . . . demanded a repetition of a work of mine played for the first time [and] is very astonished and thrilled by it, almost as much as I am.”20 With this hybrid work, Schoenberg could thus find relevance among a contemporary audience—a concern he had throughout his exile in America. Perhaps paradoxically, in reflecting musically on the horror of genocide, conceptually Schoenberg had finally found Heimat.

Conclusion

In this paper I have argued that Schoenberg, like other European artists, often adopted a hybrid approach in seeking to resolve the crisis of modernism. In the process, the concept of Heimat was important to the émigrés’ ability to adapt to their new homeland and to find connection with American audiences. Adopting a hybrid approach to their art, I suggest, was one way of achieving Heimat. As both a modernist and an exile, Schoenberg’s search for Heimat meant not only to settle down but also to find a shared solution to conflict and personal tragedy.

In considering Schoenberg’s role in Southern California Modernism, however, his experience remained mixed. As with other exiles, while profoundly grateful for the ability to find safety and to continue his art, he became at times deeply disillusioned with his reception by Americans, hence his sheer joy in hearing of the success of A Survivor from Warsaw. Through cultural hybridity he found a means of expression that enabled him to remain relevant, not only as an artist but within the modernist movement itself. To create meant to live, and to live meant to create—how could it be otherwise with exiled artists who had long seen culture and the arts as the paramount expressions of a society? Was not that one of the fundamental lessons of the Weimar era? In forming a “Weimar on the Pacific,” the exiles had to find a balance between the past and the present, and cultural hybridity provided one of the solutions to that dilemma.

Endnotes

1. On the cultural émigrés in Southern California, see Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Dorothy Lamb Crawford, A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Reinhard Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff, eds., Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Joseph Horowitz, Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Carol Merrill-Mirsky, ed. Exiles in Paradise (Los Angeles: Hollywood Bowl Museum, 1991); John Russell Taylor, Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Émigrés, 1933-1950 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983). On Arnold Schoenberg in particular, see Dorothy Lamb Crawford, “Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles,” The Musical Quarterly 86 (Spring 2002), pp. 6-48; Kenneth H. Marcus, “Judaism Revisited: Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles,” Southern California Quarterly, 89, no. 3 (Fall 2007), pp. 307-25; Christian Meyer, ed., Arnold Schoenberg in America, Report of the Symposium 2-4 May 2001 (Vienna: Arnold Schoenberg Center, 2002); Alan Lessem, “The Émigré Experience: Schoenberg in America,” in Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture, eds. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 58-68; Walter Rubsamen, “Schoenberg in America,” The Musical Quarterly, 37, no. 4 (Oct. 1951), pp. 469-89; Milton Babbitt, “My Vienna Triangle at Washington Square Revisited and Dilated,” in Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 33-35.

2. Christoph Wolff, “Preface,” in Driven into Paradise, ed. Brinkmann and Wolff, p. xiii fn.3. See also Martin Jay, “The German Migration: Is There a Figure in the Carpet?” in Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (exhibition catalog), ed. Stephanie Barron (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1996), 335; Gerald D. Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 179.

3. Kevin Starr relates this story in a speech, given May 5, 2003, at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. 30 Nov. 2010. <http://www.lawac.org/speech/pre%20sept%2004%20speeches/starr%202003.htm>.

4. Frances R. Aparicio and Candida F. Jáquez, eds., Musical Migrations: Transnationalism and Cultural Hybridity in Latin/o America, Vol. I (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), especially the essay by Deborah Pacini-Hernandez, “Amalgamating Musics: Popular Music and Hybridity in the Americas.”

5. Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, p. 20. Bahr further notes that despite the manifold divisions that had always existed within modernism, there was a collective sense that “progressive modernism had failed and a totalitarian modernism had triumphed.” Ibid., 11. On the crisis of modernism, see Russell A. Berman, The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, pp. 1-20.

6. Schoenberg was 61 at the time of his official appointment on July 1, 1936 as a Professor of Music, only a few months shy of his 62^nd birthday. Robert Stevenson, “Music in Southern California: A Tale of Two Cities,” Inter-American Music Review, 10, no. 1 (fall-winter 1988), p. 105; Rubsamen, “Schoenberg in America,” pp. 472-73.

7. The earliest evidence of Schoenberg’s arrival in southern California was his overnight stay at the Hotel Constance in Pasadena on Sept. 16, 1934. Lawrence Schoenberg, e-mail communication, Oct. 12, 2006.

8. Philip J. Ethington, “Images and Realities of Cities in the 21st Century: Global Cities, Creative Cities, and Sustainable Cities,” paper given at a symposium at Osaka City University, Dec. 21-22, 2006. I would like to thank Phil Ethington for providing me with a copy of the paper.

9. On the early modernist movement, see Victoria Dailey, Natalie Shivers, and Michael Dawson, LA’s Early Moderns: Art/Architecture/Photography, introduction by William Deverell (Los Angeles: Balcony Press, 2003); and Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, chap. 6.

10. Susan Schrank, Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

11. Merrill-Mirsky, ed., Exiles in Paradise; Taylor, Strangers in Paradise, chap. 4.

12. Kenneth H. Marcus, Musical Metropolis: Los Angeles and the Creation of a Music Culture, 1880-1940 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 7, 80-82, 132, 151, 156, 221.

13. Arnold Schoenberg, “Composition With Twelve Tones (I),” in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 217; Bryan R. Simms, The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg, 1908-1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 4.

14. Malcolm MacDonald, Schoenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 134-36.

15. The work is available on the Arnold Schoenberg Center website. 30 Nov. 2010. <http://www.schoenberg.at>. It resulted from a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation in 1947. Lawrence Schoenberg, interview with author, tape recording, Pacific Palisades, Calif., June 12, 2004. See also Alma Mahler Werfel, And the Bridge Is Love (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958), pp. 300-01, 305-06.

16. Marcus, “Judaism Revisited,” pp. 311-312.

17. Willi Reich, Schoenberg: A Critical Biography, trans. Leo Black (New York: Da Capo Press, 1981), pp. 190-91; Arnold Schoenberg, “Notes on Jewish Politics,” September-November 1933, in A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life, ed. Joseph Auner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 244; Alexander L. Ringer, Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Jew (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 135.

18. Hermann Danuser, “Composers in Exile: The Question of Musical Identity,” in Driven into Paradise, ed. Brinkmann and Wolff, p. 162.

19. I thank Maria Herrera-Sobek, University of California, Santa Barbara, for explaining this belief. I also thank Bettina Hoffman, University of Wuppertal, on my second point concerning the Eutin concentration camp.

20. Schoenberg heard about the audience’s response by both Mrs. Isabel Grear and the Albuquerque Journal that wrote a review the following day, and replied to her by letter. Arnold Schoenberg to Mrs. Jay Grear, Nov. 13, 1948, in A Schoenberg Reader, ed. Auner, pp. 320-22.

Works Cited

Aparicio, Frances R. and Candida F. Jáquez, eds. Musical Migrations: Transnationalism and Cultural Hybridity in Latin/o America, Vol. I. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Auner, Joseph, ed. A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Babbitt, Milton. “My Vienna Triangle at Washington Square Revisited and Dilated.” In Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States. Ed. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Bahr, Ehrhard. Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

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