Austrian auto-didact, music theorist, pedagogue, writer and emancipator of dissonance, composer Arnold Schoenberg was a lot of things, but cuddly wasn’t one of them. “Uncompromising and pretty curmudgeonly, Schoenberg had a genius for getting people to hate him. It’s like he wanted that for some reason,” composer Tod Machover tells Observer about the subject of his 2018 opera, Schoenberg in Hollywood at UCLA’s Nimoy Theater in Los Angeles, May 18 through 22. “The fact that he ended up in Hollywood, a place that thrived on the sort of people he understood, he loved Hollywood, he loved the sunshine and was friends with Harpo Marx, Gershwin, Chaplin.”
In 1933, the year Hitler was appointed Chancellor and the Nazis revoked Schoenberg’s professorship at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, he and his family moved to Los Angeles. He purchased a Spanish-revival house in Brentwood (across the street from Shirley Temple), near UCLA, where he joined the faculty.
Years earlier in Vienna, he shared a mutual admiration with composers like Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, who helped him in his career. Later, he counted figures like Anton Webern and Alban Berg among his pupils. His revolutionary twelve-tone technique charted a new path for twentieth-century music, so by the time he landed in Hollywood, he was world-renowned… and broke.
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Directing Simon Robson’s libretto, Karole Armitage incorporates movie icons of the era, including impressions of Humphrey Bogart, Superman, Groucho Marx and his brother Harpo, who introduced Schoenberg to producer Irving Thalberg at MGM. He was offered a movie to score, The Good Earth, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Pearl S. Buck. Schoenberg sketched out some material, then proposed an astronomical fee in addition to requesting the characters in the film talk in a certain way. Thalberg threw him out.
“He was that kind of person,” says Armitage. “His first wife really suffered from it. He had such conviction of vision; there was no modulation. He was right, and nothing else could interfere, even a wife. They were desperately poor, and she wanted him to concede a little bit. He couldn’t. He was always the kind of artist where it’s my way or nothing. I think he was quite prickly.”
Known as the punk ballerina in her youth, Armitage danced under George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham in her early years, and has collaborated with artists Jeff Koons and David Salle, with whom she was romantically linked. Creator of works for American Ballet Theatre, the Paris Opéra Ballet and Ballet de l’Opéra National de Paris, she is a frequent collaborator with Boston’s American Repertory Theater, which produced the 2008 revival of Hair for which she later received a Tony nomination.
With Schoenberg in Hollywood, she brings her genre-slipping 2018 staging to the Nimoy, near UCLA. Happily, she’s reuniting with baritone Omar Ebrahim, with whom she worked on the original production at Boston’s Lyric Opera.
“He is spectacular,” she says of Ebrahim, a modern opera veteran. “Not only is his singing and acting incredible, but he also moves so beautifully. I love working with him. I’m delighted he’s back.”
The L.A. production offers numerous advantages, being staged just miles from where the events of the opera took place. But it also presents a set of challenges. The Nimoy used to be the historic Crest Theatre, a former movie house from 1940. As such, it has no backstage area or pit.
“It’s not only extremely small but also technically very limited in what you can do, so it takes a new conception,” sighs Armitage. “There are no exits, so making costume changes is very difficult. We’ll have all the feeling of comedy and the depth of the emotion and the sense of travelogue due to history, all of that will be captured, but we have to do it in a different way.”
Schoenberg was one of many German artist expats who went to L.A. at the time, including Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann. They often gathered and talked about the news from Europe, offering each other community thousands of miles from home.
Rival composer Igor Stravinsky immigrated in 1939. “A businessman, Stravinsky was as savvy about getting his music out as Schoenberg was unsavvy about getting his music out,” laughs Machover. “Schoenberg felt Stravinsky was an opportunist and changed styles to be popular. It wasn’t true, but I think he felt that. And I think Stravinsky thought Schoenberg was too complicated and a pain in the neck. So, I think it was a personal thing.”
George Gershwin, on the other hand, was someone the composer respected and often played tennis with. “Gershwin wrote music that everyone loved and Schoenberg knew the value of that,” notes Machover.
Schoenberg’s chromatic dissonance is reflected in Machover’s dark, lush score, sometimes referencing the composer’s Verklärte Nacht or his groundbreaking 1932 opera Moses und Aron. Written for chamber orchestra and electronics, Machover’s music fittingly draws upon pop culture from the era, such as when the Schoenbergs settled in the West, and the score quotes Happy Trails.
Originally from Mount Vernon, New York, Machover studied undergrad and postgrad at Juilliard under professors like modernist master Elliott Carter. Joining the faculty of the Media Laboratory at MIT in 1985, he became Professor of Music and Media and Director of the Experimental Media Facility, where he sometimes works with Armitage, a former Director’s Fellow and director of his 2010 opera, Death and the Powers.
Like Schoenberg, Machover is working at the technical and aesthetic cutting edge of his art form. Also like Schoenberg, he finds the taste for his kind of music is an acquired one.
“When I was in my late teens, I really expected that everybody would immediately get what I was doing,” he says, looking back. “And I was pretty surprised when a lot of people didn’t. So, I’ve also had that experience—in fact, I expect it now. Like any composer, I have my own language.”
Schoenberg suffered from triskaidekaphobia, or fear of the number 13, and death haunted him in any year that was a multiple. In 1950 (not a multiple), on his 76th birthday, an astrologer wrote him a note warning that 7 + 6 = 13. He died within a year, succumbing on Friday the 13th in July of 1951, shortly before midnight.
“He definitely was paranoid and had a sense of being persecuted. And most people didn’t really like him very much, so he kind of had a right to be,” mulls Machover. “I think he was an admirable person and had a real sense of ethics. He was generally decent to people.”
