Four
The Émigré Experience:
Schoenberg in America

Alan Lessem

In 1935, some two years after arriving in the United States as a refugee from Hitler's Germany, Arnold Schoenberg delivered a short lecture to which, with characteristic irony, he gave the title "Driven into Paradise."^[1] He told his listeners that he was not prepared to talk about the horrors he had left behind, since he had come here to forget them. Unlike the biblical snake, driven from paradise to crawl on its belly and eat dust, he announced, he had been driven into paradise: "I have come to a country where I am allowed to go on my feet, where my head can be erect, where kindness and cheerfulness dominate and where to live is a joy, where to be an expatriate of another country is the grace of God." Despite some initial setbacks — his less than satisfactory teaching position at the Malkin Conservatory, the bitter East Coast winters — he held out the highest hopes in this first period for a fresh start in the New World, as indeed did many of his fellow émigrés. Such expectations for his personal future were linked to a positive assessment of America's musical prospects; there is here, he affirmed, "an extraordinarily large amount of talent, inventive ability, and originality, which in my opinion justify the highest hopes."^[2] The evidence around him, especially in regard to the spread of musical education and the proliferation of musical performances, led him so far as to believe that "hegemony" in music (as he called it) would shift westward, from Europe to America — a development that at the time he seemed to welcome.^[3] Naturally, his influence and teaching would contribute significantly to that shift!

The belief that European culture could be rescued as cargo from a sinking political ship and transplanted to terra firma in America was, as one might expect, widespread among those who were now bringing it with them, but there were Americans of the same mind too. Roger Sessions,

most notably, spoke of Europe's loss as America's gain, and called for a "genuine collaboration . . . in building gradually a real and profound musical tradition on our side."^[4] Yet he also had his doubts: American culture was still far from having reached maturity, as could be seen most obviously in the absence of any integration of musical life with institutional functions;^[5] similarly Mark Brunswick, though commending the universities for their leadership role in offering a haven to the émigrés, believed that America as a whole was not yet ripe enough to take advantage of what European musical culture was now bringing to its doorstep.^[6] Brunswick spoke quite bluntly about the "commercial and artistic gangsterism which seems to pervade the radio and concert world,"^[7] a complaint the émigrés soon began to voice themselves. Schoenberg, for one, was to make no bones about an all too typically American laissez-faire and the lack of principled leadership in the sphere of the arts. At the same time he proudly underlined his own resistance to such conditions: He himself "made no concessions to the market."^[8]

Those émigrés who took a more realistic view of opportunities available to them — most obviously the Korngolds, Steiners, and Rozsas in Hollywood — as well as those who more reluctantly permitted the exploitation of their talents to tide them over difficult circumstances, can well be said to have made a more palpable contribution to American culture, or at least that part of it that is represented by the development of distinctive popular idioms. It was they who in effect created the music of the Hollywood motion picture. Yet by the same token it would be wrong to assume that those who refused the temptations of Mammon, and also insisted that transplantation in no way compromised their integrity as composers, were unaffected by an environment in which considerations of worldly and material success overruled all others. For one thing it is evident that a number of the émigrés, discouraged by the unresponsiveness of publishers, performers, and audiences alike — what Krenek called the Echolosigkeit of the American musical milieu — indeed composed significantly less than before and went through some quite lengthy periods of silence, especially during the war years. More significant than this quantitative falloff was the tendency of their work to become more sharply divided between public and private, practical and ideal, prosaic and poetic. Hanns Eisler wrote film music for money but for himself composed songs the texts of which express nothing but contempt for the values of Hollywood society. Schoenberg, too, presented a public face, identifying in his correspondence with conductors and performers what could be considered to be his "popular" works (among them Verklärte Nacht, Pelleas und Melisande, the First Chamber Symphony, and his various orchestral arrangements), and urging that at least they be heard so as to open the door to his overall oeuvre. In all, as Krenek wryly remarked,

America had a sobering effect on the Europeans: it sharpened their sense of reality, but at the cost of what Robert Musil had called the "sense of possibility."^[9] In 1941 Schoenberg told Erwin Stein that his affairs as a composer were in a distressing state. He was receiving no income from Europe, and American publishers were interested only in a quick return on their investments. Performers, and in particular conductors (most of whom, of course, were émigrés themselves), were also part of what he called the "commercial racket." Taking stock a few years later, in 1944, Schoenberg lamented that Wallenstein in Los Angeles had performed nothing of his in six years, that Klemperer had ventured only some of his arrangements, and that Koussevitsky (ostensibly a champion of the moderns) had played only his accessible Variations, op. 43, and badly at that. After the war he became increasingly distrustful of the musical establishment, convinced by now of a conspiracy all around to suppress his music. He spoke of the "malice" directed against him by his "enemies," the New York critics, of decrees issued by public institutions against difficult music such as his own, of professional jealousies that isolated him even within the university. Above all, he saw himself as the victim of a cultural nationalism now given a renewed impetus by the Allied victory and the American presence in Europe. Although Schoenberg had from the beginning repeatedly declared his support for the cause of American music, he was inclined to see this latest development less as a legitimate nationalist aspiration than as yet another manifestation of political and economic opportunism: as he put it, less "an emotional necessity of the soul" than "an attempt to conquer a market."^[10] Inevitably it was himself that he saw as having been dealt a particularly hard and unjust blow.

Just like the racket of concert agents, there is now a racket in the making which intends to suppress gradually all European composers. Though I was probably the first European composer to speak and write publicly in favor of American composers, establishing their rightful claim to a place in American concert programs, the thanks for my attitude seems to be that I have been elected to be the first victim of the nationalistic movement, with others to follow.^[11]

The origin of the postwar developments referred to by Schoenberg was the increasing prominence already given to American music during the war period itself, when Americans tended to turn inward and cultivate their own resources in answer to what Elliot Carter called the "brutalizing forces released by Europe's conflict."^[12] Though most Americans naturally welcomed this external stimulus to the homegrown product, there were also those like Sessions who sympathized with the plight of the Europeans now suffering, as a result, comparative neglect. Sessions spoke of the "aggressive

self-assertion" of Americans, which "at least for a time poisoned the musical atmosphere and made it one of exclusiveness."^[13] Although such remarks may have been somewhat exaggerated, there was no question of the by then very considerable infiltration of American music and musical life by the new wave of immigrants, and the growing measure of suspiciousness and mistrust engendered by such a development. This is reflected, for instance, in public debates such as that published in the pages of the Musical Courier through several of its 1940-1941 issues. American participants in that debate argued that the foreign influx would "leaven" the substance of a national music; more generally, it was alleged that having to accommodate the émigrés would result in a neglect of obligations to home-trained musicians. One contributor went so far as to propose that we take into the country only a handful of the very best among the Europeans — that, after all, we have enough nonentities ourselves.

The influence of German and Austrian émigrés came to be looked upon with especial ambivalence: Did not, surely, the insidious traits of Teutonism lie at the very heart of the atonal idiom, more particularly of twelve-tone music? Regrettably enough, xenophobia clouded the judgment of many, including some of the country's most eminent composers and critics.

With the end of the war American cultural nationalism appeared to Schoenberg to have become more arrogantly self-assertive than ever. By way of retaliation he accused Americans of adopting an imperialist policy of cultural domination rivaling its Stalinist counterpart in Soviet Russia in its determination to colonize the entire civilized world. Ironically enough, the hopes he had earlier expressed for American hegemony in music had become, for him, a grim reality. Over the next few years Schoenberg attacked not only institutions and organizations but also individuals. American critics and conductors, and even composers, were forced to defend themselves against his allegations. A characteristic instance was the exchange with Aaron Copland, one that began in the press and then moved into a private correspondence that remains as yet unpublished. Virgil Thomson's column in the New York Herald Tribune of 11 September 1949 carried Schoenberg's "birthday blast" (as Thomson put it) against opponents of his music. Copland is not only counted among them but seen as the instigator of a policy of discrimination; as such he must be coupled with Stalin. In his reply to Thomson, published in the same newspaper two weeks later, Copland defends himself as in fact a Schoenberg supporter who helped disseminate some of Schoenberg's music, and he suggests that Schoenberg's linking him with the infamous Russian dictator may have had something to do with his photographed appearance with Shostakovich during the latter's recent visit to the United States. Copland now insists on dissociating himself from Shostakovich's attack, made during the Soviet composer's visit, on modern-

ists such as Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Schoenberg. Replying a few months later, Schoenberg brushes all that aside and takes another tack altogether. He is distressed to learn that

Mr Copland had given young students who asked for it the advice to use "simple" intervals and to study the masters. Much damage had been done to an entire generation of highly talented American composers, who . . . were taught to write a certain style. It will certainly take a generation of sincere teaching until this damage can be repaired.

And only in this respect did I couple Mr Copland with Stalin: they both do not consider musical composition as the art to present musical ideas in a dignified manner, but they want their followers to write a certain style, that is to create an external appearance, without asking about the inside. This I must condemn.^[14]

Copland responded with a personal letter to Schoenberg, in which he again defended himself against what he considered unfair charges, arguing that he had adopted pedagogical principles essentially no different from Schoenberg's, for he had never imposed compositional formulas or stylistic choices on his students but had rather let their own capacities and interests determine the directions they took.^[15] The next letter from Schoenberg is, at last, conciliatory, declaring his admiration for Copland's music and conceding that he may have been the victim of "gossip" in respect to whatever Copland may have said about him.^[16]

This particular peacemaking gesture aside, Schoenberg's long battle against the French neoclassical influence on American music and, more broadly, against nationalist aspirations as such must be taken seriously, since both were connected in his own mind with the American fixation on creating a product, the values and purposes of which were external to the process of developing musical ideas from the "inside" — that is, out of material that itself was rooted in and evolved uninterruptedly from tradition. As is well enough known, his antipathy toward neoclassicism, whether of Stravinskyan or more generally Latin derivation, dates back to the 1920s, when he felt that his influence was being challenged by the tonal (in his view, pseudotonal) music of composers who refused to acknowledge the importance of his advances into new territory. In the United States, subsequently, Schoenberg saw his position with regard to the enemy camp to have become even more tenuous; students there, lacking any deep sense of his tradition, were all the more susceptible to musical instruction given, as he put it, "in the manner in which a cook would deliver recipes."^[17] Young Americans, in other words, were being encouraged to look to the means rather than the ends, and in so doing leaned too heavily on abstract precepts and theories. When provided with principles of musical composition, Schoenberg complained, these students "want to apply them too much

`on principle.' And in art that's wrong. . . . musical logic does not anwer to `if —, then —,' but enjoys making use of the possibilities excluded by if-then."^[18] Furthermore, it worried him that Americans demanded results too quickly, a visible return in short order on the money they invest in their education. They had neither the time nor the patience for the lengthy, slow process of learning by the emulation of model and example, which inevitably requires the discipline of steady practice. Schoenberg was to find this problem especially acute among professionals who sought to take advantage of his presence in Los Angeles. Oscar Levant described the situation succinctly at the time:

There is hardly a period in Hollywood when all the orchestrators and most of the movie composers are not studying with one or another of the prominent musicians who have gone to live there recently. At one time the vogue was for Schoenberg, who came with a great reputation, of course, as a teacher. However, most of the boys wanted to take a six weeks' course and learn a handful of Schoenberg's tricks. They were sorely disappointed when they discovered that it was his intention to give them instruction in counterpoint, harmony and chorale, which meant that they would have to expend considerable effort themselves in doing assigned work.^[19]

Not surprisingly, most of these seekers after quick fixes were to find themselves rejected by the master. "I am not one of those," he said, "who can teach . . . a number of effective tricks in a short time. I only teach the whole of the art."^[20] And his concern with the whole of the art meant, in turn, a rejection of any hard and fast system or simplified method of teaching it.

In this regard it is interesting to compare his approach with that of fellow Europeans such as Toch and Krenek. For those two composers, transplantation sparked the desire for some fresh thinking about their musical heritage; moreover, the very different teaching conditions from those back home had them reconsider how students might best be instructed in that heritage. Toch began to look for ways of freeing instruction from fossilized "theory," and of linking it more closely to contemporary needs. The avowed aim of his Shaping Forces in Music^{[ 21]} was to impose a focus on the past from a contemporary viewpoint and to lead from that to a "universal core of thought which would serve as a starting-off point for young composers of today."^[22] Similarly, Krenek found that his teaching activity stimulated him to reflect, de novo, on the composer's relationship to the materials bequeathed to him by the past. Impatient to bring his students to the heart of the matter, he attempted to reduce older compositional criteria to a handful of general principles and then to proceed directly to contemporary means of expression. His twelve-tone counterpoint manual, which sprang from his own interpretation and drastic distillation of melodic elements in medieval music, was intended to provide the basis of a new métier. It was

dismissed by Schoenberg precisely because, in making use of the past for the purposes of historical precedent, it took leave of tradition. Yet insofar as it suggested a specific method of composition, Krenek's pedagogy was perhaps better suited to American conditions than Schoenberg's, which was rooted nonsystematically in the idea of traditional practice.^[23]

The spirit of Schoenberg's teaching was animated by a fervent belief in the crucial role that education would play in a country where a profusion of musical talent struggled with cultural immaturity. That endowment of, as it were, "resources" would require careful nurturing and guidance if it was not to be exploited and misused. For one thing, music lovers would have to be instructed in critical listening and their attention focused on strictly musical criteria and values rather than waylaid by the commercialized hype of the concert world and its performing "stars." For another, encouragement should be given to amateur music making, in order to counter the culturally damaging effects of excessive professionalism and the consumerism that went along with it. As far as the actual teaching of composition went, Schoenberg presented himself not as a theorist or pedagogue but as a master practitioner; he believed that his students would benefit most from acquiring a basic facility in generating simple musical ideas and elaborating upon them in ways appropriate to the character of those ideas and the kinds of demands made by them. For students, the majority of whom could not be expected to approach the heights of true creativity, the analysis of masterworks (to which Schoenberg gave much emphasis) would serve to point up the qualitative differences between the imaginative solutions of genius and their own modest exercises. Even more important, comprehension and appreciation of an ideal represented by great achievements of the past went beyond a training in composition to form part of a moral education that developed the whole personality. If successful, such an education would give students "the courage to express what they have to say."^[24]

As Hindemith was brought to Yale, or Krenek to Hamline, Schoenberg was welcomed to UCLA in 1934 with the understanding that the appointment would lend prestige to the institution, and that the new faculty member could expect the university's assistance with major reforms and improvements in the music curriculum. Yet many of Schoenberg's proposals were rejected, and one suspects that the ruffling of professional feathers may have had as much to do with that as with any lack of funds needed for implementing the proposals. Moreover, those proposals, advanced with an aggressive bearing of authority that was hardly politic coming from a newcomer and foreigner to boot, were nothing less than sweeping. On finding that his teaching effectiveness was inhibited by large classes of students with very different levels of ability, he suggested a new structure that would divide courses into basic and advanced types of instruction. He insisted, at the same time, that those teaching the beginners be his own, more ad-

vanced students. Basic training must be "in the hands of an instructor who is entirely familiar with my system. It is literally impossible to work successfully with students who come to me without being trained in this system."^[25] Not surprisingly, he was accused of attempting to set up what amounted to a school within a school, based on a European model. But so convinced was Schoenberg on this issue that, as an alternative, he considered setting up a private school, the "Arnold Schoenberg School of Composition," with himself as director and three of his pupils as associates, who would contribute from their earnings to meet expenses. The associates he had in mind were Hanns Eisler, Gerald Strang, and Leonard Stein; their function would be to prepare students for advanced study with him. As to the role of the director, Schoenberg was quite unambiguous. In all that pertained to the establishment, administration, and development of the school, the director was to have "dictatorial powers."^[26]

Much has been made in the biographical and critical literature of Schoenberg's authoritarian and high-minded idealism. Less has been said, however, about some quite different and complementary character traits that provide a more balanced picture. Chief among these was a down-to-earth pragmatism, which his encounter with America seems to have called into particular prominence. Not that Schoenberg bowed to circumstances to the extent that many of his fellow émigrés did. Nevertheless, he did attempt to provide for what he saw to be the practical needs of American musicians; not only did he compose for the college orchestra and amateur wind band, he also provided harmony, counterpoint, and composition manuals suited to American students with little prior training. Striking, in these texts, is his adaptation to circumstances, reflected in the omission of the kinds of philosophical speculation that had characterized his European books, among them the Harmonielehre and the unfinished Der musikalische Gedanke, und die Logik, Technik und Kunst seiner Darstellung. Now theoretical matters are reduced to a minimum, and rules for writing music presented as a distillation of practice. It is the doing that counts; the rest will come later.

Nor, for all the contempt he felt for its rampant commercialism, does the practically minded Schoenberg entirely disregard his Hollywood milieu. Among his unpublished papers is a proposal, addressed to the Academy of Motion Pictures, under the title "School for Soundmen." In it he notes that American films are careful in their handling of visual detail but sloppy and insensitive in their treatment of music and the relationship between music and dramatic event. The proposed remedy is a training for "soundmen" that will give equal emphasis to studio techniques and the necessary musical rudiments, the latter to include ear training and the ability to read a score. Nothing appears to have come of this proposal.

Teaching from the ground up, so to speak, was a precept to which

Schoenberg adhered uncompromisingly throughout his American years. The majority of his students were treated by him, as he once admitted, in a manner that "showed them I did not think too much of their creative abilities"^[27] but instead helped to give them the musical foundation they so sorely needed. Beyond that his overall bearing was to them an example of high moral principles, and this example did not go unappreciated, at least among the more gifted and perceptive of his students, to whom it served as a guiding light during artistically troubled times. Lou Harrison, who for a short period attended some of Schoenberg's classes at UCLA, later wrote him the following words of gratitude:

No person has given me so much confidence in myself, and I have had much need since then, in the face of fads and fashions, of just that intense and real belief in the importance of honesty towards oneself and honesty towards the art which I profess that you seemed to give me.^[28]

In his closing years such appreciation was joined by an awakening of genuine interest in Schoenberg the composer, rather than merely Schoenberg the inventor of a revolutionary "method" of composition. After the long years of neglect there began to be more performances of both recent and earlier works in New York and even in the until then recalcitrant Los Angeles. A small band of younger Americans began to write to Schoenberg about being won over to the music and about finding in it, as Sessions put it, "a source of deep comfort and faith . . . an immensely renewed faith in the relevance of one's own efforts, as well as renewed courage to be making them."^[29]

A gratifying response, surely, even if coming to the composer at such a late stage. Yet it appears to have done little for the cloud of mistrust and suspicion that shrouded his relationship to his American environment and sat heavily upon him until the end. As late as 1950 he wrote a circular letter to several of his older pupils, asking them to protest what he considered official propaganda directed against him, in particular, a CBS ban on his music for being (so he had heard) too "controversial."^[30] From the moment he set foot on American soil Schoenberg had applied himself to the task of helping to bring his adopted country to musical maturity, but it would seem that in the end, when all was said and done, he felt he was still far from having accomplished that goal. True enough, he could look back on an active and in some ways successful American career as an educator and publicist for his own musical values and ideas. He had given many American students the technical grounding they so sorely needed, and, beyond that, secure artistic and moral direction. To a variety of lay audiences he had spoken with extraordinary forthrightness on many of the leading issues — musical, aesthetic, and cultural — of his day. As a composer, moreover, loneliness and a deep sense of isolation had not prevented him from

stepping into the limelight with music that addressed (or alluded to) contemporary sociopolitical concerns. The rhetoric of works such as the Ode to Napoleon and A Survivor from Warsaw brings them squarely into the realm of publicly oriented "protest" music.

Nevertheless, the gap between public and private could only widen with advancing age and the accumulation of disappointments. In late works such as the String Trio and the Fantasy for Violin with piano accompaniment, we find a retreat from the greater classicizing ambition of the first mature twelve-tone works and a return to the pithy, aphoristic, loosely structured manner of pre-World War I expressionism. Abandoned with such music is the attempt at an all-encompassing synthesis, and left unanswered, in the unfinished Jakobsleiter and Moses und Aron, are the fundamental questions raised by humanity's struggle with destiny. Schoenberg could only withdraw deeper into himself. With his last composition, the Moderne Psalmen, he conversed in music with his God, with whom he had been left alone.