We can already estimate the loss to be considerable. A wealth of documents from the archives of Arnold Schönberg (1874 -1951), Austrian composer at the origin of the greatest musical revolution of the first half of the 20th century, dodecaphonism, disappeared in the fire of the Pacific Palisades district , in Los Angeles. In a statement released by Larry Schönberg, a retired mathematics professor and son of the composer, we learned Monday that “the entire inventory of works intended for sale and loan – including manuscripts, original and printed scores – was burned.” The archive was stored in the premises of Belmont Music Publishers, publishing house of Schönberg’s work, also home of Larry Schönberg, located a stone’s throw from the oldest Starbucks in the area. “Exclusively dedicated to preservation and promotion” of Schoenberg’s music, Belmont Music Publishers has been serving since the 1970s “a vital link between the composer’s visionary legacy and performers, academics and music lovers”ensuring the circulation of compositions “from his early romantic works to his revolutionary twelve-tone pieces. These works, including compositions such as Transfigured Night or the Pierrot Lunaireare foundations of the classical repertoire of the 20th century.”
But what was the archive and publishing house of Arnold Schönberg’s works doing in Los Angeles? The great liberator of harmony, born artistically as a flamboyant heir of the post-romanticism of Strauss and Mahler before becoming “progenitor of atonality, codifier of dodecaphonism, agitator who practiced polemics like a sport” (Alex Ross) emigrated from Europe to California in October 1933, a few months after Nazi Germany promulgated its law for the restoration of the civil service and the dismissal of civil servants of Jewish origin. Excluded from the Berlin Academy of Arts where he worked since 1926, Schönberg returned to France in April, before embarking for the United States. Invited to teach music theory and composition classes in Boston and New York before moving to Los Angeles, opening a private class (where he counted John Cage and Lou Harrison among his students) before being appointed professor at UCLA. He settled in Brentwood Park, across the street from Shirley Temple’s house, near the homes of Thomas Mann, pianist Arthur Schnabel and conductor Bruno Walter, befriending Harpo Marx and another neighbor of fame, George Gershwin, with whom he played tennis regularly.
Appointed honorary citizen of the city of Vienna in absentia in 1949, Arnold Schönberg never returned to Austria or elsewhere in Europe. The Schönbergs’ “Spanish revival” style house, located at 116 North Rockingham Avenue and where Ronald Schönberg and his wife Barbara Zeisl Schoenberg, daughter of the composer Eric Zeisl, still reside, is out of danger at this time. Likewise the majority of Schönberg’s manuscripts, music and writings, photographs, diaries and concert programs, as well as his library, preserved at the Arnold Schönberg Center inaugurated in Vienna in 1998.
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