Now He's the Pride of Vienna
Composer Arnold Schoenberg's Nachlass leaves L.A. for
a city that once shunned him.
By MARK SWED
VIENNA--Christian Meyer speaks very good English.
In a wide-ranging discussion of several
hours--including a tour of the new Arnold Schonberg
Center, which Meyer heads, and lunch at a nearby guest
house--he only once stumbled over a word, unable to come
up with the English equivalent of a German term.
It happened, however, to be the most important word of
the interview, the term for the collection of the composer's
manuscripts and other memorabilia contained in the
beautiful new center, an archive in an elegant former
mansion in the center of Vienna. But, in fact, there is no
good English word for it. "Estate" is too broad; "legacy,"
too vague. Scholars the world over use the German term
Nachlass, which means "what's left behind."
There is some irony in this. The relocation of
Schoenberg's Nachlass from Los Angeles, where it had
been housed at USC, to Vienna has been controversial. Los
Angeles likes to claim Schoenberg as part of its cultural
heritage. The composer, who was born in Vienna and
shaped by the city's rich culture, emigrated to America in
1933. Though recognized as one of the two most important
composers in Europe at the time (Stravinsky was the other),
the Nazis expelled Schoenberg from a teaching post he held
in Berlin. Born into an orthodox Jewish family, Schoenberg
converted to Lutheranism in 1898 then reconverted en route
to exile in America.
Vienna was even less welcoming. The Viennese musical
establishment had always been hostile to Schoenberg's
ultramodernism, as he led the breakdown of tonality and
eventually developed the 12-tone system of composition in
the early '20s. Anti-semitism (which didn't recognize his
Christian conversion) made it worse.
"I still remember," he later wrote about his Vienna
experience, "a man saying with authority about me: 'And if
he were Mozart himself he must get out.' "
Schoenberg spent the last 17 years of his life in Los
Angeles, and never returned to Europe. He wrote much
music here and had it premiered in the United States. In
private lessons and at USC and UCLA, his teaching made a
major impact on American music still felt today. His sons,
Ronald, a judge, and Lawrence, a retired teacher, were
born in Los Angeles. A daughter, Nuria, the widow of
Italian composer Luigi Nono, was 2 years old when she
came to America.
But now Vienna seems downright ecstatic to have the
composer back, although it is also trying to be sensitive to
all of the political issues such a reclamation raises.
"If I lived in Los Angeles, I would feel exactly as you
do about losing this Nachlass," Meyer says
sympathetically. "But you have to understand, we didn't
come seeking it. It was offered to us. Schoenberg was the
most important Austrian composer of the 20th century, and
this is an invaluable opportunity for Austrians to have direct
access to an important aspect of their culture which they
might not know as well as they should. And don't forget,
most of us were not born when Schoenberg was forced to
leave 65 years ago."
Furthermore, Vienna believes that Los Angeles' loss
could well turn out to be the music world's gain.
The USC debacle, which resulted in the closing of the
Schoenberg Institute last year and included an ugly court
case, left a sour taste for many admirers of the great
composer. The contents of the institute, the Nachlass, had
been donated by the Schoenberg heirs with the
understanding that the university would administer the
archive and maintain the Bauhaus-style building, created
for the collection (at a cost of $500,000 raised by the USC
trustees) in 1975, as a place devoted to the study of a single
composer.
But USC began to feel constricted by an institute with
such a single-minded purpose. Although it hoped to retain
the Schoenberg collection it wanted "more bang for the
buck," as one administrator put it. Namely it wanted
classroom space in the building. From USC's point of view,
that wasn't inconsistent with maintaining the archive. The
family disagreed.
When the legal dust cleared, the Schoenbergs decided to
relocate the Nachlass, and Vienna eagerly lobbied for it.
Early last year an agreement was made, and with
remarkable speed a new facility was created. It opened its
doors in March, although workers were still putting on
finishing touches in May, and there was the smell of wet
paint.
The new Arnold Schonberg Center is different in many
ways from the USC Schoenberg Institute, not the least in
the way it has reverted to the German spelling of the
composer's name (he Anglicized it after moving to
America). First, and most important of all, it sits almost at
the geographical center of traditional classical music.
Located on Vienna's Schwarzenbergplatz, it is just across
the street, and past a spectacular fountain, from the
Musikverein, the city's famed concert hall and home of the
Vienna Philharmonic. The equally famed Vienna
Conservatory is a very short walk away.
The new center takes up the second floor of an elegant
building, the Palais Fanto, with an interesting history.
"David Fanto, a petroleum dealer, supplied the emperor
with oil during World War I," Meyer explains. "But Franz
Joseph couldn't pay for it, so he gave Fanto a large quantity
of marble, which was used for the staircase."
The mansion was built in 1916 and later converted to
office space. On the floor below the center is the Ethiopian
embassy. Placido Domingo owns the penthouse apartments,
which he uses for his Vienna office and residence.
The Austrian government supports the center and spent
$4 million of taxpayer money to turn the 6,500-square-foot
space into a state-of-the-art research center, exhibition
space and concert hall. The government has also agreed to
continue to support it with a budget of around $1 million a
year, Meyer says, "for an eternal period of time." (USC's
budget was $300,000). And if the politicians ever change
their minds about the meaning of eternity, the city has to
pay the costs of relocation.
The new space is a bit austere but stylish. Shaped like
an arrowhead to conform to the triangular design of the
building, it has at one focal point a small but attractive
circular library, which is open to all visitors. There is a
long, narrow exhibition space, also open to the public, and
on display are paintings by the composer (who was also
briefly an artist of the Blaue Reiter school), letters,
photographs and many of the composer's quirky inventions
(an irrepressible hobbyist, he made his own chess sets and
mechanical devices and was an amateur bookbinder). A
modern computer setup, with the latest in expensive flat
screens, allows visitors to access archival material in digital
form, to listen to recordings of Schoenberg's interviews,
speeches and any of his compositions. The center has
begun the process of digitizing manuscripts and hopes to
eventually make access available on the Internet (the web
site is www.schoenberg.at).
Other rooms house the rest of the 60,000 pieces of the
Nachlass, with an archival work room for scholars. A
wedge-shaped concert hall is at another angle of the
arrowhead (it has been described as acoustically vibrant by
some, overbearing by others). It, too, is up to date, with
modern equipment to project video and data, and it can be
turned into a studio for high-fidelity radio broadcasting.
The architect for the renovation is Elsa Prochazka and
she has added some personal touches. The hallway that
leads away from the concert hall to a corridor of small
seminar rooms (to be occupied by the Vienna
Conservatory's own academic Schonberg Institute),
resembles a space station. Undulating brushed aluminum
walls contrast with Old World bleached wood floors. There
is also an already popular shop that sells otherwise
hard-to-find Schoenberg scores, books and CDs.
But excellent as the facility is, location, as they say in
real estate, is everything. And this is what really makes the
Schonberg Center a center.
It attracts the general public for the exhibition hall and
the shop, and it is in easy access of the city's center.
Though open less than two months when I visited, it was
already popular with music lovers and the curious. School
children take excursions. And famous musicians flock.
Conductors Zubin Mehta and Claudio Abbado dropped in
to look at manuscripts of works they planned to conduct.
The pianists Maurizio Pollini and Alfred Brendel ran into
each other there, and spent a couple of hours going through
the exhibition together. At the time of my visit, a table still
had on it the materials that opera stage director Peter Stein
had examined the previous day.
As it did at USC, the Schoenberg family imposes
stringent conditions on its donation, defining what is
appropriate in terms of the performances and activities of
the center, and it monopolizes the center's board. The
Viennese have handled them tactfully. The chancellor of
Austria, Viktor Klima, had an audience with them.
Vienna's Councilor for Cultural Affairs Peter Marboe is one
the center's strong supporters.
"We're really delighted," Lawrence Schoenberg
proclaimed over the phone recently, just as he was about to
leave L.A. for Vienna to attend a board meeting at the
center. "The funding is as secure as we can hope for. And it
seems to be really accessible, which we had made one of
the conditions."
The composer's son also seems to be satisfied that the
family has not been taken advantage of politically. He says
he is not naive, that he realizes that some of the remarks he
heard at the opening ceremonies--at which Klima called it a
great day, the return of a composer to a country in which he
could not have survived a half-century ago--may have been
the work of politically savvy speech writers. But the
enthusiasm of the opening week of festivities, which
included an all-Schoenberg Vienna Philharmonic program
conducted by Mehta, was genuine, he feels.
Meyer, a pianist with an economics background who
had been the business manager for the Konzerthaus (one of
Vienna's main concert halls) and later ran an arts consultant
business, says that the degree of goodwill and support for
the center has surprised even him. "I still can't believe that
no political party opposed it. I thought surely the Greens,
or the even more liberal Blues, would protest spending $4
million on elitist culture. But they were in favor."
There is, moreover, evidence all over Vienna that this
may not be the ferociously conservative and prejudiced
society it once was. For instance, an evident fascination
with all things Jewish pervades the city. One sees window
displays about Jews in just about every bookstore in
connection with Israel's 50th anniversary. The great
intermission hall of the Vienna State Opera has an exhibit
on Jews in music, with a particularly strong emphasis on
Mahler, a former director of the State Opera who converted
to Catholicism early in his career.
And Schoenberg, who was once too modern for Vienna,
now seems to be integrated into Viennese cultural life in a
way that never happened in Los Angeles. One example is
an art exhibition celebrating a century of eclectic
modernism. Hung next to each other is a portrait by
Schoenberg of Alban Berg's wife, Helena, and a
self-portrait by Cindy Sherman.
Pianist Leonard Stein, one of Schoenberg's star
American pupils and the original director the Schoenberg
Institute at USC, puts it all in perspective. "Vienna," Stein
points out, "has been vilified by association. But
Schoenberg made his peace with the city. He was offered
the keys to Vienna on his 75th birthday and was happy to
accept. His ashes are buried there.
"And there are good reasons why the center is there
now. The government supports it. It cares about memorials,
whereas in L.A., there isn't a true memorial to anybody.
Maybe you have Schoenberg Hall at UCLA, but that's all.
L.A. is not a place where you celebrate the past."
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Mark Swed Is The Times' Music Critic