First of all, this is the first opportunity I’ve had to wish all of you who observe Rosh Hashanah a sweet new year!

There’s been a lot going on the past couple of days. And now today is the birthday of dodecaphonic icon Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951).

Schoenberg, who was born Jewish, converted to Lutheranism in 1898 – not, as might be assumed, for professional reasons or in an attempt to assimilate, but because of a nagging spiritual hunger.

He formally converted back to Judaism in defiance of the National Socialists, who came to power in 1933. He was on vacation in France, when he was warned that it would dangerous for him to return to Germany. He reclaimed membership in the Jewish faith in a Paris synagogue. Schoenberg was summarily denounced by the Nazis as a Jew and an exponent of degenerate art. He was dismissed from his post at the Prussian Academy of Letters, where he had taught since 1925.

Unbowed, he drafted a “Four-Point Program for Jewry,” calling for a united Jewish party and the creation of an independent Jewish state. He emigrated to the United States, eventually settling in Los Angeles, where he taught at U.C.L.A.

Throughout his career, Schoenberg produced a number of works on Jewish themes, including his opera “Moses und Aron” (which he worked at between 1930 and 1932, before his second conversion). In 1938, the year of Kristallnacht, he composed a setting of “Kol Nidre.” He also wrote an oratorio, “Die Jakobsleiter,” between 1917 and 1922.

In reputation, in photographs, and in his music, Schoenberg can often come across as a somewhat forbidding figure. But once one learns of his fondness for tennis, his friendship with George Gershwin, his delight in Hopalong Cassidy, and his fear of the number 13, it’s impossible not to grasp his humanity. In home movies, he smiles with friends. In photos, he loves his children. His social circle included Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx.

There’s a section in Jeremy Eichler’s book “Time’s Echo” (published by Alfred A. Knopf in fall of 2023) – see the link below to learn more about it – that I guarantee will instill in a reader a greater affection for Schoenberg the man, possibly even a genuine curiosity to revisit his music. Because it turns out the somber godhead of serialism was actually a real mensch, a passionate humanitarian, even if touchingly blinkered by his idealism.

His cantata “A Survivor of Warsaw” proved to be so disturbing in 1947, with its uncompromising text relating the barbarity of a concentration camp, complete with beatings and gas chambers, that nobody knew what to do with it. More disturbing was a willful silence surrounding many of the atrocities committed against Jews, in particular, that was upheld seemingly everywhere.

When the Boston Symphony Orchestra hesitated to program the piece, which it had commissioned, it was picked up by a semi-amateur group, consisting of cowboys and farmhands, who mastered not only the twelve-tone idiom but Hebrew for its first performance – in Albuquerque, New Mexico! – in 1948. Time magazine reported that the work was performed twice, to allow the audience to better absorb what it was listening to, and that it responded with thunderous applause.

With all the division in our country right now, how can this image not charm one’s socks off: Schoenberg, possibly the most divisive composer in the history of classical music, connecting with the salt of the earth.

Happy birthday, Arnold Schoenberg, and shana tova!

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More impressions of Jeremy Eichler’s “Time’s Echo”

https://rossamico.com/2024/02/06/times-echo-music-the-holocaust/