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- Los Angeles is the city
of paradox. Where else could Shirley Temple, the Marx Brothers,
and other Hollywood luminaries live in the vicinity of eminent
Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg? Indeed, many influential
artists, musicians, and cultural critics of the European avant
garde found themselves in the land of palm trees and Hollywood
glitz during the massive upheavals that led up to the Second World
War. Leonard Stein, who was born in Los Angeles, was an active
participant in the intellectual émigré community,
and his close association with Arnold Schoenberg in particular
make him an invaluable asset to those interested in the city’s
art music life.
- Stein is a pianist who studied
with Schoenberg at UCLA and assisted the composer in his musical
and scholarly activities. He was one of the first performers in
the Evenings on the Roof concert series, which continues to this
day at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Maiko Kawabata performed
Schoenberg’s last composition, the Violin Phantasy, Op. 47,
with Stein in the spring of 1999 as part of this distinguished
series. But it is his role as a keeper of Schoenberg’s legacy
that makes Stein important to historians of the European avant
garde.
- Arnold Schoenberg was one
of the most important Western art music composers of the early
twentieth century. Feeling that the expressive capacity of tonality
as a musical language had been exhausted, Schoenberg overturned
the basic tenets that had governed Western harmony since the early
17th century. In a move he called
the "emancipation of dissonance," Schoenberg dismantled
the hierarchical relationships of tonality and invented a system
in which all twelve tones of the chromatic scale are equal. Schoenberg
strongly believed in an evolutionary model of music history and
felt that, just as tonal language—increasingly chromatic
throughout the 19th century—would
run its course, equally he was the true heir of the Germanic musical
tradition. He and his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern came
to be known as the Second Viennese School, a name which connected
them to the great trio of earlier Viennese composers Haydn, Mozart,
and Beethoven.
- Schoenberg was not the
only Jewish intellectual to flee Nazi persecution and settle in
California in the 1930s. Hanns Eisler, Bertold Brecht, Thomas
Mann, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer were amongst Schoenberg’s
fellow émigrés who observed the American cultural
industry at close hand in Hollywood. Although Schoenberg’s
archives recently returned to Europe, his name is still a part
of both the California institutions at which he taught composition,
harmony, and counterpoint—the music building at UCLA bears
his name, and the University of Southern California’s Schoenberg
Institute is a feature of their campus. Many of Schoenberg’s
important compositions and texts were produced in the last fifteen
years of his life in Southern Californian homes in Pasadena and
Los Angeles neighborhoods such as Hollywood, and Brentwood.
- From 1935 to 1942 Leonard
Stein was Schoenberg’s student at UCLA. Stein subsequently
edited Schoenberg’s books on counterpoint, harmony, and composition,
and compiled and edited over a hundred essays by Schoenberg in
Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg.
As a performer, Stein champions the music of Schoenberg, performing
all his piano works at universities and conservatories in this
country, and in radio performances in Europe. He has played Schoenberg’s
most well-known piece Pierrot Lunaire, as well as the Ode
to Napoleon and the Phantasy for Violin, which he premiered
in 1949. In addition, he has conducted Schoenberg’s Violin
Concerto with Rose Mary Harbison as soloist, Serenade Op.
24, the Septet Suite, Op. 29, and Stein’s recordings include
the Brettl-Lieder (Cabaret songs), Nine Early Songs
with Marni Nixon, and the Two Piano Pieces, Op. 33,
as well as all the piano music of Anton Webern.
— ECHO and
Maiko Kawabata
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