One morning in September 1940, a newly arrived European musician paid a visit to the conductor Otto Klemperer in Los Angeles and found him discussing Gustav Mahler with his fellow-exile Bruno Walter. The visitor went on to lunch at the new home of Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades, where he worked on some chamber music with Mann’s son Michael, a viola player. In the evening, he dropped in on Igor Stravinsky in Hollywood, assisting in a run-through of his violin concerto.
For a brief and unrepeatable moment, an eyeblink in cultural history, the City of Angels contained the future of classical music.
Classical music is, of course, a misnomer: something is classical because it is valued for its transcendence, and is from an earlier age. This classical music is really Western European orchestral music. Much as I like it, some of it, anyway, I can not help but notice that it is a bunch of white men that are its stalwarts, its stars. Surely there was much more other music around that qualified as beautiful, transcendent; just depends where we look.
For the duration of World War II, Los Angeles was at the cutting edge of musical creation. How the frontiers of a rarified art relocated to a place ruled by sun, surf and superficial movies is the subject of “A Windfall of Musicians,” Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s engaging study, based in the main on survivor interviews and documentary archives.
The influx was provoked by Adolf Hitler, whose seizure of power on Jan. 30, 1933, soon enough meant the banishment of modern art and Jewish musicians from German public life. Hollywood offered exiled writers a chance of employment, luring in the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, the best-selling “Grand Hotel” novelist Vicki Baum and Erich Maria Remarque, the author of the World War I classic “All’s Quiet on the Western Front.”
Musicians sought sanctuary first on the East Coast, with its venerable symphony orchestras and prestigious universities, drifting west in disillusion with the deep conservatism they encountered. Los Angeles, for all its open-air lifestyle, was no paradise. Schoenberg partnered Charles Chaplin and George Gershwin on the tennis court but found himself teaching music to “superficial and external” students, many of them concerned more with their credits than the challenge of art. Appalled by the ubiquity of commercialism, Schoenberg told the artist Oskar Kokoschka that he was living in a “world in which I nearly die of disgust.” Lotte Lehmann, a serene Lieder singer, wrote a novel called “Of Heaven, Hell and Hollywood,” leaving no doubt about the infernal realm she now inhabited.
I have searched high and low for the book, but it is not to be found, alas.
Ms. Crawford, who has spent much of her working life teaching and making music in Southern California, brings a physical familiarity to her narrative and a keen eye for poignant detail, the shock of the new. She quotes Vicki Baum’s first impression: “I stayed drunk for weeks with this sun and air and the beauty of the hills.” Ms. Crawford makes too much of minor figures like Ernst Toch and perhaps too little of Kurt Weill, whose Hollywood visits require deeper research. Nevertheless, “A Windfall of Musicians” is valuable for its account of how the West became a cultural force in America, a rising counterweight to the tradition-stifled East.
Up to a point, that is. In 1997, the trustees of the University of Southern California decided to rename the Arnold Schoenberg Institute building after a recent donor and vacate its contents. Vienna rescued the composer’s archives, his scores, his letters and his paintings, housing them in a purpose-built Arnold Schoenberg Centre. With this crowning slur to history, Los Angeles was cleansed of its modernist accident, or aberration.
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