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- The big event during his
first year at UCLA was the performance of his four quartets, including
the premiere of his Fourth Quartet, and the last four quartets
of Beethoven, performed by the Kolisch String Quartet in Royce
Hall on January 4, 6, 7 and 8, 1937.
 Rudolf
Kolisch was the brother-in-law of Schoenberg. His quartet, organized
in Vienna in the 1920s, had become internationally renowned for
its playing of modern works (such as the quartets of Bartók
and Alban Berg) as well as the classical masters. I believe that
Schoenberg hoped the quartet  would
be appointed to positions at the university, but that never happened.
At any rate, we got to hear top-notch performances of the great
quartet literature by this ensemble which, on several occasions,
also rehearsed their repertoire in front of the students. Incidentally,
the four quartets of Schoenberg were recorded privately by the
Kolisch Quartet at this time. Expenses for the recordings were
paid by Alfred Newman, famous film composer and a private pupil
of Schoenberg.
- Schoenberg’s Fourth
Quartet, like his Third, had been commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague
Coolidge, probably the greatest supporter of new music for string
quartet—or, for that matter, of any other chamber music.
I remember attending a cycle of Beethoven quartets played by the
Pro Arte String Quartet from Belgium, which was given at Cal Tech
as a gift from Mrs. Coolidge. In his report to Mrs. Coolidge about
the four concerts at Royce Hall, Schoenberg lauded the playing
of the Kolisch Quartet in the following terms:
The Kolischs played marvelously.
Everything seems so simple, so self-evident in their performance,
that one would think it is easy […] I confess they are
the best string quartet I have ever heard. (Letters 201)
- But Schoenberg was very
critical of the way the university treated these performances:
I have wanted for a long
time to write to you about the way in which these University
people behaved on the occasion of the four concerts. Firstly:
no publicity at all. A few days before the concerts the letters
were mailed. I insisted they mention that these concerts were
given through your generosity. They did it on small postcards,
which informed the receivers that one concert will be given
at one o’clock in the afternoon because the Budapest
quartet played the same evening […] (Letters 200-01)
I remember
this particular concert well because the audience consisted
almost entirely of school children who had been brought to the
concert by their teachers. I am not sure that they made any
sense out of the Schoenberg quartet they heard.
- Schoenberg
also complained that he had not been introduced before the concerts
or congratulated afterwards by any university official, despite
the fact that he was a professor in the music department."I
am very much disgusted by this behavior," he writes (Letters
200-201). Besides
the quartets, other
works by Schoenberg were performed during these years, the most
important ones by Otto Klemperer and the Los Angeles Philharmonic
at their downtown auditorium. Schoenberg himself also conducted
a concert at the Trinity Auditorium in Los Angeles with the WPA
orchestra (Federal Music Project) which consisted of unemployed
musicians (the depression was still on). The concert took place
on April 14, 1937. Schoenberg conducted his own tone poem, Pelleas
and Melisande, dating from 1903, while Gerald Strang
conducted works of Anton Webern, Adolph Weiss, Oscar Levant and
his own Suite for String Orchestra.
- MK You have mentioned
Otto Klemperer. Can you tell us something about him and his relation
to Schoenberg?
LS  Klemperer
was, and is recognized today, as one of the leading conductors
of the twentieth century. He was one of the most prominent refugees
to come to Los Angeles, having been chosen, almost accidentally,
by a local search committee to lead the Philharmonic orchestra,
which he did from 1933 to 1939. After the war he made a successful
career for himself in Europe, particularly in London. Klemperer
had known Schoenberg in Berlin where he had performed some of
his works, including the music drama Die Glückliche Hand
[The Lucky Hand] and Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene
[roughly, Music for a Film]. However, in Los Angeles Klemperer
conducted only transcriptions Schoenberg made of works by Bach,
Brahms, and Handel as well as his Suite for String Orchestra,
a strict tonal piece originally conceived for a student orchestra.
Later on, Klemperer also conducted Schoenberg’s Second Chamber
Symphony, also a tonal work; one of the performances of this work
(as I recall) was performed in Royce Hall. The music students
from UCLA would always attend the Philharmonic concerts in large
numbers whenever Schoenberg’s works were performed in the
downtown Philharmonic Auditorium. But Klemperer would occasionally
bring his orchestra to Royce Hall (although I don’t recall
that he played any of Schoenberg’s works there), and often
presented pre-concert speeches about the music to be played. Klemperer
was very interested in student life: at one time he formed a "Junior"
Philharmonic and even attended some of Schoenberg’s classes
as a guest. He also took a few private lessons from Schoenberg.
I remember hearing Klemperer conduct one of his own compositions
at the Hollywood Bowl; it was called "The Merry Waltz."
However, Schoenberg was not very complimentary about Klemperer
as a composer, to say the least.
- MK Besides the
works you mention that Klemperer conducted, were there many new
works Schoenberg composed in Los Angeles, and were they all twelve-tone
compositions?
LS Schoenberg
composed at least fifteen new works in Los Angeles as well as
the transcriptions mentioned before. Not all of them were twelve-tone
compositions, a new compositional system which he had created
in the early 1920s which broke the fetters of tonality, so to
speak. But some of the new works were strictly tonal, including
the Suite for String Orchestra, the Second Chamber Symphony
(a completion of a composition started in 1906), Kol Nidre
(a commissioned work for performance on the Jewish High Holiday),
and other works for organ, and for wind band. Although he made
many sketches of these works while he was teaching classes,
he did the main work on the scores during the summer time or
on other vacations. Most of the twelve-tone works were given
their premieres by symphony orchestras in New York, Philadelphia,
Minneapolis, Boston and by the NBC Orchestra. Several premieres
were also performed in Los Angeles, including the Prelude to
the Genesis Suite in 1945 and the Violin Phantasy in 1949. I
had a hand in some of these works such as reducing the score
of Kol Nidre for use by the Chorus, enlarging the Prelude
to the Genesis Suite from Schoenberg’s reduced score (particell)
to full-sized score, proofreading the scores and parts of some
of the works, and performing the piano parts of the Violin Phantasy
and the two-piano version of the Second Chamber Symphony. In
passing I might also mention Schoenberg’s recording of
his Pierrot Lunaire made for Columbia Records in 1940.
It was the only work Schoenberg recorded in America. The concert
performance of Pierrot Lunaire in New York, shortly after
the recording, proved to be one of his biggest successes in
this country and gave him the greatest satisfaction.
- MK Were any of
Schoenberg’s works associated with UCLA?
LS Well, not directly.
I have mentioned the large number of students who attended his
concerts in downtown Los Angeles.
- However, besides the Kolisch
Quartet concerts in 1937 in Royce Hall, where his four quartets
were played, an event I mentioned earlier, two other events connected
with the UCLA campus stand out in my mind. They both took place
in 1942. Shortly after Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Schoenberg
was commissioned to write a composition directed against tyranny,
with Hitler in mind, of course. So the following January we drove
together from the campus to Campbell’s Bookstore in Westwood
Village to look for an appropriate text for this work. For some
reason Schoenberg chose a book of poems by Lord Byron. After perusing
the texts, and somewhat against the advice of English Lit. professors,
he chose the "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte," generally
recognized as a minor poem of the author. However, Schoenberg
was impressed by the form of the poem, as well as the key words
which seemed like leitmotiven or musical references, and
also, I suspect, because he found a resemblance of the poem to
the orotund oratory of Winston Churchill, which he had heard on
the radio. The "Ode" was written in the spring of 1942
for speaker, piano and string quartet. It was performed two years
later by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, with a string orchestra
in place of the string quartet. The other event was an All-American
concert in Royce Hall on May 15, 1942, arranged as a patriotic
gesture by the music fraternity. Schoenberg was represented in
this program by the first performance of his two-piano version
of his Second Chamber Symphony, which was played by Clara Silvers
(later Steuermann), one of his students, and myself. Works by
several pupils of Schoenberg were also performed, including a
Violin Sonata by Adolph Weiss, Schoenberg’s first American
pupil in Berlin, and my own Scherzo for trumpet quartet. On other
occasions works by Schoenberg were performed in Royce Hall, including
three programs honoring his seventieth birthday in 1944 (which
he did not attend) and a performance by the young Juilliard Quartet
of his Fourth Quartet in January, 1951, a few months before his
death. The day after the concert the Juilliard Quartet came to
Schoenberg’s house in Brentwood and performed the First Quartet,
Op.7, for him.
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