What kind of American was Arnold Schoenberg?
In Los Angeles, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, he adopted English as his primary language. He watched The Lone Ranger on TV. For his children, he prepared peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches cut into animal shapes.
Then Pearl Harbor was bombed. Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon, in reaction to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s declaration of war on Japan, is one of the most stirring musical responses to a world event ever conceived. It’s the closing work on PostClassical Ensemble’s “Music and Wartime” concert on December 7 – Pearl Harbor Day — at the Washington National Cathedral:
The same PostClassical Ensemble program of music composed during World War II includes Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 (1944) and a selection of the Hollywood Songs composed by Hanns Eisler, setting unhappy poems by his fellow Los Angeles refugee Bertolt Brecht.
Eisler had studied with Schoenberg in Vienna after front-line service in World War I. He made his name in Berlin during the 1920s and ‘30s as the preferred composer for workers’ songs – Kampflieder (“songs of struggle”) – linked to a Workers-Singers Union with 400,000 members.
With the coming of Hitler, Eisler fled to the US, where he attempted to help New York City’s Composers’ Collective foster a comparable proletarian song movement enlisting Aaron Copland, among others. This went nowhere and Eisler wound up in Los Angeles. Though he found employment as a film composer, another musical outcome – an expression of estrangement to set beside Schoenberg’s Pearl Harbor patriotism — was the Hollywood Songbook.
Of his American exile, Schoenberg wrote that he “came from one country into another . . . where my head can be erect, where kindness and cheerfulness is dominating, and where to live is a joy and to be an expatriate of another country is the grace of God. . . . I was driven into paradise.”
Meanwhile Eisler was blacklisted and interrogated as the “Karl Marx of Music.” He was conspicuously deported in 1948. His response, also widely reported, read: “I leave this country not without bitterness and infuriation. I could well understand it when in 1933 the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the evil of the period; I was proud at being driven out. But I feel heartbroken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way.”
In East Berlin, Eisler composed the national anthem for the German Democratic Republic. Though re-united with Brecht, he discovered himself ideologically suspect all over again. In effect, he is a composer who endured a condition of exile for most of his professional life.
Schoenberg died in Los Angeles in 1951, Eisler in East Berlin in 1962.
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