Free City of Nets by Otto Friedrich Page A

outraged. Though he had been raised a Catholic, and then converted to Lutheranism in his youth, he went to the main synagogue in Paris and asked to be converted again, this time to Judaism. Then, with his wife and daughter, he set sail into exile. Only one obscure reporter met his ship in New York; he recalled many years later that “he was a lion—a lion—there is no other way to describe it.” The League of Composers arranged a Schoenberg concert in Town Hall, and the audience dutifully applauded even the dissonances that arose from the pianist’s accompanying the singer in the wrong clef. When it came to finding a job, however, there was nothing available except at the Malkin Conservatory, a small institution in Boston, where not a single student registered for the composition course that Schoenberg offered. New England’s winter weather also proved dangerous for his chronic asthma. He had to find a haven in some warmer place. His publisher, Carl Engel of G. Schirmer, wrote letters to various universities to propose a series of lectures. Of the forty-seven colleges approached, only twenty-two answered, and none made a definite offer. Engel was reduced to soliciting charitable contributions for the exile, even a place to stay.
    Schoenberg was saved by the continuous competition between UCLA and USC. When USC invited him to lecture in September of 1935, UCLA countered by offering him a professorship. And so, at sixty, small, frail, bald, and gruff-tempered—“his eyes were protuberant and explosive, and the whole force of the man was in them,” Stravinsky once wrote—Schoenberg finally established himself in the unlikely sanctuary of Los Angeles, which was in the process of becoming, without ever realizing it, the music capital of the world. Schoenberg had long been bitter about the general failure to acclaim his thorny creations, and now he was more bitter than ever. His UCLA students, he wrote to Hermann Scherchen, had “such an inadequate grounding that my work is as much a waste of time as if Einstein were having to teach mathematics at a secondary school.” In perhaps twenty years, he wrote to another colleague, “there will certainly be . . . a chapter in the musical history of Los Angeles: ‘What Schoenberg has achieved in Los Angeles . . .’ Frankly, I am very disappointed not to find the interest of the society in my doing, not to find appreciated what I am doing in favor of the future state of musical culture in this city. . . .”
    What Schoenberg was doing, amid constant interruptions, was to keep on creating music, notably the second suite for strings, the fourth quartet, the violin concerto, a setting of “Kol Nidre,” the second chamber symphony. On the death of George Gershwin, with whom Schoenberg liked to play tennis, the exile acclaimed his younger and more successful friend as a comrade. “An artist to me is like an apple tree,” Schoenberg said of both Gershwin and himself. “When his time comes, whether he wants it or not, he bursts into bloom and starts to produce apples. And as an apple tree neither knows nor asks about the value experts of the market will attribute to its product, so a real composer does not ask whether his product will please the experts. . . .”
    Irving Thalberg, the young chief of production at M-G-M, considered himself both an expert of the market and a man of refined taste, and he listened, as many people did in those days, to the weekly radio broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic. In one of its occasional departures from Beethoven and Brahms, the orchestra performed Verklärte Nacht, the almost morbidly luscious nocturne that Schoenberg had written nearly a half century earlier. Thalberg was impressed. This was the kind of music he wanted for his newest production, Pearl Buck’s best-selling drama of China, The Good Earth.
    When Thalberg’s inquiries