A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Emigre Exiles in Southern California (Part 2)
Two rival gangs meet each other on the beach. An angry confrontation ensues, but violence is averted. Los Angeles in the 1940s. The two rival gangs were composed of the partisans of the composers, Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. It was a rivalry that began in Vienna and Berlin before the Nazi takeover of Germany and Austria. That it remained a potent cultural force transplanted half a world away from where it arose is proof that the greatest talents of European classical music had made Los Angeles their center.
The large immigration of classical talent in composing, conducting and performing classical music was part of a larger emigration which included the literary world and the world of theater and film. It is a sad fact that in the Depression era, in the face of the fascistic America First movement of the time, it was not possible to evacuate all of the potential victims of Nazism from Europe. However, there were some whose prominence and prescience allowed them to keep ahead of disaster. There were others who were rescued late in the day. At the end of the day, the community that reformed was a condensation of talent.
For the youngest among them, it was possible to be an immigrant, but for most, Los Angeles, for all of its attractions, was exile. As a literary center, Los Angeles had only begun to develop in the 1920s. Visual art, beyond film, struggled to develop beyond regionalism into the 1960s. The film industry drew many talented people from all over the world, but it ground them down. The stereotype of Hollywood as the factory for the creation and the destruction of dreams doesn’t need a reiteration.
Los Angeles lacked the facilities for the performance of classical music as well as the institutions required to train the performers and creators of classical music and opera. Local music tastes were not well developed. The Los Angeles Philharmonic was founded in 1919, but was not playing at a very high level. When the conductor Otto Klemperer arrived, the Philharmonic was in “a precarious condition due to the Depression.” Klemperer took over on what he believed was a temporary basis in 1933. For Angelenos, Klemperer brought out more expression from the classical music they knew than they had heard before and in doing so endeared himself to the audience enormously. His full-time tenure ended with the development of a brain tumor and the operation to remove it.
Klemperer programmed modern music from composers then resident in Los Angeles, beyond Stravinsky and Schoenberg, including Paul “Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Ernst Toch, Ernest Bloch [and the Americans], Roger Sessions, Roy Harris, and William Grant Still.” His performances of Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht,” was a great success for Schoenberg, bringing him into the popular imagination of the Los Angeles audience. He also conducted concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, another opportunity to place high quality material and play in front of a popular audience.
Although Klemperer did appear as a guest conductor at the Philharmonic and the Bowl after 1939 the Philharmonic was taken over by Alfred Wallenstein, an American-born conductor who has less adventurous tastes and a slack work ethic. Anti-communism also took a toll on the creativity that was allowed. In this space, several other institutions arose: The Janssen Symphony Orchestra, founded by Werner Janssen and Felix Weingartner, the Los Angeles Chamber Symphony Orchestra, founded by Harold Byrns, and Evenings on the Roof, founded by Peter Yates. Evenings on the Roof proved the most lasting, though the name later changed to Monday Evening Concerts. Yates negotiated with the Musicians Union so that, as long as the programs were not larger than chamber music, the musicians would not need to be paid to scale. Although this meant that they were paid poorly for their work, they were able to perform very high quality repertoire. Many of them were from the film studios' orchestras. This was steady work, but often involved performing poor quality music or music that was nothing more than incidental.
Composers who worked in the film industry include Hanns Eisler, Frederick Hollander, Alexandre Tansman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Kurt Weill, and Franz Waxman. Eugene Zador and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco worked at it anonymously. The pace of work demanded kept some composers out of the field and drove most of them out of it over time. Korngold produced the largest body of work. The studios retained copyright over the material that was produced and many composers' work, but particularly Korngold’s, was mined repeatedly for reuse in later films for which it was not intended. These composers created much of the memorable soundscape for the films of the 1930, 40s and 50s which we now take for granted. In our current era of AI, where mass plagiarism is replacing living culture, the exploitation of the composers and performers under the studio system seems less like cruelty and more like a miracle. Perspective is everything.
Another very important employment opportunity was in education. While almost every major figure and many of the minor ones took on personal students, there were a number who helped create training programs at the major universities. Hugo Strelizter created a music program at Los Angeles City College, the Los Angeles City College Opera Workshop that produced the highest quality of work and seeded Yates’ “Concerts on the Roof.” Many important operatic performers who came into their own in the 50s and 60s studied there until City College determined that the program was outside of the scope of the type of courses that met the level of their students. Carl Ebert established an opera program at USC. Jan Popper established one at UCLA.
Herbert Zipper “professionalized the USC Music School’s Preparatory School, which … became the USC Community School of Performing Arts.” With the financial help of Richard D. Colburn he developed a highly successful music-in-the-schools program which introduced classical music to students throughout the LA School system. USC intended to close the Community School of Performing Arts. Zipper inspired Colburn to buy the school and establish it as we now know it, the Richard D. Colburn School of Performing Arts.
For most of the emigre musicians, adaptation to California was difficult, but still easier than it was for authors and film and theater workers. The community that they were able to build among themselves made up for the loss that they felt of the highly developed musical culture they had lost in Europe. For some, there were periods of time when they experienced serious depression. Others, even Stravinsky and Schoenberg, struggled with feelings of being passed by and left behind. Despite the feeling of continuity that being among a community gave, exile forced undesired detours and demands for adaptation and redefinition. With the exception of Hanns Eisler and Weill, the rightward shift of Post-War America did not hound them out of the country. Over time, some did move to other parts of the US and some returned to Europe. Hints of the milieu that they created remain, but the strength of classical music in Los Angeles and the continued existence of educational opportunity and performance venues are lasting memorials to that time.
I have said little about the Judaism of these figures. Most were highly assimilated Berliners or Viennese who were challenged by events to reconsider their relationship with their Jewish heritage. Schoenberg had converted to Christianity in his youth, but returned to and reconfirmed his Judaism in Los Angeles. The composer Ingolf Dahl created a false Swedish-Swiss persona to keep his Jewish identity hidden. Stravinsky was not Jewish, but was often claimed to be Jewish by others, particularly the Nazi regime who considered his music Jewish even if he was not. They were people who were Jewish rather than Jewish examples of whatever profession they practiced. Much of what I have written above is built on scaffolding provided by Dorothy Lamb Crawford’s “A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Emigre Exiles in Southern California.” (Phrases in quotation marks above are from this book.) Crawford is not Jewish and this was not an area that she really probed into.
Rabbi Jacob Sonderling, who founded Fairfax Temple, commissioned many Jewish pieces from the various composers active in Los Angeles. He was German-born and was interested in the integration of art into Judaism, which made him a good interlocutor for emigres. He commissioned Schoenberg’s “Kol Nidre,” among other works. Here is a link to a version conducted by Pierre Boulez.
