Here are four great twentieth-century composers whose music has cast both a shadow and a light on my life, encouraging the process of discovery and pursuit that became the book you have just read.
PAUL HINDEMITH
Paul Hindemith, who emerged in the 1920s as one of Germany’s most lauded and influential composers and teachers, once used the phrase that music could be made for specific use (Gebrauchsmusik). This was a perfectly reasonable and accurate thing to say, since so many works by the greatest composers were written for specific occasions. After World War II this term was used as a sword against him. Music was not useful! The post-war critics and avant-garde polemicists determined that Hindemith had composed too many useless pieces of “useful music.” He had become an academic whose American works were of no value or interest. In 1950 he said, “It has been impossible to kill the silly term and the unscrupulous classification that goes with it.” The eminent music critic Peter G. Davis summarized Hindemith in a New York Times review from 1979:
At one time considered to be a key figure of early twentieth-century composition, along with Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Bartok, Paul Hindemith has pretty much vanished from the concert scene since his death [in 1963]. Save for a handful of instrumental sonatas, little of his music is played nowadays. Even once-popular works such as the Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Weber and the “Mathis der Maler” Symphony turn up less often than they used to.
Born in 1895, Hindemith rose to the heights of fame as an avant-garde composer and one of the most important teachers (along with Arnold Schoenberg) of the last century. His early works were complex and provocative, but he soon renounced them and began developing a personal theory of composition that explained Western music in a new way, maintaining the function of tonality and harmonious conclusions. As a Lutheran, he was not an immediate target of the Third Reich, and like many, he attempted to work within the new regime, although he was always under suspicion because of his early works. Ultimately his music was banned. His wife was a Catholic with Jewish ancestry, which made it essential that Hindemith emigrate, first to Switzerland and then to America, where he was welcomed as one of the most famous émigrés to arrive from Germany. Physicist Albert Einstein went to Princeton; architect and founder of the Bauhaus Walter Gropius went to Harvard; Hindemith went to Yale.
Unlike other German classical composers of his time, Hindemith studied and restored the music that preceded Bach and Handel, requiring his Yale students to play “ancient” instruments or sing in his Collegium Musicum. He therefore was a pioneer in early-music studies. He also composed new music that expressed a sense of continuity with the very first music we can “decode” from European manuscripts—the music of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
During my Yale years (1963–83), two events encouraged me to look into the music of Hindemith, who taught at the Yale School of Music from 1941 until 1953. His death in Switzerland during my first year at the college resulted in my singing in a chorus for the first performance in America of the composer’s very last composition, a Mass for unaccompanied choir that he had completed a few months before. In the summer of 1966, while I was at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, Germany, Friedelind Wagner told me that her brother Wieland was thinking about producing operas at the Festspielhaus that were not composed by their grandfather, Richard Wagner. (This is now illegal, but not in those years.) The first opera Wieland was planning was Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler. That was astounding to me, given the hundreds of choices he could have made. It was time to find out more about Hindemith.
The result was simply overwhelming. There were symphonies, operas, concertos, sonatas, and choral works—composed in America. One result was to program a concert for the Music School’s orchestra consisting of Hindemith’s Sinfonia Serena, composed just after World War II; the orchestral settings of his song cycle devoted to the Virgin Mary called the Marienleben songs—astoundingly, an American premiere; and his magnificent 1951 symphony based on music from his last opera, Die Harmonie der Welt, completed in 1957, which tells the story of Johannes Kepler and his discovery of planetary motion.
We brought this program to Carnegie Hall in the spring of 1979, where it received unanimously favorable reviews. Neither symphony had been played in New York City since the years of their composition, and, as of this writing, they have not been performed there since. They contain music of profound heroism, spirituality, rigorous construction, and delightful humor. Andrew Porter in the New Yorker wrote, “I hear Hindemith’s music, and especially of his American years, as inspired, warm, joyful, even passionate.” The New York Times’s Peter G. Davis said, “His scores are not only superbly crafted but also filled with wonderful and often extremely beautiful music.”
Hindemith’s music triumphed that night. Nothing, however, followed, with the exception of a performance in 2010 by Riccardo Muti and the New York Philharmonic of the Symphony in E-flat, a heroic and magnificent work, composed just after the composer’s arrival in the United States. On March 6, 2010, a New York Times headline said, “Seldom-Heard Symphony Resurfaces as a Novelty.” Unlike Muti, who has championed the work, the reviewer described Hindemith’s music as “academic,” “pedantic,” and “ponderous.” Hindemith is considered box-office poison, and few conductors and artistic directors seem willing to explore/interested in exploring this once-heralded composer’s works.
KURT WEILL
Kurt Weill was born in 1900 in Dessau, Germany. The son of a cantor, Weill studied music with a number of famous composers, including Wagner’s former assistant, Engelbert Humperdinck (mostly famous today for his opera Hänsel und Gretel), and the Italian futurist composer Ferruccio Busoni. Weill had just turned twenty-six when his opera Der Protagonist brought him widespread acclaim within Germany (one critic called him “a creative power of the first order,” and another said his music was “technically of quite astonishing perfection”). Once he altered his musical style from densely modern expressionism into a uniquely lyrical language that was easily understood yet complex enough to express many emotions, Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera; 1928) and its early sound film (1931) brought him international notoriety and a modicum of commercial success. With the rise of Nazism in 1933, he left Germany and ultimately arrived in New York, where he composed for Broadway, dying in 1950 at the age of fifty. Unlike his sardonic and brilliant German works, the American works brought out a big-hearted optimism and were viewed by European critics as simplistic commercial compromises that pandered to common Broadway audiences—works that had no true cultural background. Sometimes, America was blamed for this fall from grace. Weill, it should be said, collaborated with many of its greatest poets and lyricists, among them Ira Gershwin, Maxwell Anderson, Ben Hecht, Langston Hughes, and Alan Jay Lerner.
As a boy, “Speak Low” was the first Weill song I heard. (The film version of his 1943 Broadway hit, One Touch of Venus, was occasionally shown on television.) Then, in high school, I attended a performance of his 1947 Broadway opera, Street Scene, which the New York City Opera occasionally revived. Once again, the music—mysteriously foreign and yet appealing—cast a spell. It is therefore no surprise that I jumped at the chance to conduct another revival of Street Scene at the City Opera in 1978. Directed by Jack O’Brien, the production opened during a newspaper strike. There were only four performances, but the word got out after opening night and all subsequent performances were sold out. The production was hastily scheduled for the next season and telecast on the public television series Live from Lincoln Center. I was able to spend time with the composer’s widow and muse, Lotte Lenya, and among the many thousands who saw the production was Leonard Bernstein. “I am not convinced,” he said, to my surprise and disappointment. He expressed the opinion held by a number of American composers (and European critics) that Weill’s “American” voice was somehow fake.
More than a decade later, I led the first professional staging of Street Scene in Great Britain, its first complete recording, and its country premieres in Portugal and Italy. I also wrote articles and gave speeches about Weill’s American works being a continuation of the Weill who created Die Dreigroschenoper in Berlin—a work that, after all, was also composed for the commercial theater and not a government-sponsored opera house. This was in direct contradiction to the received wisdom that Weill had compromised and dissipated his style for Broadway. In his case, the phrase “sold out” referred not to ticket sales but to a fatal artistic compromise. The most current assessment of his work at that time, published in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, said, “It was Weill’s misfortune that a radical transformation became unavoidable as soon as he was left without an alternative to Broadway.” Street Scene was nonetheless conquering audiences throughout America and Europe some fifty years after it closed at the Alvin Theater in 1947.
Meanwhile, in West Germany, Decca was recording Weill’s music, and usually it was a first for the local musicians. I recall seeing a kiosk in West Berlin announcing a production of The Threepenny Opera. It said (in bold print):
Bertolt Brecht
DIE DREIGROSCHENOPER
Underneath were the names of the stage director and designers, and below that the various roles and performers. At the very bottom, almost as an afterthought, were the unforgettable words:
Musik: Kurt Weill
I still remember the recording sessions of Die Sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins) in the months just before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Not a single musician in the RIAS Berlin Sinfonietta (members of what is now called the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin—the German Symphony Orchestra of Berlin) had ever played this major work by Weill, composed in 1933.1
For the centenary of Weill’s birth in 2000, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion, broadcast on German Radio (MDR) from Dessau. A goodly sized audience attended what was essentially a press conference regarding the German premiere of Weill’s 1935 Bible play Der Weg der Verheissung, known in America as The Eternal Road.
Sitting behind a table in the Bauhaus—the great design school built by Walter Gropius, who escaped from Germany in 1934—with other Weill experts, we spoke mostly in English to this group of Germans. The panel included David Drew (English), Teresa Stratas (Canadian), Kim Kowalke (American), and myself (American). One representative from the Chemnitz Opera spoke in German. And here is a point that cannot be dismissed: There was no true Weill tradition in Germany. The so-called German Weill tradition was a post-war invention of Bertolt Brecht, who had returned to East Germany and created a talk-sing style, in which the musical lines were erased to focus on the playwright’s texts. Weill’s most trusted interpreter, the conductor Maurice Abravanel, was adamant on the subject. He told me, “Weill insisted that every note be sung! This so-called talking style is disgusting.”2
The painful truth was sitting behind the table: a group of English-speakers telling Germans about their own culture. We were being broadcast live on the radio, so I took the opportunity to implore young German composers to follow in Weill’s footsteps and compose accessible and politically active music theater works.
Der Weg der Verheissung received its long-awaited European premiere, its Israeli premiere, and its return to New York, after sixty-five years, in a fairly good production that was greeted enthusiastically in Chemnitz, but with muted approbation in New York City. One member of the audience in Chemnitz said that he was surprised by the story, which tells, in flashback, the history of the Jewish people beginning with Abraham. Having been brought up in atheist East Germany, he said, “Very interesting, but I thought Jesus was in the Bible.” Critics seemed unable to “place” it, and there was more discussion about its ending—in which the Jewish community leaves its little town rather than fight—than about the magnificent two-and-a-half-hour score and the work’s position not only in Weill’s life but in cultural and political history. The Israeli orchestra was particularly difficult to rehearse and openly disdained the music. One player (a Russian Jew) asked me, “Was this Weill a Jew? We never heard of him in Russia.” I said, “Let’s have lunch and talk about World War II.”
ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD
Born in 1897, Erich Wolfgang Korngold astonished all of Europe by composing mature works beginning at the age of eleven. Mahler called the child “a musical genius,” Richard Strauss championed his early orchestral works, Sibelius referred to him as “a young Eagle,” and Puccini called him “the greatest hope of German music.” At the age of twenty-five, his opera Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City) became an international hit, with productions throughout Europe as well as at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Korngold worked closely with Europe’s greatest stage director, Max Reinhardt, and their adaptations of Viennese operettas were performed with enormous success. When Reinhardt was asked to adapt Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Warner Bros., Korngold traveled to Hollywood and became fascinated with the new medium of sound films and the synchronization of music to image and drama. Because of the annexation of Austria into the Third Reich, Korngold and his family moved to Los Angeles, where he continued to compose during the war, convinced that the films for which he wrote music would not be screened in the Third Reich. Once the war was over, he returned to composing for the concert hall. His attempt to return to Vienna, where formerly he had been hailed as a hero, was disastrous, with his music—both old and new—judged to be passé. His musical style developed naturally but always maintained a complex Romanticism that was similar to the tone poems and early operas of his mentor Richard Strauss but made a unique use of “shadow” notes within his tonal language and had a roiling emotional underpinning more like the symphonies of Gustav Mahler.
It was generally said in classical music circles that Korngold—a founding father of Hollywood’s Golden Age—“was always writing for Hollywood even before he went there.” The word Hollywood had been given a new post-war meaning of derision. In 1956, months before his death at age sixty, he wrote of the Vienna State Opera, “It is as if I have been totally obliterated, yes; in three or four books about the Vienna Opera, I am totally ignored.” He died convinced that his life could be summed up as a transition “from genius to talent.”
Like most classical music snobs, I thought that movie music wasn’t worth my serious attention. I have no idea how I “knew” this, but I did. Like many people, I believed that Hollywood film music was mostly stolen from real classical composers. Sometime in the 1980s I had been blindsided by happening upon a recording of a dramatic and extraordinarily beautiful cello concerto broadcast on the radio. I had no idea who had written it, but it was terrific, carrying within its DNA the music of Wagner and Strauss, and yet different—more complex and contemporary. It was, I suppose, evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The announcer said it was the Cello Concerto of Erich Wolfgang Korngold from the 1945 Bette Davis movie Deception. I realized at that moment that I needed to go back to the drawing board about film music. Quite simply, this was great music.
As stated at the beginning of this book, in 1990 I was investigating music composed in Los Angeles for a brand-new symphony orchestra to play at the Hollywood Bowl, just as the Decca Record Company asked me to be a principal conductor for a proposed series devoted to entartete Musik—the music banned by Hitler that would be restored and recorded in Berlin. Here is where the two worlds collided: The Adventures of Robin Hood in Los Angeles and Das Wunder der Heliane in Berlin: the music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
These two masterpieces, composed under entirely different circumstances and in two countries, became a common denominator of confusion. They were both enormously complicated. They were both magnificent and, apart from an occasional excerpt, neither had been heard “live” in over a half century. Wunder would be a world premiere recording, though it had been composed in 1927, and Robin Hood, I would soon learn, actually saved Korngold and his family’s life, since they were in Los Angeles in 1938 and expecting to return to Vienna when it became clear that Austria was about to become part of the Third Reich.
I got to know Korngold’s son Ernst and his daughter-in-law Helen, and met the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren when I programmed Korngold at the Bowl. His music had not been heard at the Bowl (or in Los Angeles, for that matter) since Korngold had conducted a single concert in the 1930s. One of his great-grandchildren shared an essay he had written for his sixth-grade class in which he said, “If it weren’t for my great grandfather coming to Hollywood, I would not exist.”
I began to learn his music for the Berlin recordings and the Hollywood Bowl concerts. There was no biography to study. There were few recordings. Grandson Leslie had Korngold’s private recordings in the garage, and I was able to hear the composer play his Symphonic Serenade on the piano, intended as a way of helping Wilhelm Furtwängler know his intentions for the work’s world premiere in 1949 with the Vienna Philharmonic. I would use the same “instruction” to inform the recording we made in Berlin.
When I stood before the NDR (North German Radio) Orchestra in Hannover, there was not a single member of the orchestra who had ever heard of Korngold. When I made my debut with the Boston Symphony, I played a program of Hindemith, Weill, and the great Symphony in F-sharp by Korngold. Nothing on that program had ever been played by the Boston Symphony. I brought the Symphonic Serenade to the New York Philharmonic for its first New York performances in 1995 in a program that also included the Theme, Variations and Finale of Korngold’s colleague, the Hungarian émigré Miklós Rózsa—famous for having composed the scores to such films as Spellbound, Ben-Hur, and Madame Bovary. Theme, Variations and Finale had last been played by the Philharmonic on a Sunday afternoon in 1943 at the debut concert of Leonard Bernstein.
There were two concerts of this program at Lincoln Center, both sold out. This was the first time in the history of the New York Philharmonic that live orchestral accompaniment was used in showing sound films, even though live-to-picture only amounted to half the concert. The instantaneous cheers and the standing ovations felt like we had achieved something historic. The New York Times, however, published no review of the event, and by doing so buried its moment for future researchers looking into the emergence of bringing these composers into mainstream concert life. Anyone looking for information on the beginnings of reclaiming the forgotten music of the twentieth century would find no record of this event in America’s “paper of record.”
Similarly, during the period from 1991 to 2006, when the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and I performed hundreds of first concert performances of film music and my colleagues and I developed the techniques that are used today for live-to-picture concerts, the Los Angeles Philharmonic refused to call these restorations “premieres” or “first concert performances” because the music could be heard on films. Needless to say, the Los Angeles Times mostly ignored sixteen seasons of concerts heard by four million people. After a concert of music to Alfred Hitchcock films by five different composers that included mostly first performances, the Times answered the question of why it had not been reviewed with “We have already reviewed Mauceri conducting Hitchcock”—as if Hitchcock were a composer.
When I learned that during 1997—the centennial year of the birth of Erich Wolfgang Korngold—there would be no concert in the United States celebrating his life and music, I felt some echo of the frustration he and his family must have felt during his lifetime. Imagine my delight, then, in being asked to conduct the official centenary concert in Vienna.
I soon learned that Marcel Prawy, the greatly beloved and elderly impresario, would be the “host” of the concert, which would be televised. As a friend of Korngold during his Vienna years, Prawy knew what he wanted, and this amounted to music written before the war and before Korngold’s escape to America. But how could a concert—a single concert—that was to consist of excerpts erase the years in America, which included more than a dozen film scores, a symphony, and two concertos? Prawy would not give in, because he felt Korngold’s American music was not “on a high enough artistic standard.”
My conversation with Christof Lieben, who ran the Vienna Konzerthaus, was a painful one. I told him to find “a nice young Austrian conductor who was willing to do what Prawy wants, because I, as an American and a musician, could not pretend that Korngold did not live and compose in America.” A few days later, I got a phone call: “I hope you still want to do this concert because Prawy is out.”
Thus, in April 1997, I conducted Vienna’s tribute to Korngold, which ultimately did include the devastating Adagio from his Symphony, as well as extended excerpts from The Adventures of Robin Hood, shown with the film. The concert was sold out and enthusiastically received, even if there were audience members who thought we had added the Technicolor to the print, since they had only seen it on black-and-white television, in German, and without Korngold’s music.
However, it was a Pyrrhic victory. There was no press coverage. The principal critics did not attend. Television withdrew, and the delayed radio broadcast with Prawy’s narration deleted the American music. He had replaced it with pre-war recordings from Korngold’s Vienna days.
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG
If you are a classical music lover, there is no more frightening name than that of Arnold Schoenberg, the “father of atonality” (a phrase he hated). Born in 1874, he was the oldest of the generation of young radical musicians. At first his music sounded as beautiful and unique as that of anyone growing up in the shadow of Wagner and Mahler until, as stated earlier, in 1908 he jumped into a new and unregulated world that would soon make him internationally famous.
Fleeing the Nazis, Schoenberg came to live in Los Angeles and, as he had done in Berlin, made his living as a professor. Like Hindemith at Yale, he taught hundreds of American students, many of whom were women, and like Hindemith, he taught music—whatever the level his students required—but not how to imitate his style. His impact on music of the twentieth century is enormous, even if performances of his twelve-tone and non-tonal music are relatively rare.
Schoenberg remains far more complex to assess. On the one hand, he was the father of the musical avant-garde, internationally regarded as the leader of the most progressive musical movement of the era that straddled World War I. Although he had, in the early 1920s, begun orchestrating the music of Bach, once he came to America he composed new music that occasionally made use of his early avant-garde methods and also occasionally explored older music, such as Baroque dances, albeit refracted through a complex and imaginative prism.
As with Igor Stravinsky, who also lived in Los Angeles, Schoenberg’s music was being newly recorded in the 1960s and thereby becoming available to young American musicians of my generation. The popular image of him was of a stern and unforgiving martinet whose music was both fascinating and occasionally profoundly unpleasant to hear. That image held true for me until I discovered his Second Chamber Symphony in 1987.
Rarely played, it is in two movements. The first movement, dark and Tristan-haunted, was completed in 1908, just before Schoenberg moved into non-tonal explorations. While in Los Angeles, he picked up the old score, left incomplete thirty years before, and composed a second and final movement. This movement starts as a surprisingly happy scherzo, one that no one would guess is the music of Schoenberg, which gradually becomes crazier and crazier until it just stops, and the sad flute melody of the first movement returns, now on an elegiac trumpet, as we feel the inexorable march of time and the awful reality of being at the start of another war. The last bar of the symphony is dated October 21, 1939. England and France had already declared war on Germany the month before; Austria was part of the German Reich; Warsaw had fallen; and the first concentration camps were in operation.
I first conducted the Second Chamber Symphony in 1988 with the Scottish Opera Orchestra, in a concert that started with Richard Strauss’s tragic waltz München (Munich), composed in 1940 after the bombing of the city. The Schoenberg followed it, with the rest of the program devoted to a concert performance of Kurt Weill’s 1940 musical play Lady in the Dark. The Schoenberg and the Strauss had not been announced, and the sold-out hall in Edinburgh responded to the Symphony with enough enthusiasm to bring me back to the stage for a second bow. One critic, in reviewing the concert, wrote, “One way to get people to like the music of Arnold Schoenberg is to spring it on them as John Mauceri did last night at Usher Hall.”
What makes this work so important is that embedded within the silence that falls between the first and second movements is what most people think of as “Arnold Schoenberg” and his legacy. Those twenty seconds in which we turn a page and we performers collect ourselves contain thirty years in his journey into non-tonality and the twelve-tone methodology. When the second movement begins, the composer has come to another place, one in which consonance is once again a viable part of his expression. Humor and beauty, if only for a few minutes, return to his musical universe, and all his tumultuous life experiences become tools for continuing his musical story—not into some future that never would exist, but into his own reality, one that he finally embraces, staring into its face: October 1939, when he lived on Rockingham Drive in Brentwood, California, with his wife and children, and his native Austria was at war with him.
The Chamber Symphony No. 2 is not considered a major work, though it most certainly is. When it was recently reviewed after a rare New York performance, one major critic seemed insensitive to what it contains, referring to it as “amiable.” When Decca and I talked about a Schoenberg record for the Entartete Musik series, I suggested “Schoenberg in Hollywood” as a provocative enough title to confront what had previously been hidden: that Schoenberg composed astoundingly beautiful and complex music during the last thirteen years of his life.
Learning music comes with the job, of course, but learning an entire segment of a truly famous composer’s output otherwise unknown to me, and seemingly to almost everyone, was a journey filled with exclamation points and question marks. On the one hand, given the composer’s reputation, the Berlin orchestras were concerned that Schoenberg’s music would be just too difficult to play and record. On the other hand, no one seemed prepared to accept what they were playing as actually being the music of Schoenberg.
In 1996, the Arnold Schoenberg Institute was housed at UCLA, in Los Angeles. It was there that I listened to private recordings of the works I would record, and was able to look at manuscripts, study performance materials with markings from the composer, and read various documents. Here is when more curious information presented itself to me: the fact that the music written in Los Angeles was not played there, much to the frustration of the composer. The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra’s first recording of Hollywood music, Hollywood Dreams (1991), had begun provocatively enough with a fanfare by Schoenberg. Composed in 1945 for Leopold Stokowski, it is called Fanfare for a Bowl Concert. It had never been played. Anywhere.
Now, five years later, I was preparing a Schoenberg record for Berlin that included the Second Chamber Symphony, the Suite in G Major, and the Theme and Variations, Op. 43b. The Suite had been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and performed under the direction of Otto Klemperer in 1935, and shortly afterward under the composer’s direction—which was the last time it was performed by the orchestra that commissioned it.
In a conversation with Schoenberg’s two sons, Lawrence and Ronald, in 2014, they recounted the performance history of their father’s music at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Violin Concerto had been performed once, “forty years ago”; the Prelude to the Genesis Suite, once; Theme and Variations, Op. 43b, never. Lawrence wrote to me (January 30, 2014), “I think that Schoenberg pretty much currently 0 for 3 as far as the Los Angeles Philharmonic is concerned.” The numbers, given in terms of baseball statistics, refer to the interest of the current and past music directors of the orchestra.
In 2018, the Los Angeles Philharmonic announced its centenary season, including fifty new works that would be given world premieres, along with a traversal of its extraordinary history. Stoically, but with more than a touch of unbearable sadness in his voice, Lawrence Schoenberg said (October 11, 2018) that the situation with his father’s music in his adopted city was now “less than zero.” Lawrence Schoenberg is a retired mathematics teacher and understands what numbers mean. In this case, for the one hundredth anniversary of the Los Angeles Philharmonic not a single note of Schoenberg’s music was to be played and no reference to him exists in any of their print materials.
In a 2021 conversation, Lawrence confirmed that Arnold Schoenberg, the composer credited for creating the overriding sound of classical music in the twentieth century, still had not been programmed in his adopted city, and hoped that something would be played by the Philharmonic in 2024, the 150th anniversary of his birth.
Hearing the children and grandchildren of the refugee composers speak English with an American accent tells a profound tale. While I was recording “Dawn” from Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in 1994, a man came up to me during a break on the MGM (Sony) Soundstage—where, once upon a time, Judy Garland recorded “Somewhere, Over the Rainbow,” and Miklós Rózsa recorded the score to Ben-Hur—and said, “Hi, John. I’m Larry.”