John Russell Taylor memorialized one entertaining version of the contradictory image of Schoenberg in California, telling the possibly apocryphal story of a society hostess who cornered the composer, during a party at Ira Gershwin's, with the no doubt well-intended invitation: ‘Give us a tune, Arnold!’Footnote ¹ The title of the book under review could itself be understood in one of two ways. I confess that my interest was aroused by the idea of a study that would set the historical Schoenberg, contradictory and often inscrutable as were his ever ‘advancing’ compositional manner and intentions, against mass-cultural constructions of musical modernism that were popularized by Hollywood. We might recognize these, on the one hand, perhaps, in the brilliantly angry and edgy performance by Oscar Levant of the third of Gershwin's Three Piano Preludes in Humoresque (1947); on the other, in the description by fictional cellist Karel Novak (Paul Henreid), in Deception (1946), of the music of his rival-in-love – composer Alexander Hollenius (Claude Rains, as creator of the featured Cello Concerto). Novak, talking to a reporter, thoughtfully positions Hollenius's style somewhere between Richard Strauss (named as representing ‘the past’) and the clearly up-to-the-minute Stravinsky; Hollenius thus combines ‘the rhythms of today with the melody of yesterday’. The fictional composer was in fact ghosted by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, both at the piano and in his composition (this was Korngold's last original film score). Hollenius nevertheless maintains his haughty stature in the film as a conventionally ‘great’ (and evidently European) composer by somehow mediating between late romanticism and Stravinsky – the most celebrated Russian ‘modernist’ who not only lived in Los Angeles but was also composer of the famous ‘dinosaur’ sequence in Walt Disney's 1940 Fantasia (the scene used an effective mash-up of The Rite of Spring).

I am unaware, however, that Schoenberg, who might himself have merited a barely modified version of Novak's characterization of Hollenius, ever attained the status of mentionable representative of modern music in Hollywood films of the 1940s. In any case, historian Kenneth Marcus (described also as a ‘musician and composer’ in the internal fly-leaf of his book) is not at all interested in this take on ‘Hollywood Modernism’. It soon emerges that his aim is to rescue the ‘forgotten’ émigré Schoenberg not as a misfit, but as an integral member of a wider community of real Californian modernists who lived in and around Los Angeles, and were therefore within glitz-range of Hollywood, whether they despised the film-industry or hoped at least to use it as a source of income. The latter aspiration Schoenberg shared ill-advisedly and largely ineffectually, as is well known. As a result, Marcus sees it as his task to make more of Schoenberg's famous friendship with George Gershwin (who was an admirer) and, for a time, with the likes of Oscar Levant and other popular-culture musicians, as signs of a bona fide Californian Modernist, whose proximity to Hollywood, in the big Brentwood Park house he eventually occupied, was plain for all to see. Yet that house's heavy Viennese-bourgeois interior decoration, with its drapes and curtaining, shut out the Californian sun and put off all but the persistently admiring and the students who hung upon his every word, convinced that he really was the European Modernist that Hollywood never quite got its head round: the direct representative of the great Austro-German European tradition, as which he consistently presented himself. And perhaps with some justification.

In summing up the contents of his second chapter (‘Hollywood and exile’), Marcus concludes that by moving West from New York in 1934, and choosing to live first in the Hollywood Hills and then in Brentwood amongst the ‘stars’, Schoenberg was ‘making a statement: the entertainment industry is of importance to me and I want to be a part of it’ (95). Having provided a useful account of the home-grown early modernists in Southern California (c. 1913–33) in his first chapter, more precise questions about what, and how broadly, ‘modernism’ meant in this period are nevertheless begged when he adds two more observations at the end of Chapter 2. The first is that the ‘borders between classical and popular music in Southern California’ became blurred and indistinct – to the extent that ‘modernist composers’ pragmatically engaging with the film industry were in fact adopting an approach ‘similar to film composers who were not modernists, such as Korngold or Rózsa’ (97) – an assessment that reinstates the very opposition that it had seemed to want to deny. The second, related observation, is that the arrival of the ‘émigrés’ in California – as a ready-made and rapidly institutionalized, largely Jewish, community – compromised the locals’ sense of modernists as visionary loners, and goaded some of those same locals to form a deliberately opposed ‘Californian Society of Composers’ in 1936 (it included Charles Wakefield Cadman, Mary Carr Moore, and others). It ultimately foundered, Marcus tells us, ‘on its own xenophobic character’ (95). The Californian Never-Never-Land of ‘doing your own thing’, be it painting or photographing stones and cacti or free dancing or committing to modernist architecture after Frank Lloyd Wright, was progressively darkened by racism and consequently contested models of Modernism (socialist, conservative, ‘European’, ‘Jewish’ – even ‘Californian’). These problematize the paradisal scene in which Marcus had seemed to want to plant Schoenberg as a newly laid-back friend of tennis-chums Gershwin and Jerome Kern, open to everything and ready to please.

He appropriately takes his scholarly bearings from the work of Alexander Ringer, Dorothy Lamb Crawford, and Sabine Feisst (16–17), yet Marcus fails to convince in his aim to turn Schoenberg into a fellow-travelling ‘Californian composer’, precisely by revealing in the best, later sections of this book, the ways in which issues of race, politics, factionalism, and power (sought or acquired, cultural or otherwise) gave the lie to the dream of some sort of authentic Californian openness and honesty (to ‘self’, the ‘dream’, the ‘vision’ – all of which took many and contradictory forms). As the Second World War and the subsequent era of Senator McCarthy's witch-hunts approached, when the very idea of ‘exile’ was confronted by the more agency-rich connotations of emigration, the rosy dream gave way to the literal alienation of émigrés.Footnote ² They suddenly found themselves ‘enemy aliens’, for whom citizenship of and allegiance to the newly nationalist Nation became urgent requirements. Decent anti-fascists now faced the threat of being labelled ‘communists’ or communist sympathizers.

Following carefully researched sections on Schoenberg's academic appointments, first at the University of Southern California, then in a more secure post at UCLA, Marcus's account of Schoenberg's pupil Hanns Eisler's experience of and in America, including his trial and eventually self-chosen abandonment of the American Dream, comprises one of the most interesting parts of this book. He effectively unfolds the story of Eisler, the formerly half-committed Communist, whose socialist critique of his otherwise admired teacher's ‘a-political’ conservatism caused both men some grief; Schoenberg even styled himself a ‘progressive conservative’ to Thomas Mann in 1939 (14). Eisler's story, however, throws little light on the complex conundrum of what Schoenberg was really up to in the tense, alienating and endlessly self-camouflaging ‘modernist’ works that Marcus worshipfully contextualizes and attempts to explain in ever more confusing and conflicted ways.

Conflict is evident in Schoenberg's own early apparent capitulation to what Marcus describes as trying ‘to make his music more accessible to California audiences’ (77) – specifically by returning to ‘tonal keys’ in the Suite for String Orchestra in G major. That repeated phrase ‘tonal keys’, which does little to support Marcus's self-identification as a ‘musician and composer’, is soon joined by other confusions. The ‘Blaue Reiter’ expressionists are translated as the ‘Blue Four’ (imagine the cabaret act – the German actually means ‘Blue Rider’ and refers to a painting by Franz Marc); we are also assured more than once that the ‘program music’ implications of the Ode to Napoleon signified ‘something unheard of during his European period’ (197; Schoenberg's published notes for long-ago works such as Verklärte Nacht and Pelleas und Melisande demonstrate, if demonstration were needed, that they were more elaborately programmatic than almost anything by Richard Strauss). The train comes fully off the rails when Marcus reaches, and falls awkwardly at, the daunting hurdle of how to deal with Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus (1947), and the confrontation it led to with Schoenberg (aided and abetted by Alma Mahler-Werfel, who, for all her many sterling qualities, was never one to waste oil on troubled waters).

Marcus interprets the novel, rather patronizingly, as a sort of hybrid modernist ‘montage’ constructed out of bits and pieces of known and remembered individuals and history, mixed with dialectical cultural critique in what he describes as a phantasmagoric ‘stew’ (249). He believes that Mann's technique of borrowing from his friends (like Adorno on Schoenberg and Beethoven) was adopted to compensate for the fact that ‘the development of modern music was beyond [Mann's] understanding’ (249). Rather than portraying the twelve-tone method

Overlooking the fact that no one has entirely successfully explained how the development of a synthetic method for pitch ordering and generation might constitute a ‘discovery’ (an invention perhaps?), Marcus seeks at all points to sweep a protective, anti-questioning curtain of adulation around Schoenberg at his most vulnerable. He certainly fails to grasp the depth and subtlety of Mann's attempt to invest Leverkühn's version of the twelve-tone method with powerful psychological and cultural-historical significance, nor does he catch the icy, ironic twinkle of Mann's highly developed sense of humour. While it is commendable that Marcus evidently trawled through archival notes by Mann relating to the writing of Dr Faustus, finding ‘only one citation that directly alluded to Schoenberg’ (252), it is unclear whether he entirely registers what it was that had evidently struck the novelist as amusing about Schoenberg's typically masochistic description of his String Trio as ‘impossible but rewarding’ (254).Footnote ³ Mann's characteristically arch humour is deftly communicated in the Author's Note that Marcus describes as appearing in ‘a subsequent edition’ of the novel (256) (in fact it was to appear in all subsequent editions and can be found at the back of the Lowe-Porter translation). Mann must have derived not a little entertainment from fashioning the statement, with the help of Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter in its English version. The elaborate initial locution (‘suprerogatory’ means to do more than duty might require) could well have come from the pen of the novel's Serenus Zeitblom, who also carefully restores the composer's original German Umlaut:

Although Mann goes on to cite the latter's Harmonielehre as a source for the novel, Marcus remains convinced that the novelist knew ‘so little about music theory’ that his misreading of the serial method ‘seems clear’ (253).

Rather clearer, perhaps, is that while Marcus's book remains consistently unreliable in matters of critical acumen, and a good few facts,Footnote ⁴ it certainly contains intriguing information about Schoenberg's reaffirmed Jewish faith (with relevant discussion of the later works that demonstrate it), even though his wife Gertrud brought up their children as Catholics. Marcus also sheds light on Schoenberg's fiercely held principles that included, we learn, a detestation of scouting, for its echoes of the Hitler Youth movement, and of firearms – the latter strong enough to lead him to confiscate the toy rifle of one of his son Lawrence's unsuspecting school friends. Yet at every point where the Californian liberal seems convincingly about to emerge, we encounter something that seems not quite to fit, as when we learn that in 1934 Schoenberg had responded thoughtfully to Eisler's suggestion that he might take on the leadership of an undisclosed ‘music institute in the Soviet Union’, drafting a policy document in which he insisted that ‘for the establishing, founding, building, and development of such a school a director must possess dictatorial power’ (223). Marcus's book, for all its occasional failings, makes it unintentionally clear that to know Arnold Schoenberg must indeed have been both impossible and rewarding.