Arnold Schoenberg’s life after he emigrated to the U.S. in 1933 was “full of musical, political, and spiritual convulsions,” writes Jeremy Eichler in Wednesday’s (9/5) Boston Globe. This fall, the story of that period “arrives in the form of a newly minted opera … ‘Schoenberg in Hollywood’ … by Boston-based composer Tod Machover” at Boston Lyric Opera. “A point of departure [is] a real-life event, one of the most fabled cultural collisions in the history of modern music: the 1935 meeting of Schoenberg and Irving G. Thalberg, the legendary executive and producer at MGM…. If he were to write music for a new film, he told Thalberg, he would insist on complete control of its entire sound world—including the actors’ lines.… ‘Schoenberg in Hollywood’ [also depicts] his birth into a Jewish home during a hope-filled moment in European Jewish history … his discovery of the 12-tone method … his confrontations with anti-Semitism, and his bitter journey into exile … presented through the prisms of classic Hollywood film styles.” Says Machover, “He is one of the greatest composers who ever lived and—in my view—the public still does not realize the breadth of his achievement or the richness of his legacy.”
Posted September 10, 2018
