The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Copland, for his part, wrote a score for a film documentary titled The City, which played every day on the fairgrounds. The narration, written by Lewis Mumford, advanced the thesis that the American city had become frenzied, oppressive, and inhumane. First, New England scenes illustrate a golden age before humanity and nature fell out of balance, Copland’s music making liberal use of plainspoken melody and pure-hearted harmony. Then industry invades. “Smoke makes prosperity,” the narrator intones, “no matter if you choke on it.” Copland responds with brassy dissonance. A sequence depicting the congestion of the city inspires vamping repetitive music that anticipates the minimalism of Philip Glass. (Koyaanisqatsi, Glass’s film symphony about the ruination of the planet, is essentially an update of The City.) Finally, we are given the solution—the model community of Greenbelt, Maryland, where modern convenience was joined to rural values, “where children play under trees and the people who laid out this place didn’t forget that air and sun was what we need for growing.” Despite the overlay of Popular Front rhetoric, the film was trumpeting the concept of the commuter suburb, which served the interests of the big automobile manufacturers. General Motors was a major investor in the fair.

  The summer of 1939 was a somber time for leftist artists. News of the abrupt termination of the Federal Arts Projects coincided with the even more shocking news of Stalin’s pact with Hitler. Some American Communists were beginning to realize that blood, prisons, ruin, and darkness, to paraphrase Joshua Kunitz, were very much part of Stalin’s world. Copland, though, was in a buoyant frame of mind; long a force behind the scenes, he was now tasting real popularity. “Mr. Copland Here, There, and at the Fair” was The New Yorker’s headline for a column on his doings. If one avenue, the way of New Deal art, was blocked, others were opening up. In October 1939, Copland went west to Hollywood. Ever the optimist, he wrote to Koussevitzky: “Hollywood is an extraordinary place…It’s like nothing else in the world. Thank heavens.”

  Hollywood Music

  Schoenberg’s epigram about his California exile—“I was driven into Paradise”—is sometimes used as the setup for a grim punch line, along the lines of “For émigré artists, the Hollywood paradise soon became a nightmare.” Or, to quote a line from Brecht that Hanns Eisler set to music in his Hollywood Elegies of 1942: “Paradise and hell can be the same city.”

  Schoenberg, an Austro-German chauvinist turned American patriot, would never have condoned such a simplistic formula. Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular, became a nightmare only for those who arrived with irrational expectations. Hollywood was in the business of generating maximum revenue from entertainment. Any composer—or writer or director—who came west with the intention of indulging his genius was bound to go away embittered. “The man who insists on complete selfexpression had better stay home and write symphonies,” Copland wrote in 1940. “He will never be happy in Hollywood.”

  Say this for the movie people: they were certainly mad for music. Lauritz Melchior and Kirsten Flagstad flirted with film stardom; Nelson Eddy became one of the biggest box-office draws of the period; there were biopics of Schubert (Melody Master), Chopin (A Song to Remember), Robert and Clara Schumann (Song of Love), even Rimsky-Korsakov (Song of Scheherazade). John Garfield played a violinist in Humoresque; Bette Davis played a pianist entangled with a cellist and a composer in Deception; Leopold Stokowski played Leopold Stokowski in the Deanna Durbin comedy One Hundred Men and a Girl. Each major studio assembled a symphony orchestra to record its scores, providing employment to the throngs of Jewish musical émigrés who had been driven out of the great ensembles of Central Europe. The director of music at Paramount Studios was a curious character named Boris Morros, who made it his mission to sign up famous composers for film work. He negotiated at various times with Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Copland, and Weill, and even tried to get Shostakovich on loan from the Soviet Union. All the while, he was serving as a KGB agent, with an assignment to generate pro-Soviet propaganda. Morros seems to have used his subversive activities mainly as an ingenious way of raising cash for his own projects and accounts.

  Hollywood may have been hazardous territory for composers, but they at least felt wanted there, as they never did in American concert halls. The shift to talkies had created a mania for continuous sound. Just as actors in screwball comedies had to talk a mile a minute, composers were called upon to underline every gesture and emphasize every emotion. An actress could hardly serve a cup of coffee without having fifty Max Steiner strings swoop in to assist her. (“What that awful music does,” Bette Davis once said to Gore Vidal, “is erase the actor’s performance, note by note.”) Early movie scores had a purely illustrative function, which composers called “Mickey-Mousing”: if a British frigate sails into the frame, “Rule, Britannia” plays. Later, composers introduced techniques of musical distancing and irony, along the lines of Sergei Eisenstein’s counterpointing of image and sound. Music could be used to reveal a hidden psychological subtext, to indicate absent figures and forces, to subvert whatever film reality the viewer was seeing.

  In Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Shadow of a Doubt, Franz Lehár’s “Merry Widow Waltz” undergoes spooky variations by Dimitri Tiomkin, thereby tracing out the tortured psychology of Joseph Cotten’s serial-killer character. As the film scholar Royal Brown writes, the tune stands in for Uncle Charlie’s “loathing of the present day in favor of an idealized past.” In Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (co-written by Brecht), Hanns Eisler had the pleasant assignment of depicting the assassination of the SS leader Reinhard Heydrich, and marked the moment of death by writing rapid, sibilant string figures in the upper register, suggestive of a squealing rat. When a portrait of Hitler appears on-screen, Eisler responds with a cackling eruption of atonality.

  Copland, when he came to Hollywood, had the luck to work with directors who let him write in his accustomed style. His favorite collaborator was the literate, left-wing, musically sensitive director Lewis Milestone, who hired him to score a film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As the Los Angeles Times noted in wonder, there was no music director looking over the composer’s shoulder as he worked. The setting for the novel, the agricultural valleys of California, elicited winsome stretches of music in the now familiar pastoral mode, while the later tragic twists in the drama prompted Copland to revive his “modernist” voice; the music for the climactic scene of Lennie’s death is a near-recapitulation of the Piano Variations. What’s distinctive about the score is its reticence; its commentaries tend to be subtle rather than obvious, and for long stretches it stays silent. It’s as if the composer were watching the drama along with the audience. David Raksin, one of the most gifted native-born film composers, singled out the “absolutely clear and pure and wonderful style” in Of Mice and Men, noting that it set the tone for dozens of classic Hollywood Westerns.

  The crown prince of the Hollywood music community was Erich Wolfgang Korngold. In his youth Korngold had been one of history’s most remarkable composer-prodigies, astonishing both Mahler and Strauss with his prepubescent mastery of the Wagnerian orchestra. Back in 1920, at the age of twenty-three, he had conquered the opera houses of Central Europe with Die tote Stadt, or The Dead City, a tale of artistic and romantic obsession in the vein of Schreker’s Der ferne Klang. As the twenties went on, the opulent style that Korngold had so easily mastered fell out of European fashion, although it remained in demand in thirties Hollywood, especially for social dramas and period pictures.

  Korngold’s first assignment, in 1934, was to arrange Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music—banned in Nazi Germany—for a Max Reinhardt adaptation of the play. Korngold all but took over the production, telling the actors how to recite their lines and letting the cinematographer know how many feet of film would be needed to cover his musical cues. On a second visit the following year, Korngold scored the Errol Flynn picture Captain Blood, his muscular, flamboyant style transforming what might have been a run-of-the-mill adventu
re into the first of Flynn’s box-office-smashing “swashbucklers.” All told, Korngold won for film composing a degree of respectability that soon drew other international celebrities into the game.

  Korngold was the flashiest, but the most original of Hollywood composers was Bernard Herrmann, who began with Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, reached his peak with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and ended his career with Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Herrmann started out as a feisty youngster on the New York scene, a sometime member of Copland’s “commando unit.” Keenly aware of the possibilities of radio and film, he went to work as an arranger, conductor, and composer at the CBS network in 1934. It was at CBS that Herrmann met Welles, who, on the heels of his Federal Theatre Project successes, was presenting innovative radio productions under the title Mercury Theatre on the Air.

  When Welles went to Hollywood to launch what promised to be a history-making film career, he took Herrmann with him. Welles remained a model Popular Front activist, as he had been in New York, and Citizen Kane was perhaps the supreme Popular Front work; it told of a great American who betrays the progressive ideals of his youth and becomes a decrepit capitalist relic. The right-wing newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, who was the main target of Welles’s satire, tried to have the film suppressed, but it opened anyway, on May Day 1941.

  Like his idol Sergei Eisenstein, Welles possessed exceptional musical instincts. An opera maven in his youth, he understood how music could amplify stage action, draw out hidden moods and emotions, even expose a lie. Kane’s opening two-and-a-half-minute sequence, showing the protagonist’s last moments and death, is propelled entirely by Herrmann’s score, the only nonmusical sound being Kane’s whisper of “Rosebud!” The principal motif, a five-note phrase that drops down a tritone at the end, recalls, aptly, Rachmaninov’s tone poem Isle of the Dead. Throughout the film those notes undergo variations and mutations; for example, in the rapid-fire sequence that describes Kane’s early days in the newspaper business, they are heard sped up and in a major key.

  The most amazing synergy of music and image comes when Kane’s second wife, the would-be singer Susan Alexander, makes a disastrous debut on the opera stage that the tycoon has built for her. It is the turning point in Kane’s transformation from hero to monster, and grand opera epitomizes his delusions. As Herrmann’s gloriously overwrought French verismo aria plays, the camera pans up to show a stagehand holding his nose in disgust. Is he a working-class opera lover who knows a fake voice when he hears one? Or a pop-music devotee who rejects opera as upper-crust foolery? The viewer decides. Following Eisenstein’s practice in Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, Welles shot this sequence and also the final scene with Herrmann’s music already composed and recorded. He later remarked that Herrmann was “50 percent responsible” for the success of Kane.

  Herrmann’s scores for Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons (mangled along with the film in release), Vertigo, and Psycho contain some of the century’s most piercingly effective dramatic music, but film work was terminally unfulfilling for this arrogant, irascible, impassioned man, who dreamed of returning in triumph to concert music and opera. Korngold, likewise, yearned to reassert himself as a “serious” composer but could not shake the Hollywood tag. His Symphony in F-sharp, a valedictory utterance whose slow movement takes the form of a shatteringly eloquent funeral oration for FDR, met with dismissive shrugs after its 1954 premiere. Other Hollywood émigrés, such as Ernst Toch, Karol Rathaus, Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman, and Eric Zeisl, labored under the kitsch-H, K'Jcomposer stereotype. They were generally considered too serious for Hollywood and not serious enough for the concert hall. Most would have identified with Toch when he wrote, “I am the forgotten composer of the twentieth century.”

  Exile Music

  Had there been a demand, the vendors who hawked maps of movie stars’ homes on street corners in Beverly Hills could also have sold maps for the stars of European music. Schoenberg had a house on North Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood, down the way from Tyrone Power. Stravinsky lived on North Wetherly Drive, up the hill from the Sunset Strip. Rachmaninov was on North Elm Drive, in the center of the movie colony. Bruno Walter was on North Bedford Drive, next door to Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel; Theodor Adorno on South Kenter Avenue in Brentwood, near the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky; Otto Klemperer, former head of the Kroll Opera, on Bel Air Road, up the street from the directors Otto Preminger and Ernst Lubitsch; and Eisler on Amalfi Drive, in Pacific Palisades, close to Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley. Korngold, befitting his high station, lived in the elite Toluca Lake development, near Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Bob Hope. The more culturally attuned movie stars, such as Charles Chaplin and Charles Laughton, mixed comfortably with their impressive new neighbors. Others committed the occasional faux pas. At a dinner at Harpo Marx’s, the comedienne Fanny Brice walked up to Schoenberg and said, “C’mon, Professor, play us a tune.”

  The most surreal thing about the Los Angeles music scene was that Schoenberg and Stravinsky, the twin giants of modernism, now lived just eight miles apart, each on a side street north of Sunset Boulevard. On four occasions the masters were within sight of each other: at Franz Werfel’s funeral, in 1945; at the dress rehearsal for a multicomposer work called the Genesis Suite, for which both had written movements, in the same year; at a dinner for Alma Mahler at the Crystal Ballroom of the Beverly Hills Hotel, in 1948; and at a seventy-fifth-birthday concert in Schoenberg’s honor, in 1949. They might have enjoyed speaking to each other, but in this imaginary Europe it was somehow inconceivable that they should meet.

  Schoenberg had been living in the Los Angeles area since 1934, teaching first at the University of Southern California and then at UCLA. He adapted to his new surroundings with alacrity; the Weimar Republic, with its health fads and cult of sport, prepared him well for the Republic of California. He tooled around in his Ford sedan, followed UCLA football, and played a mean set of tennis. Welcome anytime on George and Ira Gershwin’s court, he would show up almost every week, accompanied by a gaggle of pupils. He also played tennis with Chaplin, who enjoyed the sight of the “frank and abrupt little man” in a white T-shirt and cap. He took pride in the all-American lifestyles of his daughter, Nuria, and his sons, Lawrence and Ronald; the latter’s victory in a junior tennis championship occasioned much celebration. Although the composer never fully mastered English, he did pick up a fair amount of American slang, which he would wield to lacerating effect. When one pupil presented a piece that had an exaggerated galloping rhythm, Schoenberg started to jump around like the Lone Ranger, shouting, “Hi-yo, Silver!” His dress grew funky. According to his student Dika Newlin, he came to one class at UCLA wearing “a peach-colored shirt, a green tie with white polka-dots, a knit belt of the most vivid purple with a large and ostentatious gold buckle, and an unbelievably loud gray suit with lots of black and brown stripes.”

  In his music Schoenberg experienced what he called an “upsurge of desire for tonality.” With a series of more or less tonal works—the Suite in G for Strings, the Variations on a Recitative in D Minor for organ, Kol nidre for synagogue choir, and the Theme and Variations in G Minor for high-school band—he evidently hoped to create marketable “hits,” whose profits would then allow him to carry on with Moses und Aron and other more advanced endeavors. Even the twelve-tone Violin and Piano Concertos were written in the hope that the classical virtuosos of the radio age would popularize them. These pieces proved no more financially rewarding in America than the comic opera From Today Until Tomorrow had been in the Weimar Republic.

  As a teacher, Schoenberg remained tough as nails, but he did not foist his methods on students. He raised eyebrows by praising the tonal symphonic art of Sibelius and Shostakovich, which he might have been expected to deplore. When one of his pupils started attacking Shostakovich, Schoenberg cut him off, saying, “That man is a composer born.” He once or twice caught his class off guard with the announcement that “there is still plenty of good music to
be written in C major.”

  Schoenberg loved the movies and hoped to write a film score himself. In late 1934, Irving Thalberg, the frail, cultured head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, heard Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night or perhaps the Suite in G on the radio one day and asked the composer in for a meeting. The screenwriter Salka Viertel, who was present, described the scene unforgettably in her memoir, The Kindness of Strangers:

  I still see [Schoenberg] before me, leaning forward in his chair, both hands clasped over the handle of the umbrella, his burning genius’s eyes on Thalberg, who, standing behind his desk, was explaining why he wanted a great composer for the scoring of the Good Earth. When he came to: “Last Sunday when I heard the lovely music you have written…” Schoenberg interrupted sharply: “I don’t write ‘lovely’ music”…He had read the Good Earth and he would not undertake the assignment unless he was given complete control over the sound, including the spoken words. “What do you mean by complete control?” asked Thalberg, incredulously. “I mean that I would have to work with the actors,” answered Schoenberg. “They would have to speak in the same pitch and key as I compose it in. It would be similar to Pierrot lunaire but, of course, less difficult.”

  Unfazed, Thalberg asked Schoenberg to think about what kind of music would best suit the screenplay. The composer prepared several sketches, again leaning in a tonal direction. The sticking point between composer and studio head was not style but money; at a follow-up meeting Schoenberg asked for no less than fifty thousand dollars, whereupon Thalberg lost interest. After hearing nothing from the executive for three weeks, Schoenberg wrote an uncharacteristically pleading letter: “I can not believe, this is your intention: to give me no answer at all. Maybe you are disappointed about the price I asked. But you will agree, it is not my fault, you did not ask me before and only so late, that I had already spent so much time, coming twice to you, reading the book, trying out how I could compose it and making sketches.” But nothing more was heard from MGM. A few months later, Schoenberg called at Paramount to discuss a project called Souls at Sea, but it, too, came to nothing. The twelve-tone method finally reached the silver screen by way of Scott Bradley’s inventive scores for Tom and Jerry cartoons in the forties, notably Puttin’ on the Dog and The Cat That Hated People.