5 Fun Facts: Schoenberg Edition

1.  Irving Thalberg once sent an emissary to persuade Arnold Schoenberg to produce a score for The Good Earth. The man, finding Schoenberg indifferent at best, launched into an animated discussion of the potential for music to complement the film. “Think of it,” he enthused. “There’s a terrific storm going on, the wheat field is swaying in the wind, and suddenly the earth begins to tremble. In the midst of the earthquake, Oo-Lan gives birth to a baby.” “With so much going on,” Schoenberg drily replied, “what do you need music for?”

Schoenberg never did score a Hollywood film. “I will write the music,” he once offered, “and then you will make motion pictures to correspond to it.” Unsurprisingly, the producers declined.

2.  Following his arrival in the United States, Arnold Schoenberg was forced to teach music courses at all levels to make ends meet. He once found himself instructing a class of kindergarten music teachers. “You are teachers?” he asked, bewildered. “You mean there are people who know less than you do about music?”

3.  George Gershwin often sought advice and lessons from other composers (Ravel and Stravinsky among them). While playing tennis with Arnold Schoenberg one day, Gershwin asked him for some lessons as well. Schoenberg declined: “I would only make you a bad Schoenberg,” he explained, “and you’re such a good Gershwin already!”

4.  “My music is not modern,” Schoenberg once remarked. “It is only badly played.”

5.  Reluctant Modernist

In 1917, the forty-three-year-old Arnold Schoenberg was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army. Though he was careful to conceal his civilian identity, he was often asked by fellow soldiers: “Aren’t you that controversial modernist composer?” Eventually he was forced to come clean: “I must admit that I am,” he declared, “but it’s like this: somebody had to be, and nobody else wanted to, so I took it upon myself.”

“I am a conservative,” Schoenberg declared on another occasion, “who was forced to become a revolutionary.”

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