Lionel Rolfe Literary L.A., Chronicle Books: San Francisco, 1981, 102 pp., 1950s, 1941, 1940s, 1908
4. Thomas Mann: Faustus in the Palisades
" . . . [1950s] . . .
"My mother, Yaltah Menuhin, is a pianist, and she and Michael [Mann, son of Thomas Mann] had toured throughout Europe. . . .
" . . .
"Thomas Mann [and his wife, Katia, mother of Michael Mann] was the most famous of the many famous refugees from Hitler's Germany who sought out the untroubled blue skies over Los Angeles, so far away from the Holocaust in Europe . . . Many of the greatest personalities, as well as egos, had come to L.A. to escape Hitler. Some were Jews, of course, but many, like Mann and Stravinsky, were not. Some were quite left-wing; others were conservative . . . Yet they clung together . . .
" . . . [Menuhin lived on Pelham Avenue]
" . . . in the Pacific Palisades, . . . Mann lived at 1550 San Remo Drive.
" . . . Arnold Schoenberg [and his wife, Gertrud] . . . in Brentwood, at 116 N. Rockingham.
[A system for composing music is considered as unnatural.]
"It is surely not coincidence that in 1908 Schoenberg wrote some music for poems by Stefan George for voice and piano. Schoenberg regarded this work as his great "breakthrough"-melody and harmony almost completely drowned out by atonality-and he believed that he had finally succeeded in his . . . claim of emancipating dissonance with his work. . . .
"Like Schoenberg . . . George was a dedicated member of the so-called avant-garde, which was always searching for a "higher order" . . .
" . . .
" . . . Alma Mahler-Werfel, who had once been married to the composer Gustav Mahler . . . then remarried Franz Werfel, author of The Song of Bernadette, . . . is said to have pointed out the parallels to Arnold Schoenberg's music and career, in Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, to Arnold Schoenberg himself.
Schoenberg . . . blamed musicologist and philosopher, Theodor Wisengrund-Adorno . . . who Mann had consulted . . .
" . . . Mann was sixty-six when he came to Los Angeles in 1941 . . ."