3. America.

Schoenberg’s search for employment ended with his acceptance of a teaching post until the next May at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston. The family arrived in the USA at the end of October. The work proved to be on a more elementary level than he had realized. Some of the classes were held in New York, which meant a tiring weekly journey there. As soon as the weather became bad in December his health deteriorated; he fell seriously ill in January and again in March. The summer put him right, but he dared not stay another winter on the east coast and, after two months at the Chautauqua Institution, a centre for religion, education and the arts in New York State, he moved to Los Angeles in September 1934 for the sake of the climate – a decision that probably added several years to his life. He first settled in Hollywood, where he completed the Suite for string orchestra by the end of the year. Private pupils soon began to come to him, and in the academic year 1935–6 he gave lectures at the University of Southern California. In 1936 he accepted a professorship in the University of California at Los Angeles, and moved to a house in Brentwood Park where he lived for the rest of his life. That year saw the composition of the Fourth Quartet and the completion of the Violin Concerto, begun the previous spring or summer.

Though more fortunately placed in his country of exile than many of his fellow refugees, Schoenberg enjoyed little peace of mind. He found much in his alien surroundings hard to accept; few of his pupils were well enough grounded to benefit at all fully from his knowledge and experience; there was no audience for such music as he might write; above all there was the appalling news from Europe and the growing threat to relatives and friends there. His constant efforts on behalf of individual victims of persecution could not ease the sense of helplessness of one who was accustomed to take remedies into his own hands. For once he admitted to depression. In due course, however, he made some kind of truce with his situation. The war disposed in its own way of certain issues. His domestic happiness was a source of strength, and his young American children gave him a certain stake in the country. In the four years after 1936 his only original works had been Kol nidre, intended for synagogue use, and the completion of the Kammersymphonie no.2, partly composed between 1906 and 1916; but in 1941 he composed the Organ Variations in response to a commission, and three more works had followed by 1943. He also set about recasting material from various unfinished theoretical works in the form of a series of more strictly practical textbooks suitable for his American pupils. Nevertheless, in 1944 he was still thinking of emigrating.

This year was a turning-point in two respects. In February his health began to deteriorate sharply. Diabetes was diagnosed, he suffered from giddiness and fainting, and his asthma grew worse, as did the optical disturbances that had troubled him for some time. On reaching his 70th birthday in September he had to give up his professorship. As he had taught in the university for only eight years his pension was very small. Consequently he was obliged to continue giving private lessons, and in 1946 held a course of lectures at the University of Chicago. In August that year he had a heart attack which caused his heart to stop beating; he was resuscitated only by an injection directly into the heart. This experience is in some sense reflected in the String Trio which he completed shortly after his recovery. Although he was well enough in the summer of 1948 to give classes at Santa Barbara, for most of his remaining five years he led the withdrawn existence of an invalid. But he had the satisfaction of seeing the emergence of the state of Israel (he was elected honorary president of the Israel Academy of Music in 1951), and also the upsurge of interest in his music that marked the postwar years. At this time he revised a small selection from his vast accumulation of largely unpublished essays and articles, and published it under the title Style and Idea. The few short compositions that he managed to complete were nearly all religious in inspiration. During the last year of his life he worked on a series of meditations which he originally called Moderne Psalmen, and later Psalmen, Gebete und Gespräche mit und über Gott; his last composition was an incomplete setting of the first of these.

Schoenberg, Arnold