Schoenberg in Hollywood: A Discussion with Director Karole Armitage

In an ambitious new collaboration, the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience and The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music are presenting the West Coast premiere of composer Tod Machover’s opera Schoenberg in Hollywood. Machover’s work, originally premiered in 2018 by Boston Lyric Opera, takes as its point of departure an anecdote from Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg’s later period when he was living in exile from Nazi persecution in the United States. Approached by the head of a Hollywood studio with an offer to compose music for film, Schoenberg embarks on a journey of memory and soul searching on the theme of art and commerce. In a unique and dizzyingly intertextual conceit, the opera approaches the scenes of Schoenberg’s biography and inner life through the vocabulary of classic Hollywood cinema. The resulting pastiche of sounds and images offers a dizzying ride through discussions of war and political violence, scenes of romantic desire and despair, and a meditation on the meaning and purpose of abstraction in a world where story and spectacle are celebrated.

Ahead of the May 18 premiere performance at the UCLA Nimoy Theater, I had the privilege to talk to director Karole Armitage about the opera and her work.

Armitage is a long-time fixture on the New York avant garde scene, having collaborated as choreographer with composers John Luther Adams and John Zorn, among other luminaries. She built a name for herself in the 1980s as the “punk ballerina,” working across genres and achieving a distinctive approach to genre bending, garnering plaudits including a Tony nomination for her choreography of the Broadway musical Hair. She has already worked with Schoenberg’s music in the past, having choreographed his 1912 song cycle Pierot lunaire. Armitage spoke with reverence about the lore surrounding Schoenberg, citing his relationship as teacher to composer John Cage as a touchstone in his role as progenitor of American post-modernist art scenes.

Armitage noted how the opera centers experiences of loss and political refugee status in Schoenberg’s life. “So much of the piece is about American naivete and optimism in contrast to the political depth of European knowledge about how power operates.” And yet Schoenberg was actively involved in the American “good life” of Hollywood in the late 1930s, befriending and socializing with stars like Fred Astaire and Groucho Marx. The irony of the juxtaposition of intellectual rigor and political violence with the easy pleasures of American celebrity culture are infused into the opera. The milieu of the pop culture elite is captured by the librettist Simon Robson and incorporated into the maximalist visual vocabulary of Armitage’s production. While the stage set is extremely minimal, projections on a film screen serve as a commentary and set of visual foils to the action on stage. The intertextual references to classic cinema on the screen are, by turn, movingly direct and laugh out loud funny. According to Armitage the humor has a potent function in communicating the tensions in Schoenberg’s work.

“Comedy is a way to deal with strife. In some ways, Schoenberg represents a Moses and Aaron conflict, the conflict of knowledge versus salesmanship. You feel that Schoenberg had tremendous powers of self-examination. He was a non-compromising artist and for good reason.” Schoenberg’s intellectual rigor as a composer and the dissonance that he unapologetically championed are presented in the opera as being in dialogue with the communicative power of music and the role of the arts as entertainment.

“We all have artists that we revere, and we compare ourselves to. Todd was so in love with Schoenberg’s music. People think of it as difficult, but it has a lightness.” Part of the purpose of the opera seems to be to champion Schoenberg for a new era and to find the joy and humanness in a body of work that challenges.

Armitage told me, “I believe in art that achieves intellectual engagement with who one is and how society functions. But the energy and vitality of popular culture is something one can draw into the philosophical conversation. It can infuse the work with energy, even while addressing different aims.” One of the strengths of the opera is its eagerness to embrace the idea of Schoenberg as a contemporary to the Marx Brothers and Humphrey Bogart. The opera introduces a perspective on his work as partaking in the ethos of old Hollywood productions, with their lightness of touch and vibrant emotionalism.

Armitage’s production style follows the concept introduced by the libretto, juxtaposing abstraction with a winningly energetic and charming approach to movement. Her direction of the opera reveals her primary fluency as a choreographer, with the singers frequently breaking into dance. “My background is in dance, and singers are so connected to the body. Body language carries the psychology, allowing for a dramatic character study.”

Schoenberg in Hollywood is characterized by a rapid flow of ideas and startling juxtapositions in sound and image. Armitage found a pacing and focused approach to energy that matches the intellectual restlessness of the story and the score. “The pace and rhythm sustain a large amount of information. It’s very American, very contemporary, and that makes it exciting. But the audience has to be able to follow; you have to understand. There are nuggets entwined in all kinds of references.”

The overarching goal of making abstraction fit into an emotionally legible narrative registers on many levels of Schoenberg in Hollywood. As Armitage explained to me, this ambitious goal of balancing abstraction and engagement is “natural to me because dance doesn’t depend on realism.” Approaching the opera with the populist energy of a dance number, Armitage honored the goal of endearing Schoenberg to the world, making the esoteric familiar, and exploring the elements of abstraction in the seemingly prosaic world of old Hollywood imagery.

Learn more about Schoenberg in Hollywood!