How an opera about Harpo Marx introducing Marmite modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg to Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg went down in Shenzhen, China
- Tod Machover was full of praise for the young singers who gave his opera Schoenberg in Hollywood its first public performance in China, at a Shenzhen symposium
- The opera, about the divisive composer Arnold Schoenberg’s life after fleeing antisemitism in Europe, had themes its mainly young Chinese cast found challenging
The year 2024 is the 150th anniversary of Arnold Schoenberg’s birth in a Jewish part of Vienna.
The son of a shoemaker and a piano teacher, Schoenberg grew up to become a composer and, like his near-contemporary James Joyce, is what might be called a Marmite creative: people either worship him as the father of 20th-century composition or revile him as the man who developed atonal music.
His very name can incite nervousness; in 1924, Alban Berg, one of his students who would also become a famous composer – his oeuvre includes the operas Wozzeck and Lulu – wrote an essay titled “Why is Schoenberg’s Music So Difficult to Understand?”
Events in honour of this maestro of complications officially begin in January but, earlier this month, the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Shenzhen kicked off celebrations with an international Schoenberg conference.
The highlight of the weekend event was a performance of Schoenberg in Hollywood by American composer Tod Machover.
