Deconstruction in Technicolor: Schoenberg, Subjectivity,
and the Cinematic Imagination in Schoenberg in Hollywood
Schoenberg in Hollywood opens not with exposition but with rupture. What emerges from that opening is less a historical figure than a shattered mind, flickering across time and medium. Tod Machover’s score and Simon Robson’s libretto reject chronology in favor of kaleidoscopic inquiry. Together, they summon a portrait rendered not in oil but in volatile compounds. Part theory, part dream, part crisis.
Arnold Schoenberg did not merely write music. He unmade it. In the early 1920s, after years of exploring chromatic excess that stretched traditional harmony to its breaking point, he abandoned the gravitational pull of tonality altogether. In its place, he devised a system built on equality and control. Twelve tones, each granted the same value, arranged into a tone row that would govern the structure of a piece. No note would dominate. None would repeat until all had sounded. The old hierarchy was dismantled. What he invented was serialism, also known as twelve-tone composition.
To many, it felt like a form of sacrilege. In a tradition where harmonic progression was everything, Schoenberg’s method struck like a theological rebellion. For his followers, it was liberation. A new path forward in a musical language shattered by modernity. For others, it marked the death of pleasure in music. Either way, it sent tremors through the classical music world. No composer after him could entirely ignore the implications.
But invention was not enough to shield him. In 1933, with the Nazi regime tightening its grip on German culture, Schoenberg—an Austrian Jew and unapologetically modern artist—fled Berlin. His music had already been labeled degenerate. His colleagues denounced or abandoned him. Conversion to Lutheranism in his youth offered no protection. He formally returned to Judaism upon emigrating. He escaped to America, where many exiled minds would land, carrying both genius and grief.
The chamber opera, scored for 15 instruments, begins in 1935 with a true event: Schoenberg’s meeting with MGM producer Irving Thalberg. Though it led nowhere, Machover and Robson reimagine it as a rupture in space and time. From that speculative conversation unfolds a psychic reel of the composer’s memories, myths, and projected futures. Vienna’s haunted salons collide with the artificial sun of Los Angeles. What results is not biography, but collision. The ruins of European modernism crash against the mirror-gloss of Hollywood fantasy.
Machover’s score pulses with dissonant clarity. Tonal hints flicker like apparitions. Serial structures hum below the surface, refusing to resolve. There are echoes of cantorial chant, bits of ghosted Bach, and spectral jazz that slides sideways into nothing. The musical language is as restless as the man it reflects. Occasionally, the sonic layers coagulate into something resembling warmth. An early string gesture recalls his romantic masterwork Verklärte Nacht. Then it curdles or vanishes. This is not music that arrives. It circles. It interrogates. It recedes.
The staging leans into this vertigo. Director Karole Armitage uses space not as location, but as an index of psychological pressure. Schoenberg doesn’t stand in rooms. He floats in schemas. Memory is treated less like narrative and more like chemical residue. The transitions between scenes are abrupt. Abruptness becomes rhythm. One moment he’s in conversation. The next, inside a silent film or thrust into noir. Each stylistic pivot refracts the same internal question: how does a man retain authorship when the medium keeps reshaping itself?
Omar Ebrahim anchors this question with precision. His Schoenberg is not a martyr, nor a prophet, but a man balancing disbelief with clarity. Ebrahim sings with a vocabulary of restraint. Within that stillness is a thrum of heat. His phrasing never demands attention. It earns it. He lets the tension simmer. Anna Davidson and Jon Keenan orbit him with agility and intent. They assume multiple identities across genres and timelines. They shift from interpreter to interrogator to figment. Their elasticity keeps the opera from collapsing into abstraction.
And yet, abstraction threatened anyway—less from design than from production.
Unfortunately, the version that arrived last night at the UCLA Nimoy Theatre in Los Angeles bore little resemblance to the one advertised in the Boston trailer. What was pitched as a full-scale multimedia experience had been reduced to a semi-staged concert: no set, no scenic structure, only a scattering of props and a projection screen. Videos flickered in the background, but they lacked intentionality. Unlike Peter Torpey’s original immersive projections (as seen in the trailer), the visuals here felt like decorative filler. They nodded toward narrative but did not support it. They did not rupture or illuminate. They diluted. With no visual framework to tether the fragmented scenes, the opera’s disjointed chronology became muddled rather than mysterious. One could admire the conceptual ambition, the musical density, the theoretical rigor—but the psychic collage lost its cohesion. The spell never fully took.
Robson’s libretto still cuts. Language here is not just dialogue. It’s terrain. Dialogue shatters into aphorism. Recollection stumbles into assessment. Schoenberg often steps out of memory to critique his own arc. He delivers lines that drift between memoir and theoretical monologue. When he describes his music as “a structure where nothing leads but everything matters,” the line feels less like exposition than mission statement. The text is dense but avoids pedantry. It expects the audience to listen like eavesdroppers to a restless mind.
Schoenberg did not arrive in cultural isolation. Los Angeles, during and after the war, transformed into an improbable colony of dislocated brilliance—Korngold, Rózsa, Waxman, Stravinsky. Some, like Korngold, melted effortlessly into the studio system, scoring swashbucklers with symphonic sweep. Their Romanticism softened into gold. Others brought frost. Schoenberg was not built for leitmotifs. Where Hollywood wanted melody and catharsis, he offered rupture and interrogation. His music moved too sharply, asked too much. Yet even without a single film credit, his fingerprints spread. Through teaching at UCLA, he seeded a lineage of American composers who absorbed his rigor and carried fragments of his method into the bloodstream of postwar music. He was not a voice-over. He was subtext.
Ironically, decades later, film composers began to draw from the very techniques that had once exiled Schoenberg from the studio system. Jerry Goldsmith, one of Hollywood’s most daring composers, embraced serialism with surprising fluency. In Planet of the Apes (1968), he built entire scenes from atonal clusters and twelve-tone motifs. The result was an alien soundscape that rejected conventional harmony. His brass writing echoed Schoenberg’s angularity. His percussion avoided resolution. Unease became texture. The score mirrored the film’s themes of evolutionary inversion. Later, in Alien (1979), Goldsmith used serialism not as intellectual homage but as emotional dislocation. The score refused climactic arcs. It shimmered with dread. What had once provoked outrage in concert halls became cinematic grammar. Schoenberg never scored a film, but his ghost lingered in the sound design of its most ambitious visions.
The opera meditates on this disconnect. Not every idea lands. A superhero figure meant to represent Jewish identity feels too literal. It jars the tonal equilibrium. At times, the piece foregrounds its own cleverness. It narrates its machinery instead of letting it operate. There’s a reflexive intelligence at work. But when insight becomes diagram, emotion recedes.
Still, the work throbs with conviction. This is an opera that declines closure. Its ending recedes like a tide. What does it mean for a prophet of dissonance to arrive in a culture built on harmony? What becomes of artistic defiance when its audience grows distracted? Schoenberg in Hollywood doesn’t solve the riddle. It rephrases it.
This is not a monument to Schoenberg. It is a prism. What flickers inside is not just a composer’s story. It is the sound of collapse resisting silence. It is theory reformed as lament. It is a mind that refused to vanish. It is not music that flatters.; it’s music that dares to think in public.
What remains is not melody. It is a signal. Not resolution, but ripple.
Schoenberg in Hollywood
West Coast premiere
presented by Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience
and UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music
UCLA Nimoy Theatre, 1262 Westwood Blvd.
ends on May 22, 2025
for tickets, visit UCLA Events
