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Es Geht Wohl Anders (Things Turn Out Differently): The Unexpected Life of Walter Arlen

As Franz Schubert 1928

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2. Tante Henshi c. 1920s The Dichter family at their home in Burgenland in the 1920s. Seated in the center is Leopold Dichter and to his right, his sister Hannah (Henshi), who moved to Chicago in the late 19th century. Tante Henshi, as Walter knew her, provided crucial assistance, including visas, to Walter and other family members that allowed them to escape Austria when the Nazis came to power. Image from the Dichter Collection, courtesy of Schüetz Design.
6. In Burgenland, 1929 Walter's family at their home in Burgenland in November, 1929. Standing left to right are Dr. Blick, Berthold Silberstein, Toddy Kolb, Michael Aptowitzer (Walter's father), and Rosl Dichter. Seated left to right are Mrs. Blick, Esther Dichter, Edith Aptowitzer, Shirley Wahl, Rose Wahl, Gretl Dichter, Isidor Dichter, and cousin Joyce Wahl. Walter sits on the ground in the front. Image from the Dichter Collection, courtesy of Schüetz Design.
8. Dichter Department Store c. 1910 The signage in this 1910 photo of the store indicates the items that the Dichters offered: "HAUS KUCHENGERATE," which means "cooking utensils," a message reinforced by the pots and pans prominently displayed. Other signs on the left side of the photo advertise rubber goods, toys and leather goods. The number "40" indicates the store's location at Brunnengasse 40. Image from the Dichter Collection, courtesy of Schüetz Design.
14. At the Beverly Hills Hotel, 1957
16. Outside the Dichter Department Store, 1928
17. With Consul General Thomas Klestil, c. 1970s Walter (far left) stands next to Austrian Consul General Thomas Klestil and members of a German theater group during their visit to Los Angeles in the early 1970s. Klestil, who opened Austria's consulate in Los Angeles in 1969, went on to serve as Austria's ambassador to the UN and was elected President of Austria in the 1990s. Also pictured are the German Consul General Constantin von Dziembowski (far right) and German cultural attaché Ingeborg Kurtz (center). Image from the Arlen (Dichter) Collection, courtesy of Schuetz Design.
20. At the home of Minna Coe, 1957 Walter (top left) and guests at a dinner party hosted by Minna Coe (seated, center) in honor of Heitor Villa Lobos (seated, center) during the filming of "Green Mansions" in 1957. Standing next to Walter are choral conductor Roger Wagner, Viennese conductor Ernst Kanitz, and John Vincent, chair of the UCLA Music Department. Seated on left is renowned film composer Milkos Rosza. Image from the Dichter Collection, courtesy of Schüetz Design.
24. Hiking in Sauerbrunn, 1935
29. With Eugene Ormandy c. 1970s Walter with famed conductor Eugene Ormandy and his wife Margaret at their home in Palm Springs. Ormandy was born to Jewish parents in Hungary and came to the United States in 1921. He began his tenure as the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1936 and served for in the post for over 44 years. Ormandy would often consult with Walter about his work during visits to his family's vacation home in Palm Springs, as pictured here c. 1970s. Image from the Arlen (Dichter) Collection, courtesy of Schuetz Design.
30. Hannah and Wolf Aptowitzer
35. With Copland and Mills, 1965

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A Poet in Exile At 2:00 in the morning of Monday, March 14, 1938, seventeen-year-old Walter Aptowitzer watched as six Nazi policemen entered his family apartment in Vienna and ransacked it, taking jewelry, cash, and his father’s prized stamp collection. Walter’s grandfather, Leopold Dichter, was the founder and owner of Warenhaus Dichter, a successful department store in the working class Ottakring district, and one of the wealthiest Jewish business owners in the city. He and his wife Regine lived in suites of apartments above the store with their children and grandchildren, including Walter, his sister and his parents, Michael and Mina (Dichter) Aptowitzer. Tipped off by a fellow stamp dealer, local police allied with the Nazi party raided the Dichter family apartments within hours of the Anschluss, seized their property and bank accounts, and took Walter’s father and his uncle into custody at Vienna’s recently established Gestapo headquarters.

A little more than a half year later, Walter had turned eighteen. He had bribed officials to have his father freed from Buchenwald, only to see him arrested again a few weeks later. He had witnessed months of bullying and the requisition of the family's country estate on the Hungarian border, where he had spent every summer holiday with his best friend, Lorant, a Hungarian playmate from Budapest affectionately known to his friends as ‘Lumpi’. The family bank accounts and department store had been ‘liberated’ from Jewish ownership and his mother, who had worked every day in the women’s accessories department, had been abused and thrown out by her own employees. In November, he watched as the clouds of the night sky turned glowing red when marauding crowds stormed Vienna’s Jewish quarter, setting fire to all but one of the city’s historic synagogues in a murderous pogrom that would soon be known as Kristallnacht.

Not only did the Nazis destroy Walter’s family’s livelihood, they also thwarted his brilliant academic and musical ambitions. His musical talent was discovered when, as a five year old, he would entertain his grandparents’ and customers at the store by singing a popular song frequently heard on the radio. His grandfather promptly took him to see Otto Erich Deutsch, a renowned Schubert scholar, who declared that Walter had perfect pitch and recommended he be enrolled in piano lessons. But after the Anschluss, Walter’s musical education halted abruptly: he and all other Jewish students, along with many of their teachers, were expelled from school only weeks before university exams called the Matura.

Walter had absorbed these terrifying images and experiences at the most impressionable point in his life. They ingrained in teenage Walter the rejection of an entire society along with the abrupt loss of status and wealth, the fear of walking on the very streets where he had grown up and the sense that all the mitzvahs so scrupulously carried out by the Dichter family for the people of Ottakring had been for nothing. Added to this sense of desperation was the insecurity of all young men on the threshold of adulthood, and the dark ambiguities of sexual desire. His father was back in Buchenwald, his mother clinically depressed (eventually committing suicide) and his younger sister Edith no longer a member of the coveted ballet school at Vienna’s State Opera. The family was well-connected but even then, only Walter was free to make it to America before the expiration of his affidavit, changing his name to Arlen and leaving everyone else behind. His mother, father (eventually securing release through bribes for a second time) and sister would end up in London where they would be bombed out of temporary accommodation on more than one occasion. His youthful dreams of becoming a composer had been dashed.

Until later in America, he was advised by a therapist to compose anyway.

And compose he did. He hadn’t really had much training beyond lessons with Leo Sowerby in Chicago, his first city of residence, and four years spent as Roy Harris’s amanuensis. Some would think this training enough and indeed, he no doubt picked up a good deal without the day-to-day instruction in orchestration and what in German is called Tonsatz – the craftsmanship of composition. Like all talented painters, writers and composers, he was able to make his own way, if only groping forward and trying things out before putting his efforts back into a desk drawer – presumably, never to be seen again, or even heard. Writing music had become the aesthetic crossword puzzle he needed in order to stay sane. How apt that his earliest American compositions are based on the poems of Robert Frost – cool, yet full of nature, yearning and melancholic. Even in these first works, it’s possible to recognize a musical language that would result in Arlen becoming the quintessential ‘exile’ composer.

By the time of his arrival in Los Angeles in 1950, his music did not resemble anything written by one of his American contemporaries; but neither could it express itself as the work of a young Austrian. It was the music of dislocation, transplantation, longing for an unrecoverable past and thirsting for understanding, love and security. It was music that quietly sang of nobility in isolation, music of a poet in exile.