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

At Graduation, 1971

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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.
17. At the Beverly Hills Hotel, 1957
19. Outside the Dichter Department Store, 1928
20. 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.
23. 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.
27. 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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Contributions to Musical Life in LA During his thirty years as a music critic, Walter Arlen became immersed in a community of world-renowned composers and musicians, many of whom had themselves escaped the Nazis and found refuge in Los Angeles, providing a rich array of artistic influences. When he returned to composing, he would recall his many connections with prominent West Coast refugees, such as Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and his particularly close relationship with Darius Milhaud in songs.

But Walter Arlen’s contributions to musical life in Los Angeles were not limited to his work as a critic. He founded the José Iturbi Gold Medal Concert Series for young artists following the death of the pianist in 1980. During their long friendship, Iturbi surprised Arlen by delivering a piano and thus unwittingly contributed to Arlen’s later resumption of composition. Arlen also took up the challenge of founding and heading a music department at Loyola Marymount University, allowing him to teach and research. Indeed, Arlen was the natural music communicator. Perhaps because English was his second language, he was infinitely more precise in its use, and handled words and meanings with care, never falling into lazy patterns, clichés, or trendy formulations. His command of his second language would eventually equal his fluency in his native German. It was a precision in communication that he maintained when analyzing the works of other composers and when writing his own.

The arrival of Howard Myers into Arlen’s life would offer the familial stability he had missed since childhood. Myers was creative, intelligent, inquisitive, and open to the world that Arlen was eager to show. He would also be the inspiration for some of Arlen’s most sensitive, intimate, and beautiful music. One day in 1986, Myers presented Arlen with his translation of poems written by the Catholic mystic St. John of the Cross, a Spanish Saint whose family had converted from Judaism to avoid persecution during the Inquisition. It would inspire Arlen to return definitively to composition with a cycle entitled Songs of Love and Yearning.

Composition had come and gone throughout the decades and Arlen’s circle of intimate friends meant that he was treated to the occasional private performance. One of his acquaintances was the soprano Marni Nixon, at the time married to Ernest Gold, the composer of Exodus and himself a fellow Viennese refugee born as Ernst Goldner almost exactly a year after Arlen. Nixon was attracted to Arlen’s cycle Le Tambeau de Gabriel Fauré and even sang them in recitals, making them the first Arlen works to be heard in public concerts.

By the time of Arlen’s retirement, his life must have appeared happy and fulfilled. Howard Myers was able to balance the hurt and rejection that so audibly infused Arlen’s music. He encouraged Arlen’s intellectual and historic inquisitiveness and was sympathetic to his cultural and religious identity as a Jew. As a couple, they traveled the world - through London, Paris, Rome and, of course, Vienna - and these ancient civilizations moved Arlen to musical expression. Perhaps it was their very contrast with trend-obsessed Los Angeles that spoke most powerfully to Arlen’s soul. In any case, his four Arabesques form a massive work for piano solo and would be considered a Sonata were they not four tone poems describing the transcendental beauty of the ancient world. His Arabesques, in contrast with those of Debussy or Schumann, refer to the original meaning of ‘as an Arab’. The piano works of Arlen, in general, are freer in their structure than his songs. The pianism they demand does not require fast fingers or pounding octaves, but exactitude of color and harmonic balance. He evokes his experience through the sounds of the instrument rather than attempting to relate a linear narrative: tone poems in every sense of the word.

Since the publication of this digital exhibit, Filmdelights has released a documentary about Walter Arlen's life featuring Michael Haas, among others. Learn more about the film, "Walter Arlen's First Century" at Filmdelights.
A Critic is Made Walter Arlen (born Aptowitzer in Vienna, 1920) did not grow up dreaming of life as a music critic; yet an invitation to cover a few concerts turned into a thirty-year relationship with the Los Angeles Times. From 1951-1981 Arlen had a front row seat from which to observe, comment on, and help shape the audience for Los Angeles' music scene as its reputation expanded beyond Hollywood film scores and live jazz, to an important center for new music, and the recording industry. With the opening of The Music Center in 1964, the city also became the site for world-class performances. Arlen's European background, his own composing experience, training in music education, and deep passions are reflected in his music reviews. This essay will explore a crucial period in the growth of Los Angeles' music scene from the perspective of a refined, young Jewish émigré with an educator's impulse.

Arlen arrived in the United States after enduring unfathomable tragedy and loss and struggled to rebuild his life in Chicago. He managed to find a wartime job with a furrier (where he learned English) and later the government assigned him to work at a chemical factory, but there was no time for music. Depressed, Arlen consulted a psychiatrist and at his suggestion began writing music to relieve his anxiety. He also became acquainted with important American musicians in Chicago, studying with composer Leo Sowerby and assisting composer Roy Harris. Soon, he earned a B.A. in music education and resettled in Los Angeles to continue his education in UCLA's Masters Program in Music. One of his first classes was in music criticism with Albert Goldberg, who himself had come from Chicago only a few years prior to serve as the first full-time music commentator for the Los Angeles Times. At the end of the quarter Goldberg invited Arlen to write for the paper as a stringer while he went on vacation, and the gig as assistant music critic under Goldberg and later Martin Bernheimer ran from 1951-1981. Arlen’s early reviews are signed only W.A.; but in a couple of years, his full name appears at the end, and eventually he is awarded a byline as staff writer.¹

Owing to his linguistic abilities and his musical pedigree, many of Walter's earliest assignments were covering the émigré community which had been making a major impact on the L.A. music scene in the two decades before his arrival. Although by the time he started writing for the Times in the early 1950s, their popularity had somewhat declined, Arlen mixed and mingled with the classical luminaries who still remained, forging personal relationships with Ernst Toch, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Eric Zeisl, Alma and Anna Mahler, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Darius Milhaud, and Arnold Schoenberg’s family.² His years writing about the artists of the émigré community helped Arlen to find his voice as a critic.

At first, Arlen kept composing as well. Goldberg reported in 1956 that Arlen received the W.W. Kimball Prize of $200 from the Chicago Singing Teacher’s Guild for his song, “Sonnet LX” and in 1959 that the Westside JCC’s Composer’s Workshop exhibited his work, and he spoke approvingly of Arlen’s “ability to capture mood and write fluently for the voice.”³ Yet, frustrated by the inability to fully complete his musical training and concerned that composing might be perceived as a conflict of interest, Arlen ceased composing for decades. Instead, Arlen created a music-oriented life with satisfactions of a different kind. In the 1960s Arlen taught music at Mount St. Mary’s College and California State University, Los Angeles. In 1969 he was invited to found the music department at what would become Loyola Marymount University. After retirement from Loyola, he organized concerts that presented gifted young artists at the Cerritos Center, through the Jose Iturbi Gold Medal Concert Series, of which he was a founder.

After he retired from his job at the Times, Arlen resumed composing music as a form of therapy, writing music to deal with the pain of relatives murdered in concentration camps, the loss of his homeland, and personal tragedies. He remembers that when he first started composing again in 1986, he wrote five pieces in six days. Once in a while, a friend such as Marni Nixon would sing one of his songs for their circle, but Arlen did not make an effort to have the music performed.

In a surprising and gratifying denouement to his career, Arlen’s music was discovered in 2008 by Walter Haas, an Austrian music producer and musicologist researching Viennese émigrés. Arlen was able to attend a concert of his works performed that year in the Jewish Museum of Vienna, in front of Austrian politicians at a memorial event marking the 70th anniversary of the Nazi takeover of 1938. Since then, six CDs of his music have been recorded. In 2015, James Conlon conducted a concert dedicated to Arlen in Beverly Hills, as part of the Colburn School’s Ziering-Conlon Initiative, which preserves and celebrates the legacy of composers suppressed by the Nazi regime.

¹ For example, “Memories Re-created by Quintet.” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1952. “Boston Orchestra’s Flawlessness Thrills Distinguished Audience.” Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1953. Arlen, Walter. “Milhaud Honored at Concert.” March 17, 1967. (LA Times historical citations in this article are from ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los Angeles Times 1923-Current File.)

²Haas, in Dorothy Lamb Crawford, Evenings on and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939-1971 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). Arlen was said to attend every rehearsal, day or night, which involved Igor Stravinsky.

³ Goldberg, Albert. “The Sounding Board,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1956, and Walter Arlen, "New Music Presented at Evening Concert," Los Angeles Times, Feb. 4, 1959.