Arnold and Igor by Howard Rappaport

When I was a kid, Howie, as the author of Arnold and Igor was then known, lived a few blocks from me. He was a year behind me in school, but we both played the clarinet so we became friends in school bands and orchestras. We introduced each other to music we had discovered. Howard (I should call him) went on to study music and make a profession of it. He moved out of Los Angeles so I have not stayed in touch with him. But when he wrote his first novel he contacted me thinking I might like to read it. I was happy to do so, both to support a friend, and because the topic is of interest to me, and because it turned out to be a darn good read.

The novel combines a complicated mix of strands. First, there is a fictionalized dual biography of the distant and strained relationship between Schoenberg and Stravinsky: the Arnold and Igor of the title. Their stories take us from the early part of the 20th century when, in Europe, mostly Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, they created their early masterpieces and changed the direction of classical music, through their separate emigrations to the United States in the years prior to World War II where they found themselves living within a few miles of each other in Los Angeles, and ending with Schoenberg’s death, in Los Angeles in 1951. Stravinsky lived a couple of decades longer and died in New York.

Interwoven with the half-fictionalized story of the real composers, is the completely fictional story of another composer: Simon Grafton, who, in 1990s Los Angeles, is attempting to complete an opera called Arnold and Igor that he’s been commissioned to write for Santa Fe. I was about halfway through Rappaport’s novel before I realized that the twenty-one chapters devoted to Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Rappaport titles them “tableaus”, are actually the twenty-one scenes of Grafton’s opera.

In the present day, Grafton has a wife, Francine, and two young boys. Grafton’s stress about meeting the deadline for the opera commission overlaid onto his characteristic irresponsibility causes problems in his marriage. He’s late for commitments; he neglects parenting duties; he makes promises to his wife he doesn’t keep. Rappaport probably stacks the argument too much against Grafton as I began to root for Francine to cut him loose rather than reconcile. The fact that I felt sympathy for the family situation testifies to Rappaport’s skill as a writer.

Grafton’s personal life and the lives of Arnold and Igor intersect in another way, too, not merely as the subject of his opera. Grafton’s father was a gardener, who just happened to be the gardener for both the Schoenberg and Stravinsky households. And Grafton’s mother, Helena Dent, was a soprano who pursued a music career in Los Angeles. Helena’s career brought her into contact with a local conductor and his wife, a dancer named Elsa. Elsa worked before her death on a project with Schoenberg based on the Orpheus myth, a project which had begun decades earlier with Elsa’s mother, Vivian, when she knew Schoenberg in Berlin. Later, Vivian left Berlin for Paris to dance with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes in the premiere of Stravinsky’s La Sacre du Printemps. The Orpheus project, according to the novel, actually began when Schoenberg and Stravinsky stayed up late at a cafe following the premiere of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and together scribbled some musical ideas on a paper placemat.

All these story threads, mostly fictional, slightly factual, are sewn into the backing of the true, interesting, story of how the two towering figures of 20th century music, whose lives paralleled each other in so many ways, had almost no professional or personal relationship. Grafton’s problem for his opera, which causes him so much stress and delay, is that he has two characters who never collaborate and barely ever met.

And then, the MacGuffin appears that sets off Rappaport’s novel, and promises a way forward for Grafton and his opera. Staying late at his office at UCLA, Grafton receives a mysterious package. It turns out to contain an original notebook, kept by Schoenberg throughout his life, and hitherto unknown. In the notebook, Grafton discovers tantalizing clues that perhaps Schoenberg and Stravinsky knew each other better than thought, and even collaborated musically. The notebook, if interpreted and understood correctly, has the potential to upend musicological studies of 20th century music while also giving Grafton the ending he needs for his opera.

Rappaport uses the fictional characters of the dancer Vivian in Europe, and later Elsa, and Grafton’s mother and father in Los Angeles, to bring Schoenberg and Stravinsky together in ways they truly seldom did. I knew just enough of the composers’ life stories to be confused in my reading about what really happened and what was Rappaport’s fiction. At the first instance of an episode that didn’t sound right to me, I paused to look it up. Stravinsky did not, in fact, attend the premiere of Pierrot Lunaire in Berlin on October 16, 1912. After that I just let the novel tell its own story. I knew the story of Schoenberg’s first wife’s affair with the painter Richard Gerstl and Gerstl’s subsequent suicide. I knew the story of Irving Thalberg offering a commission to Schoenberg to write the film score for The Good Earth. Rappaport embellishes that story by having Thalberg, on the same day, first offer the job to Stravinsky, who also declines, and then has Schoenberg and Stravinsky meet in the hallway outside Thalberg’s office.

The last time Schoenberg and Stravinsky met was, briefly, at the Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles a few months before Schoenberg’s death. Coincidentally, I recently picked up a copy of writings by Nicolas Slonimsky including several of the entires he wrote for Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. In the article on Schoenberg, Slonimsky records the meeting and says that the two composers “greeted each other, in English, with a formal handshake”. In Rappaport’s telling, the two meet because of a mix-up in their butcher orders, then go on to visit a violin repair shop and talk about the twelve tone system. In a final entirely fictional scene at the Brown Derby in Hollywood, the two dine together, Schoenberg entrusts the notebook to Stravinsky and encourages him to complete the Orpheus project. They finish the evening, and the novel, walking through Hollywood laughing and enjoying each other’s company.

That makes a nice ending for Grafton’s opera. The opera itself has its premiere in Santa Fe: a successful premiere (not like the receptions for Pierrot Lunaire or La Sacre). Grafton’s estranged wife appears unexpectedly at intermission with the two kids to put a satisfying coda to that story, too.

It’s an impressive first novel. I hope he writes a second. Rappaport did an incredible amount of research. The bibliography at the end lists 59 entries “consulted.” I almost wish he had simply written a straightforward biography as the composers are fascinating enough, at least for me. Obviously, Arnold and Igor will appeal more to musicians than others, but there’s enough non-musical drama to keep anyone’s interest, and Rappaport does a great job of hand-holding the uninitiated through the inside baseball stuff of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositional method, and Stravinsky’s rhythmical and neoclassical innovations. As an Angeleno who has long been fascinated by the story of the artist-exiles in Los Angeles, I enjoyed that part of the story, and the Los Angeles scenes at UCLA and elsewhere. Other settings resonated with me, too. Having just returned from the Santa Fe Opera earlier this month, I appreciated that closing scene, as well as an earlier scene in Venice, where Schoenberg and Stravinsky are improbably staying in neighboring hotel rooms during a classical music festival. I had recently learned that Stravinsky is buried near Diaghilev in Venice on the island of San Michele and pointed out the island cemetery to Jim as we sailed by it between the city and the airport on our visit last month.