Walter Arlen

Walter Arlen was born Walter Aptowitzer on July 31 1920 in Vienna. He was the grandson of Leopold Dichter who founded a department store called Warenhaus Dichter in Ottakring, a working class district of Vienna. By the time of Walter Aptowitzer’s birth, the Dichter/Aptowitzers were one of the wealthiest families in the city.  Walter Aptowitzer’s cousin was the later marketing guru Ernst (Ernest) Dichter who as a teenager, established that playing music in the store resulted in people purchasing more. When young Walter sang the many hit songs being played over what must have been one of the first piped music systems, his grandfather realised he might be musically gifted.  He took him to the Schubert specialist Otto Erich Deutsch who confirmed that Walter Aptowitzer had perfect pitch and suggested he take piano lessons. Young Walter hated the piano and his teacher but clearly loved music. His parents insisted that he finish middle school in preparation for university entrance before discussing further music studies. Just as Leopold Dichter would “happen to know” Otto Erich Deutsch, Walter Aptowitzer would “happen” to have the pianist Paul Hamburger as a classmate. They soon became inseparable friends. Hamburger would later become an important chamber musician, accompanist and teacher in London. As schoolboys, they were enthusiastic musical companions. Hamburger had successfully entered Vienna’s Music Academy and the two boys would pour over scores from the Academy’s library. It was Walter Aptowitzer’s earliest and in many ways, most profound learning experience. 

Hopes for university entrance exams, let alone auditioning for the Music Academy or Conservatory were dashed with the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. As one of the city’s prominent Jewish families, they were subjected to the worst excesses of the pogrom that immediately followed Hitler’s march into Vienna. Their home was broken into by an angry mob who stole what they could find and beat up Walter’s father before taking him to the Gestapo, then on to Dachau. They were soon evicted from their homes and their store was “aryanised” or expropriated by a non-Jewish owner. The Dichters managed a bribe to free Walter’s father, only resulting in a brief respite before he was re-arrested and deported to Buchenwald. Walter Arlen later recalled one of the SS men asking if they should “take the little Jew (meaning him) as well”. In the end, they left him alone with his mother and sister. This was the point the seventeen-year-old Walter Aptowitzer composed his first important work for voice and piano: Es geht wohl anders – Things Aren’t What They Seem, to a text by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. The song was composed in a style similar to Joseph Marx or Richard Strauss and it is surprisingly precocious for someone who had no instruction beyond that offered by his friend Paul Hamburger. 

The family was related by marriage to the wealthy American Pritzker family who provided affidavits, though only a single visa ultimately arrived. It was decided it should go to Walter who wanted to wait until his father was released from Buchenwald before leaving. In the event, he left for passage on the Vulcania docked in Trieste on the only possible day before the visa’s expiration. He arrived in New York unsure when or if he would see his family again. From New York, he travelled to the Pritzkers in Chicago where he was met by an uncle who told him he could not possibly live in America with the name Aptowitzer. It was changed to Arlen, though Walter claimed this had nothing to do with the popular composer Hal Arlen who at that very moment was making a name for himself as the composer of The Wizard of Oz. The Pritzkers found him work in a furrier. With the outbreak of war, he was moved to work in a chemical factory. The stress and lack of music led to a mental breakdown and eventually, he was taken as a pupil by the American composer Leo Sowerby. Thereafter, Arlen won a competition allowing him to live and work as amanuensis and assistant to the composer Roy Harris and his pianist wife Johana. Through Roy and Johana Harris, Arlen was introduced to everyone important in contemporary music in America. After a period of four years, Harris reluctantly allowed Arlen to leave for post-graduate work at UCLA where he studied with Lukas Foss and the critic Albert Goldberg.  It was Goldberg who gave Arlen his first music review job for the Los Angeles Times. These were years when Los Angeles was still bristling with its Central European diaspora. Arlen knew them all, chauffeuring for Stravinsky and later being one of the few to attend Schoenberg’s funeral. He was friends with Alma and Anna Mahler. Other people in his circle included the Feuchtwangers, the Zeisls, the Korngolds, Darius Milhaud and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco who composed a “Quartettsatz” on the name of Walter Arlen.  

Arlen met his lifelong companion Howard Myers in May 1958 at a private event where Arlen’s music was being performed. Over the next decades, Arlen became established as a regular music correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He and Howard Myers were frequent guests at the city’s many social and cultural events. He was later engaged to chair and create a music department at Loyola Marymount University. Alren’s professional ambitions as composer were brought to a halt. His own musical language was far from the emerging avant-garde and as a critic, he felt compromised if his own work became too exposed. 

The compositional silence was broken during a sabbatical year in 1986 when Howard Myers presented him with his translation of poems written by St John of the Cross (1542-1591). The words and the person of St. John intrigued him. Not only was St. John from a Jewish family forced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition, he wrote his love poetry to Jesus wearing the mask of a woman. It was a combination that spoke deeply to Arlen on several levels. Arlen began composing again, but it was composition as therapy. Indeed, he had continued to compose as therapy even after officially giving it up. He used music as a means of coming to terms with the suicide of his mother, the murder of his grandmother in Treblinka, the loss of his best friend in Austria, murdered in a forced labour camp and the suicide of other friends and family members. He was isolated and made to feel humiliated as a Jew at a vulnerable age in the city he once loved. Being an immigrant and a homosexual in a new homeland only added to his feelings as an outsider. The music he composed was meant only for himself with no intention of public performances. It was this search for an inner centre of gravity that resulted in his setting of five poems by Czesław Miłosz, entitled Poet in Exile, undated but also composed in the late 1980s. Orchestrations were provided by Eskender Bekmambetov, later adapted by conductor Kenneth Woods for this recording.