Here, in this house, my musician friends came and we had our experiences imagining Arnold Schönberg living there, working”. Who has these memories on a sunny February morning is Josep Maria Sans, a music lover, interior designer and retired gardener who knew the importance of the figure of Schönberg (Vienna, 1874- Los Angeles, 1951) and who in the eighties had the opportunity of renting with his wife, Margarita Sagarra, the modernist house where the composer lived in the years 1931-1932.
Eight key months in which he would make progress on the unfinished Moses und Aron and his daughter Núria would be born, conveniently named with a Catalan name. The views of Barcelona with the sea in the background in this place in Vallcarca were more spectacular in those years, now dwarfed on the right by a block of flats from the Porcioles era. But it can be recreated as Schönberg saw it while composing the second act of the famous opera and his last piece for piano, Opus 33b.
The devotion that the figure of Schönberg in Barcelona awakened in Catalonia goes beyond the complicity he forged with artists of the time, such as Robert Gerhard, who was a neighbor of Vallcarca, such as Juan Eduardo Cirlot, who, fascinated by the his work, dedicated several texts to him. In reality, and unlike the terrible fate of Enric Granados’s house on Tibidabo avenue, the modernist house in Baixada de Briz where Schönberg arrived due to medical prescription – his asthma required him to travel to south – and due to the rise of Nazism in Berlin it is still practically intact and in the hands of the family of the Sans music lover.
His son Martí, who was born when his parents moved here, opens the door to La Vanguardia, already used to the visits of curious people. He has bought the house and, having followed in the professional footsteps of his progenitor, he takes care of the place like the jewel that it is. “You see the railing that overlooks the garden: I put it in iron, but I reproduce exactly the wooden original; and the stones of the garden, I have lifted them one by one and put them back.”
In the gazebo, where Schönberg had placed the piano, there is now a colorful kitchen with which Selva, Martí’s daughter, plays. The windows are the same. And the wind that sneaks in too, says Marina Rivadulla, the mother of the three-year-old girl.
In fact, it was the same architect Salvador Valeri who gave it to the composer for the first time, nine decades ago. And, despite the harshness of that winter, the Schönberg family stayed there longer than expected, enjoying the views to the sea and the garden that Arnold (Arnau, as they would say here) cultivated with the help of a neighbor.
It was still a decade and a half before Thomas Mann made him angry by turning him into his Adrian Leverkühn, the musician who sells his soul to the devil in Doctor Faustus in exchange for transcending the history of musical creation. Because, after his time in Barcelona, ??it was impossible to return to Nazi Germany. And, in the definitive exile in Los Angeles, Schönberg would share a neighborhood in Beverly Hills with the Nobel Prize in Literature at the time, as well as Stravinsky, Adorno or Hindemith. Adorno, very close to the music of Schönberg, met with Mann and explained to him the findings he was making in the search for a musical language. The novel refers to Adorno’s interpretations, but at no time did they come to include the devil in the process of developing the novel. The anger had to do with the ideas they put in his mouth – there was no other composer who had invented a twelve-tone system! – and whose interpretation he did not necessarily share.
Devil or not, the Barcelona house still breathes a resounding magic…, which grows at times when Selva’s mother confesses that the girl was born on the same day as Núria Schönberg, on May 7. Grandma Sagarra then takes out the scrapbook – “she used to keep everything” – and shows the photos they took in this same garden in 1985 when the composer’s daughter, married to Luigi Nono – whose birthday is celebrated this year centenary–, he went to Barcelona for the premiere of Moses und Aron at the Liceu and visited the house of which it was impossible for him to have any memory, as well as the garden and the pond, among palm trees much smaller than those enjoyed by Schönberg , where turtles now live.
Therefore, only two families have lived in this part of the house in a building shared with the Sallents: the Valeris and the Sans-Sagarra. “The owners, older people, didn’t want to rent it to just anyone. I heard that it was available… look, he says, pulling out a CD from among the scraps, those from the Kandinsky Trio also came to see it”. They have a copy of Schönberg’s letters that Turner published in 1987, including some dated in Barcelona. In one he tells Dr. Joseph Asch in New York that he would like to finish the third act of Moses und Aron…
For the 150th anniversary of his birth, which is celebrated this 2024, Taurus has brought out another volume about his life, music and importance today. It is titled Por qué Schönberg and Professor Harvey Sachs (Cleveland, 1946), author of biographies of Toscanini and Rubinstein, traces a history of the first half of the 20th century through the figure of Schönberg. It describes a man who was at war with the world, the young Jew who when his father died has to work in a bank, but who feels like a composer from a very early age, ready to rebel against tradition and defying critics. Also the tyrant with whom his first wife had to live, the non-Orthodox Jew who becomes Catholic, but who claims Judaism when anti-Semitism grows, and who helped many to flee Nazi Europe.
Sachs talks about disagreements, but not so much about reconciliations. From the demonic episode with Mann, he highlights that the main reason for Schönberg’s anger was not musical, but that the hero, the brilliant musician, was sick with syphilis (a symbol of Germany’s fate). As a result, he was forced to add in later editions that “the method of composition […] known as dodecaphonism is actually the intellectual property of a contemporary composer and theorist, Arnold Schönberg, and I assigned it in an imaginary context to a fictional musician”. The author points to the fact that Mann acknowledged his debt and that, through subsequent correspondence between the writer and the musician, we know that they reconciled: in January 1950, Schönberg writes Mann a letter proposing that they bury the hatchet, although, out of respect for all the people who had supported him “in this fight”, before moving to a stage of friendship they must go through another stage of “neutrality”. Mann replies that delighted.
Regarding the survival of his work, Sachs explains that it has not been projected into the future. “He saw himself as the next link in the extraordinary history of Germanic music. And it’s sad, but the road ends in itself”, he says, in conversation with La Vanguardia. Would the same have happened in the 20th century, musically speaking? “In any case, the atonality had to appear”.
