Schoenberg owes his survival to crime drama
George Gershwin once made a home movie of Arnold Schoenberg grinning in a suit on his tennis court in Beverly Hills but, sadly, never filmed one of their weekly matches. According to one observer, the composer of ‘I Got Rhythm’ played with languid strokes in a ‘nonchalant and chivalrous’ manner against the ‘choppy, over eager’ strokes of the creator of Erwartung. That figures. But how odd that the two men should be friends and passionate admirers of each other’s work. Gershwin paid for the first recording of Schoenberg’s gnarliest string quartet, the Fourth; when the younger man died, Schoenberg described him as ‘a great composer’ and expressed ‘the deepest grief
