Introduction...
Playing The Hindemith Quintet
Schonberg and the WPA Orchestra...
The Schonberg Quintet...
Monday Evening Concerts...
Starting with Stravinsky ...
l'Historie du Soldat...
The Ojai Festival...
Working with Boulez...
Stravinsky and Schonberg...
Working with Stockhausen...
About the writer...
In this interview, Don talks about one aspect of his career - performances in the 30s, 40s, and 50s with Schonberg and Stravinsky. Of special importance during these years was Don's involvement with Evenings on the Roof and Monday Evening Concerts. These two concert series in Los Angeles introduced young conductors and included the professional debuts of Michael Tilson Thomas and Lawrence Foster and the West Coast debuts of Robert Craft, Boulez, and Stockhausen - all appearing with Don's LA Woodwinds.
The interview was done at Don's home in Sherman Oaks, California in 1984.
Charles Lipp: How did you become acquainted with Schonberg and Stravinsky?
Don Christlieb: It was through playing chamber music and goes back to WPA days - the mid 1930s when I was playing in a woodwind quintet.
Even though we had a heavy schedule with the WPA symphony, we kept our woodwind quintet practicing and performing the Hindemith quintet for several years - always with a reaction from the audience, sometimes good, sometimes almost violent. Several German refugees said, "There ought to be a law against such works. " Actually, our group had such success playing the Hindemith that it bolstered our careers and made us permanent devotees of chamber music. We were the first to record the Hindemith in America. The second time it was ever recorded. Later, we worked diligently on the Schonberg Quintet.
The Hindemith recording, oddly enough, caught on. Columbia Records never told us about the record's popularity, but we'd get letters from listeners and dance companies all over the country. Dancers would say, "We love to dance to wind music; is there anything else like the Hindemith?"
We suddenly found that other quintets were springing up all over the country - based on an interest the recording aroused. Years later, I met people who would say, "The Hindemith was my first introduction to contemporary music. I liked it, so maybe I should have a second listen to Schonberg and Webern. Maybe I'd like their music too. " That sort of thing happened more than once. We'd meet musicians coming to California who knew us by the reputation of the Hindemith recording. Often, the same people didn't even know the personnel of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
As a quintet, we hoped that the recording would achieve a broader recognition than Just appealing to professional musicians. We were devastated when we learned that Hindemith did not like recordings and was disturbed over our receiving more than a few accolades. He made the statement, "After all gentlemen, I've other works; don't you listen to my string quartets?" - This was not at all unlike Beethoven when being complimented on his Septet.
The Hindemith gained us recognition that we wouldn't have had otherwise. We met film composers that eventually we worked with - like Arthur Morton, who was one of the top arrangers then, and later his brother, Lawrence, who became the impresario of Monday Evening Concerts, which was formerly Evenings on the Roof under Peter Yates.
Schonberg and the WPA Orchestra...
Before this 1939 period, back in 1936, in Los Angeles, the WPA had three orchestras - an opera orchestra, a show orchestra, and a symphony. I was just getting out of the army and wanted to play. Ray Nolan, my colleague, invited me to join him in the auditions for the symphony. The audition was easy and very informal; Ray had already auditioned first, so he became principal bassoonist, but he was so fair minded that we traded off playing principal.
During the time I was playing in the WPA orchestra, Schonberg was living near Santa Monica. The orchestra decided to have him do a work with us - his Pelleas und Melisande - calling for a huge orchestra. We combined nearly all the personnel in the three WPA orchestras to get the complete personnel needed for Pelleas. For example, we needed twelve horns.
Of course, in 1936 Schonberg's music was not that familiar to the players, but they knew his reputation and grew to idolize him because of his demeanor. Schonberg had that marvelous capacity to reverse roles - making you seem like the great person. I found out later that trait was common to Stravinsky as well. So when we worked with Schonberg, everybody played their hearts out. We wanted to please him and to get as much out of the experience as we could. In spite of the fact that he was not a gifted conductor, the performance was good.
During the week of rehearsals with Schonberg, we used to have lunch at the Trinity Auditorium Cafeteria. We would all eat together at a huge round table with Schonberg, and anybody could talk with him. At the table sat the first American pupils of Schonberg: Gerald Strang, who was at Long Beach State for many years; George Trembly, the first pupil of Schonberg in America; bassoonist-composer Adolph Weiss, who was the first American pupil of Schonberg to study with him in Europe; and Oscar Levant. Also there were composer friends who were more or less associated with Schonberg from the beginning of his living in Los Angeles - such as David Raskin, Hugo Friedhofer, Willie Stahl, Hugo Davies, Joseph Achron, Leslie Laviolette, and Ernst Toch.
CL: Did Schonberg know about your interest in chamber music?
DC: I found out he had been told by Gerald Strang, and before lunch ended that day he asked, "Is there any possibility that you can get together a group to do the Beethoven Septet for my composition class? I've just started teaching a group at UCLA." I said, "Absolutely!"
I got a group together and we played for his class. After we had finished playing, I said, "We're working on your woodwind quintet and we could do a rehearsal at your place." He said, "I would be most grateful." A few days later, we went to his house.
As we came in, we noticed his one-year-old daughter in a crib. (Much later she married the Italian composer Luigi Nono.) On a cardtable near where we were playing, was a manuscript for string quintet. We asked what it was, and Schonberg said, "You know, it's been so long since I heard my woodwind quintet, I thought if I arranged it for strings, I'd get a chance to hear it again." We had picked a most propitious time to do the work.
We'd performed the Schonberg maybe half a dozen times - always on a lark. In those days, it was considered too complex to be well performed, and many composers said that it was like Bach's Art of the Fugue - to be studied, not performed.
I must say, we never got a performance we liked until about twenty years later, in the 50s, when we began to take it apart. You know how you cycle measures when you are practicing. Well, we did it as a group playing a few bars of the Quintet over and over. We began to know our entrances and displacements, who we displaced and who displaced us. In that particular case we had a fine performance. It was in the 1950s with Robert Craft at the Los Angeles County Museum.
Not only was it the first time that we felt we had given a good performance, but it was the first time we felt a real appreciation of the work by the audience. The piece came alive and we enjoyed playing it. Before, in the 30s, it was a vehicle to startle and amaze since few would attempt it. Now groups like the Emanuel Quintet treat it like a work by Mozart, as it should be.
CL: What chamber music performances were there between the reading with Schonberg and the performance with Craft twenty years later?
DC: Well, we had a close association with Peter Yates, who formed the Evenings on the Roof concert series, and later Lawrence Morton, who eventually took over the organization of the Evenings series. When Peter left, it became the Monday Evening Concerts. With Lawrence, the Monday Evenings were the fountainhead of chamber music in southern California. It was a well-known series and probably the only source of consistently highquality performances. It was well attended by composers.
We read a lot of new music and a lot of very old - always the two extremes. We figured other groups would be taking care of the Romantic works and other repertoire. We wanted to do the unusual. Our concerts were always attended by every composer in town. Quite often we would expand our group to a larger ensemble, never wanting to limit it to just a woodwind quintet. Also, we needed to expand because the quintet literature, being extremely limited, wouldn't allow for very much variety. By being flexible, we would get to read works of many composers. When they'd come to town, we'd meet them. For example, when Elliott Carter visited, he was amazed to see our programs. He took the program lists back East. He said, "We've got to have something like this in the Boston area." He took the programs to Europe where they influenced the new music scene in Cologne, where Stockhausen was. The programming was a style-setter. You could call it adventurous.
CL: Did Stravinsky go to those early Evenings on the Roof concerts?
DC: Yes, I'm sure he saw this series as an ideal setting when he arrived. He got his first American hearings there. And then when Bob [Craft] came to Los Angeles - being brought here by Stravinsky from New York - our group gave him his first ensemble to conduct on one of the Evening Concerts. He programmed the Casella Septet and Suite after Corrette by Milhaud. Bob had become very close with Stravinsky starting with his New York debut where he performed Soldat and Reynard.
Later, during a rehearsal, Bob related to us a meeting after the performance of after Corrette where Stravinsky complimented Milhaud on his Corrette. Milhaud's response was "Igor, do you realize that's the first time you've ever said anything nice about my music?"
CL: So this group began playing Stravinsky's music?
DC: It was only natural that we would read many Stravinsky works with Bob. Always, with a new Stravinsky work and a first rehearsal, Stravinsky would appear with a score and read it while we rehearsed. This was true of many works by other composers. We got to do several premiers after these reading sessions. We read the Septet and the Three Songs after Shakespeare before they went to the publisher. We also premiered some early small pieces that he orchestrated, like the suite from his piano pieces, the Eight Instrumental Miniatures he dedicated to Lawrence Morton. Other pieces he dedicated to the Monday Evening Concerts.
I think we also read In Memoriam Dylan Thomas with Aldous Huxley listening. Huxley spoke about Dylan and for some reason talked about U.C.L.A. He was highly critical of the English teaching there. He read from some dissertations for examples and said, "God help the students." Then he read some poems of Dylan's.
We did other premiers of rewrites like the Four Russian Peasant Songs. Stravinsky added four horns to it. Marilyn Horne premiered it and my wife Pearl, a soprano in her own right, rounded up the women's chorus.
CL: Did you play l'Histoire du Soldat during this time?
DC: I probably did Soldat with Stravinsky more times than any man alive. When we were doing it, we used to get word to him and he'd come over for the rehearsal. He didn't get to hear the piece very much in those days. On one occasion, he came with composer Alexander Tansman. We had a marvelous evening with wine afterwards. We did the same thing later when he brought choreographer George Balanchine. Those were grand occasions. Later, when we got to rehearse with him conducting, he would frequently say he had had such a good time rehearsing that the performance would be anticlimactic.
Stravinsky always had interesting ways of getting the right sound out of the players. For example, in the opening of the Soldier's March, the bassoon has a repeated, dotted quarter, sixteenth, and quarter. After a couple of tries to get the right inflection, Stravinsky told me to play it as though I was saying, "What the heck. What the heck."
Many years later when we did it, it turned out to be within two or three months after Stravinsky's death. It was the first work of Stravinsky's played in Los Angeles after his death. Of course, we dedicated the performance to him.
You would have thought the Los Angeles Philharmonic would have been the first organization to honor his death, but it wasn't. It's part LA's history of treating its artists, I'm afraid. This city thinks nothing of having a special day to honor an athlete who will be forgotten tomorrow. However, for a man like Stravinsky who shakes the world and will be remembered as long as man is civilized, a man who is the envy of every city in the world - no honor.
The same thing happened after Schonberg's death. The first to honor him were the Austrians who came here and made a presentation from the consulate. As for causing embarassment to the city fathers, there was not the slightest ripple of conscious awareness that anything was amiss. Only thirteen mourners attended the funeral services in Westwood.
CL: How did you become active in the Ojai Festivals?
DC: The chamber group that did the Monday evening concerts became the nucleus of the orchestra at Ojai. Lawrence [Morton] asked us to assist in building orchestra personnel, and we did. The orchestra invited many prominent guests (Stravinsky especially) to come and conduct. We had many nice seasons there with Stravinsky, and later with Copland and Boulez. With John Bauer as the city representative and manager, Lawrence did an excellent job as impresario and attracted national attention. He became known as a premier programmer, honored the world over.
It is well known that programming is a delicate, difficult art. It has no relationship to who and how good a conductor is. It won't work with a conductor picking his favorite tunes.
When Stravinsky was on tour in Europe, he discovered many performers who would later become guests of the Ojai Festival. Stravinsky would phone back to Lawrence [Morton] and say that he had just heard a new performer who should come to Ojai. For example, when he said we must have Boulez, we got Boulez. When he heard Stockhausen do Gruppen, he said the audience reaction reminded him of Le Sacre's premier. He said we must have Stockhausen, and we did.
At the time, Boulez was conducting the pit orchestra in a production with Jean Louis Barrault, the mime in the film Children of Paradise. When Barrault was touring the States with Boulez conducting the ensemble, it was the time to capture Boulez for Ojai.
It's hard to believe that in his first conducting appearance in Los Angeles, Boulez was actually nervous and made rehearsal mistakes - for which he'd apologize. Nowadays a mistake by Boulez is unheard of, and his great accuracy has become a legend. But during this first occasion he managed to surprise himself.
These first Boulez concerts were the beginning of a friendship with Los Angeles that endures to this day. He was here in '84, and he'll probably come back and conduct again. He always had success here with unusual repertoire. He would do Ives' works when no one else would do them - and do them extremely well. His used to astound the orchestra with his solfegging of the violin parts.
CL: What chamber music were you doing at that time?
DC: There were performances of the Schonberg Quintet and the Stockhausen Zeitmasse. We recorded Zeitmasse for Columbia Records with Bob [Craft]. Bob was under a deadline pressure, and we probably didn't have as much preparation as we should have. Nevertheless, when Stockhausen, also an excellent conductor, came here to conduct the work himself, he announced that our recording had sold 10,000 copies in a matter of weeks. This was unheard of in classical and chamber music. It showed that the piece caught on.
CL: Did Stravinsky hear any of the rehearsals of the Stockhausen Zeitmasse or the Schonberg Quintet?
DC: Yes. When we began to do Zeitmasse, Stravinsky was there every day, four or five days in a row, and followed the score meticulously. On the final day, he brought out pictures that I had taken of him on previous occasions, autographed them all, and gave us each one. We knew he was very pleased because the usual requests for autographs annoyed him. We were well aware that Stravinsky and serialism were assumed to be mutually irreconcilable.
The County Museum presented us with opportunity to do the Schonberg Quintet. A performance I was telling you about earlier. I felt that it was the only time that we gave a performance that we were proud of - at least three of the four movements. When we began to work on the Schonberg, Stravinsky came to my home every day. At the end of the third rehearsal, when we took an intermission, he said, "That has to be the finest work ever written for this kind of combination, is it not?" Of course, we all said, "Yes, absolutely!" We were also shocked because we were hearing it openly for the first time.
On that particular day Bill Ulyate, who played with the Hollywood Saxophone Quartet, was substituting for our regular clarinetist. Bill was an excellent player, but more schooled in jazz. He didn't have the usual mannerisms of the total symphonic trained player. He said, "Mr. Stravinsky, how is it you only live a few miles from Mr. Schonberg and we never see you two together?" Stravinsky walked over and put his hand on Bill's shoulder and said, "You know, Bill, our mutual friends have protected us from each other."
CL: Did you also do chamber music with Boulez?
DC: It was later, when we did Stockhausen's quintet Zeitmasse with Boulez conducting. We had a dozen rehearsals with him right in my house. That performance was a revelation. He was meticulous about the bar lines. In some sections of Zeitmasse, the measures are different lengths for each player. Certain instruments are in strict time and others free within that period. He had all the parts in the score carefully marked out, the free one in blue pencil, the strict one in red, and so forth. We had a lot of freedom in doing it with him, and it made for an excellent performance.
It was performed at Ojai where chamber music, as well as orchestral repertoire, was done. That has been the customary policy of Ojai for years - one or two orchestra concerts and several chamber music concerts, always with soloists, sometimes vocal and sometimes instrumental. We did Persephone, the J. S. Bach Chorale Variations, and Oedipus several times with Stravinsky conducting. Later, many of us recorded Persephone and Firebird with Stravinsky for Columbia.
CL: With so many rehearsals in the house, how was your home life affected?
DC: Well, my son Peter, who now plays tenor sax in the Tonight Show band, was about twelve at that time. He and Stravinsky wou ld sit on the couch and listen. Because of listening to Soldat, his first instrument was violin. Later, when he took to jazz, my jazz colleagues told me the classical influence was obvious.
Occasionally, when Bob would bring Stravinsky, they'd drive a large Buick sedan. There would be a lot of cars to park in front of the house, and Peter would park the cars. Once my wife Pearl was coming up the long drive from the Bel Air front gate, and she saw this car coming down the hill with no driver. She wondered, "That's strange, no driver. " It turned out to be Peter crouched behind the wheel. Instead of parking Stravinsky's car, he went tooling down the hill. Needless to say, a wreck would have been an international incident.
My older son Tony was a first rate pianist having memorized two Mozart piano concertos by the age of ten. During his college days he studied composition with George Trembly, the noted Schonberg disciple. At the same time, he was a theater arts major at UCLA where he won a best actor award for his work in the plays of Moliere. However, of his various pursuits, his first love was sketching and painting as a teenager. He sketched portraits of Stravinsky trading his best examples for one done by Stravinsky's daughter.
I can't say enough about my wife Pearl who sacrificed a singing career to raise a family and keep some order in a home that had constant rehearsals of chamber music. It meant keeping a kitchen that never closed and having furniture with ever new cigarette burns. Of course, every room was cluttered with some piece of reed machinery.
Having photography as a hobby, I kept my darkroom busy on weekends. I have photojournal albums (kept for over 25 years) of Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, Franz Waxman, Boulez, Stockhausen, Aaron Copland, Rudolph Serkin, Oscar Hammerstein George Stevens, Rex Harrison, enough framed 11x14s to supply two Stravinsky symposiums, as well as a page or two in each of Robert Craft's Stravinsky biographies.
CL: These rehearsals at your home were in the early 50s - just as Stravinsky was starting to compose using twelve-tone technique.
DC: Yes, Stravinsky's very next work shortly after hearing the Schonberg Quintet was the Septet that has a five-tone row. We read through the manuscript at Peter Yates' home before it went to the publishers. Stravinsky was sitting on the couch with Lawrence Morton following the score. Stravinsky looked a little disturbed, but we were too far away to hear any of the conversation. Afterwards, I asked Lawrence "What was he saying to you?" Lawrence said: "You know what Stravinsky told me? 'This is fiercely tonal! ' " It is possible that the piece wasn't what he had hoped for.
Of course soon after that came the serial works. We did Canticum Sacrum and Agon. Although we didn't get to do the first performance of the Cantata, we did the second performance at UCLA.
It was interesting because all the serialists in town came to that performance. They couldn't extol Stravinsky's praises high enough after the concert. The next day they had second thoughts and believed they had been too generous. I personally believe they misunderstood his direction. Stravinsky was a constant source of embarrassment to younger composers in the LA circle. They seemed to want to stereotype him by saying that he was through innovating and approaching a decadent period so often referred to in music biographies. But Stravinsky always said, "I'm not going to do the Firebird yet another time. " Other composers at his age tend to give up their experimenting, but Stravinsky in his seventies was going one step farther every time he composed. It was not only a lesson, but a shock for a lot of people.
CL: In addition to being Stravinsky's assistant, was Craft actively bringing Stravinsky into contact with new music?
DC: Yes, we'd always known that after rehearsals Bob would return home to Stravinsky's house. He'd lay the scores on a table inside the door. The first thing the maestro would do would be to thumb through them to find out what Bob was doing that day. At first Bob was apprehensive to have so much twelve-tone music, but Stravinsky never showed anything but interest. You see some composers here knew about this interaction between Stravinsky and Bob, but we instrumentalists were just becoming aware of it. We knew that Bob had been presenting him with a barrage of new works. We'd play in Stravinsky's home or our homes, and every time there was something new he would be there.
We were playing old music too. For example, I was doing Mozart octets that I had read about in Alfred Einstein's catalog of unpublished manuscripts. I'd get copies of the scores from Einstein, copy out the parts, and do them. Once, I ran across a mention of the K. Anh. 226, 227, and 228. (At the time, Einstein thought Anh. 228 was spurious.) I wrote him, and being a man of great generosity, he sent me the manuscripts.
We performed these pieces with Craft. While we were rehearsing, Stravinsky came with Aldous Huxley to listen. They enjoyed it immensely, and during intermission Stravinsky ' talking with Aldous said, "You know, this is the rustic youthful Mozart." So we did "repremiers" - in other words first performances in the United States. Einstein was always grateful when we'd send the parts to him after a reading session. Later, I sent the material to Bill Waterhouse in London and it was published by Musica Rara.
At that time, I had copied out the canons for basset horns and voices. I also had some canons which the young Mozart and his father had written during the intermission of a concert of Minnesingers. They were much like the Bach Goldberg Variations - canons on each degree of the scale. We added words to them that referred to the fact that this was Minnesingers concert. Since the young Mozart was getting a lesson in harmony, we put that in the words too. We used singers and basset horns, and we based a concert around those canons for the Los Angeles County Museum.
Shortly after that, Bob had the score with him on a trip with Stravinsky. They were flying East for a concert. Stravinsky, while studying one of these Mozart scores, turned to Bob and said, "I think I found an error in voice leading. "
The Evenings on the Roof invited Pierre Boulez to do his Le Marteau sons Maitre in the States. Also, Karlheinz Stockhausen came to do his Zeitmasse and other works.
When Stockhausen came, I picked him up at the airport and loaned him my extra car. With the quintet for Zeitmasse, we had many rehearsals together and developed a warm friendship. One evening he said, "You know after this evening's lecture at UCLA, I'm going to be hosted by Lukas Foss. Boulez has warned me that I might be in for a night of music I don't want to hear, so pick me up after our dinner, about 8:30. Let's go to one of your drag races... "
Then he told me the story Boulez had told him: After dinner Lukas sat down at the piano and began to play his latest composition. Finishing, he said, "Well, you may not agree with the work, or even like it, but you'll have to agree that it's fresh. Do you not think so?" Boulez replied, "That's the stalest thing I ever heard. "
CL: Does the story end on that downward note?
DC: No, the story doesn't end here. Previously, by only a few months, we LA Woodwinds were recording Zeitmasse for Columbia with Robert Craft. Among the invited guests were Stravinsky, Ernst Krenek, Milton Babbitt and Lukas Foss. While others remained, Lukas lasted about ten minutes.
Next, Stockhausen in his lecture made the dramatic announcement that the symphony orchestra as we know it will, in 25 years, be a relic of the past, and the audience groaned. Several months later, I got frantic letters from my colleagues throughout the country saying that Lukas Foss had just been there and, after performing his Time Cycle, made the statement that the symphony orchestra was through. To make a long story short, Foss wound up with the Buffalo (New York) Symphony and his first guest performer and lecturer was Stockhausen who remained in Buffalo for an extended period.
The moral of the story: people change.
Charles Lipp is an active bassoonist-composer in Illinois. In addition to musical pursuits, his other career is writing technical documentation for computer software at Gould Computer System Division, Urbana, Illinois.