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The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and The Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience present the West Coast Premiere of Tod Machover's Opera Schoenberg in Hollywood
May 18, 19, 20 & 22, 2025
UCLA Nimoy Theater in Los Angeles
“A grandiose fantasy…ingeniously original music.”
The Wall Street Journal
“A composer biography like no other.”
The Boston Globe
Sunday, May 18, 2025, at 4:00PM
Monday, May 19, 2025, at 7:30PM
Tuesday, May 20, 2025, at 7:30PM
Thursday, May 22, 2025, at 7:30PM
UCLA NIMOY THEATRE, 1262 Westwood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA
More information: https://schoolofmusic.ucla.edu/schoenberg-in-hollywood/
Schoenberg in Hollywood explores the complex relationship between uncompromising art and mass appeal, and of whether—and how—art can change the world.
The opera begins with a meeting (one that did occur in history) between the legendary producer Irving G. Thalberg of Metro Goldwyn Mayer and the radical Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, who escaped the Nazis during World War II by fleeing to Los Angeles. Thalberg asks Schoenberg to compose music for a film based on Pearl S. Buck’s best-seller The Good Earth. The prospect of writing a Hollywood film score that would reach millions appealed to Schoenberg greatly, but when he demanded a $50,000 fee—an astronomical sum at the time—from Thalberg, he was not offered the job.
Schoenberg in Hollywood exploits—and explores—the hypothetical scenario of what would have happened if Schoenberg had indeed composed for Hollywood, and depicts the composer facing an identity crisis and looking back on various events in his life, played out in a pastiche of Hollywood film styles, including silent film and film noir.
Machover says, "Bringing Schoenberg in Hollywood to Los Angeles is like a dream fulfilled, as if the opera is coming 'home' to the city where Arnold Schoenberg arrived from so far away in 1934 and which he came to love so much. I have always found truly compelling and also very poignant how Schoenberg - the most uncompromising and “difficult" of composers - became increasingly devoted to using his music to inspire listeners to urgent action against the injustices and horrors unfolding in Old World Europe. Today, seven years after its premiere, the themes of the opera - persecution, exile, the importance of art in trying times - seem even more urgent. My wish is that these L.A. performances will be both thought-provoking and reaffirming at a moment when hope is in short supply."
The Los Angeles production is presented by the The Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience and the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. The cast and creative team includes English baritone Omar Ebrahim, who created the role of Schoenberg in the Boston production, and American director Karole Armitage, who directed the Boston premiere. Playing multiple supporting roles will be soprano Anna Davidson and tenor Jon Lee Keenan. The orchestra of 15 will be conducted by UCLA Director of Orchestral Studies and Milken Center Artistic Director Neal Stulberg, with electronics provided by the MIT Media Lab.
Schoenberg in Hollywood was premiered by Boston Lyric Opera in 2018 and given its European premiere by the Vienna Volksoper in 2022. The opera had its Asian premiere in 2023 at the Grand Theater of Longgang Cultural Center in Shenzhen, China. The opera is based on a scenario by the late Braham Murray with a libretto by Simon Robson.
Other operas by Tod Machover include the AI-infused VALIS (1987, revised 2023) based on the Philip K. Dick novel, which received a new production at MIT production last season at MIT, the audience-interactive Brain Opera (1996-1999), Skellig (2008) adapting the celebrated children’s book by David Almond, and the Pulitzer Prize-finalist Death and the Powers (2010), exploring whether technology can lead to immortality.
"Machover’s music always sounds like his own. Personal conviction, a rarity in so much contemporary opera, seems always at the center of this rangy, emotionally engaging score—never more so than at the very end when the music becomes a kaleidoscopic mash-up of lots of Schoenberg all at once."
-- Musical America
Machover, widely regarded as one of today’s most innovative composers, “has always chosen unconventional subject matter and has done so with an indomitable communicative urgency.” So said David Patrick Stearns in his Musical America review of Tod Machover’s Overstory Overture, which premiered in March 2023 at Lincoln Center and in Seoul, Korea, and which Machover is currently developing into a full-length opera. He spoke to The New York Times about the work before the premiere, and the performance in Seoul is available on YouTube.
As the impact of AI on music-making has taken hold in the public eye, Machover – who has been a pioneer in the interplay of AI and music for decades – speaks expertly about the need for human-centered systems, as he did in The Washington Post and Chamber Music Magazine; he and his team are currently building such AI music systems at the MIT Media Lab, some of which are featured in the new production of VALIS that premiered at MIT in the Fall of 2023.