An Emigre With a Case of Unrequited Love of U.S.

During his first tour of the western United States, in 1932, my grandfather, the eminent Weimar-era Austrian-Jewish composer Ernst Toch, used to convene news conferences before his concerts to urge his interlocutors, and through them a wider American public, to open their ears to new sounds. Don’t always be trying to force contemporary music into the old established mental compartments (classical, Baroque, Romantic and the like), he’d tell them; such insistence only ends up mangling the music and hurting your ears. Instead, patiently, attentively, allow the new music to build up its own organic compartments inside you, thereby adding immeasurably to the entire auditory experience.

Following one such passionate soliloquy, in Seattle, Toch opened the floor for questions, and one eager young reporter inquired as to his favorite food. Steak tartare, replied my grandfather, utterly naive. Utterly predictably, the banner headline atop his photograph in the next morning’s paper blared “EATS RAW MEAT.”

Ah, yes, the Americans of that era, especially those in the western hinterlands, were a bunch of barbarians, or so I assured an audience of Germans gathered in Frankfurt a few weeks ago for a daylong symposium-cum-concert series devoted entirely to Toch’s occluded legacy. In Berlin, the home he’d had to flee in 1933, four full-time orchestras had vied for attention year round; three full-bore opera houses vied for audiences every night. And Toch had been at the center of it all, his music regularly featured by all the chamber groups and orchestras (led by the likes of Klemperer, Furtwangler, Steinberg, Leinsdorf), his piano concerto premiered by Gieseking, his cello concerto performed more than 60 times by Feuermann, his “Geographical Fugue” launching the entire experimental form of spoken music (Weimar rap). From such energizing resonance he’d been forced into a Southern California exile characterized, above all else, by the passive indifference of the local audiences of the time.

Yes, I told the audience at the Frankfurt symposium, compared with you Germans, the Americans were a bunch of barbarians--but at least there they weren’t trying to kill him.

‘Forgotten Composer’

The comment was surprisingly well-received--the audience nodded gravely. But the fact that I felt compelled to make it at all reflects a grave ambivalence I myself often feel whenever I address German audiences about my grandfather (as the heebie-jeebies start welling up inside me, unbidden), and which, curiously, turns out to constitute the converse of an ambivalence my grandfather himself seems to have felt during his lifetime.

For although he did make a home for himself here in California--he taught privately and at USC and scored for Hollywood (receiving three Academy Award nominations) before going on to an astonishing regeneration of his own creative impulse during the 20 years before his death in 1964 (including seven symphonies, an opera and countless further chamber works)--he never regained that mid-career sense of a resonant audience. Although his Third Symphony was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, his work was rarely performed, especially here in Los Angeles, and dying, he deemed himself “the world’s most forgotten composer.”

“To the country which gave me shelter when shelter was taken from me, I dedicate this book in everlasting gratitude,” Toch recorded at the outset of his 1948 book, “The Shaping Forces in Music: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Harmony, Melody, Counterpoint and Form.” “I wish that I could convey that this dedication is not a mere gesture.” And his love for America, and for his Santa Monica home and neighbors, was heartfelt.

But his musical wellsprings remained resolutely German. The inspiration he drew from the Germanic cultural tradition (entirely self-taught, he’d mastered composition as a child by secretly copying out pocket scores of works by Bach and Mozart, whom he revered) was the great heartbroken romance of his life. (In this he was hardly unique: perhaps no one idolized Germanic culture as much as a certain class of German Jews, even in exile, even on the way to the crematoriums. Toch’s wife, my grandmother Lilly, spent part of the war years at UCLA working on a thesis proving Nietzsche had not been responsible for Nazism: a classically German-Jewish thing to do.)

Despite the fact that Toch had lost more than half his relatives to the Holocaust, when his creative juices once again began flowing, following the war, he repeatedly had recourse to Germanic mottos for his new pieces.

“To see the sunlight through tears,” he scrawled at the head of his String Quartet, Opus 70 (1946), quoting the German romantic poet Eduard Moerike. Shortly thereafter, following a devastating heart attack, he returned for several months to war-ravaged Vienna of all places (the town of his birth, to be sure, but the birthplace as well of much of the most virulent modern Germanic anti-Semitism) to recover and resume his career in earnest with his First Symphony (1949), to which he affixed a motto from Martin Luther of all people--”Although the world with devils filled should threaten to undo us / We will not fear, for God has willed his Truth to triumph through us.” (Luther, of course, had been a raving anti-Semite, and one perhaps shouldn’t spend too much time pondering the precise identity of the devils in that passage.)

Toch dedicated his Second Symphony (1951) to Albert Schweitzer--the archetypal Good German of that era, and a great Bach scholar to boot--assigning it a motto from the Bible (Jacob, wrestling with the angel: “I will not let Thee go except Thou blest me”), which, when he subsequently sent the manuscript to Schweitzer, turned out to be a signature passage for the latter as well. And to his Third Symphony he affixed a motto from Goethe--”Of course I am a wanderer, a pilgrim on this earth, but can you say that you are anything more?”--thereby somehow managing to meld both the German classical and the wandering Jewish traditions.

And it is in turn not that surprising, just recently, that the longed-for renewal of interest in Toch’s work--something I have been working and working and working for, pretty much haplessly, for decades, and which now seems to be happening all by itself--appears to be welling out of a Germany suddenly avid for a sense of its own lost and squandered tradition.

Toch’s final opera, “Sheherazade: The Last Tale” at last received its premiere there a few years ago, and now this Frankfurt symposium. Eight new Toch CDs have been issued this year alone (including major compilations of symphonies, chamber pieces, cello pieces and works for piano solo), with a survey of all eight of his string quartets in the works for the next couple years, along with a recording of his Passover “Cantata of the Bitter Herbs” (composed in Southern California at the very moment of Hitler’s Anschluss of his native Austria). And most of these are coming out of Germany.

So perhaps the heart is on the mend, in however limited a fashion. Still, it would be nice if Southern California as well (the site of his archive at UCLA) could finally open its arms to this trove of largely home-grown music. It’s exasperating to always have to be going to Germany to hear that Third Symphony, for example. Enough already with the raw meat.

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Lawrence Weschler is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author, most recently, of “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders,” “Calamities of Exile” and “Boggs: A Comedy of Values.” The Toch archive at UCLA can be accessed online at https://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/music/mlsc/toch/.