City of Nets by Otto Friedrich Page A

Schoenberg to Sinatra.”
    These Hollywood musical encounters could reach a rather exalted level. Stravinsky had already gone to bed one night in July of 1942 when he heard a noise on the steps leading to his front door. He went to investigate and found himself confronting a tall and austere-looking man who apologized in Russian for the lateness of his visit but said he wanted to bring Stravinsky a jar of honey and to invite him to dinner. He promised that music would not be mentioned. Stravinsky naturally recognized his nocturnal visitor as the unmistakable Sergei Rachmaninoff, and accepted. If no music was discussed—it seems hard to believe—that was hardly the case when Vladimir Horowitz came to visit Rachmaninoff’s home shortly before the composer’s death in 1943. The two master pianists spent the evening—imagine the scene!—playing four-hand duets.
    The superb RCA Victor recordings of Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio and the Schubert B-flat came about largely because Arthur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifetz, and Emanuel Feuermann were all neighbors. “After those recordings . . .” Rubinstein recalled later, “the three of us, joined by other musicians, spent glorious days and nights playing chamber music.” Some of these occasions, though, were less distinguished. Oscar Levant, who had been studying desultorily with Schoenberg, wrote a piano concerto that Schoenberg thought might interest Otto Klemperer, another Berlin refugee, who had become the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. When they all met at one of Salka Viertel’s parties, Schoenberg urged Levant to perform his new work. “This was the opportunity that would have meant so much to me,” Levant confessed, “but my unpredictability and my quixotic impulse to undo myself resolved into a bad joke. I sat at the piano and played and sang ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling,’ and to this day I am perplexed by my own behavior. . . . To top it off, I asked Klemperer if he liked Beethoven.”
    Ben Hecht played the violin with amateur gusto, so he decided to organize what he called the Ben Hecht Symphonietta, which was to meet for concerts every Thursday night in Hecht’s hilltop home. He recruited a peculiar variety of talents. Charles MacArthur played the clarinet, and Harpo Marx the harp, but only in A major. George Antheil, the composer, was supposed to keep order of a sort on the piano. Groucho Marx wanted to join in, but the others decided that he was ineligible since the only instrument he could play was the mandolin, which the others considered beneath the dignity of the Ben Hecht Symphonietta. It was all partly a joke, but all chamber music players take their obsession seriously.
    On the night of the first rehearsal, in an upstairs room of Hecht’s house, the musicians had just started to play when someone began a loud banging on the door of their rehearsal room. The door suddenly flew open, and Groucho Marx appeared on the threshold.
    â€œQuiet, please!” he shouted, then disappeared again, slamming the door behind him.
    The assembled musicians looked at one another with some embarrassment. “Groucho’s jealous,” Harpo Marx explained. Hecht thought he had heard strange sounds downstairs, but the musicians all decided to ignore the interruption and let Groucho go his own way. They started playing again. Once again, there came a banging on the door. Once again, Groucho Marx appeared.
    â€œQuiet, you lousy amateurs!” he shouted.
    When the musicians still ignored him, Groucho turned and stamped down the stairs. Yet again, the musicians turned to their instruments. Then came a resounding orchestral flourish from below. It was the overture to Tannhäuser.
    â€œThunderstruck,” Antheil recalled, “we all crawled down the stairway to look. There was Groucho, directing with great batlike gestures, the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra.