Here, in this house, my musician friends came and we had our experiences imagining Arnold Schönberg living there, working.” The person who has those memories on a sunny February morning is Josep Maria Sans, a music lover, interior designer and retired gardener who knew the importance of the figure of Schönberg (Vienna, 1874-Los Angeles, 1951) and who in the eighties had the opportunity renting with his wife, Margarita Sagarra, the modernist house in which the composer lived during 1931-1932.
Eight key months in which he would advance in the unfinished Moses und Aron and in which his daughter Núria would be born, conveniently baptized with a Catalan name. The views of Barcelona with the sea in the background in this corner of Vallcarca were more spectacular in those years, now diminished on the right by a block of apartments from the Porcioles era. But you can recreate what Schönberg saw while he was composing the second act of his famous opera and his last piano piece, Opus 33b.
The devotion that Schönberg's figure aroused in Catalonia during his time in Barcelona goes beyond the complicity he wove with artists of the time, such as Robert Gerhard, who was a resident of Vallcarca, as was Juan Eduardo Cirlot, who, fascinated by his work, he dedicated various texts to him. In reality, and unlike the terrible fate that has befallen Enric Granados's house on Tibidabo Avenue, the modernist home in Baixada de Briz where Schönberg ended up by medical prescription - his asthma required him to travel south - and the rise of Nazism in Berlin, remains practically intact and in the hands of the family of music lover Sans.
His son Martí, who was born when his parents moved here, opens the door to La Vanguardia, already accustomed to visits from curious people. He has bought the house and, since he followed in his mother's professional footsteps, he cares for the place like the jewel that it is. “Do you see the railing that overlooks the garden? I have made it of iron, but I exactly reproduce the wooden original, and I have lifted the stones from the garden one by one and put them back.”
In the viewpoint, where Schönberg had placed the piano, there is now a colorful kitchen in which Selva, Martí's daughter, plays. The windows are the same. And the wind that sneaks in too, says Marina Rivadulla, the mother of the three-year-old girl.
In fact, it was the architect Salvador Valeri himself who gave it to the composer for the first time, nine decades ago. And, despite the harshness of that winter, the Schönberg family stayed longer than expected, enjoying the views of the sea and the garden that Arnold (Arnau, as they would say here) cultivated with the help of a neighbor.
It was still a decade and a half before Thomas Mann made him angry by turning him into his Adrian Leverkühn, the musician who in Doctor Faust sells his soul to the devil in exchange for transcending the history of musical creation. Because, after his time in Barcelona, it was impossible to return to Nazi Germany. And in his final exile in Los Angeles, Schönberg would share a Beverly Hills block with the then Nobel Prize winner in Literature, as well as with Stravinsky, Adorno and Hindemith. Adorno, very close to Schönberg's music, met with Mann and told him about the discoveries he made in his search for a musical language. The novel uses these interpretations of Adorno, but at no point did they include the devil in the process of writing the novel. The anger had to do with those ideas that were put in his mouth – there was no other composer who had invented a twelve-tone system! – And whose interpretation he did not necessarily share.
Devil or not, the Barcelona house still breathes a resounding magic..., which grows by the moment when Selva's mother confesses that the little girl was born on the same day as Núria Schönberg, May 7. Grandma Sagarra then takes out her scrapbook – “I used to save everything” – and shows the photos that were taken in this same garden when in 1985 the composer's daughter, married to Luigi Nono – whose centenary is celebrated this year – came to Barcelona for the premiere of Moses und Aron at the Liceu and visited the house of which it was impossible for him to have any memories, as well as the garden in whose pond, among palm trees that Schönberg enjoyed when he was much smaller, freshwater tortoises now coexist.
Thus, only two families have lived in this part of the house of a building shared with the Sallents: the Valeri themselves and the Sans-Sagarra. “The older owners didn't want to rent it to just anyone. "I heard it was available... look," she says, taking out a CD from among the clippings, "these people from the Kandinsky Trio also came to see it." They have a copy of Schönberg's letters that Turner published in 1987 and among those dated in Barcelona. In one he comments to Dr. Joseph Asch in New York that he would like to finish the third act of Moses und Aron...
For the 150th anniversary of his birth, which is celebrated this 2024, Taurus has released another volume about his life, his music and his importance today. It is titled Why Schönberg and, in it, Professor Harvey Sachs (Cleveland, 1946), author of biographies of Toscanini and Rubinstein, traces a history of the first half of the 20th century through the figure of Schönberg. He describes a man who was at war with the world, the young Jew who, when his father died, had to take a job in a bank, but he felt like a composer from very early on, willing to rebel against tradition and defy the critics of he. Also to the tyrant with whom his first wife had to live, to the unorthodox Jew who became Catholic, but who reclaimed Judaism when anti-Semitism raged, and who helped many to flee Nazi Europe.
Sachs talks about her disagreements, but not so much about her reconciliations. From the demonic episode with Mann, it stands out that Schönberg's main reason for anger was not musical but rather that the hero, the brilliant musician, was sick with syphilis (a symbol of Germany's destiny). As a result of which he was forced to add in later editions that “the method of composition (…) known as dodecaphonism is actually the intellectual property of a contemporary composer and theorist, Arnold Schönberg, and I have attributed it in an imaginary context to a fictional musician.” The author points out that Mann acknowledged his debt and that, through subsequent correspondence between the writer and the musician, we know of their reconciliation: in January 1950, Schönberg wrote Mann a letter proposing that they bury the hatchet, although, Out of respect for all the people who had supported them “in this fight”, before moving on to a stage of friendship they must go through another of “neutrality”. Mann responds that he is delighted.
Regarding the survival of his work, Sachs concludes that he has not projected himself into the future. “He saw himself as the next link in the extraordinary history of German music. And it is sad but the path ends in itself,” he says, in conversation with La Vanguardia. Would the same have happened in the 20th century, musically speaking? “Atonality was going to happen anyway.”
