As Europe’s artistic luminaries flocked to Los Angeles after Hitler came to power in 1933, they found themselves in a thriving, if sometimes incongruous, cultural landscape. Drawn by the climate, Hollywood industry and the promise of creative freedom, they purchased homes in Beverly Hills and on the mountainous lanes of Laurel Canyon. They rubbed shoulders with movie moguls and starlets. They learned how to drive and play tennis.
The writer Thomas Mann dubbed this environment ‘German California’. It was where composer Arnold Schoenberg and philosopher Theodor Adorno met up while grocery shopping, where Stravinsky discussed a film project on Charlie Chaplin’s patio, and where Rachmaninov applied his large hands to gardening.
Los Angeles musical tour: Brentwood
Arnold Schoenberg
116 North Rockingham Avenue
A faculty post at UCLA in 1936 prompted Arnold Schoenberg and his wife Gertrud to buy this Spanish revival house in leafy Brentwood, just across the street from the actress Shirley Temple. Musicians came from afar to study with the Austrian master, who hosted Sunday afternoon gatherings with Viennese pastries and performances from the Kolisch Quartet and pianist Artur Schnabel.
Schoenberg composed works including Kol Nidre and his Piano Concerto here, sometimes between rounds of tennis with George Gershwin and Harpo Marx. His athletic son Ronnie became a junior tennis champion and, to his father’s annoyance, the more famous Schoenberg at the local tennis club.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
12000 Saltair Place
In the decade that Esa-Pekka Salonen owned this airy, six-bedroom, five-and-a-half-bathroom house (pictured top), he added some touches from his native Finland including a sauna with a musical inscription from Sibelius’s Finlandia. Built in 1993 and designed by LA architect Ted Tanaka, the 4,700-square foot house provided a generous space for Salonen and his family during his directorship of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He sold the home in 2011 after accepting a post with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra.
Los Angeles musical tour: Beverly Hills
George Gershwin
1019 North Roxbury Drive (demolished)
Brothers George and Ira Gershwin rented a Spanish colonial revival house in 1936-37, having migrated west after the commercial failure of Porgy and Bess. Here, they focused on writing for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals; songs included ‘A Foggy Day,’ ‘Shall We Dance’ and ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’. The stately residence, with its pool, tennis court and chauffeur’s quarters, was built in 1928 for the silent film star Monte Blue and was later home to the singer Rosemary Clooney. Despite protests by preservationists and Gershwin admirers, new owners razed the house in 2005.
Alma Mahler
610 North Bedford Drive (demolished)
Alma Mahler and her third husband, Franz Werfel, moved into gold-plated Beverly Hills in 1940, a mark of the latter’s growing success as a playwright and author. In their lush garden, the couple hosted composers Schoenberg and Korngold, and conductors Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter, their next-door neighbour. Werfel died of a heart attack in 1945 and Mahler moved back to New York in 1951.
André Previn
304 S. Bedford Drive, 1454 Stone Canyon Road
The great conductor, composer and pianist André Previn and his family were exiles from Nazi Germany when they arrived in Los Angeles in 1938, and he would spend large stretches of his life in Beverly Hills. While still at Beverly Hills High School, Previn began working as an arranger and orchestrator at MGM and went on to compose more than 50 Hollywood scores. Previn was never drawn to trendy addresses, and told the New York Times in 1986 that he was appalled by the ‘geographical caste system’ of Los Angeles.
Sergei Rachmaninov
610 North Elm Drive
‘It’s true, I’ve bought a house,’ a frail Sergei Rachmaninov wrote to a friend in 1942, about his seventh and final home. ‘[It is] a small, neat house on a good residential street in Beverly Hills. It has a tiny garden with lots of flowers and several trees: an orange tree, a lemon and a nectarine.’
‘It has a tiny garden with lots of flowers and several trees: an orange tree, a lemon and a nectarine’
In the months before he officially moved in, Rachmaninov began planning a garden and planting a row of trees in the front for privacy. His time here was brief. But before his death in 1943, the composer played piano duets with neighbour Vladimir Horowitz and dined at the home of the Stravinskys.
Both Horowitz and Rachmaninov feature high in our rankings of the greatest pianists of all time.
Bruno Walter
608 North Bedford Drive
After a period of tragedy marked by the deaths of his daughter and wife, Bruno Walter moved into a five-bedroom home that became his base from 1945 until his death in 1962. Next door was Alma Mahler – whose late husband’s works he assiduously championed – and joining him were his surviving daughter, Lotte, and her husband, actor Karl Ludwig Lindt. Though slowing down after a heart attack in 1957, Walter continued to make recordings, some in a nearby studio with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra.
Los Angeles musical tour: West Hollywood, Laurel Canyon
Igor Stravinsky
1260 North Wetherly Drive
Up a twisting street from the Sunset Strip is a white stucco house where Igor and Vera Stravinsky settled from 1941 to ’63. The couple often socialised with other European émigrés (including neighbour Aldous Huxley) but their home itself was not designed to impress.
‘The composer’s desk was kept ‘in impeccable order’, complete with rows of coloured pencils’
One guest, conductor Georg Solti, remarked on the modest furniture and spartan study where the composer’s desk was kept ‘in impeccable order’, complete with rows of coloured pencils. While the home today is mostly shielded by a thick hedge, the alert passer-by can glimpse the birthplace of the Symphony in Three Movements, The Rake’s Progress and Agon.
Franz Waxman
8201 Mulholland Terrace
The Bride of Frankenstein, Rebecca and Sunset Boulevard were among the 144 film scores that Franz Waxman completed during his three-decade stay in Los Angeles. Many scores came to fruition in this house, set high in the Hollywood Hills with commanding views of the San Fernando Valley.
Guests, who included Shostakovich, described a studio stuffed with scores and books, Academy Award nominations, a piano, a large desk and a drafting table. The composer also contributed to the local music scene, managing and underwriting the Los Angeles Music Festival for nearly 20 years.
Los Angeles musical tour: Central Los Angeles
William Grant Still
1262 S Victoria Avenue
Soon after moving to Los Angeles in 1934, composer William Grant Still conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic, making him the first African American to conduct a major US orchestra. Five years later, he married pianist Verna Arvey and moved into this bungalow in the Oxford Square neighbourhood, where the couple raised two children. From his studio, Still juggled symphonic commissions with Hollywood studio projects – many uncredited. Two years before his death in 1978, the city of Los Angeles designated the home a historic-cultural monument.
- William Grant Still features in our list of African-American classical music pioneers
Los Angeles musical tour: Toluca Lake, Glendale
Erich Korngold
9936 Toluca Lake Avenue
Korngold moved into a three-bedroom house in the elite Toluca Lake development after accepting a position at Warner Bros in 1938. The waterfront house, formerly owned by actor Boris Karloff, was a short walk to the studio’s offices.
‘No one tells me what to do. I do not feel part of a factory’
‘I feel very happy as an artist here,’ he said. ‘No one tells me what to do. I do not feel part of a factory. I take part in story conferences, suggest changes in the editing when it is dramatically necessary to coincide with musical structure.’
John Cage
2708 Moss Avenue
As an LA native, John Cage moved frequently as a boy, but the one home that he remembered most fondly was a bungalow that his parents owned in the Eagle Rock neighbourhood near Glendale in the 1920s. Built ‘on an elevated lot’, it was ‘covered with vines and rose plants’, the composer later recalled. During this period, the young Cage began creating collage art projects, inspired by his grandfather’s wallpapering business.
Los Angeles musical tour: Palm Springs, Joshua Tree
Ernst Krenek
623 W Chino Canyon Road, Palm Springs
In 1966, when Palm Springs was a playground for the Rat Pack, Ernst Krenek and his wife Gladys moved from Los Angeles to this mid-century modern abode. Perched among cactuses and palm trees, the home offered views of the surrounding Coachella Valley and space for mementos of his native Austria: cookbooks, postcards and a small flag.
Krenek’s studio contained a Buchla synthesiser and tape-recording equipment while the den was dominated by a Bösendorfer grand piano. In a town where streets carry names such as ‘Frank Sinatra Drive’ and ‘Gene Autry Trail’, Krenek is honoured with a small plaque set against a collection of stones beside his former driveway.
Lou Harrison
6881 Mt Lassen Ave, Joshua Tree
Though long associated with Northern California, composer, critic and theorist Lou Harrison actually spent his final days in the mystical desert landscape near Joshua Tree National Park. An 84-year-old Harrison built his dream home here, a straw bale structure with a vaulted main room that functioned as a custom sound environment.
The composer died a year later, and the home was christened the Harrison House, a monument to his work in music and environmental activism. It is now home to the nonprofit Joshua Tree Foundation for Arts and Ecology, which offers classes and artist residencies.