Sifting the Ruins of Music’s History : ‘Everybody’s Loss’ to a Suspicious Fire

In the wake of the fire that destroyed the Ledler Building in Burbank, it’s hard to imagine that anything representing beauty and grace ever existed there.

Now it’s a mass of grotesquely twisted girders, collapsed walls, melted office equipment, shattered glass and towering black mounds of ruined documents. The stench of burnt wood and paper was so intense--weeks after the Jan. 24 fire--that clean-up crews sifting through the debris wore face masks.

But before the fire, which police believe was started by an arsonist, there once was a fragment of a workbook handwritten and signed by Beethoven, a first edition of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflote” and hundreds of letters written by prominent composers and opera stars, all stored in a small interior room of the blocklong building.

In nearby rooms were reportedly more than 2,500 opera scores from the 19th Century, some of which had notations written in them by their composers. There were file drawers crammed with signed pictures of opera greats, costumes worn in lavish productions and a collection of New York Metropolitan Opera programs spanning 1884-1982 and hundreds of live recordings and rare books.

The collection, which was uninsured, was neither the most historically significant nor most valuable in town--a doctor on the Westside has a significant collection of Verdi scores and a film composer has several important handwritten manuscripts, for example.

But local music lovers, dealers and collectors will long mourn its loss.

“In terms of money, it was not a great collection,” said Sarah Willen, a local dealer in antiquarian manuscripts and president of the Southern California chapter of the Manuscript Society.

“But it sounds as if it was absolutely marvelous. Just because it was not worth millions doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have loved to have seen it. Now we’ll never know just what those letters said, what that piece of music was of Beethoven’s. It’s everybody’s loss.”

The collection would have been of great interest to musicologists, had they only heard about it. Outside a close circle of friends of the late Lawrence E. Deutsch, who built the collection over a period of almost 20 years, few knew it existed until after the fire.

The collection was probably never meant for historians, anyway. It was not born of scholarship.

It was born of love.

“Look what I found!” shouted Jamie Rigler, 41, a Ledler employee who took interest in the collection, as he pulled a thick box out from a water-soaked pile of debris. He tore open the scorched cover and pealed away several layers of papers and partly melted records.

Finally, he pulled out a swatch of cloth.

“This is a piece of the curtain of the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York,” he explained.

A bit of curtain from a beloved opera house, a glove once worn by a famous soprano, a doodle made by Puccini--these were some of the items amassed and cherished by Deutsch, who died in 1977 at age 57.

According to Beverly Sills, who was one of Deutsch’s closest friends, he was not just a fan.

“He was not one of those opera nuts who run around collecting everything in sight,” said Sills, speaking from her home in New York. “He was incredibly knowledgeable. It was joy to spend an evening with him and talk shop, gossip a bit.

“Larry knew what he was talking about. And he was a lot of fun.”

Deutsch was not by trade a man of the arts. In 1949 he and his partner, Lloyd E. Rigler (Jamie Rigler’s uncle) took $1,500 borrowed from Deutsch’s grandmother and used it to start a business to introduce and market Adolph’s Meat Tenderizer.

The product, which was basically made of monosodium glutamate, was a huge hit and by 1955 the company’s founders had created the Ledler Foundation. Through it, Deutsch and Rigler funneled millions to arts organizations and other causes.

Some of their most substantial gifts went to opera. “With few exceptions, they were the single backers of the visits to Los Angeles by the New York City Opera,” said Sills, whose career is most closely tied to that company, both as a singer and administrator. NYCO had annual seasons at the Music Center from 1966 through 1982.

Deutsch himself gave lectures about opera through UCLA Extension and at meetings organized at the homes of friends. Sometimes these lectures were purely educational, some were fund-raisers.

“I remember one night over 20 years ago, after the lecture the hostess made the pitch for money,” said Bruce Bisenz, who had been hired by Deutsch to put together the taped music clips used in the lectures. He is now a film sound engineer.

“She announced that Mr. Deutsch had started the ball rolling with $100,000, which was a lot of money back then. You could hear a gasp go through the room.”

Through Deutsch’s active involvement in the opera world, he was able to begin his collection. “We helped fund the start of the archive at the Met,” said Lloyd Rigler, now 76. “And we arranged to buy programs through them for our own collection.”

By the time of his death, Deutsch had a complete copy of almost every Met program back to 1884. For most of the missing issues he had at least the cast page.

His collection was probably more complete than what the Met now has. “The entire 1910-1911 season is missing from our archive,” said Bob Tuggle, Met archive director. “That was the season Puccini’s ‘Fanciulla del West’ and Humperdinck’s ‘Konigskinder’ had their premieres.

“I don’t know if there are any other copies in the world.”

In 1969 local book dealer Theodore Front got word that a major collection of printed opera scores was available in Italy. “The collection was started by a singer who performed in many of Verdi’s premieres and then continued by four generations of his family,” said Front, who specializes in musical literature.

“The price was high, but I knew Mr. Deutsch was interested in opera, so I went to him.”

Records saved from the bottom of a desk show that Deutsch paid $48,500 for the 2,585 leather-bound scores. They included some of the earliest copies of works by the likes of Verdi, Rossini and Gluck, plus operas by composers who are now almost forgotten.

Sills made use of the collection. “Larry let me borrow some of the scores so that I could study them,” she said. “It is always valuable to go back to as near to the original as you can get. Over the years, scores get edited, changes are made, mistakes get in.

“By looking at these, you get a better idea of what the composer wanted.”

In 1970, Front arranged for Deutsch to buy the Mozart first edition “Die Zauberflote” for $1,260. It was one of Deutsch’s most prized items, his friends said.

Records show that in the 1970s Deutsch bought several lots of memorabilia at auctions in New York. Charles Hamilton, who oversaw several of those auctions, no longer has records to show what was in those lots but believes they were probably mostly letters and signed pictures.

Hamilton said he may have also sold Deutsch a glove in the collection that once belonged to famed Swedish soprano Jenny Lind.

“Jenny Lind liked to dress sumptuously,” Hamilton said. “She had more gloves than . . . Michael Jackson.”

None of the written records found in the building give clues as to where he obtained the Beethoven fragment, which Jamie Rigler describes as being about the size and shape of a business envelope.

“It had just a couple of staffs of music,” Rigler said. “It looked like he was fooling around with some musical idea.”

Although by far the most valuable item in the collection--dealers said it could be worth from $20,000 to $100,000, depending on the piece--the fragment is certainly not a one-of-a-kind item.

“There are about 8,000 of these leaves from Beethoven’s sketchbooks that have been found,” said Robert Winter, a UCLA professor and one of the authors of “The Beethoven Sketchbooks,” published in 1985.

“There are about another 2,000, we think, that are lost. It’s unfortunate that there was one right in my own city and I didn’t know about it until it was too late.”

Like most of the letters and other items in the collection, no known copies of the Beethoven fragment were ever made.

After Deutsch died, little was added to the memorabilia. Lloyd Rigler pursued his own interests in business and the arts. The insurance that specifically covered the collection was allowed to expire, Jamie Rigler said.

When Jamie Rigler went to work for the foundation in 1987, he began to comb through the collection. Just days before the fire, he and his uncle were talking about making it more available to scholars.

They asked Tony Clark, executive director of the Severin Wonderman museum in Irvine, which specializes in the works of Jean Cocteau, to help them in the preliminary stages.

“I was just there a few days before the fire,” Clark said. “It is so tragic. Part of the plan would have certainly been to make these materials more secure and to do an inventory.”