Toch Still Has Trouble Fitting In

Poor Ernst Toch. Among the major European composers to immigrate to Los Angeles in the 1930s, he seems to be the most forgotten. His music appears nowhere in the concerts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in conjunction with its “Made in California” exhibition, nor is he part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s or the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s related California programming.

Even with a small revival of interest in the composer on the East Coast and in Europe now beginning, forget about finding one of the recently released Toch CDs in the classical department of the large Virgin Records on Sunset Boulevard; all that could be discovered in the store with Toch’s music on a recent day was a video of the 1940s horror film “Dr. Cyclops.”

However, the Villa Aurora--where the popular German writer Lion Feuchtwanger once lived and where German and Austrian emigres, including Toch, often met--has made a small and important effort to recall the composer who never quite seemed to fit in. On Thursday night, a concert of cello and piano music celebrated the installation of the composer’s 1924 Bluthner baby grand piano in the Villa’s library (and lovely performing space).

On Saturday afternoon, the Villa--in the Pacific Palisades and now home to a foundation for European American relations sponsored by the German Foreign Office--continued the theme with a discussion about the emigre scene between Toch’s grandson, writer Lawrence Weschler, and Leonard Stein, the pianist and Schoenberg assistant who turned 84 on Friday. But as a further example of Toch’s continuing obscurity, the composer was hardly mentioned during the fascinating recollection of the antics, accomplishments, friendships and more often feuds in a community that included Schoenberg, Brecht, Adorno, Mann, Stravinsky and many others.

The tragedy of Toch would seem to be his inability to fit in after he fled Germany. Unlike Korngold and other more Romantically inclined German and Austrian emigre composers attracted to Hollywood, Toch was more modernist and only worked in film on occasion to help pay the bills. Yet, stylistically, he was never as modern as Schoenberg or Ernst Krenek, and hence, never as attention-getting. Nor did he fit comfortably into the academic community as did Ingolf Dahl.

Nevertheless, Toch’s obscurity is, perhaps, overrated. His grippingly Expressionist style proved invaluable in creating what became the standard creepy atmosphere of cinematic fear. Hollywood showed its appreciation with three Academy Award nominations. His Third Symphony, premiered in 1955 by the Pittsburgh Symphony, is a bold and powerful autobiographical work that includes in its extraordinary orchestration a garish Hammond organ and the disturbing hissing sound of carbon monoxide released from a tank. Nor did this symphony’s originality and forcefulness go unnoticed; it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize (an extremely unusual occurrence for music made in L.A.) and recorded by the Pittsburgh Symphony under William Steinberg. It is a major score awaiting rediscovery.

At Thursday’s concert, a clue or two was given about what makes Toch both a fascinating and difficult figure in California history. Its two main works, written in Berlin a year apart, were the Piano Sonata (1928) and Cello Sonata (1929), performed by cellist Steven Honigberg and pianist Kathryn Brake (who have recorded the Cello Sonata on a new CD). The Piano Sonata, dutifully played, sounded rhythmically predictable and harmonically conventional in the style of gray neoclassical German music of its time and period. The Cello Sonata, played with great ardor by Honigberg, is a rapturous work with a stunning central movement, an intermezzo titled “Spinning” that weaves a hypnotic melody through an ecstatically inventive web.

Unlike Schoenberg, Toch clearly did not write enduring work with nearly every piece. He is also a composer desperately in need of the championship of top performers--a compromised new recording of the Third Symphony shamelessly does not use an authentic Hammond organ. But mainly, what Toch needs now is an appropriate advocacy that can bring his best music before the public.

In a Saturday lecture-demonstration on Schoenberg, Stein demonstrated just what such advocacy can produce. He brought an arresting drama and depth of expression to Schoenberg’s Three Pieces, Opus 11, which he played on the Toch piano. (The instrument, recently rebuilt, sounded undernourished on the earlier Toch program but bloomed under Stein.) And in describing how the late Schoenberg String Trio (commandingly played by violinist Maiko Kawabata, violist David Walther and cellist William Skeen) was a reflection of the composer’s heart attack, Stein helped make this violent work seem all the more vivid and accessible.

Now it’s Toch’s turn.