George Rochberg, American Composer

Front matter

- AMERICAN COMPOSER -

Amy Lynn Wlodarski

American Composer

Introduction

1 Second Lieutenant Aaron G. Rochberg: 1938-48 2 The Long Road to Ars Combinatoria: 1943-63

3 Entropic Suffering and Ars Combinatoria: 1962-70 4 Jewish Secularism as Ars Combinatoria: 1954-87

Afterword: On Trauma, Moral Injuries, and Aesthetic Recoveries

Notes

Index of George Rochberg’s Musical Compositions

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100 120 148 163 213 225

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3.2

3.3 3.4

3.5

3.6

1.1

3:1 4.1 5.1

Illustrations

Examples

Rochberg, “261st Infantry Song” (1943)

Rochberg, “March of the Halberds (the 261st Infantry March)” (1943)

Rochberg, “Song of the Doughboy” (1944)

Rochberg, “Lullaby for Paul” (1944)

Rochberg, “Waltz/Piano Music for Paul” (1944)

Rochberg, “Cacophony” (1944)

Rochberg, Sonatina (1945), first movement, mm. 54—65 Rochberg, Sonatina (1945), first movement, mm. 144—end Rochberg, Motet (1946), mvt. 1, mm. 1-21

Prime form of the twelve-tone row for the Twelve Bagatelles (1952) Rochberg, Twelve Bagatelles (1952), Bagatelle no. 4, mm. 18-34 Rochberg, Twelve Bagatelles (1952), Bagatelle no. 5, mm. 10-14 Rochberg, Twelve Bagatelles (1952), Bagatelle no. 6, closing measures Rochberg, “Passions According to the Twentieth Century” (1967), first movement, m. 1

Rochberg, “Passions According to the Twentieth Century” (1967), second movement, m. 8

Rochberg, Third Symphony (1969), mm. 7-8

Rochberg, “Passions According to the Twentieth Century” (1967), third movement, p. 57

Rochberg, “Passions According to the Twentieth Century” (1967), third movement, p. 60

Rochberg, “Passions According to the Twentieth Century” (1967), third movement, p. 66

Figures

Photograph of Rochberg in his United States Army infantry uniform (ca. 1943)

Diagram from Rochberg’s journal, August 1, 1963

ELOHIM hexachord for proposed fantasia for violin and piano Photograph of Rochberg at the University of Pennsylvania, ca. 1961, with Stephen Albert

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90 92 xX %& ILLUSTRATIONS

Tables 2.1 Serial organization of Twelve Bagatelles (1952) 53 3.1 Final three-movement organization of “Passions According to the 82 Twentieth Century” (1967) 3.2 Rochberg’s three “compositional clusters” in the “Passions According 85 to the Twentieth Century” (1967) 4.1 Textual and hexachordal structures in David the Psalmist (1954) 107

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Acknowledgments

Funding for this project was generously provided by a series of grants from the Paul Sacher Stiftung, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Dickinson College Research and Development Committee. I am also grateful to Dickinson College for publication subventions associated with this project and to Ben Sweger and Glen Peterman in the Sponsored Projects Office for helping me prepare and revise external grant applications.

The entire staff at the Paul Sacher Stiftung deserves my deepest gratitude; you were my family for a year—thank you for welcoming me so warmly. I especially wish to thank Felix Meyer, Heidy Zimmerman, and Tina Kilvio Tischer (to whom this book is lovingly dedicated). Thank you also to the staff at the New York Public Library Performing Arts Division; J. J. Ahern and Timothy Horning at the University of Pennsylvania Archives; Chad Daniels (museum director) at Camp Shelby, Mississippi; Anne Rhodes at the Oral History of American Music Archive, Yale University; Scott Schwartz at the University of Illinois Archives; Lee Anne Tuason at the Julliard School Archives; and Eric Van Slander at the National Archives. Thanks also to Veit Arlt at the University of Basel for hosting my family so graciously during our year in Switzerland.

Sonia Kane and Ralph Locke of the University of Rochester Press believed in this project from the beginning, and I am grateful to them both for their guidance and ideas. Thank you to Julia Cook, Tracey Engel, and Cheryl Carnahan for their help with the final stages of preparation and to my anonymous reviewers for their pointed and spot-on advice about how to improve the manuscript. I am in your debt. Thank you to David Czyz and David Glasgow for helping to engrave the musical examples and to Ann Folger who provided key bibliographic support. Individuals at the Dickinson College Library also helped with challenging interlibrary loan requests (even when I was abroad); I would be remiss not to mention Kirk Doran specifically for his help with seemingly impossible research requests. I am also grateful to Kate Brett from Cambridge University Press, who provided sound counsel at a pivotal moment in the process.

The following individuals provided permission to publish copyrighted archival material or correspondence that appears in this book: Mimi Adam (Alexander Ringer); Marilyn Albert (Stephen Albert); Byron Au Yong; William

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Bolcom; Robert Carl; George Crumb; Betty Anne Dugan (Milton Babbitt); Jon Forshee; Jeremy Gill; Stephen Hartke; Martin Herman; Stephen Jaffe; Shirley Perle (George Perle); Jim Primosch; Francesca Rochberg (George and Gene Rochberg); Michael Alex Rose; and Greg Wilder. A version of chapter two appeared in shortened form as “George Rochberg’s Road to Ars Combinatoria, 1943-63,” Journal of the Society of American Music 12 (2018): 119-50. A short excerpt from chapter four appeared as “George Rochberg as Secular Kabbalist,” Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 31 (2018): 49-53.

Stimulating conversations with colleagues also fed the pages of this book. Thank you to Abby Anderton, Andrea Bohlman, Joy Calico, Hermann Danauser, Sabine Feisst, Jeremy Gill, Loren Kajikawa, John Kapusta, Nitsa Kann, Andrea Lieber, Marie Sumner Lott, David Metzer, Laura Mockli, Wendy Moffat, Brett Pearson, Karl Qualls, Wei Ren, Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Anne Shreffler, Martha Sprigge, and Steve Swayne. Two scholars deserve specific mention for their critical reading of large portions of this manuscript: Elise Bartosik-Velez and Lily Hirsch. I am so grateful for our friendships and collaborations—you both make me a better scholar and a happier person.

Thank you to my parents, Fred and Terri Wlodarski, for their continued support of my career and for letting me and my family live with them one summer when we were between sabbatical residences. I would never have found my way through the afterword without the help of my sister, Jennifer Wlodarski, MD, who helped me make sense of the technical language surrounding moral injury and provided excellent insight into the psychological suffering of war veterans. Thank you to Julie Ball for helping us place our children in such supportive educational settings and to the Swiss International School and the Bilingual Kids Academy for providing safe and loving communities for them. Thank you to Kathy Abbott, Sandra Alfers, Angela Baade, Erin Brenner, and Heather Champion for being the lifelong friends one always hopes for and rarely finds. Your emotional support during this project was more important than you might have realized.

Family was at the heart of this project, and it would not have come to fruition without the charity they showed me. I am indebted beyond words to Francesca (Chessie) Rochberg for allowing me unrestricted access to her father’s diaries, letters, papers, photographs, and scores. I am also deeply humbled to have met with Rochberg’s widow, Gene, only a few years before she passed away. Our conversation about love, loss, and music on a beautiful summer afternoon is one I will never forget. Finally, to my family, without whom I would have no purpose. Benjamin and Ellie, you are the two most loving children a working parent could hope for. I love exploring and learning about this world with both of you. And in words too small to convey their expanse, thanks to Jeremy for realizing how much this project meant to me and coming along on the adventure as a friend and partner-in-arms. I love you so very much.

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POW PTSD SGR-PSS

UPenn V-E Day VPP-NYPL WSP-NYPL WWII

Abbreviations

American Broadcasting Station in Europe

artificial intelligence

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome

American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers American Society of University Composers

British Broadcasting Corporation

Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (Bach Works Index)

initial Allied invasion of Northern France (June 6, 1944)

Doctor of Musical Arts degree

“Government Issue”; shorthand for an enlisted soldier in the United States Army

George Rochberg Papers, New York Public Library, New York, NY George Rochberg Papers—Additions, New York Public Library, New York, NY

individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/ or queer

Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart

Officer Candidate School, United States Army

Oral History of American Music, Yale University, New Haven, CT Office of War Information, United States Military

Doctor of Philosophy degree

prisoner of war

post-traumatic stress disorder

Sammlung George Rochberg, Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, Switzerland

Victory Europe Day (May 8, 1945)

Vincent Persichetti Papers, New York Public Library, New York, NY William Schuman Papers, New York Public Library, New York, NY World War II

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This book is available under the Open Access license CC BY-NC-ND. Funding Body: The National Endowment for the Humanities

Introduction

The war years were much more than an interruption in my musical studies. They taught me what art really meant because I learned what life really meant. The war shaped my psyche. . . . I came to grips with my own time.

In 1984, George Rochberg dashed off an irritated letter to his friend, the Canadian composer Istvan Anhalt, about the Ronald Reagan presidency (“so many small people, luft menschen”) and a film he had recently viewed: “I saw an 1% hour documentary of World War I . . . which stunned me with the utter stupidity of what we so euphemistically always refer to as ‘mankind.’ Such pride, arrogance, wrong-headedness, lack of understanding, brutality; such unwillingness on all sides to let go of all the falsities that govern men’s behavior when they are in positions of power and authority.” As he wrote to Anhalt with some vigor, “Stick a uniform on someone, give him a high-sounding title, tell him the fate of the country . . . depends on him—and suddenly everything that is possible to imagine that is against humanity emerges.”! Rochberg’s commentary was not unusual for the time; ruminations about totalitarianism and the uncritical participation of Americans in their government were common, in part because the year of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 had finally come. Published in 1949, the book had posed serious postwar questions about how governmental control over messaging could “invade and destroy . . . relationships: children’s belief in their parents; close friendships; the love between a man and a woman.”? Indeed, Rochberg had always seen a connection between the memory holes of “Orwell’s monsters” and the Nazi propaganda machine run by Joseph Goebbels.’ “When language no longer reflects reality,” he wrote in his journal on New Year’s Day, “it becomes a tool of propagandists ... and a means not only for deluding others but oneself as well.”4

Rochberg was speaking not only as a cultural critic but also as someone whose life experiences and human relationships had been impacted by the political implications of mid-century nationalist rhetoric—whether Hitler’s fascist decrees or Roosevelt’s description of the attack on Pearl Harbor as a

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“day that will live in infamy.” In response to these global events, Rochberg was drafted into the United States Army and fought in the European theater as a second lieutenant in the infantry. The experience was life-changing, as he candidly shared with an unlikely confident, the conservative political theorist and Reagan staffer Robert R. Reilly: “Somewhere around the late 1940s [or] early 50s, I began to realize that this confrontation with death had been probably the most potent experience in my life up to that point. I had been severely wounded at one stage. I recovered and was sent back to the front. As the years passed, I began to realize that this was really an incredible thing.” Only these most basic details of his service surface in the literature, primarily because Rochberg was famously tight-lipped about his war narrative; as he cautioned Reilly at the onset of the interview, “I rarely talk about my experiences in the war.”6

Rochberg’s reticence to share his World War II experience has created an Orwellian “memory hole” in the composer’s accounts of his career, although it is unclear if the narrative gap is the result of deliberate autobiographical revision or avoidance of a traumatic period of his life.’ In interviews, he often glosses over the war (unless asked pointedly about his experience) or briefly touches on his service before pivoting to what he considered his greater legacy: the recovery of music from the threat of modernism. Even in the composer’s posthumous autobiography, Five Lines, Four Spaces (2009), his time in the army becomes reduced to a shadowy graphic on the page, an extended gray field that could be interpreted along myriad lines: a foggy blackout, a visual scar, a dividing wall, a self-imposed silence.® On one side stands the young student Rochberg (“I was drafted into the army in 1942”) and on the other side, the veteran composer reemerges from the foxhole (“In July 1945, after three long years in the army, I returned home”) a

External agents have also facilitated the war’s narratological sidelining by interpreting Rochberg’s war service as tangential to his postwar creative life. For example, the 2001 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians relays basic information about Rochberg’s early studies and primary teachers at the Mannes School of Music (1939-42) and the Curtis Institute of Music (1945-47), separating the two formative periods with a brief transitional phrase: “War service interrupted his studies.”!9 Alexander Ringer’s detailed evaluation of Rochberg’s early career—to date, the most extensive treatment of his pre-1965 compositional corpus—provides a small measure of additional information based on personal correspondence with the composer. Ringer notes that the “deep emotional scars left by the war had by no means healed when the former infantry lieutenant returned to Europe [in 1950-51] to take stock of himself in relative peace and quiet” during a residency at the American Academy of Rome.!! Most musicological accounts since Ringer’s have followed suit by either ignoring his wartime experience altogether or mentioning it only

This book is available under the Open Access license CC BY-NC-ND. Funding Body: The National Endowment for the Humanities as a curious piece of trivia. Instead, authors generally move quickly through his serial period (1952-63) to emphasize another tragic moment in the composer’s life—the premature death of his twenty-year-old son, Paul, in 1964—which is almost unanimously interpreted as the event that “prompted the composer to discard serialism” and embrace postmodern citation as a valid compositional technique. !* This touching narrative remains one of the cornerstones of the composer’s humanistic legacy, a story that is both deeply heartbreaking and emotionally relatable.

After his death, this compassionate portrait of Rochberg’s work was maintained by one of the few people with firsthand knowledge of his inner emotional life: his wife, Gene, who passed away in 2016. Throughout her life, Gene was a dedicated champion of her husband’s music and intellectual work, a devotion that continued well after the composer’s death in 2005. In the time that followed, she spearheaded the posthumous publication of Five Lines, Four Spaces, including sending the manuscript to academic presses for consideration, overseeing the editorial process, and writing the introduction. She also pursued the publication of Rochberg’s final intellectual project—a thousandpage scholarly treatise on chromaticism, published in an abridged version as A Dance of Polar Opposites (2012)—a venture to which she contributed her opinion on everything from content to title. In rare moments, she gave interviews about her husband’s life, and I was privileged to have met with her in 2013. During our first visit, she freely answered questions about Rochberg’s wartime service, but the letter I received the following week suggested that perhaps it was a fruitless line of inquiry: ““The war’ is quite another story quite by itself,” she asserted.!%

This book represents my attempt to tell that “other” story and to integrate it meaningfully into Rochberg’s artistic biography. It also represents the first critical study devoted to contextualizing and tracing the broader arc of Rochberg’s career, including his work as a leading American composer, public intellectual, and college educator. The past few decades have witnessed renewed attention to Rochberg’s music—in part as a result of the arrival of his centenary in 2018— but musicological focus has generally remained limited to a ten-year period (1964-74) that corresponds with his “postmodern turn” to ars combinatoria, a compositional philosophy that encourages overt references to “music of the past” as a means of reconnecting with a premodern, humanistic basis for musical expression. This study significantly expands that scope of inquiry by examining the earliest roots of his aesthetic thinking—hatched while serving as an infantryman in Patton’s Third Army—and following their threads through his mature compositional period into the final stages of his long career. In doing so, I assert that Rochberg’s military service was a transformative life experience for the young humanist, one that crucially shaped his worldview and impacted his aesthetic thinking for the next sixty years of his life.

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Drafted into the war in 1942, Rochberg was forced to interrupt his compo-

sitional studies to begin basic training. He found its exhaustive and at times dehumanizing conditions antithetical to the creation of music, noting in several letters to Gene that he was afraid of the emotional consequences military service would have on his development and success. Rochberg was not the first young composer to have suffered such fears; in 1918, the Austrian composer Alban Berg wrote to his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, with similar dismay that World War I had resulted in “three years stolen from the best years of my life, totally, irretrievably lost.”!4 Nor was his anxiety singular in the specific context of World War II. Illustrative of the concerns of the time was a 1942 essay in the journal Modern Music, which advised enlisted composers to “make their abilities known as early as possible in their Army careers and, during training, to be as good soldiers as possible.” 15 The impact of such advice was mixed, even for composers with well-established reputations in the 1940s. Barbara Heyman explains that Samuel Barber’s “low appetite for military duty” was influenced not by a “lack of patriotism but rather out of a desire to continue writing music,” a pursuit he found nearly impossible during his active administrative service with the Second Service Command of Special Services.!® Others parlayed their established careers into fruitful creative work for the armed forces. During his active duty with the US Army Eighth Air Force Division, Marc Blitzstein scored documentaries for the Office of War Information (OWI) and served as music director of the American Broadcasting Station in Europe (ABSIE). In some cases, documented medical conditions exempted individuals from active duty, allowing contemporaries of Rochberg such as Leonard Bernstein and William Schuman to remain musically active on the home front.!”

As these limited examples remind us, the personal experiences of modern warfare were as diverse as the musicians who encountered it; but for those who experienced active combat on the battlefield, its effects had direct physical and psychological consequences that stayed with them for a lifetime. Unlike the composers profiled above, Rochberg was among these directly impacted veterans, and yet most scholarly treatments of his life provide only a skeletal account of his tour of duty: that he was deployed shortly after D-Day, wounded, redeployed, wounded again, and then honorably discharged at the close of the war. But such vague details tell us little about the significance of the war on Rochberg’s creative work. They only situate his activities within a general sea of statistical knowledge: that he was one of nearly eight million soldiers serving in the army in 1944, that he was among the nearly 325,000 US troops who landed on the beaches of Normandy by June 11 (D+5), that his injuries were attended to by field doctors who treated over 380,000 casualties in the European theater alone, that he served less than the average time a typical recruit spent overseas (sixteen months versus Rochberg’s twelve), and that his approximately 250

This book is available under the Open Access license CC BY-NC-ND. Funding Body: The National Endowment for the Humanities days in the operational field suggests he was at risk for developing severe posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).!8

The fleshing out of Rochberg’s unique experiences and their significance to his musical career required me to locate specific details and personal reflections from a variety of sources and integrate them into broader historical and cultural contexts for his thoughts, actions, and compositions. The tale that unfolds was therefore stitched together from bits and pieces—a quality the collagist composer might have found amusing—drawn from published interviews, oral histories, unpublished correspondence, love letters, military documents and maps, music sketchbooks, marginalia, and scraps of papers strewn throughout two continents. Bound together, they form the first coherent narration of Rochberg’s war story and provide a biographical prelude to his first two significant style periods—his embrace of serialism in the 1950s and his later turn to ars combinatoria in the mid-1960s—that lends insight into the traumatic backdrop from which his deep and abiding ideas about art, love, and humanity ultimately emerged. Connecting the war to Rochberg’s emerging ideas about musical humanism also provides an unexplored context for the significance and impact of his son’s death in his biography. As he noted in one interview, Paul’s death—generally recognized as the personal catalyst for ars combinatoria—had ultimately taught him something he had already experienced “during

2, 66 the war, but not that deeply yet”: “[It] confirmed in me all kinds of tendencies that had been there, and I could only give expression to them in my music.”!9 Rochberg’s combinatorial method earned him a host of critical detractors who characterized him as a plagiarist and a neo-conservative, but others saw in his music a courageous attempt to confront the consequences of modernism. Such heroic language appears in the Oxford History of Western Music, in which Richard Taruskin characterizes the composer as facing a noble but impossible mission: “Rochberg’s quest to regain the full range of sincere emotional expression that had been available to artists (and other humans) before the horrors of the twentieth century is thus doomed to failure; but the failure is noble, because it faces the unhappy truth of contemporary life rather than retreating, as modernism had done, into a self-satisfied, self-induced (and socially isolating) delusion.”2° Rochberg also portrayed his artistic struggle in intrepid terms, contending that the restoration of the postwar musical landscape would only be achieved by composers with moral fortitude and self-reliance who “depend entirely on their own taste, their own range of musical experience” and thereby allow “sensory order [to take] precedence over external logic and methodology.”?! As he argued in 1944, an artist “needs a special and unique courage—not the courage of the battlefield, but a longer-lasting courage with which to overcome indifference, lack of understanding, and the very problem of physical existence itself. . . . [His] victory [is] proof that man is capable of forgetting himself in service to the [human] race.”22

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Rochberg once famously described his ars combinatoria as “standing in a circle of time, not a line,” noting that such a perspective allowed for “movement »23 in any direction” so long as one could “keep your balance. chapter of this book traces the course of a thematic radius—sometimes with

Similarly, each overlapping chronology but representing independent strands of thought— to evaluate the impact of World War II on various aspects of Rochberg’s creative and intellectual work. Chapter one begins with a reconstructed account of Rochberg’s war experiences, with specific attention to the impact of the war on his musical education and earliest compositional efforts. Music served many roles for the aspiring composer during this time, providing him with a way to cope with the trauma around him and remain emotionally connected to his family and his craft. He also encountered a rich array of musical materials that stimulated his imagination and intellect in ways that would last throughout his lifetime.?4 The chapter ends with his return to the home front and his struggle to find a musical voice capable of reflecting the trauma he had just experienced.

After the war, 1969 emerges as a crucial year in terms of his creative and intellectual output, and the internal chapters circle around it to contextualize works from his corpus that reflect his postwar humanistic thinking. Chapter two begins with an exploration of the essay “No Center” (1969)—Rochberg’s most explicit and poetic description of ars combinatoria—and then moves back in time to trace the seeds of its anti-modernist leanings from the personal discontent of his serialist period (1952-63). In chapter three I detail the composition of his first large-scale combinatorial work, the Symphony no. 3 (1969), and argue that Rochberg intended it as a pointed postwar commentary on the destructive consequences of the war and the lingering impact of fascism on postwar aesthetics. The symphony contains several stylistic references to an unpublished Holocaust lament Rochberg completed in 1967, the “Passions According to the Twentieth Century,” and thus might be read itself as a piece of secondary musical witness that portrays the war’s Jewish victims through musical symbols.?° Rochberg’s musical response to the Holocaust moves the narrative forward to chapter four, in which I consider his shifting and complex postwar relationship to Judaism and identify his evolving interest in Kabbalah as a possible mystical foundation for both ars combinatoria and his essay “The Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics of Survival” (1969).

The final section of the book is concerned with moral aspects of Rochberg’s career, reflecting both affirming and dissenting portraits of the composer’s vision of an aesthetic recovery for twentieth-century culture. Chapter five examines his long teaching career and draws heavily from interviews and firsthand accounts provided by his former students, many of them well-known figures in American art music. Through their memories, a complex portrait of Rochberg emerges that testifies to the moral and aesthetic impact of his work on nearly

This book is available under the Open Access license CC BY-NC-ND. Funding Body: The National Endowment for the Humanities three generations of postwar American composers while also recognizing his human faults and weaknesses. An afterword looks broadly at the concept of aesthetic recovery in Rochberg’s discourse and hermeneutically connects it to recent revelations about moral injury and trauma in the field of war psychology. This final section also contends directly with humanistic complications to his legacy and places such discussions within recent interpretive frameworks of paranoid readings and reparative scholarship.

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Chapter One Second Lieutenant

Aaron G. Rochberg: 1938—48

The long years before 1948-49 when I wrote the original five-movement version of my Symphony No. 1 were the dark years out of which came the gigantic catastrophe we call the Second World War. . . . All of it soaked into our still-unformed minds, still-awakening souls.

Rochberg began his formal musical studies in 1938 as a twenty-year-old student at Montclair State Teachers College in New Jersey. The courses he took stressed the canonical repertory, specifically the Austro-German symphonists and the large-scale works of Johann Sebastian Bach, and provided him with his first intellectual engagement with music. “It was a level of school,” he described, “where only the most ‘popular’ pieces of those masters were played, and I knew little of music then except that I liked it tremendously. . . . The grandeur and solidity of [these] names—Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms—caught my fancy.”! He auditioned for and was accepted to the Mannes School of Music in New York City and began his first compositional studies with Hans Weisse, a Viennese theorist widely recognized as one of the fathers of American Schenkerism.2 As a teacher, Weisse rarely discussed Schenkerian analysis with Rochberg. Rather, he immersed his student in detailed studies of counterpoint and the German masters. “I studied Bach in a way I’d never dreamed possible,” Rochberg wrote about his earliest mentor. “He was tied more to traditional models than other people of his generation ... [but he taught] me what I hungered to know about the mysteries of writing music.”*

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SECOND LIEUTENANT AARON G. ROCHBERG: 1938-48 aw 9

In 1941, Weisse passed away from a brain tumor, after which Rochberg studied briefly with Leopold Mannes before being transferred to the compositional guidance of the Hungarian conductor George Szell. According to Rochberg, World War II had played a role in bringing the two together. Szell had held positions at premiere institutions throughout central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, but the outbreak of war had occurred during a series of guest appearances in South America. Like many artists of stature, he chose to relocate his activities to the United States, where he initially conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra and taught at Mannes. Throughout their early time together, Rochberg continually found Szell—who had a reputation for exacting standards and a short temper—emotionally cold, as if there was “a bridge ten miles long between us that I could not get across.”> But Szell was an inherently methodical teacher—once described by a colleague as “irritatingly pedagogical”—who emphasized analytical study of the symphonic repertory and technical mastery of the basic genres.°

In addition to being a lauded conductor and pianist, Szell had also achieved some acclaim as a composer in his early career. Among his earliest orchestral works was the Variations on an Original Theme, op. 4 (1916), written at age seventeen after his studies with Richard Strauss in Vienna. Szell crafted his approach on canonical models he had studied or performed, but reviewers seized on the young composer’s ability to forge a “distinctive voice” in the work.” The opening theme is a dance-like gavotte structured along binary phrases, a simple melody made more interesting by its use of late Romantic harmonic modulations, including chromatic explorations of the parallel modes (I/i) and flat supertonic (bI). The variations showed his technical grasp, supplying interest through shifting figurations, styles, orchestrations, and tempos. For the young Rochberg, such techniques held endless fascination and provided a rich template for his own ideas. “I saw that sameness could be disguised, altered, reshaped in as many ways as one . . . could invent,” he wrote, taking delight in the genre’s “organic wholeness.”® He therefore set out to write his own original theme—with a set of twelve variations and a culminating finale—under Szell’s watchful and experienced eye.”