Walter Arlen was born Walter Aptowitzer on July 31, 1920 in Vienna. He was the grandson of Leopold Dichter who in 1890 founded a department store called Warenhaus Dichter in Ottakring, a working class district of Vienna. By the time of Walter Aptowitzer’s birth, the Dichter/Aptowitzers were one of the wealthiest families in the city. Walter Aptowitzer’s cousin was the later marketing guru Ernst (Ernest) Dichter who as a teenager, established that playing recordings of music in the store resulted in people purchasing more. When young Walter perfectly sang the many hit songs being played over what must have been one of the first piped music systems, his grandfather realised he might be musically gifted. He took Walter to the Schubert specialist Otto Erich Deutsch who confirmed that Walter had perfect pitch and suggested he be given piano lessons. His first teacher was tyrannical and Walter soon hated her, but clearly loved music. His parents insisted that he finish middle school in preparation for university entrance exams, before discussing further music studies. Just as Leopold Dichter 'happened' to know Otto Erich Deutsch, Paul Hamburger, a young serious pianist, 'happened' to transfer into Walter’s class. They soon became inseparable friends. Hamburger would later become an important chamber musician, accompanist and teacher in London. As schoolboys, they were enthusiastic musical companions. Hamburger had successfully entered Vienna’s Music Academy and the two boys poured over scores from the Academy’s library. Hamburger enjoyed sharing everything he knew about music with Walter. It was Walter Aptowitzer’s earliest and in many ways, most valuable learning experience.

Hopes for university entrance exams, let alone auditioning for the Music Academy or Conservatory were dashed with the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. As one of the city’s prominent Jewish families, they were subjected to the worst excesses of the pogrom that immediately followed Hitler’s march into Vienna. Their home was broken into by a band of SS officers with rifles who stole what they could find. They beat up Walter’s father before taking him to the Gestapo, then on to Dachau. All of the family were soon evicted from their homes and their store was 'aryanised' (expropriated) by a non-Jewish owner. The Dichters managed a bribe to free Walter’s father, only resulting in a brief respite before he was re-arrested and deported to Buchenwald. Walter Arlen later recalled one of the SS men asking if they should 'take the little Jew (meaning him) as well'. In the end, they left him alone with his mother and sister. He at this point had to become the head of family. This was when Walter Aptowitzer composed his first important work for voice and piano: Es geht wohl anders als du denkst ('Life goes differently than you plan') to the text by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. The song was composed in a style similar to Joseph Marx or Richard Strauss and it is surprisingly precocious for someone who had no instruction beyond that offered by his friend Paul Hamburger.

The family was related by marriage to the wealthy American Pritzker family who provided affidavits for almost every family member. Walter was able to arrange for the safe passage of his parents and sister to England before he himself had to leave on the day his affidavit expired. When he travelled from Vienna to Trieste and left on the Vulcania for New York, he was unsure when or if he would see his family again. From New York, he travelled to the Pritzkers in Chicago where he was met by a friend of the family who told him he could not possibly live in America with the name Aptowitzer. The family agreed and his name was changed to Arlen. Walter had not heard of Harold Arlen, an American composer who had made a name for himself by composing the hit songs in The Wizard of Oz, a film that came out around the time of Walter Aptowitzer’s arrival in America. The Pritzkers found him work in a furrier. With the outbreak of war, he was moved to work in a chemical factory. The stress and absence of music led to an emotional breakdown. Only the completion of a course of therapy by a Freudian psychoanalysis saved him allowing him to return to music and study with Leo Sowerby. Walter Arlen entered songs in a competition, winning first prize. This allowed him to live, study and work as amanuensis with Roy Harris, the top American orchestral composer of the day. Through Harris and his pianist wife Johana, Arlen was introduced to everyone important in contemporary music in America. Harris was committed to four year-long composer-in-residence stints, at four different universities, in four different states. Walter gained hugely from these experiences. After a period of four years, Harris reluctantly allowed Arlen to leave for post-graduate work at UCLA where he studied with Lukas Foss and the critic Albert Goldberg. It was Goldberg who gave Arlen his first music review job for the Los Angeles Times. These were years when Los Angeles was still bristling with its Central European diaspora. Arlen knew them all, chauffeuring for Stravinsky and later being one of the few to attend Schoenberg’s funeral. He was friends with Alma and Anna Mahler. Other people in his circle included Darius Milhaud, Carlos Chavez, and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco who composed a Quartettsatz on the name of Walter Arlen.

Arlen met his future husband, Howard Myers in May 1958 at a performance of Arlen’s music. Over the next decades, Arlen became established as a regular music critic for the Los Angeles Times. He was later approached to create a music department at Loyola Marymount University and served as its chairman for 30 years. Arlen did not want his own music to be performed publicly while being active as a music critic.

The compositional silence was broken during a sabbatical year in 1986 when Howard Myers presented him with his translation of poems written by St John of the Cross (1542-1591). The words and the person of St John intrigued him. Not only was St John from a Jewish family forced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition, he wrote his love poetry to Jesus wearing a woman’s mask. It was a combination that spoke deeply to Arlen on several levels. Arlen began composing again, but it was still composition as therapy. He used music as a means of coming to terms with the of his life in Vienna, the suicide of his mother, the murder of his grandmother in Treblinka, the loss of his best friend from Budapest, who starved to death in a labour camp, and the suicides of other friends and family members. He was isolated and made to feel humiliated as a Jew at a vulnerable age in the city he once loved. Being an immigrant and a homosexual in a new homeland only added to his feelings as an outsider. The music he composed was meant only for himself with no intention of public performances. It was this search for an inner centre of gravity that resulted in his setting of five poems by Czesław Miłosz, entitled The Poet in Exile, undated but also composed in the late 1980s. Orchestrations were provided by Eskender Bekmambetov, later adapted by conductor Kenneth Woods for this recording.

The Song of Songs was a much earlier UCLA project. It dates from 1953. It was written originally for 112 instruments and later reduced under Arlen’s supervision by Eskender Bekmambetov to 38 instruments. Out of all of Arlen’s compositions, it remained the one work he hoped one day might be performed. As he explained in an interview with RTÉ (Radio Television Ireland):

Basically, I found something that in some way gave me a sense of belonging […] that I belong to a people that have created the Ten Commandments, and whose religion is based on the Ten Commandments that eventually went into Catholicism and the New Testament. The subject itself influenced me, it interested me because I recognized then that it was the first example of poetry in the history of mankind […] This was poetry that was the beginning of an intellectual and emotional attitude expressed in language; it was the first of something that’s still valid today. We write poetry, and throughout history, people wrote poetry […] I looked at it as the example of progress from polygamy [a harem is mentioned in The Song of Songs]: Solomon had 800 wives or concubines and there is this girl who’s in love with a boy and there’s this boy who’s in love with a girl and she doesn’t want to be part of the harem. She wants to have the kind of love that now is accepted as a way of life.

In the program for the work’s first performance in Los Angeles under James Conlon, Arlen offered further background:

Leroy Waterman [1875-1972] went back to the oldest available source material and came up with a new translation, based on extensive linguistic and historical research. Waterman’s translation is notable not only for poetic beauty and for historical and linguistic accuracy, but also, in contrast to the version in the Bible, for its coherent meaning. This coherence of meaning is forceful enough to enable him to refer to his translation as a Dramatic Poem. The immediate appeal of Waterman’s poem, to the ear and to the senses, facilitated the composition of the work by providing me with spontaneous musical responses, which only remained to be worked out and reconciled with the dictates of the textual and musical form. What emerged was a composition that warranted the subtitle ‘Lyric Cantata’ denoting both the character and the form of the work.

Following further performances by the Vienna Symphony and the Israel Philharmonic, it was clear to Arlen that some of the revisions made in 1994 to a work composed in 1953 needed further changes. At this point, Arlen was in his 100th year, could no longer see and Myers approached Kenneth Woods to help carry out additional modifications, resulting in the version presented on this recording. Arlen lived long enough to hear, approve and enjoy the final edit. He died in Santa Monica at the age of 103 on 2nd September 2023.

Michael Haas © 2024