WORLD PREMIERE | SEARING, INTIMATE PORTRAIT | AN INSPIRING LIFE

The brilliant composer Arnold Schoenberg fled the darkness and despair of Hitler’s Europe and found himself in 1930s Hollywood—a bold, new world of golden sunshine and camera-ready beauty. Can he find a way to reconcile reflection with action, and tradition with revolution? What is the meaning of art in the wake of atrocity?

In this World Premiere from BLO’s New Works Initiative, internationally acclaimed composer Tod Machover, based in Boston, along with librettist Simon Robson, explores a great artist’s personal struggle, finding humor, heroism, and—ultimately—hope.

Arnold Schoenberg’s remarkable life intersected with some of the most traumatic and violent human atrocities of the 20^th century—born a Jew in Vienna, he converted to the Lutheran faith as a young adult, served in World War I, faced the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, and re-converted to Judaism just before he and his family fled to the United States as refugees.

Schoenberg in Hollywood dramatizes many of these moments in his life, as the character of Schoenberg strives to find artistic meaning in the wake of brutality and personal loss—an aspiration that all of us, as artists and audience members, share.

Please be aware that this opera depicts unsettling and potentially disturbing images and themes, including: brief, graphic images of the Holocaust; Nazi references and imagery; suicide; irreligious imagery; and a recorded gunshot sound.