Alex Ross's Blog, page 5

The Scheyer House reborn

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Photo: Justin Reinhardt, Max Reinhardt's great-grandson.

In April of last year, I sent a note to Benno Herz, the program director of the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles, asking if he knew that the Galka Scheyer House had come on the market. This is the hilltop gallery-home that Richard Neutra built in 1934 for Scheyer, a crucial figure in the propagation of modernism on the West Coast. I'd visited the house the previous year, at the invitation of its then owner, the late Frank M. Devine, and registered its significance. It represents not only a pivotal moment in Neutra's development — his turn from a somewhat severe modernist mentality to a more open, mellow, landscape-oriented aesthetic — but also a landmark of Los Angeles cultural history, embodied in Scheyer's spirited embrace of trends across the arts. She was not only the primary advocate for the group she called the Blue Four (Kandinsky, Klee, Jawlensky, Feininger) but also an early supporter of younger talents such as John Cage and Maya Deren. She connections in Hollywood as well, although the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Josef von Sternberg, and Fritz Lang tended to enjoy her vibrant company without purchasing the works on offer. She was an astonishing and unclassifiable person who will have a chapter to herself in my forthcoming history of the German-speaking emigration in Los Angeles.

In 2016, another monument of that era, the Mann House, was in danger of being torn down when a minor miracle occurred: the German government purchased the house and converted it into a residency for writers, scholars, and thinkers. I idly wondered: could something similar happen to the Scheyer House? If anyone could work such a wonder, I knew it would be Benno. Amazingly, he did. He wrote an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine, which caught the attention of a German art-lover, who proceeded to buy the house with the idea of turning it into an artists' residency. EscherGuneWardena Architecture will begin a restoration process later this summer. At the moment, as KCRW reports, the house is being occupied by the artist Beatriz Cortez, who lost her home in the Altadena Fire. On a rainy day last winter, I met Raymond Neutra, the architect's youngest and only surviving son, for a conversation at the Scheyer House; a short film of our talk, augmented by rich documentation of Scheyer's life, is soon to be released.

Thomas Mann at 150

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The arch-magus of ambivalence is being celebrated all over Germany today, most spectacularly in his home town of Lübeck, where the Lübeck Philharmonic will give a celebratory concert, the program beginning with the Prelude to Act I of Lohengrin, which had a transformative effect on Mann when he first heard it in his youth. Doctor Faustus had that effect on me when I first read it at age eighteen; my own writing career stems in some way from the experience of that novel. I wrote about Mann for The New Yorker in 1996, 2016, 2020, and 2022. In the current issue of Studia Philosophica I have an essay titled "Thomas Mann, Richard Wagner, and the Inescapability of the Political." Alles Gute! In a certain sense.

The rhythms of acquiescence

M. Gessen, New York Times: "We humans are stability-seeking creatures. Getting accustomed to what used to seem unthinkable can feel like an accomplishment. And when the unthinkable recedes at least a bit — when someone gets released from detention (as the Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi was a few weeks ago) or some particularly egregious proposal is withdrawn or blocked by the courts (as the ban on international students at Harvard has been, at least temporarily) — it’s easy to mistake it for proof that the dark times are ending. But these comparatively small victories don’t alter the direction of our transformation — they don’t even slow it down measurably — even while they appeal to our deep need to normalize. They create the sense that there is more air to breathe and more room to act than there was yesterday. And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other."

For Per Nørgård

The great Danish composer has died at the age of ninety-two.

Success and value

"Today, I would not go as far to pretend, that every work which was a failure has to be considered as a masterpiece, I would even not pretend, that every masterwork ought to be at first a failure. But I want to pretend, that success is not a standard of value."

                            — Arnold Schoenberg, 1935

Trumpian realism

Leonard Slatkin on Trump's hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center: "Why is this dismantling taking place? Everyone has their own theories. Mine takes its cue from Oscar Wilde: 'Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.' If there is anything that scares the current administration more than individualism, I am not aware of it. Our job as creators and performers is to stimulate free thought. Others may judge the merits of our convictions but should not infringe on our rights to express them."

For Guy Klucevsek

The bewitching accordionist-composer has died at the age of 78.

The authoritarian enablers on the Supreme Court

Josh Marshall: "This remains a renegade and corrupt Supreme Court majority making up its own Constitution as it goes and most times, if not every time, enabling arbitrary and untrammeled presidential dictatorship."

Salome at the Met and Heartbeat Opera

Head Cases. The New Yorker, May 26, 2025.

Previously: Salome with Mattila in 2004; the Salome critical edition; a roundup of Salome recordings (for The Gramophone); Salome as play and opera (for the Times).

Nightafternight playlist

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New and recent releases of interest.

Bach, Mass in B Minor; Raphaël Pichon conducting Pygmalion (Harmonia Mundi)

Raven Chacon, Voiceless Mass, Biyán, Owl Song; Chacon, Present Music (New World)

Begin the Song!: A Purcell Academy; Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian, Le Consort (Harmonia Mundi)

Licht und Schatten: Schubert Lieder of 1824; Samuel Hasselhorn, Ammiel Bushakevitz (Harmonia Mundi)

Timothy McCormack, mine but for its sublimation; Jack Yarbrough (another timbre)

Korngold, Symphony; Korngold (piano transcription), John Mauceri conducting the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana (Supertrain)

Ash Fure, Animal (Boomkat)

Haydn, Quartets Op. 74, Scottish Folk Tunes; Maxwell Quartet (Linn)

Strana armonia d'amore: Madrigals by Vicentino, Gesualdo, Nenna, Verunell; Geoffroy Jourdain leading Les Cris de Paris (Harmonia Mundi)

Gabriel Dupont, Complete Songs; Cyrille Dubois, Tristan Raës (Aparté)