The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

Schoenberg had a house on North Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood, down the way from Tyrone Power. Stravinsky lived on North Wetherly Drive, up the hill from the Sunset Strip. Rachmaninov was on North Elm Drive, in the center of the movie colony. Bruno Walter was on North Bedford Drive, next door to Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel; Theodor Adorno on South Kenter Avenue in Brentwood, near the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky; Otto Klemperer, former head of the Kroll Opera, on Bel Air Road, up the street from the directors Otto Preminger and Ernst Lubitsch; and Eisler on Amalfi Drive, in Pacific Palisades, close to Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley. Korngold, befitting his high station, lived in the elite Toluca Lake development, near Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Bob Hope.