Arnold Greissle-Schoenberg

From Philosopedia

Arnold Greissle-Schoenberg (9 April 1923 - )

Arnold Greissle-Schoenberg's autobiographical account begins:

My eyes first saw the light of the world on April 9, 1923. To be more precise, my birth took place in a second-floor room of Arnold Schönberg’s residence at Berhardgasse 6 in Mödling, which my parents, Trudi and Felix Greissle, had been occupying. Present, in addition to my father, were my grandparents and Georg Schönberg, their younger child. A Czech midwife did the honors, as was then the custom in Austria. Hospitals being strictly for sick people, a healthy woman gave birth at home.

My father, who was twenty-eight-years old at the time, came from middle-class Wieden, the Vierte Bezirk (Fourth District) of Vienna. His mother, Therese, was a simple woman and a wonderful grandmother. Descended from an Oberösterreich (Upper Austrian) peasant family named Berger, she too had been born in Vienna, spoke only Wienerisch, the Viennese dialect, and was a typical Viennese in every respect. Some time before World War I, Therese decided to buy a house for her family and began to put by money for that purpose from my grandfather Josef’s earnings. Having saved up enough, she was about to finalize the purchase when the war began. So she decided to wait until it was over, when she anticipated there would be even more money saved, and they could buy a really lovely house in one of the suburbs, where it would be quiet and countrified.

With the end of the war four years later, once-glorious Austria emerged as a small, third-rate republic, and a terrible economic crisis ensued, with an inflation that devoured everything people owned like wildfire. One day in 1923 Therese went to the bank, withdrew the money for the house, and bought two loaves of bread with it. Had she waited another day, there would have been enough for only one loaf!

Also,

The year was 1935. In Mödling, my hometown, which is just a stone’s throw from Vienna, my parents gave me a radio for my twelfth birthday. This wasn’t just your ordinary radio. It came in a big, black metal housing with an illuminated dial that displayed the names of many faraway places: Munich, Moscow, Berlin, Amsterdam, Bratislava, Laibach, Cairo, Paris, New York, Casablanca, on and on. With this gift, a whole new world suddenly opened up to me. Now I could listen to people speaking foreign languages and singing their songs. I could learn what they were thinking and why they were thinking it.

I spent many long hours alone with my new treasure. In the process I heard some new kinds of music that were extremely appealing to me. I found the Arabic songs particularly fascinating, but best of all was the tango with its exotic rhythms and captivating melodies. American jazz also caught my fancy. I just couldn’t get enough of it, and would often turn the dial of my radio hither and thither for hours on end in search of this music.

One evening, as I was sitting in the darkness of my room listening to the wonderful sounds coming from afar, the door suddenly opened, and there in the doorway loomed the tall, lean figure of my father in his pajamas. He hadn’t even knocked. For a long moment he stood there, apparently dumbfounded. Then all at once his voice boomed out: "Arnold! What kind of music is that?"

I felt as if I had been caught committing some terrible crime, and my face must have shown it. "Papa, it’s a tango," I tried to explain. "See how lovely it is." I turned up the volume so he could hear it clearly. "I like jazz too," I added, hopefully.

But Papa–whose name was Felix Greissle—only looked at me more severely, and his voice was full of reproach. "What! Tango and jazz? That’s what you’re listening to?" He pronounced jazz like yachts as if it rhymed with shots. "That’s not music!" Papa went on. "Not real music! Remember who you are, Arnold!" What he meant was that I was the grandchild of Arnold Schönberg, the famous though controversial Austrian composer, who was even then deemed by many to be the twentieth century’s foremost composer and by a few, the greatest of all time, and it behooved me to behave accordingly.

And that’s how it all began. All my life long, I’ve been the grandson of the Master, the inheritor of his blood and genes. And that’s how it all will, no doubt, end.

Now as I, who am well into my seventies, begin to describe my life, I do so with the thought that I am creating a rather unusual time capsule. I grew up in small-town Austria in the politically turbulent years between the First and Second World Wars, and as a half-Jew or Mischling I witnessed the rise of National Socialism and Hitler’s Anschluß (invasion of Austria). At fifteen, I had to leave with my family, and while America, which took us in, has been good to us, coming here was still a form of exile to me. I felt as if I had become an outcast, someone who had forever been robbed of his country.

Doubtless, the most important aspect of the time capsule is my Schönberg connection, the fact that I am the Master’s oldest grandchild—that is, the first child of his first child by his first wife, Mathilde von Zemlinsky—and thus also the great nephew of Mathilde’s brother, the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, whose music is only now, sixty years after his death, being recognized. A child in the twenties and a teenager in the thirties, I lived amidst a circle of artists and intellectuals of enormous importance, people like Anton von Webern, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht, Eduard Steuermann, and Franz Werfel, to say nothing of Schönberg himself. Some I remember quite well, while of others I have only a hazy recollection of a look, an intonation of voice, a mannerism such as a child would take note of. Added to this, my late brother Hermann and I were, considering our ages, keen observers of human nature and understood intuitively the tenderness and sadness of Alban Berg, the timidity of Zemlinsky, and the bravado of Alma, meaning Alma Mahler, of course.

His website continues with historical information about Austria, more about the Greissles, his family, his friends, how the family somehow passed inspection by some SS men from the Sicherheitsdienst and allowed to leave for America, details about his brother Hermann, and his service in the U. S. Army.

He currently lives with his wife, Nancy Bogen, in New York City's West Greenwich Village.