Walter Arlen's First Century

Hearing the name of postmodernist composer Walter Arlen, most people will think of popular songster Harold Arlen—but the two couldn’t be more different musically. Austrian-born composer and former Los Angeles Times classical music critic Walter Arlen, age 97 at the time of this filming, has definitely had the Socratic 'life worth examining' even though he’s not a household name either in his adopted home of Los Angeles or his native Austria. And it’s thanks to filmmaker Stephanus Domanig that Arlen’s unique personal history is aptly chronicled on film. Arlen was born in Austria in 1920 to a Jewish family who owned a prominent Vienna department store, which was later overtaken by local anti-Semites. Although Arlen began composing music at a young age, he was forced to flee to America as so many other Jewish families did during the Nazi takeover in the 1930s. He gravitated to Hollywood to work as a music critic, initially resigned to the fact that he would no longer compose his own music. But after decades writing about music, the exiled Arlen realized he could no longer suppress his own musical creativity. All that he had suffered—his mother’s suicide, the sight of his fellow Jewish neighbors murdered by Nazis—came out in his music. The most poignant aspect of Domanig’s documentary is footage of a 97-year-old Arlen seeing his long-dormant compositions being played for the first time in public. Influenced by Schoenberg’s stark 12-tone modernist compositions, you hear Arlen’s haunted past coming out in these strangely elegant chamber pieces, which are delicately melodic but also ominously dissonant in places. This heartfelt documentary is a no-nonsense and fitting tribute to an underappreciated artist whose music is suffused with the troubled history of the tumultuous 20th century. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (M. Sandlin)