A Windfall of Musicians

I didn't know that for a time in the 1940s, California was home to some of the giants of 20th century classical music. Dorothy Lamb Crawford's book "A Windfall Of Musicians" chronicles the times:

One morning in September 1940, a newly arrived European musician paid a visit to the conductor Otto Klemperer in Los Angeles and found him ­discussing Gustav Mahler with his fellow-exile Bruno Walter. The visitor went on to lunch at the new home of Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades, where he worked on some chamber music with Mann’s son Michael, a ­viola player. In the evening, he dropped in on Igor Stravinsky in Hollywood, assisting in a run-through of his violin concerto.

For a brief and unrepeatable moment, an eyeblink in cultural history, the City of Angels contained the future of classical music. Klemperer, a pioneer of modernist opera in Berlin, was working as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, pushing out the horizons with daring commissions to living composers. Stravinsky, a quarter-century after his noisy notoriety with “Rite of Spring,” was in the thick of his neoclassical ­period. Off Sunset Boulevard, on North Rockingham Avenue, lived ­Arnold Schoenberg, the man who had broken music out of its tonal straitjacket. Thus two of the ­century’s three ­musical revolutionaries wound up in the same city of refuge. The third, Bela Bartok, lived in New York.

Hollywood history fascinates me and here's yet another facet of that town I didn't know about.