Nuria Schoenberg-Nono and Arnold Schoenberg

Nuria Schoenberg-Nono on her father, Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg. Translation (by dust2340): My name is Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, Schoenberg after my father and Nono after my late husband. This is a picture of me and my father, I guess I am -- this is still in Hollywood so I have to be three years old, because we moved to West Los Angeles then, I sit toward my father and we are looking very serious, as if we are discussing something. My brother enlarged, framed and gave me this picture when my Schoenberg-biography was published, and he called it “preliminary discussions“. These were the first discussions with my father about his life. He was strict, but to himself too and with anybody who was around him, but he was also very humane and kind. I am often asked if he was authoritarian and I say yes, but the authority didn’t come from his power but from his knowledge and the respect towards him. One of the most beautiful remembrances concerning my father are the lessons he held at home in the living room in Los Angeles on Sunday mornings after he retired from Los Angeles University in California. On this big board he wrote the score exercises and the pupils -- who were a lot -- were sitting in the living room. These were the rare moments we could hear our father talking about music because he didn’t talk about it a lot in public and we were too young to here him at the university. You have to know, my brothers were very young, and at home you would talk about what is going on in the world or about school, who was ill and who wasn’t, it was more or less an ordinary family. We were often asked how it felt to be children of Schoenberg, of the famous composer. Though we were aware of our father’s fame we only knew it through our family. For example when I was 10 or 11 years old I once was in the car of a mother of a friend from school, and she asked “What’s exactly what he is doing, your father?“ and I said “He is the greatest living composer in the world!“ and she said “Yes? Does he earn a lot of money?“ and I answered “No, sadly not.“ and she said “Oh, I’m sorry!“. And that’s how it was! I studied at UCLA and wanted to become a Medical Doctor, after my first 4 years I got the bachelors degree in zoology, meaning biology about human and animals, which was the prestage to go to Medical School. But then I came to Europe with my mother in 1954 to Hamburg to the premiere of Moses And Aaron, where I met my husband, and after a year I came back, we got married and I didn’t become a doctor but composer’s wife, which is good too, and mother! It was no coincidence that we came along because he loved and studied my father’s music and I was a woman who knew how to live with a composer, and because we were both young and in love. When I started working on the biography I thought “strange, that he always took his stuff with him, though he was travelling so much“ but when I studied all and tried to put the pieces together and find a relation between them I thought, “perhaps, for somebody who was to travel with those things, this is want meant home to him“. He was surrounded by this things and so he had Vienna and Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam and Barcelona always with him, all of this was his home. I don’t really have a sense of home. When I am in Los Angeles where I grew up I feel very natural there, also in in Italy where I live since 45 years, but HOME is nowhere for me. Home is where the people are I like to be with.