Join the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music as we continue the celebration of Arnold Schoenberg's 150th birth anniversary with the screening of two documentaries about the famed composer, his music, and his era.
About Through the Darkness :
"Hilan Warshaw presents his powerful documentary Through the Darkness, the poignant story of a love triangle that upended the life of one of the most important figures of 20th-century classical music. Composer Arnold Schoenberg befriended painter Richard Gerstl, a young man who shared the revered musician's passion for art—but that was not the only love they shared, as Schoenberg's wife also found herself drawn to the mysterious figure who was Gerstl. The drama and tragedy that ensued also cleared the way one of the most groundbreaking aesthetic shifts in music history..." - medici.tv
Directed by: Hilan Warshaw
Production date: 2021
Duration: 52 min
Production: Hilan Warshaw/Overtone Films LLC
About The Language of the New Music:
"They are without question among the principal architects of the imagination of our time and yet both are still widely regarded as difficult or impossible to comprehend: a film about the work and ideas of Schoenberg and Wittgenstein, who changed the course of European thought.
At the close of the 19th century, Vienna presented to the world a picture of ordered elegance and dignified gaiety, but beneath the surface the corruption of the late Hapsburg Empire produced widespread and deep-seated confusion and so set the stage for some of the profoundest meditations on the nature of human experience that the 20th century ever produced.
Vienna was the scene of the intellectual and artistic struggles of many of the seminal minds of our time; among them, Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, Georg Trakl, Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oscar Kokoshka, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Schoenberg – the composer – and Wittgenstein – author of the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus – never met, although they were close contemporaries and had common friends in Viennese intellectual society. Why put them together? Because their work springs from the same soil and shares a common ethical purpose; so much so that the development of their ideas runs parallel throughout their lives in an extraordinary and very illuminating way." -medici.tv
Directed by: Christopher Nupen
Production date: 1985
Duration: 1 h 2 min
Production: © Allegro Films London