Rediscovering the Music of Walter Arlen, Composer Who Escaped the Nazis

“The 102-year-old” composer Walter Arlen “lives … in Santa Monica, Calif., with his husband of 65 years,” reports Tim Greiving in Friday’s (1/27) National Public Radio. “He was born in Austria, in 1920, as Walter Aptowitzer. He grew up in a cosmopolitan cradle of music and high culture: Vienna before the war…. His mother played piano, his uncle played fiddle,” and he studied music and composing. “It was a happy childhood—‘until Hitler came, and that’s when it changed overnight,’ he says…. Aptowitzer escaped Austria and moved in with relatives in Chicago. Many others in his family” perished in Nazi concentration camps. In the U.S., he changed his name to Arlen and “became an assistant to the American composer Roy Harris. Arlen pursued his musical studies at UCLA, worked as a driver for Igor Stravinsky and, before long, was hired as a classical critic for the Los Angeles Times.” Music by Arlen and other banned composers has been preserved “by Michael Haas — a musical historian who arranged for Arlen’s work to be recorded along with many other Jewish composers…. Haas co-founded the Exilarte Center for Banned Music in Vienna, which locates, preserves and presents music lost during the Holocaust.”