Arnold & Igor

Written by Howard Rappaport
Review by Christina Nellas Acosta

To the non-specialist reader, a novel saturated in names, events, terms, and compositions of any period of music history poses a challenge. Add to that history, as Arnold & Igor does, the spectacle of both the dance and art worlds, and the portrayal of avant-garde Austrian Arnold Schoenberg and influential Russian Igor Stravinsky underscored by their intimate lives and loves, controversy and polemics, and the result is a deep immersion into early 20^th-century modernism.

As Romanticism and Wagnerism waned, the so-called long century tipped into 1914, and the chaos of World War I changed everything. When the two titans of music first established themselves—Stravinsky composing for the Paris ballet stage and Schoenberg for Vienna’s symphonic hall—the former’s neoclassicism and the latter’s serialism had not yet swept across the world. But eventually both famous composers landed in Hollywood (“driven into Paradise”), living near each other. Rappaport’s device is to construct a story born of rivalry and collaboration of sorts between them and to insert a 1995 Los Angeles university instructor struggling to complete his opera commission, while also discovering a secret Schoenberg sketchbook with an embedded musical code. Translating that code drives the story of Simon Grafton, a husband and father, perpetually late, guilt-ridden, and fumbling, to restore order to both his private and professional lives.

Simon and the mysterious sketchbook launch a frenzied energy, and thereafter chapters alternate between early and late 20^th century, revealing a younger Stravinsky in awe of Schoenberg, who had yet to create his radical twelve-tone theory and philosophy. The fiction weaves intrigue, jealousy, and disruption, including the near-riot reception of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) and Schoenberg’s wife’s affair with the tragic painter Gerstl, thus planting parallel themes that intrude on Simon’s creative mind and disordered world. The earlier, decadent century, unsurprisingly, captures the reader’s fascination with history.