Christmas Eve with Nuria Schoenberg

I have been under the weather for the past week. Fortunately the day before yesterday Mr. Chatanooga Bates drops by with some of his 80 mm. Howitzer Christmas eggnog. He said it was an old family recipe from Virginia and would “load me down and cheer me up.” INDEED. I’m feeling a lot better this morning, enough so that I could take Eloise for a long walk up Buckshot Creek Road.

There are very few houses on the road, and most of them are buried back in the woods, so the road looks empty and especially remote at this time of year. I pass by the easement road that leads down a steep ravine through redwoods and tanoak to Marcel Proost’s trailer. As I think I’ve mentioned already, Marcel was busted for marijuana growing about two months ago, but he got released—we all think because the judge was one of his customers. I think that all he’s up to right now is hunting boletes and of course maintaining our road with his backhoe, which is a big job during the rainy season.

I hear music coming from way down the ravine, and damned if it doesn’t sound like the Schoenberg Woodwind Quintet.

So Eloise and I head down the slippery dirt road and see Marcel’s trailer all decked with Christmas lights and a big plastic Santa that I know he found while scavenging at the Annapolis Transfer Station.

His dogs start barking as we approach the trailer. It’s getting dark and I’m wondering how we’re going to get home, but I can’t resist finding out what’s going on.

Marcel greets me in a bright red Christmas vest with a Santa hat and a glass of hot rum in his hand.

“Yo John, c’mon in and have a toast!"

His pit bull Jean-Paul Sartre is delighted at the sight of Eloise.

The first thing I notice (aside from the deafeningly loud sound of the music coming from his boombox) is that Marcel has taken down his longtime beloved Avedon poster of Nastassja Kinski with the boa constrictor. Now he’s got a blow up of an old black and white photo in its place. This woman has her clothes on, but even so, she is quite possibly more beautiful than the dazzling Nastassja.

“So Marcel,” I say, “You got a new pin-up crush, I see. Who’s that, the young Ingrid Bergman?”

“Naw, John. Don’t you recognize her? It’s Nuria Schoenberg.”

“You don’t mean…daughter of….The Emancipator of Dissonance?”

“Oh yes,” says Marcel. Lovely lady. Turns out old Arnold was a great family man, and his daughter Nuria, in addition to being a lively, intelligent person, was astonishingly beautiful—I would say, the face that launched a thousand hexachords.

“Schoenberg and his first wife Mathilde had children earlier in his life back in Vienna and Berlin, and then, he started another family with his younger second wife and brought them all up in Los Angeles. Nuria was born in Barcelona, but she grew up in Brentwood, studied at UCLA. She had two brothers, one who spent his life teaching high school math and another, Judge Ronald Schoenberg, who was famous for his controversial adjudicating of the first spousal-abuse case against OJ Simpson. Arnold’s grandson E. Randol Schoenberg has been a successful attorney and made news litigating the rightful return of Klimt paintings that were stolen during the Holocaust.

“So who’s that handsome young guy in the picture there with Nuria? Is that the young Roberto Rosselini, or what?”

“No, John, that’s the Italian postwar serialist Luigi Nono who married Nuria. You must know his famous “Ain’t no trail…just the bushwack.”

“I imagine you mean his piece, “Noy hay caminos. Hay que caminar.”

“More or less. He was a passionately committed socialist and one of the most soulful of the Darmstadt bunch. Nobody plays his music here in the USA much these days. Seems like we’ve gone all soft and are all about user-friendly easy-on-the ear and kind of losing our edge.”

“Yeah, I remember being in the audience with Nono at a concert of Soviet music in Leningrad in 1988. He stood up at one point and shook his fist and yelled out something in Italian. “Non è vero!” I think it was. He was mad at some other Italian Marxist composer whom he considered a fraud and a party patsy.”

“Well, John, you should go to the Arnold Schoenberg Center website. Those folks have their shit together. And there are lots of good articles you can read at Axel’s Castle. Anyway, gotta get the Toyoto truck up and running. I’m playing Santa tonight at the Horicon School Christmas Eve party. Take care…or as Nuria would say, “Ciao e Buon Natale!”