Walter Arlen, a Viennese musical prodigy who fled to the United States after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and became a music critic and a late-in-life composer of Holocaust and Jewish-exile remembrances in song, died on Sept. 3, 2023, in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 103.
The death, in a hospital, was not widely reported at the time; Howard Myers, Mr. Arlen’s husband and sole survivor, confirmed it to The New York Times only recently. Mr. Arlen and Mr. Myers, longtime residents of Santa Monica, had been companions for 65 years and were married in 2008 after California’s Supreme Court upheld the legality of same-sex marriages.
Even after eight decades, Mr. Arlen’s memories remained vivid — of his father being dragged off to a concentration camp; of his mother’s nervous breakdown and suicide; of his family’s home, business and bank accounts stolen by the Nazi authorities; and of witnessing the vicious murder of an older Jew by an SS guard.
The scion of a prosperous Jewish family that had owned a department store in Vienna since 1890, Mr. Arlen, whose family name was Aptowitzer, was an 18-year-old high school student in 1938, nearing graduation with a brilliant musical future ahead, when German troops invaded and absorbed German-speaking Austria into Hitler’s Third Reich in what was known as the Anschluss.
As waves of Nazi violence and property expropriations crushed Jewish life across Austria, the department store was seized and “Aryanized,” the family was evicted from its apartments on the top floor, and Walter’s father was sent to a series of concentration camps, ending at Buchenwald. Walter, his mother and his younger sister, Edith, took refuge in a pensione.
“And what does the little Jew boy want today?” Edmund Topolansky, a private banker, sneered when Walter arrived to withdraw money from his family’s accounts to buy food. Told that the accounts no longer existed, Walter received a few coins for bowing to his humiliation and learned later that it was Mr. Topolansky who had raised the swastikas in Aryanizing his family’s store.
Starting at age 5, Walter had enchanted shoppers there with his perfect-pitch vocals. At 10, he was studying piano with the Schubert scholar Otto Erich Deutsch and had composed lieder, the German songs that captured the spirit of lyrical poetry. His parents planned to send him to a music college. Instead, the family was plunged overnight into the ordeal of saving itself.
After repeated visits to Gestapo headquarters, Walter secured his father’s release from Buchenwald and exit visas for his family by signing papers pledging that the Aptowitzers would leave Europe and resettle in New Zealand.
“It was just a sham agreement,” Mr. Arlen said in a phone interview for this obituary in 2022. “We never intended to go to New Zealand. There was an organization in England that arranged it. The Nazis wanted to get all the Jews out of Europe, and my father was one of a group released on the condition that they move their families to New Zealand.”
With his own visa running out, Walter fled first — by train to Trieste, steamer to New York and bus to Chicago, where he joined relatives. He worked in a factory, learned English and Americanized his surname. His parents and sister used their exit visas to reach London, where they remained for the war’s duration.
The family was reunited in Chicago after the war. But Mr. Arlen was severely depressed. A psychiatrist suggested music composition as therapy, and it helped Walter recover. He studied with the composers Leo Sowerby and Roy Harris and in 1947 won a songwriting competition.
He moved to Los Angeles in 1951 and began graduate studies in music at U.C.L.A. Albert Goldberg, who reviewed classical music for The Los Angeles Times and taught one of Mr. Arlen’s courses, hired him in 1952 as an assistant, to review contemporary music. It became a 30-year career, much of it devoted to the city’s popular Monday Evening Concerts.
Mr. Arlen made wide contacts in the music world and joined the musical émigré community, exiles from the Hitler era who found stardom in Hollywood. They included Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Toch, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alma and Anna Mahler, and Igor Stravinsky.
In 1969, Mr. Arlen was teaching at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles when he organized a music department there. He also arranged concerts and musical competitions and founded the José Iturbi Gold Medal Concert Series, showcasing young talent at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.
To avoid conflicts of interest, Mr. Arlen stopped writing music while working as a critic. But after retiring in the early 1980s, he resumed composition. His longtime companion, Mr. Myers, fostered his work, offering as subject material his own translations of poems by the Spanish Catholic mystic St. John of the Cross, whose Jewish parents had been forced to convert during the Spanish Inquisition.
“The poems resonated with Arlen on several meaningful levels,” the author Michael Haas, who championed Mr. Arlen’s career, wrote in Artbound magazine in 2015. “Suddenly, the way to composition reopened as a way to express the pain and loss he had felt: family members had been murdered in concentration camps; his mother, an uncle and a nephew had committed suicide.”
Mr. Arlen’s output of 65 compositions, mainly scored for voice, violin and piano, went into a desk drawer at first, with no thought of hearing them performed. But in 2008, a concert of Arlen music was arranged by Mr. Haas and presented at the Jewish Museum Vienna, marking the 70th anniversary of the Anschluss.
It was a breakthrough for Mr. Arlen. His works have since been performed in Europe and the U.S. and released on CDs. Among the titles are “Things Turn Out Differently” (2012), “The Last Blue Light” (2014) and “Memories of an Exiled Wandering Viennese Jew” (2015).
Walter Aptowitzer was born in Vienna on July 31, 1920, to Michael and Mina (Dichter) Aptowitzer. His parents were the proprietors of Dichter’s Department Store, which had been founded by the boy’s maternal grandparents, Leopold and Regine Dichter. Walter’s mother ran the women’s handbags department.
In 1923, loudspeakers were installed and recordings of hit songs, American jazz and Viennese waltzes were played. Walter, with obvious talents, began singing for shoppers in 1925. He also began writing songs and resolved to be a composer. “I just felt it was something I had to do — it was in my blood,” he told Gramophone magazine in 2012. Success was eight decades away.
In his 99th year, Mr. Arlen composed a score for a newly discovered print of the 1924 silent film “Die Stadt Ohne Juden” (“The City Without Jews”), based on a Hugo Bettauer novel. And on July 31, 2020, his 100th birthday, a documentary film by Stephanus Domanig, “Walter Arlen’s First Century,” premiered in Vienna. His sister, Edith Arlen Wachtel, died in 2012.
Among his indelible memories, Mr. Arlen witnessed a murder that seemed to encapsulate the Anschluss, he told Mr. Haas. At a document center for Jews seeking exit visas, he arrived at dawn during a snowfall and saw an SS guard handing out snow shovels to older Jews, ordering them to get to work.
“One old man couldn’t or wouldn’t, and simply leaned on his shovel,” Mr. Arlen recalled. “The SS man shouted abuse, and when he didn’t respond, the SS man hit him with the butt of his rifle. Blood went everywhere. Once the old man lay unconscious on the ground, the SS guard cocked his rifle and shot him.”
Read More: Walter Arlen, Holocaust Refugee and Belated Composer, Is Dead at 103
