After moving to Los Angeles in 1934, Arnold Schoenberg pondered whether or not to build a new house in his adopted city. His longtime friend and artistic ally, the architect Adolf Loos, had died in 1933, but the composer still hoped to incorporate Loos’s distinctive style in a home of his own. He was especially keen on one of Loos’s most characteristic techniques: adorning interior walls with thin sheets of marble or wood, an economical and more modern alternative to old-fashioned ornamental coverings like wallpaper. The local architect whom Schoenberg consulted (Richard Neutra, who had emigrated from Vienna in 1923) lacked experience in this technique, so Schoenberg dispatched a letter to Vienna, addressed to Loos’s former student Heinrich Kulka. In words at once urgent and matter-of-fact, the composer bombarded Kulka with detailed questions about Loos’s method of wall paneling before apologizing for all the trouble. Unperturbed, Kulka responded to Schoenberg’s letter right away, and he even offered to execute a sketch of the proposed house. In a handwritten postscript, he added a request Loos had once made: “Once I am dead, tell Arnold Schoenberg that he was my best friend!”

Despite numerous references to the friendship between the two men in the literature on Viennese modernism, Schoenberg’s admiration for Loos’s approach to interior design has rarely been considered in much detail. Accounts of fin-de-siècle Vienna typically pair Loos’s polemic against ornament (definitively stated in the 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime”) with Schoenberg’s simultaneous venture into atonality as parallel examples of the critique of Viennese aestheticism. Often citing Loos’s and Schoenberg’s shared sympathy for the journalistic agitations of Karl Kraus, these studies include the composer in a modernist project that aimed to strip away all decoration from language, design, and the arts. And yet, although it is true that Schoenberg and Loos paid little heed to the allegedly decadent demand for beauty, their rejection of bourgeois aesthetics had radically divergent consequences – works such as the Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, and Erwartung, op. 17 (both composed in 1909), can hardly be said to reflect the “plain, undecorated simplicity” that Loos advocated in “Ornament and Crime.” Nor do the stark facades of Loos’s Steiner House (Vienna, 1910) appear to endorse the urgent expressive agenda of Schoenberg’s atonal music (Figures 6.1 and 6.2).