Ruth Schonthal (1924-2006), A Remembrance
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On July 10, 2006, composer Ruth Schonthal died at home in Scarsdale, New York, of complications following a heart attack. She was 82.
I remember my first meeting with Ruth Schonthal as a fourteen-year-old aspiring composer. My family had moved from Forest Hills to Chappaqua, New York, and my mother drove me to Ruth’s house in New Rochelle for an interview. “It is a lonely life, being a composer,” she said in her thickly German-accented English. “You will not be appreciated in your lifetime. You will be misunderstood. Your music will not be performed. You will have to do something else in order to make a living.” Remember, this was in the years when Meet The Composer and other organizations were just beginning to make a real difference in American composers’ visibility and their ability to actually earn a living writing music. “You will have only two uses for your music: to have pieces for yourself to play and to seduce women.” She looked at the pieces I had written and agreed to take me on, as both a composition and piano student. In an uncharacteristically nervy moment, I then asked her to play something for me. She smiled indulgently, and sat down and played her Sonata Breve. Ruth had the narrowest fingers I had ever seen, with the tiniest fingernails; but her playing was powerful and communicative, her composition full of invention and emotion.
Ruth had boundless enthusiasm for all music and knew no aesthetic boundaries. She had praise for everything from Hindemith to Stockhausen. Such an open mind on her part was a challenge for an unformed student looking for direction, but it certainly exposed me to the entire gamut of contemporary music. Her teaching was anything but dry (that is, after we got through Foote & Spalding’s Harmony, which I loathed). She always tried to bring things to a human, emotional level. I remember trying to negotiate Schönberg’s Opus 19 for her during a piano lesson, while she hovered over me intoning in an almost horror-movie mad-scientist voice: “This is expressionism! Sick! Weirder! Sicker!” Her composition teaching was non-doctrinaire but revelatory. She had a talent for putting her finger on the one slight modification that would transform a piece from being dull to being something really interesting. “I like to think of it as making something good even better,” she would say.
Ruth was a formidable pianist and improviser. At age five she was a prodigy, and the youngest student admitted into the Stern Conservatory in Berlin. She later went to Mexico to study with Manuel Ponce. Studies with Hindemith brought her to America. She had apparently been accepted as a student by both Hindemith and Schönberg and had to choose between them. I remember her once ruefully admitting that she often wondered whether she had made the right choice. “I think my career might have been totally different had I gone to Schönberg,” she said. And she hated being called a “woman composer.” “I am a composer!” she would say, proudly.
Her music was eclectic in the truest sense: nostalgic snatches of half-remembered tunes would often vie for attention with non-tonal materials, jostling alongside tone clusters or unexpected strumming inside the piano. Her compositions often reminded me of the paintings of her husband Paul Seckel that hung throughout their house in New Rochelle: bright expressionist swaths of color from which would peek fragments of realistically painted objects—the old knocking against the new, neither getting the upper hand.
I last saw her at the premiere of my opera, Miss Lonelyhearts. She was using a cane and her hair was a gorgeous pure white but, apart from that, it was the Ruth I knew as a student, alert as ever, her eyes sparkling with wit and enthusiasm. She mentioned that she didn’t get around so easily these days, and we made promises to see each other again soon.
