James Dean and the Story of Schoenberg's Sixth Finger
How a mixed-up account of a 1937 interview became James Dean's favorite joke.
UPDATE: I have been reliably informed by an expert that the joke about Schoenberg saying a sixth finger was necessary to play his concerto had spread orally among his students by 1939 and was recorded in Dika Newlin’s diary that year. Other students told versions of the same. It was from this oral transmission that Leonard Rosenman picked up the story and transmitted it to James Dean.
This week, the New Yorker published a retrospective on the Hollywood influence of atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg, who, among other things, briefly gave lesson in 1947 to Leonard Rosenman, the friend of James Dean who composed the scores to East of Eden and Rebel without a Cause in 1954 and 1955 respectively. The New Yorker tried to sex up its article by placing this very tendentious connection to Dean front and center in the subhead, and in the piece, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross offers an anecdote about Dean that has a truly convoluted history:
Rosenman wasn’t writing for the movies at the time; that transition came about when one of his piano students, James Dean, was cast in “East of Eden” and got his teacher hired along with him. (Dean, a modern-music fan, liked to tell an anecdote about Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto: after Jascha Heifetz complained that he would need to grow a sixth finger to master the piece, Schoenberg supposedly said, “I can wait.”)
That Dean was familiar with Schoenberg is beyond dispute; in a 1955 Modern Screen profile, Dean describes the albums littering the floor of his Sherman Oaks home: “I collect everything from Twelfth and Thirteenth Century music to Wanda Landowska’s harpsichord recordings of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier to the extreme moderns—you know, Schoenberg, Berg, Bartok, Stravinsky. I also like Sinatra’s Songs for Young Lovers album.” The version of the Schoenberg story known to James Dean was a secondhand, mixed-up version at the end of long game of telephone, of which he was merely the middle link in a century of copying and confusion.
The story is conventionally attributed, according to most later citations, to Umair Mirza’s An Encyclopedia of Quotations about Music in 1978, which quotes Ross as saying “Very well, I can wait.” Mirza, a past editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, gives no source and states only that the anecdote is “attributed” to Schoenberg. The explanation about six fingers appears in Mirza’s editorial note, and Mirza clearly is not personally familiar with the story or the sourcing. The exact wording used in most later sources (sans the “very well”) and given by Ross appears almost identical to that given in a piece by Anthony Burgess on the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: “when told that a soloist would need six fingers to play his concerto, [he] said: ‘I can wait.’” I am not aware of the exact date of publication, only that his collection Homage to QWERTY UIOP dates it to 1978 or later and it must postdate the publication of the 1979 third edition of the ODQ, which his piece reviewed. The Schoenberg quotation, however, does not appear in the ODQ of 1979.
I won’t belabor this. The 1978 version is a slight corruption of a genuine quotation Schoenberg really did say: “I am delighted to add another unplayable work to the repertoire. I want the concerto to be difficult and I want the little finger to become longer. I can wait.” According to a more recent Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, the genuine quotation first appeared in Joseph Machlis’s 1963 Introduction to Contemporary Music. Machlis gives no source. But we don’t need to accept the ODQ’s word for it. According to Schoenberg’s biographer, Mark Berry, Schoenberg said the line to the music critic José Rodriguez about his then-new violin concerto, Violin Concerto Op. 36, which two violinists refused to perform.
So, I dug up Rodriguez’s interview with Schoenberg in the 1937 book Schoenberg edited by Merle Armitage. Here is the original of all the various quotes:
RODRIGUEZ: […] A virtuoso recently told me that the concerto is unplayable until violinists can grow a new fourth finger especially adapted to play on the same string at the same stop as three other fingers.
SCHOENBERG: (laughing like a pleased child): Yes, yes. That will be fine. The concerto is extremely difficult, just as much for the head as for the hands. I am delighted to add another unplayable work to the repertoire. I want the concerto to be difficult and I want the little finger to become longer. I can wait.
So, there you have it. The sixth (here, fourth) finger bit was Rodriguez’s line, not Schoenberg’s, but the anecdote is old enough that James Dean might have read it. He did not, however. Instead, he got it from Leonard Rosenman, who had passed it off as his own, despite it coming from Rodriguez’s interview. William Bast gives the story in his 1956 biography James Dean:
It was from Rosenman that he picked up the story, which became his favorite, about the late Arnold Schönberg, one of the world’s greatest, and still most controversial modem composers. Jimmy took special delight in telling the tale to anyone who would take the time to listen, perhaps because it represented to him the significance of the problems of the few great artists who suffer the curse of being ahead of their times.
“You see,” he would begin, accentuating with appropriate animation, “Schönberg had just composed his famous violin concerto, and one of the world’s foremost violinists was going to introduce it. The music was very difficult, and one day at rehearsal the great violinist complained to Schonberg, ‘Mr. Schönberg, your music is indeed magnificent, but it is impossible to play. To be honest, a violinist would have to have six fingers on his left hand to play it properly.’ To which the mild but intense Schönberg replied modestly, ‘I’ll wait.'”
Sanford Roth claimed that a series of photographs he took captured Dean telling the story with full animated gesticulation—all made up, of course, since the story he was telling was only half true! But it seems that later writers like Anthony Burgess picked up James Dean’s version of the story from Bast and never checked the original.
And, just for kicks: Alex Ross’s claim that Jascha Heifetz said the line about the fourth finger, that is not entirely certain. In Mark Berry’s biography, he places Heifetz’s claim that the concerto was unplayable in proximity to Rodriguez’s claim that “a virtuoso” made the fourth finger crack, but does not identify the two, though the identity is implied. Nor do most writers explicitly claim their identity. One writer, Kenneth H. Marcus, writing in Schoenberg and Hollywood Modernism (2016), does, however. He substitutes Heifetz for the virtuoso in the lines without explanation, and given the close similarity between the subject of the New Yorker piece and Marcus’s book, I’d guess this was Ross’s source.