Composer Walter Arlen has died at the age of 103. He was born Walter Aptowitzer in Ottakring. When the Nazis came, he emigrated to the USA via Trieste.
In 1965, a year after his father’s death, he returned to his hometown for the first time as a successful music journalist in Los Angeles. The connection to the city of Vienna became closer. In 2011, Arlen bequeathed his estate to the Vienna Library, and in 2017 the Vienna Symphony Orchestra performed Arlen’s lyrical cantata The Song of Songs at the Konzerthaus. The composer himself describes his pieces with a tonal background as « post-modern »; influences from his old and new homelands intermingle.
