“Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate…Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?” – Siegfried Sassoon
After 1945, those who performed, wrote or taught classical music worked in a culture scarred by omissions. These were not of their making, but were part of the legacy of atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. With its racist ideology and systematic suppression particularly, although not exclusively, of Jewish musicians, artists and writers, the Third Reich silenced two generations of composers and, with them, an entire musical heritage. Many, who were murdered in concentration camps, and others, whose freedom and productivity were curtailed, were fated to be forgotten after the war. Their music seemed to have passed with them, lost in endless silence.
However, more has survived than was at first thought, and though much remains to be done, much has been accomplished. We must now mitigate a great injustice by working to revive and perform the music of those whose “crime” was to be Jewish, or deemed offensive by, the authoritarian Nazi regime.
I believe that the spirit of this “lost generation” now needs to be heard. The creativity of the first half of the twentieth century is far richer and varied than we commonly assume. Alongside Stravinsky, Strauss and other major and more fortunate figures, the varied voices of composers from Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Budapest, whether Jewish, dissident or immigrant, reveal much about the musical ferment of their time. Their music, I believe, is accessible and relevant. Further, American musical culture owes an enormous debt to those who emigrated to Hollywood and Broadway, bringing their distinctive personalities with them, creating a style that has since evolved into a characteristic American one.
The cliché “there are no lost masterpieces” reveals our own ignorance. Entire civilizations, along with their masterpieces, have been destroyed by war since the beginning of human history. Various forms of censorship have repeatedly affected artists and works, and continue to do so.
The suppression of these composers and musicians caused the greatest single rupture in what had been a continuous seamless transmittal of German classical music. This centuries-old tradition, dating from before Johann Sebastian Bach, was passed on from one generation to the next. It was nourished by the free expression of an often contentious creative exchange between conservative traditional artistic expression and competing currents of innovation and iconoclasm. The policies of the Third Reich destroyed the environment in which this exchange could flourish, uprooting a centuries-old garden, with its creative polemics and dialectics, forcing those who survived to scatter all over the world, where comparable artistic milieus in which to live and create were scarce. This immense self-destructive act seriously damaged one of Germany’s greatest cultural traditions, accomplished by killing and dispersing many of its caretakers, burying a “lost generation” along with its spirit.
There are three fundamental aspects to be taken into consideration when approaching the revival of this music: moral, historical and artistic.
Moral: Undoing injustice, when and where one can, is a moral mandate for all citizens of a civilized world. We cannot restore to these composers their lost lives. We can, however, return the gift that would mean more to them than any other–that of performing their music.
Historical: Our perspectives on the history of twentieth-century classical music are incomplete because an enormous quantity of works has remained unplayed, and the lives of its composers largely ignored. History is not only made by its “big names,” its warrior kings, dictators. Nor is the Zeitgeist of any era only about its most famous artists. It is also a cultural concretization of those who lived in a given era. Our understanding of twentieth century classical music needs re-examination. Part of the mandate of the historian is to integrate new information as it becomes available, and perhaps to offer a more comprehensive view of the past. In this case that reassessment can only be fairly accomplished after we have significantly acquainted ourselves with the voluminous music cast out by the Nazi suppression.
Artistic: Moral or historical considerations would not be reason enough for revival were it not for the artistic quality of what was lost. This cannot be judged by a single hearing of tokenistic or uncommitted performances. Judgments, if indeed they must be made at this time, should only be made after those performing and listening over the course of years have given these varied voices and their attendant spirits sufficient time to be fully digested.
For more than two decades now, I have integrated many of these suppressed works into my symphonic and operatic repertory and programming. During that time, others have followed suit. I have worked tirelessly with young musicians, taken every opportunity possible to speak with the general public, and have written as much as I can, all in the hope that the music will find its place in the standard repertory. I have created the Orel Foundation as an Internet resource for music lovers, musicians and those who are simply curious. I initiated the Recovered Voices series at Los Angeles Opera and have borrowed this umbrella term to describe and present the two generations of composers whose lives and productivity were cut short or radically altered. I have sought to disseminate their names and music. The list of names is long: Walter Braunfels, Hanns Eisler, Pavel Haas, Karl-Amadeus Hartmann, Vitezslava Kapralova, Gideon Klein, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Hans Krasa, Ernst Krenek, Bohuslav Martinu, Franz Schreker, Erwin Schulhoff, Victor Ullmann and Kurt Weill, to name just some. Last and certainly not least, it was the music of Alexander Zemlinsky that opened up this entire domain to me.
The revival of this music can serve as a reminder for us to resist any contemporary or future impulse to define artistic stands on the basis of racist, political, sectarian or exclusionary ideologies.
By keeping alive the music of the Recovered Voices composers, along with that of other victims of totalitarianism, we deny the Nazi regime a posthumous victory which, as long as the damage is still not repaired, still stands. That victory should not be allowed to stand and I, for one, will not rest until it no longer does.
The answer to Sassoon’s question is: it is we, now, who can work to “absolve the foulness of their fate.”
James Conlon New York, October 2006, revised 2018. All rights reserved.
Music with a fraught past is frequently performed, but how should it be presented? Is it correct to say that all fraught pasts are equal – e.g., Beethoven’s or Mahler’s personal experiences as opposed to Klein’s experience in a concentration camp? Reflecting upon recitals of works that depend on the audience’s knowledge of historical contexts, we may legitimately wonder whether such events offer something more like a history lesson than a musical experience. Jumping back and forth between history and aesthetics is a common practice, but are the two worlds mutually exclusive, or can they coexist to create powerful experiences? And if they can, in what way? Must programs that in some way engage the fraught past be entirely devoted to a particular time, place and condition, or are there more subtle ways to program?
All of these issues were on display at the recent symposium, “How Should We Perform the Troubled Past? A Weekend of Concerts and Conversation,” at the Colburn School in Los Angeles on October 8 and 9, 2016.1 A series of panel discussions, scholarly papers and performances raised issues on topics that ranged from music in the camps to legal issues of appropriation and recovery, and from Beethoven, Wagner, Schoenberg and Shostakovich to questions of concert programming. Of particular note on the latter front was the Saturday night concert put together by Robert Elias and Mirjam Frank and curated by Frank, a mezzo-soprano who is also a doctoral student at Royal Holloway, University of London; students from the Colburn Conservatory had been recruited to play chamber works by Erwin Schulhoff and Gideon Klein. At first, Elias and Frank had imagined a straightforward, two-part program: a vocal recital followed by two chamber works for strings. But Frank had other ideas, and the final result was an intricately designed presentation that intertwined the instrumental with the vocal.
There are, of course, many possible ways to organize musical presentations. The most common one, in terms of pedigree and prestige, usually involves programs that have an obvious inner coherence: the string quartets of Beethoven; a lieder recital that proceeds chronologically; an orchestral concert with an overture, a concerto and a major symphonic work; songs about springtime. At the opposite end of the spectrum, at least in our time, there are more vaudevillian approaches to a concert as a series of unconnected acts. While such events were the norm in many places throughout the nineteenth century (Mme Richard will sing an aria from the Magic Flute, followed by a bravura piano improvisation by Monsieur Thurnbottle on a theme from Fidelio, and the evening will conclude with a twelve-hand, six piano arrangement of von Suppé’s Light Cavalry Overture), they are rarer today. The very idea of interpolating two chamber works within the context of a vocal recital raises questions: Why do we program as we do? And what, in fact, does a concert or a composition actually mean?
But there was something else as well. By combining songs written in Terezín with compositions by Beethoven, Mahler, Zemlinsky and others, Frank challenged those “memorializing” programs that invite audiences to go back to “those times” and empathize with composers, contemporary audiences and all the victims of the period in question. Frank’s views, stated simply and powerfully in a recent article,2 can be summed up in the following words: “A re-enactment of Terezín cannot be in anybody’s interest.” In keeping with her approach, this concert program juxtaposed works from Terezín with other repertoire choices in a way that highlighted tensions, created dissonances and suggested multiple ways of telling both historical and aesthetic stories.
* * * *
It is no secret that, for the most part, writers of history have chosen a linear approach: events follow each other rather than moving backward; chapters tend to move in chronological order or to be organized by subject matter. Although the linearity may be interrupted by footnotes, it is also enhanced by them, as the forward motion is given even more weight. Whether we acknowledge this practice’s imperfections and recompose the past according to other models, or whether we consider this process to be inherently false, this is the primary way in which we encounter the past as it has been written down.
Concerts are entirely different creatures. Even if they are presented within a historical context, they have an immediacy and a protocol that separate them completely from written history. Yet, even though concerts are not discourses on history, programs such as this one can suggest ways of thinking about the past that are more subtle than most historical writing.
Even the first three short pieces on the program raised myriad questions about the past: The beautiful lullaby, “Adio querida,” a song textually linked to the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry, was sandwiched between two Terezín songs attributed to Ilse Weber. Although many of the seemingly infinite recordings of this lullaby, on YouTube and elsewhere, endeavor to forge a fantastical, late medieval Sephardic sound world, the melody was almost certainly a creation of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and may even be based on Verdi’s “Addio del passato” from La Traviata (although there are those who believe that Verdi was the borrower). And although the combination of slowness, the lover’s farewell and the minor-sixth tone of the piece can, and has been, tied to the theme of Jewish loss— related not only to Spain, but also to the Holocaust–this kind of appropriation is as subjective as it is arbitrary. (This leads to a paradox: if a person writes a farewell song and is killed immediately afterward by a piano falling through the floor of the apartment above, it cannot be said that the farewell song was a personal one anticipating the piano’s fall, yet it is natural for listeners who know the story to link the two events and to hear the farewell song as a personal adiós).
image needed
Mirjam Frank
This ambiguity is mirrored in the two songs by Ilse Weber that surround “Adio Querida” – “Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt” and “Wiegala” – both of which raise related but different questions. For neither song is there an authoritative text. We have several versions of “Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt,” but none can be attributed to Ilse Weber herself; and to further complicate the matter, the song’s two arrangements, as Frank notes, are radically different from each other: one is sentimental, the other ironic. The lullaby “Wiegala” is even more difficult to interpret: it has an unattributed back-story that links it to the gas chambers, and only a text and a melody exist in Ilse’s hand. No tempo, harmony or accentuation is given. Extant versions vary in tempo, texture and even meter. “Wiegala” seems to be whatever we make of it, and, once again, this can be either an invitation to careful thought or a vehicle for a variety of self-fulfilling prophecies about Terezín and the camps.
These three songs are often used to comment upon the past, to suggest associations, even to make assertions. But can they deliver on this score? Or do the historical lessons we learn from them involve that key tension between engagement and reflection? Sometimes, even as we immerse ourselves in such beautiful and interesting songs, our desire to learn more about them forces us to ask other questions, most of which have to do with how willing we are to delude ourselves about what happened, or our inability to grasp it fully. Earlier in the symposium, in a lecture-recital, Frank had demonstrated how different realizations of the limited materials relating to the songs of Ilse Weber create different world-views about the place where she was interned. This fact also reminds us that there is no single “Terezín experience,” and that even if such an experience had existed, no single piece of music could depict it.
* * * *
The approach outlined here might seem to imply that any relationship between aesthetic engagement and historical speculation is potentially disruptive to either or both. But this need not be the case. We have neither the words nor the broader capacity to understand the rich processes that take place when we go to a concert. Unlike a play or an opera, in which at least part of our thinking is harnessed by a story line, a concert program allows for a kind of thinking that is simultaneously somewhat directed and completely free.
Yet there are obvious problems in certain repertoires. In this case, the specific issue is the awesome power of the Holocaust, which can almost automatically become the center of gravity whenever material within its orbit is performed. Consider the third of Zemlinsky’s “American” songs performed on this concert – the exquisite, “Love, I Must Say Goodbye.” Does this desperately sad song become a farewell gesture that soundtracks the “Terezín experience” when it is performed alongside the work of Ilse Weber? We cannot say for sure, but we might agree that in today’s concert atmosphere, it is far more likely for Zemlinsky to be pulled into the Terezín orbit than for the Terezín songs to be heard as “mere” romantic goodbyes, owing to their proximity to Zemlinsky’s work. And yet there is no reason why this should be so; the power of a concert depends, once again, on the most sensitive interplay among its components, none of which can be proscribed.
We can explore this question in greater detail by examining the felicitous pairing of Gideon Klein’s “Lullaby” with his Trio for Strings. The former was written in the early winter of 1943; the composer still had almost two more years to live; he had been interned in Terezín for just over a year, probably knew nothing about the death camps in Poland and was a key figure in Terezín’s musical life. Not that he knew nothing about death—it is possible that the lullaby was a response to the typhus epidemic that raged through the camp during February of that year; but he was probably not aware of Auschwitz. How different were the circumstances under which the Trio was conceived and completed! Begun in August 1944, it was finished during the fall transports that emptied the camp of a large majority of its long-term prisoners. We can never know precisely what Klein knew about what awaited him, but there is an extremely good chance that by that summer he was aware of the death camps. Thus he probably knew where he was headed, and he would likely have tried to incorporate some of his responses into the Trio, in the form of hidden elements such as symbolic song texts, quotations from other works, and references to a funeral march.
It is difficult enough, not to say almost impossible, for even the most serious and careful scholar to calibrate the differences between these two works in relation to Klein’s ultimate fate and the larger questions surrounding it, and it is certainly impossible to figure out how a performance of either work can or should reflect in any way the realities on the ground at the time of composition. And yet, linking them is a meaningful gesture. Even if two pieces of this sort were grouped together only on the basis of historical continuity, their juxtaposition would still create aesthetic moments that transcend such things. The lullaby, as Klein understood it, was a Hebrew folk song that seems to foreshadow some of the character of the Trio’s second movement.
* * * *
Of course the battle for and about musical meaning has been going on for centuries. For some, music is nothing more or less than the relationship between tones in “musical space,” gloriously abstract and preferably untainted by too much contact with other aspects of reality. Others insist on a general connection between human states of mind and behavior and musical gestures, while still others wish to forge closer connections, arguing, as did Mendelssohn, that music is actually the most precise commentary on human existence. Finally, in Terezín artists and musicians also used music as a means for sending messages that exposed the propaganda lie of the camp.
Mirjam Frank is a musician-scholar who, although keenly engaged with historical issues in various aspects of her work, has a horror of imposing them on the music she performs, and she is especially skeptical of basking in the hot emotions related to specific, fraught events of the past. Thus her work and her compelling performance style are artistic rather than didactic: she makes nuanced suggestions about connections between musical, textual and historical substances without ever forcing them, and she ensures, as far as possible, that the pieces on the program inform each other rather than having a “memorializing” center of gravity. We see this in her arch choice of Thomas Traill’s “My Love’s in Germanie,” composed in 1794. Seen from one angle, this lovely lament may be drawn into the orbit of Ilse Weber’s “Wiegala,” but from another, under its impact, “Wiegala” becomes a simple lullaby whose power does not depend on its Terezín setting. The same process obtains in the final two songs: ending the program with Mahler’s “Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen” and Beethoven’s “In questa tomba oscura” neither straitjackets these two composers within the world of “Recovered Voices” nor forces the Terezín songs out of their context. Yet the songs do address each other.
One of the main points of instrumental music and of non-dramatic vocal music is that there is no straightforward plot or narrative. Thus listeners are at liberty to avoid narratives altogether or to create their own nuanced plots, if they wish. Although an artfully crafted program, such as the one under discussion, in no way interferes with this freedom, it also has the capacity to open up varied, thoughtful and profound approaches to sound and history.
Endnotes
1. The event was organized under the auspices of The Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices at the Colburn School.↑
To see the concert program from the event, click here.
Michael Beckerman is Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Music at New York University and is currently the Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic. He was a co-organizer of the symposium in which the referenced concert took place and is the author of a series of books and articles on topics related to the event.##
As a music lecturer and promoter, Anneliese Landau participated in an extraordinary number of significant developments: early German radio broadcasts, the Jewish Culture League in pre-war Berlin, and the activities of émigré composers in Los Angeles. She knew and worked with many important historical figures — musicologist Alfred Einstein, composer Ernst Toch, and Rabbi Max Nussbaum, among others. In doing so, she navigated traditional roles that defined women in her day and common assumptions regarding Jewish identity, within and outside the world of music.
Landau was born in Halle, Germany, on March 5, 1903. She studied law – a difficult field for women at the time – at the University of Halle, but she eventually received permission to focus on her real passion, music history, an area with gender issues of its own. She followed her primary instructor, musicologist Arnold Schering, to the University of Berlin and earned her Ph.D. in musicology in 1930. After graduation she prepared, at Alfred Einstein’s request, the Musikalische Zeitschriftenschau, an index of all the articles on music published during the preceding year, for the respected journal Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft. She continued this annual activity until 1933 and compiled similar listings for the Bach-Jahrbuch and Händel-Jahrbuch.1
While carving out a portfolio career in this area, she also gave lectures on music on German radio until early in 1933, when the Nazis forced the cancellation of contracts with all Jews in broadcasting. In her unpublished memoirs, Landau recalled her incredulity when she arrived at the radio station and was told that her program proposals simply wouldn’t work. She asked, “Do you mean, I cannot broadcast any longer because I am Jewish?”2
Landau had to consider emigration: in addition to being Jewish, although she was not observant, she had joined the Social Democratic Party along with her friend Franz Beidler, the grandson of Richard Wagner.3 Chance interceded. One day, while she was standing on a sidewalk gazing into a shop window, “I suddenly see a familiar face appearing next to mine in the reflection of the window: Dr. Kurt Singer,” she recalled. “That afternoon, at his office, he spoke to me about his idea of a [Culture League]: he would call together all Jewish musicians, actors, lecturers and ask them to become part of an organization which would offer drama, opera, and lectures to a Jewish membership.”4 In this way, she began her tenure with the Jewish Culture League in Berlin (Jüdischer Kulturbund), an organization created by and for Jews, through negotiations with the Nazi regime.5
In the League, she gave remarkably popular lectures on music. A reporter for the Jüdische Rundschau, a contemporary German Jewish newspaper, described an evening with Landau as “magic.”6 Why? For one thing, Landau included live music by way of illustration, and these performances made use of the best musicians available. Her regular performers included pianist Wolfgang Rosé, son of cellist Eduard Rosé, a founding member of the prominent and long-lasting Rosé Quartet; Mascha Benya, a folk singer, who became a good friend and featured artist in the League’s opera productions; and baritone Fritz Lechner, with whom Landau had worked on the radio. When Lechner left for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Wilhelm Guttmann, who had been a member of the Municipal Opera in Berlin,7 took his place on Landau’s programs.8 These accomplished musicians performed entire pieces, rather than examples of only a few bars, and Landau’s accompanying talks were entertaining performances in their own right: she used colorful anecdotes to set the music in its historical context. The interplay between her words and the music augmented the impact of both. One review at the time described the format “as a completely new form of artistic performance.”9
Critics and some former members have argued that involvement in the League, which existed from 1933 to 1941, distracted its Jewish members from the Nazi danger and the changing reality of the situation of Jews in Germany.10 This was not the case for Landau. After the 1938 pogroms, with worries about her sister’s family as well as mounting restrictions on her work (including the requirement that she focus on Jewish topics), she made plans to leave Germany. She emigrated in 1939, staying first with a friend in London while she waited for the Kindertransport that would carry her sister’s children from Berlin to freedom in foster care; her sister and brother-in-law remained behind to look after her parents. After her niece’s and nephews’ arrival, Landau went on to the United States, hoping to find the means and sponsorship to win her family’s release from Germany; she was not successful. She traveled on a ship, SS Nova Scotia, first to Nova Scotia and then to Boston, where she arrived on January 1, 1940, and was received by a representative of the National Council of Jewish Women, who was dismayed that Landau did not speak Yiddish. “You don’t understand Jewish, what kind of a Jew are you? Are you Jewish at all?”11 she exclaimed. After this unsettling welcome, Landau traveled to New York.
As a single woman in New York (Landau never married), she struggled to support herself in her chosen field. But in the fall of 1941 she was invited by Jane Evans, head of Cincinnati’s National Federation of the Temple Sisterhood,12 to work on a book, The Contributions of Jewish Composers to the Music of the Modern World, which she completed in 1946. 13 She also organized a unique lecture-performance program, “An Evening of Forbidden Music,” that was presented early in 1942 at the B’nai B’rith Lodge in Forest Hills, a well-to-do neighborhood in Queens, New York.14 It was meant to be a one-time affair, but the chairman of the Lodge asked Landau to repeat it in Manhattan. After that encore performance, Landau was invited to take the program on tour, with the support not only of the Lodge but also of the Army Emergency Relief Fund, a private nonprofit organization incorporated in 1942 to give financial aid to soldiers and their families in need.15 Between March 1942 and March 1944, Landau presented her program sixteen times, with slight variations in repertoire and in the roster of performing artists, at B’nai B’rith lodges as well as Jewish Community Centers in New York and Connecticut.16
A draft of the full program, most likely from 1943, lists the repertoire: the music of Jacques Offenbach, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Ernest Bloch, Henryk Wieniawski, and Dmitri Shostakovich—Jewish and non-Jewish composers suppressed during the Third Reich. Landau also programmed folk songs—Russian, Lithuanian, English, and Hebrew, which were sung by her friend Benya, who had also made her way to the United States after the pogroms. Landau explained in commentary that punctuated the performances, “Each country that was occupied by the Nazi aggressors had to stop immediately with the performance of music written by Jews, and had also to quit her National Anthem, her national composers, and her folk songs.”17 Landau closed the concert with “American music” —excerpts from Broadway and film: She asked, already embracing her new home, “And if Fascism would happen here—did you ever think about what we would have to miss of our American music?”18
A visit to Los Angeles changed Landau’s life. She had traveled there thanks in part to an invitation from Rabbi Max Nussbaum to speak at Hollywood’s Temple Israel, which he had recently begun to serve and would lead for thirty-two years. While in the city, she learned about the work of the Jewish Community Centers and met Lee Kestenbaum, who had important musical contacts in the city. During a second trip, Kestenbaum was able to arrange for Landau to meet Meyer Fichman, the first executive director of the Jewish Centers Association, created in 1943 to coordinate the city’s various Jewish Community Centers.19 Landau was offered and accepted the position of music director of the Association, and she moved to Los Angeles in 1944. In 1952, membership in the Association’s five centers was estimated to be 7,692, but the total number of people who frequented the centers was 835,116. Among the approximately sixty staff members, sixteen were “special interest staff,” with expertise in the arts, including drama and dance as well as music.20
In her new role, Landau quickly discovered that only a small segment of the population frequented the limited concert offerings available in the city and that there was little room for new music. One contributing factor was the notion “that music was a social accomplishment, not a profession” —something to be left to the women.21 This attitude was a distinct obstacle for Landau in her early attempts to find academic work in the United States: American musicology was trying to distinguish itself as male in an effort to assure the field’s respectability as a profession.22 But it may have actually helped Landau in Los Angeles; indeed, many women in the city played prominent roles in non-academic musical life. The oil heiress Arline Barnsdall, for instance, had sponsored programs of the California-born composer Henry Cowell’s New Music Society of California from 1925-1927 in the ballroom of the city’s luxurious downtown Biltmore Hotel. Artie Mason Carter, who had studied as a pianist in Vienna, was behind the Symphonies Under the Stars series at the Hollywood Bowl, which had begun in 1922 as a means of generating income for the Los Angeles Philharmonic during the summer.23
One of Landau’s earliest triumphs in her new position was a special International Composers Concert that took place on April 24, 1945, at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. For this event, she had reached out to the émigré composers in the city and had had memorable meetings with Ernst Toch, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Arnold Schoenberg. Landau’s recollection of approaching Schoenberg is especially memorable: “No kindness or any form of hospita[lity] expected me at Schoenberg’s house. I felt like an intruder into the sanctuary of an embittered man. ” 24 In addition to their music, the program would include Maurice Ravel’s Kaddish, music by Darius Milhaud, Ernest Bloch’s Psalm 22, The Dances of King David by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and, by Louis Gruenberg, Five Variations on a Popular Theme, Including Three Apologies, for three violins and cello.25 The appreciative audience included many of the featured composers. Only Korngold, among them, participated on stage as a musician in the performance of his suite “Much Ado about Nothing” for violin and piano, accompanying his friend violinist Henri Temianka.26
In addition to special events, Landau also established regular programs at the centers. For musicians between the ages of eight and twenty-eight, she organized a series of monthly Sunday afternoon recitals, which she called Musicians in the Making. It began in the fall of 1945 and continued uninterrupted from October through April, each year for two decades.27 Budding musicians auditioned and were adjudicated by professional judges. Typically, two hopefuls would be awarded that month’s recital, which they would split, in addition to a cash prize established by local composer Ferde Grofé. The first winner was the fifteen-year-old pianist André Previn, who was born in Berlin but had settled in Los Angeles as a child after his family had emigrated from Germany in 1939. Some other winners included violinists Arnold Steinhardt and Zina Schiff, pianists Daniel Pollack and Malcolm Bilson, and violist Myra Kestenbaum. In a parallel effort, Landau created Composers in the Making, with judges Lukas Foss and Ingolf Dahl.28
On March 12, 1955, Landau proudly oversaw another high-profile event: the West Coast premiere of Alexandre Tansman’s oratorio Isaiah, the Prophet. Although she had at her disposal an excellent stage at Los Angeles’s Westside Jewish Community Center, she chose to use Royce Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles. She engaged not only the Roger Wagner Chorale but also the prominent film composer Franz Waxman, who conducted the fifty-six-piece orchestra. Actor Louis Calhern, whose most endearing and enduring film role was Ambassador Trentino in the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, agreed to be the narrator. Police had to close Royce Hall’s doors thirty minutes before the start of the program: the auditorium was already filled to capacity.29
In 1957, Landau found a way to re-involve émigré composers in her work. She began The Composers Workshop, a more regular showcase for local contemporary artists in performance and conversation.30 Each invited composer spoke about a new piece or a piece in progress and then performed it or had it performed. A question and answer period was followed by an informal discussion with audience members over tea, coffee, and cookies.31 The purpose was twofold: “to help the music listener develop an ear for the music of his own days, and to make him aware of the contribution Jewish composers are making to the international musical scene.”32
In 1957, the series featured Louis Gruenberg, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Ernest Gold, and Leon Levitch. During the 1958-1959 season, the program included Ellis Kohs, Max Helfman, Maurice Goldman, Walter Arlen, Ernest Kanitz, Roy Travis, and William Grant Still.33 Within this list, Still’s name may seem surprising, given the series’ focus on the contribution of Jewish composers. Born in Mississippi, he had relocated to Los Angeles in 1939, the same year in which he married Verna Arvey, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.34 She and her family must have been the initial link between Still and the Jewish Community Center.
Two especially memorable sessions of these workshops were Ernst Toch’s Some Viewpoints of the Composer, on May 22, 1957, and Eric Zeisl’s presentation, Message from the Conscientious Jewish Composer, on January 9, 1957. During the latter program, Zeisl introduced vocal parts from his incomplete opera, Job; this was the only performance of these segments during the composer’s lifetime. (The complete work was not performed until 2014.)35
In 1960, Landau assumed a full-time position at the new Valley Cities Jewish Community Center in Van Nuys, in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. In this way, she lost her central function in the Westside Jewish Community Center’s musical activities. Her new role was a poor substitute for the old one and, increasingly frustrated, she retired in 196836 and focused on writing. She had always loved art-song, and she devoted herself to the genre in her final project, The Lied: The Unfolding of Its Style, a book published in 1980, eleven years before her death in 1991. On July 18, 1982, at a conference on nineteenth-century music at Southampton University in England, Landau gave a talk – “Schubert and Wilhelm Müller” – in which she described Müller’s role in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and the work’s reception.37 In more informal discussion during the conference, she spoke of her direct work with many composers of interest to those in attendance. The younger participating musicologists excitedly asked her about the concerts she had attended in Berlin and the artists she had known in Germany and after.
1. Anneliese Landau, “Pictures you wanted to see—People you wanted to meet, ” Memoirs (unpublished), donated to the author by the Landau family, 31-33. ↑
2. Anneliese Landau, “Bridges to the Past, ” donated to the author by the Landau family, 38. Landau, Memoirs, 40. ↑
3. John M. Spalek, Interview with Anneliese Landau, December 29, 1982, recorded and held at the University of Albany. For more information on Beidler, and the controversy of his connection to Wagner, see Eva Rieger, Friedelind Wagner: Richard Wagner’s Rebellious Granddaughter (New York: The Boydell Press, 2013), 10, 53, and 190. ↑
5. For more information, see Lily E. Hirsch, A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). See also http://orelfoundation.org/index.php/journal/journalArticle/
the_j252dische_kulturbunde_in_the_early_nazi_years/.↑
6. Micha Michalowitz, quoted in Matthias Harder, “ ‘Messianische Erziehung’? Die Kluturbund-Vorträge zwischen Tradition und Augenblick, ” Geschlossene Vorstellung: Der Jüdische Kulturbund in Deutschland 1933-1941, ed. Akademie der Künste (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1992), 132. ↑
7. See Horst J.P. Bergmeier, Ejal Jakob Eisler, and Rainer E. Lotz, Vorbei … Beyond Recall: Dokumentation jüdischen Musiklebens in Berlin 1933-1938… A Record of Jewish musical life in Nazi Berlin 1933-1938 (Hambergen: Bear Family Records, 2001), 365. ↑
9. Anneliese-Landau-Archiv 584, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. ↑
10. Lily E Hirsch, “Germany’s Commemoration of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, ” in Jewish Music and Germany after the Holocaust, ed. Lily E. Hirsch and Tina Frühauf (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). ↑
16. Landau, Memoirs, 110-111; Spalek interview; Press clippings about “Forbidden Music,” Ruth-Nussbaum-Archiv 63, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.↑
17. Anneliese Landau, “Forbidden Music” lecture, Anneliese-Landau-Archiv 435, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.↑
18. Anneliese Landau, “Forbidden Music” lecture, Anneliese-Landau-Archiv 435, Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Anneliese Landau, “Forbidden Music” concert program, Anneliese-Landau-Archiv 432, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.↑
19. Herbert Morris Biskar, “A History of the Jewish Centers Association of Los Angeles with Special Reference to Jewish Identity, ” Doctor of Social Work thesis, University of Southern California, 1972, 55-57.↑
20. Murray T. Blumberg, “Community Relations as Recognized and Practiced by the Jewish Centers Association of Los Angeles and its Four Institutional Members, ” Masters Thesis, University of Southern California, 1952, 36-45.↑
21. Dorothy Lamb Crawford, A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler’s Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 25-28.↑
22. Judy Tsou, “Women Musicologists in Mid-Century American Academies, ” in Frauen in der Musikwissenschaft/women in musicology. Dokumentation des internationalen Workshops Wien 1998, ed. Markus Grassl and Cornelia Szabó-Knotik (Vienna: Bundesministeriums für Wissenschaft und Verkehr, 1999), 183-188. ↑
30. Anneliese Landau, “A Different Approach to Music and the Related Arts for Adults, ” Anneliese-Landau-Archiv 452, Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Landau, Memoirs, 123-134. See also “Music at the Center,” a program, personal collection of Carrie Paechter. ↑
32. Anneliese Landau, “Interest in Work of Living Jewish Composers Stimulated by Los Angeles Music Council,” Circle (Spring 1959), Anneliese-Landau-Archiv 449, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. ↑
33. “Music at the Center,” 1958-1959, program, in the private collection of Carrie Paechter.↑
34. Catherine Parsons Smith, Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 178. ↑
35. Malcolm S. Cole, “A Miracle in Munich: The Bavarian State Opera Premieres Zeisls Hiob, ” The OREL Foundation, http://orelfoundation.org/index.php/journal/journalArticle/
a_miracle_in_munich_the_bavarian_state_opera_premieres
_zeisls_hiob/.↑
36. Letter to Lisel Micklem from Anneliese Landau, Sept 10, 1967, private collection of Spedding Micklem.↑
37. “Schubert and Wilhelm Müller, ” Anneliese-Landau-Archiv 45, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. ↑
Against all odds, in 2014 three multi-generational, Holocaust-related projects came to fruition almost simultaneously: Night Will Fall, an HBO Documentary film; Glenn Kurtz’s book, Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux); and the opera Zeisls Hiob [Zeisl’s Job], which is the focus of this essay. Commissioned by the Bavarian State Opera for its summer festival, Zeisls Hiob premiered in Munich’s venerable Reithalle on July 19, 2014, with repeat performances on the 21st and 23rd. Imaginatively conceived, well performed, and extensively reviewed, Zeisls Hiob is a music drama sui generis. Presented in a markedly different form than its originators could ever have imagined, this miracle in Munich merits an account of its meandering evolutionary course, an assessment of the finished work in theory and practice, and speculation concerning its future.
Joseph Roth’s novel Job, The Story of a Simple Man, appeared in 1930.1 Set in Europe and America, it recounts the travails of the devout Torah teacher Mendel Singer, a 20th-century Job. As a memorial to the exiled Roth (1894-1939), who had died in Paris, admirers staged an adaptation of Hiob on July 3, 1939 (Théâtre Pigalle). The young Viennese composer Eric[h] Zeisl (1905-59), himself a recently arrived exile, contributed a prelude, Cossack dance, and “Menuchim’s Song.” Profoundly moved by the subject and identifying closely with its protagonist, Zeisl soon determined to transform Roth’s modern fable into an opera. He enlisted as librettist his friend Hans Kafka (1902-74) and feverishly composed Act I in 1939-40, despite the trauma attendant on his relocation to New York. The project stalled as pressing circumstances forced Kafka to postpone his completion of the libretto – for seventeen years! In the interim, the now Los Angeles-based Zeisl composed a series of surrogates, several of which incorporated a theme similar to “Menuchim’s Song,” as, for example, the Requiem Ebraico (1944-45), the Violin Sonata (1950), the biblical ballet Naboth’s Vineyard (1953), and the Concerto Grosso for Cello and Orchestra (1955-56). These scores and others reveal a steady growth in compositional technique and expressive vocabulary. When at last Kafka delivered a typescript in 1957, Zeisl speedily set Act II. With the Europe portion finished and the America portion beckoning, fate intervened. Less than six weeks after completing the orchestration of Act II, Zeisl died, on February 18, 1959, at the age of fifty-three.
For five decades, the Hiob fragment remained in limbo. By 1992, performance prospects appeared so dim that I wrote, “For Zeisl, Hiob . . . ended on a tragic note, unfinished, unsung, and frustratingly unfulfilled. My account must close at this point; the story need not.”2 Fortuitously, the Zeisl commemorative years of 2005 (centenary of his birth) and 2009 (fiftieth anniversary of his death) engendered a heightened awareness of his legacy through an upsurge of concerts, recordings, and publications. Herbert Krill’s exquisite documentary film, Eric(h) Zeisl—An Unfinished Life, introduced Zeisl’s art to a broad public.3 Curiosity about Hiob led to student performances of excerpts in Rostock (2009) and Vienna (2010). An Austrian company seriously considered commissioning someone to finish the opera. In 2013, the Bavarian State Opera took charge. From Zeisl and Kafka, the torch passed to a new generation: Miron Hakenbeck, dramaturge and librettist; Jan Duszyński, the young composer commissioned to finish the music; and Daniel Grossmann (founder of Munich’s Jakobsplatz Orchestra), a conductor celebrated for performing works by neglected Jewish composers – works that address issues that remain relevant today.
Immediately, the triumvirate encountered challenges inherent in Zeisl and Kafka’s materials. For the portion set in Europe, transcriber and arranger Regina Gaigl capably converted Zeisl’s hastily written manuscripts into a usable score. (I must insert a caveat: had Acts I and II come to rehearsal in his lifetime, surely Zeisl would have revised his draft substantially.) For the portion set in America, Kafka’s libretto, for which Zeisl had not written the music, posed knottier problems, among them its introduction of several new characters (following Roth) and its daunting length: forty-four typescript pages, as opposed to a mere fifteen pages for Acts I and II.
Having determined that the opera must be finished, the team devised an ingenious strategy: the generation of Hakenbeck, Duszyński, Grossmann, and the fictional Menuchim (played by a young tenor) would react in its contemporary way to the vital questions raised by the older generation of Roth, Kafka, Zeisl, and the fictional Mendel (played by an older tenor). To realize this strategy, Hakenbeck and Duszyński implemented key decisions concerning text, musical style, length, and title. Beginning in December 2013, they drafted a new text – in German, English, and Hebrew – that extends the narrative arc in a distinctly allusive, dreamlike fashion. Eliminating Kafka’s new characters (with the exception of Mike), the collaborators reframe the story. Instead of emphasizing the religious conflict or exile, Hakenbeck notes, “We have concentrated upon the relationship between father and son” (but see below).4 Correspondingly, in response to Zeisl’s late Romantic, Hebraic-inflected style, the Juilliard-trained Duszyński projects his own compositional voice and draws upon his extensive experience in today’s theater: “It was a great adventure for me . . . wasn’t easy, but definitely thrilling” (email, August 30, 2014). The timings of the two “halves” accentuate the contrasting conceptions: Zeisl’s Europe segment required two hours, twenty minutes; fifty-eight minutes sufficed for Duszyński’s America segment. Daniel Grossmann provides welcome insight into the resulting, multi-generational effort. In essence, the “unfinished” itself becomes the subject of the enterprise. “For that reason,” Grossmann concludes, “the evening is not called Hiob by Eric Zeisl but Zeisls Hiob, because Eric Zeisl as a person is also the theme of the evening” [Dümling, “Macht und Ohnmacht,” p. 64].
On the sweltering night of July 19, a capacity audience filled the Reithalle, a multi-purpose venue ill-suited for opera. Attendees received a printed leaflet that included a roster of the performers, bios of the principals, and an essay by Shoshana Liessmann entitled “Pessach: Die Nacht der Fragen” (“Passover: The Night of Questions”). Parroting Roth’s own division – Part I, Europe; Part II, America – programmatic subheadings led many (including me) to assume, wrongly, that an intermission would separate Zeisl’s music from Duszyński’s. Unfortunately, there was no plot synopsis or explanation of the creative team’s strategy.5
Placed at the front of the bare-bones performance area, a low platform supported a table and chairs, a bed, and a cupboard. Synagogue lamps hung overhead. A high, railed platform stood at the rear. A fireplace and benches lined one side, while on the other side the Jakobsplatz Orchestra and the Munich “Project Chorus” (formed specifically for this production) were squeezed in behind the cupboard. In the center, a vacant space stood ready to accommodate a billowing curtain and, at times, a video screen.
A prologue by Duszyński (unmentioned in the leaflet) launched the performance. Representing the younger composer, tenor Matthew Grills chanted individual English words and clusters that ultimately cohered into an eloquent articulation of the challenge: “I / have been asked / to / finish / an unfinished / opera.” Zeisl’s uplifting prelude then proclaimed the two themes, “Miracle” and “Menuchim’s Song,” that color the Europe segment. The stylistic amalgam of East and West that Zeisl had developed to complement Roth’s Hebraic subject matter was immediately projected.6 Prominent, too, were the contrapuntal textures that Zeisl had long equated with the religious spirit, although Zeisl’s extended fugue had been shortened.
Acts I and II are set in a shtetl in Eastern Galicia before World War I. Zeisl’s music unfolds in a manner reminiscent of Wagnerian music drama. Organized into a series of scenic complexes, the narrative advances through an arioso-like Sprechgesang, with set-pieces embedded to allow ample operatic responses to key events. Orchestral transitions serve, structurally, to link the complexes and to raise or lower the emotional temperature of the drama. In his living room, Mendel attempts to instruct a group of students who would rather mock the sickly Menuchim. Ensuing dialogue between Mendel and his wife, Deborah, yields character portraits of the couple’s three healthy children: the strong Jonas, the sly Shemariah, and the graceful Mirjam. To a melody grafted onto “Menuchim’s Song,” a visiting Hasidic Wunderrabbi prophesies that Menuchim, the fourth child, will be healed. The voice of the Lord will speak through him. Never must Deborah leave him. At the act’s climactic moment, Menuchim cries, “Mama!” This precious word elicits an emotional outpouring from Deborah, followed by the parents’ rapturous duet. Alas, their joy is short-lived. The healthy sons face military conscription, and Mirjam finds uniformed Cossacks irresistible. Parents and offspring unite to perform a quintet, cast in the style of a Russian dance. The act closes with Mendel’s plaintive rhapsody over Menuchim’s crib, “Oh, God, why hast thou punished me so?”
Act II, Scene 1, takes place a half-hour later, at the inn. Conceived as a vast ritornello complex, a surging crowd scene unfolds.7 Against the background of a Cossack chorus and dance, Zeisl foregrounds the principals: the drunken Jonas, the subdued Shemariah, the flirtatious Mirjam, the desperate Deborah, the seductive female innkeeper, and Kapturak, a colorless but well-connected middleman in Roth’s novel, but a malevolent, anti-Semitic police commissar in Kafka and Zeisl’s version of the story – their first major departure from the original plot. To conclude, Mendel and Deborah ecstatically sing a chant-like duet in which the text’s bright promise is contradicted by a descending, chromatic ground bass, the centuries-old musical symbol of suffering and death.
During the intermission, viewers wondered whether the break signaled the end of the Europe segment. In fact, Zeisl’s Act II, Scene 2, is still firmly rooted in Poland and is laden with potent dramatic situations that elicited five of his greatest scenic complexes. (In my opinion, this crowning scene is Zeisl’s musical epitaph, in two senses: as his final testament in his favorite compositional genre, and as his greatest dramatic composition.) It is a Friday evening in late summer, one to two years later, on a street in the village of Zuchnow. A Vesper hymn initiates a solemn prayer scene. A shocking confrontation ensues. In a “hate-filled” (hasserfüllt) song in 7/8 meter, Kapturak spews his venom, to which Mendel serenely counters, “We have a homeland, . . . the Torah.” Plumbing a new emotional depth, Deborah sings an intense, melismatic lullaby, the central European equivalent of a Bach Passion aria. Before rising to yet greater expressive heights, Zeisl inserts an episode for two drunks. Some might find comedy in Kafka’s text, but Miron Hakenbeck detected menace. The narrative’s main thread resumes with Zeisl’s most erotic scene, the Cossack Michael’s seduction of Mirjam (or vice versa). A blend of the spiritual and the carnal, this slowly building, masterfully controlled complex culminates with an orchestral “orgiastic love scene.” Recalling the grand concertati of Verdi, Zeisl’s final complex juxtaposes the individual and the collective: Mendel chanting the “Schma Yisroel,” the chorus in the synagogue, the debauched Cossacks in the tavern, and Mendel’s disgrace following the discovery of the lovers’ tryst. Capping the complex is a mighty choral fugue with solo interjections by the principals. Realizing that he must abandon Menuchim (whose handicaps preclude his emigration), yet determined to save Mirjam, Mendel announces, “Deborah, we must go to America!” The derisive populace announces Mendel’s fate: “Wander, Jew!” As Mendel and Deborah implore God to help them, the orchestra foretells salvation through a soaring augmentation of “Menuchim’s Song.”
Kafka had divided his America half into three large units: (1) a multi-racial, predominantly Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, 6 April 1917 – the date of America’s entry into World War I; (2) a year later, April 1918; and (3) 1924.8 Closer inspection reveals a series of events distributed along a clear timeline and significant departures from Roth’s novel, notably the introduction of an American counterpart to the diabolical Kapturak. I submit that if Zeisl had lived, he would have composed another segment of roughly two hours in length and would have divided a shortened Kafka text into Acts III (Scenes 1 and 2) and IV. The resulting palindromic structure would have counterbalanced Act I’s focus on the sickly boy with Act IV’s focus on the adult Menuchim. But this is pure speculation on my part. Zeisl’s journey ended; either Hiob would remain incomplete, or others would have to finish it.
Hakenbeck and Duszyński stepped into the breach and delivered their vision of the America segment. On the unaltered set, Mendel and Deborah appear in the foreground. Behind them, Mike (formerly Michael) and Mirjam dress. In a reversal of Act I, the students teach Mendel English: “table,” “chair,” “bed,” and “cupboard.” The younger generation’s allusive manner of storytelling obliges the viewer to shift gears precipitously. Blurred timelines, the suggestion (or conflation) of events, abrupt transitions, and unpredictable changes of momentum become the new norm. To reinforce this approach, Duszyński, while retaining his individual voice throughout, unerringly supplies musical responses that spotlight each phase of the ever-shifting narrative. As this first complex continues, the family and Mike express an illusory happiness in their new circumstances, this “good land.” In a sultry torch song, Mirjam declares her love for Mike. (Kafka had envisioned a “biblical love song”.) An intense orchestral passage, a quintet for the principals, and an ominous choral entry signal gathering storm clouds.
With ringing cries of “Feuer,” the adult Menuchim heralds further complications, starting with a conflation of two events: the pre-war fire in Zuchnow that had stimulated Menuchim’s recovery and the all-consuming flames of World War I in which, Mendel believes, his son must surely have perished. Calamities mount: the deaths of Shemariah, Mike, and presumably Jonas in combat, and Deborah’s death – “they are all dead,” Mirjam declaims flatly – and Mirjam’s insanity. As the climax of this twenty-first-century mad scene, she is rolled off on a gurney, accompanied by gleefully singing, waving children and the din of a town band. “I am the only one,” the adult Menuchim intones. Dark, richly scored funeral music for orchestra and chorus punctuates this litany of loss.
“Come here, Deborah!” With this pathetic entreaty, Mendel begins a soul-wrenching aria (Duszyński’s version of the ritual song that Kafka had envisioned). Reading from his sacred book, in a musical equivalent of davening (praying), he chants ecstatically in a punishingly high tessitura. The moment passes. Disillusioned, he removes his prayer paraphernalia. As the adult Menuchim enters, a crushed Mendel appears poised to renounce his faith. A Grand Pause, silence, and darkness combine to heighten the suspense.
Prefacing the final complex, the Menuchim/Duszyński figure restates his challenge: “I have been asked . . . .” To a brooding lament colored by the historic descending “sigh” figure, the ghosts of Deborah, Mirjam, Jonas, Shemariah, and Michael enter. An orchestral interlude redirects attention to Mendel, who is clad in a white robe and is sitting on the bed. Called to the Passover Seder, he covers his ears. To shattering orchestral-choral music, the ghosts surround Mendel before proceeding to the table. With a magical instrumental passage, Duszyński seemingly suspends time. Singing in Hebrew, the children reestablish momentum. Although remaining apart, Mendel begins to chant. As the ghosts glide backward, Menuchim steps forward. Gradually slowing music prepares his portentous knock. After searching the cupboard, the father sees his son at the Seder table. Satisfied, Mendel returns to the bed. Menuchim/Duszyński then constructs the English word, “Finished.” Reconciled at last, Mendel falls asleep.
In considering the “America” segment, I noted two discrepancies between theory and practical stage reality. First, although Hakenbeck and Duszyński intended to emphasize Mendel’s feelings of guilt, in performance the overwhelming impression was spiritual: the Seder as agent of reconciliation. Second, while acknowledging their indebtedness to Kafka, the collaborators quietly memorialized the unwitting instigator of this
multi-generational effort. Bypassing Kafka’s synoptic prayer of thanksgiving, they staged Roth’s ending in utter silence: “Mendel fell asleep. And he rested from the weight of happiness and the greatness of miracles.” (Benjamin translation, p. 204)
Zeisls Hiob attracted considerable media coverage. With the exceptions cited in Note 4, pre-concert publicity typically conveyed light fare, for example, “There Are No Mountains in California,” David Mermelstein’s delightful account of a visit with Barbara Zeisl Schoenberg, the composer’s daughter.9 Opinions expressed in post-performance reviews ran the gamut from generally favorable to curtly dismissive.10 Critics agreed on two points: the excellence of the six-person Kinderchor (directed by Stellario Fagone) and Peter Lobert’s magisterial turn as Kapturak. To supplement the published reviews, I offer herewith my capsule assessment, beginning with the work’s individual components. Drawn partly from the main company and partly from its opera studio, the soloists – all of whom acted convincingly – ranged, vocally, from capable to outstanding. Besides Peter Lobert, Mária Celeng (Mirjam), Matthew Grills (Menuchim/Duszyński), Chris Merritt (Mendel), Christa Ratzenböck (Deborah), Joshua Stewart (Michael/Mike), and Rachel Wilson (Inkeeper) also distinguished themselves. Daniel Grossmann elicited clean, intense, focused playing from the thirty-member Jakobsplatz Orchestra. Prepared by Elisabeth Löffler, the twenty-voice “Project Chorus” contributed significantly, its distance from the action notwithstanding. Taking into consideration the Reithalle’s physical limitations, I found the staging imaginative, especially the singing actors’ exploitation of the performance space. Their advances, retreats, lateral movements, couplings, and partings underscored the unfolding narrative more effectively than did the manipulations of the billowing curtain and the sporadic video projections. To this specifically Ostjüdisch story, Philine Rinnert’s generic costumes imparted a sense of universality and timelessness. I heartily commend Miron Hakenbeck, Jan Duszyński, and Daniel Grossmann for their vision. I applaud the Bavarian State Opera for investing the thought, time, effort, resources, and creative energy required to mount Zeisls Hiob.
Back in Los Angeles, I pondered two larger, interconnected questions – one speculative, the other aesthetic – concerning the opera as a whole. The speculative question is: might the July performances inaugurate a new chapter for the now finished opera? As an advocate, I wish it a long, fruitful stage life. Accordingly, I submit this wish list for future productions: presentation in an opera house, an orchestra of at least sixty players (for ample string tone), a costumed opera chorus circulating on stage, and an animated corps de ballet (several critics judged the production overly static). Admittedly, costs would soar. On the other hand, at very little additional expense an expanded leaflet could profitably incorporate a synopsis, a compelling argument for the viability of the multi-generational strategy, and some tantalizing hints of the singular experience to come.
Although I found the entire production enthralling, on first view the America segment puzzled me, despite its beauty, intensity, and sense of urgency. This mixed reaction prompted the second, aesthetic question: do the asymmetrical segments – Europe (1940-59) and America (2013-14) – connect sufficiently to form a compelling, integrated, and reasonably coherent whole? Although I was initially skeptical, through subsequent viewings I have come to embrace Zeisls Hiob as an entity, an effective conjunction of two dramatically different manners of storytelling and musical composition that serve a single overarching narrative. The forebears raised fundamental questions in their way; the descendants respond in theirs. As powerfully demonstrated by the very structure of Zeisls Hiob’s, tensions inevitably arise. In the end, however, the generations reconcile; the story is finished. As repeated viewings continue to reveal new facets, I fervently hope that the production history of this miracle in Munich has only just begun.
—-
Endnotes
1. Joseph Roth, Hiob, Roman eines einfachen Mannes (Berlin: G. Kiepenheuer, 1930); Job, The Story of a Simple Man, trans. Ross Benjamin (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2010). When citing characters’ names, I follow the spellings adopted for the Bavarian State Opera production. ↑
2. Malcolm S. Cole, “Eric Zeisl’s Hiob: The Story of an Unsung Opera,” The Opera Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 52-75. The quoted matter appears on p. 73. ↑
3. Eric(h) Zeisl—An Unfinished Life, written and directed by Herbert Krill (Austria, 2012 [TV version]; 2013 [Festival version]). ↑
4. dpa/lby [initials], “Staatsoper erzählt Vorkriegs-Oper ‘Zeisls Hiob’ zu Ende,” http://www.welt.de/newsticker/dpa_nt/regiolinegeo/bayern/
article130219165/Staatsoper-erzaehlt-Vorkriegs-Oper-Zeisls-Hiob-zu-Ende.html. See also Albrecht Dümling, “Macht und Ohnmacht der Musik,” Max Joseph [the magazine of the Bavarian State Opera] 4 (2013-14), pp. 60-64. ↑
5. Full disclosure: Miron Hakenbeck graciously invited me to contribute a piece, re: Zeisl’s stylistic evolution, 1940-57. Regrettably, I had to decline, owing to illness. ↑
6. An examination of this amalgam appears in Malcolm S. Cole and Barbara Barclay, Armseelchen: The Life and Music of Eric Zeisl (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), pp. 87-96. ↑
7. Zeisl expressed his desiderata for effective operatic scenes in letters to Lion Feuchtwanger (July 19, 1955) and Victor Clement (November 30, 1956). See Cole, “Eric Zeisl’s Hiob,” pp. 55-56. ↑
8. Zeisl and Kafka’s original materials are housed in the Eric Zeisl Papers (Collection no. 29-M), Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles [chiefly in Boxes 15 and 20]. I have been unable to obtain a libretto or score of Hakenbeck and Duszyński’s America segment. ↑
9. David Mermelstein, “Es gibt keine Berge in Kalifornien,” Max Joseph 4 (2013-14), pp. 30-38 [German], 228-29 [English Excerpt]. ↑
A Professor Emeritus of Musicology (UCLA), Malcolm Cole began investigating Eric Zeisl’s legacy in 1970. For forty-five years, he has disseminated his findings through performances, papers, articles, an oral history with the composer’s widow, Dr. Gertrud Susan Zeisl, and a biography (with Barbara Barclay). Ably assisted by Steve Rothstein and Gábor Lukin, in retirement he has prepared performing editions of several little known Zeisl works, among them the Concerto Grosso for Cello and Orchestra. For Professor Cole, hearing Zeisls Hiob truly was a miracle in Munich.
How did this happen? Or more importantly: how could it happen? How did the up-to-date, cheeky, cosmopolitan art form known as ”operetta“ become transformed from a popular, commercial genre into the old-fashioned, state subsidized, sexually repressed waltz-and-schmaltz entertainment that it is usually seen as today? There are several answers to these questions. Although there is a somewhat different explanation for the shift in the United States, in the German speaking world the line that divides operetta history into a ”before“ and ”after“ is the year 1933.
Let’s take a step back and look at the original — or ”authentic“ — form of the genre. The French operettas of Jacques Offenbach, which conquered the world in the 1850s and ’60s and established this new form of musical theater internationally, were grotesquely exaggerated, anti-realistic sex farces for rich, upper class gentlemen and their demi-monde companions. (We can read all about this in Emil Zola’s novel Nana.) The shows presented a witty commentary on the socio-political situation of the Second Empire, and the authors loved ridiculing the moral standards of the newly empowered bourgeoisie. As a result, these early operettas are characterized by a liberal use of eroticism, verging on the pornographic, and the inclusion of the latest scandalous dance crazes: the can-can in Paris and the sensual waltz in Vienna. After 1918, American jazz, the dernier cri, was what every self-respecting operetta composer from Emmerich Kálmán and Eduard Künneke to Bruno Granichstaedten and Paul Ábrahám included in his scores. Ábrahám’s Die Blume von Hawaii (1931) became the most successful stage work of the Weimar Republic.
Almost all European operetta composers in those years looked to Broadway and the operettas of Sigmund Romberg, Rudolf Friml and Vincent Youmans as models: they imported American rhythms and themes into Germany and Austria. This transatlantic symbiosis led to the genre’s heyday and creative peak.
But it all changed after January 30, 1933.
Contrary to popular belief, there was no official black list for shows when Hitler’s regime came to power, the sole exception having been Leo Fall’s Der fidele Bauer, which was prohibited after protests by the Reichsbauernführer, who claimed that the operetta did not properly represent the German farmer. Instead of issuing official bans, the newly installed Reichsdramaturg, Dr. Rainer Schlösser, invited theater directors to his office for one-on-one meetings during which the new guide lines were explained. After the 1934-35 season, all theater programming had to be presented to the Propaganda Ministry for approval, but the planning and organization of theater seasons remained the sole responsibility of the theater directors themselves. The fact that they ”voluntarily“ took shows out of circulation and that many Jewish artists ”voluntarily“ fled from Germany soon after January 1933 was a direct consequence of the so called Wilde Massnahmen (wild actions) organized by radical Nazi groups: they stormed into theaters, screamed and threw eggs and other objects at performers, beat up artists after performances and caused chaos all around. Although not a single official decree was issued, many directors, if they stayed in Germany at all, immediately changed their repertoire so as not to provoke such incidents in their houses. As a result, the repertoire and casting of operetta theaters changed swiftly.
A discussion of operetta in Nazi times involves three basic varieties of the form:
(1) revue operettas and revue operetta films, such as the popular UFA movies starring Johannes Heesters and Marika Rökk (Gasparone, Clivia, Maske in Blau etc.). All of these shows continued the tradition of the 1920s jazz operettas but avoided the more avant-garde style of the music of Paul Ábrahám or Kurt Weill and the open sexuality of the lyrics of Fritz Löhner-Beda and Alfred Grünwald;
(2) operettas ”elevated“ to opera status and presented with famous opera singers and renowned symphony orchestras, such as the Wiener Philharmoniker, playing Lehár or re-discovered older works by Johann Strauss, Carl Millöcker, Carl Michael Ziehrer, Franz von Suppé and others;
(3) nostalgic Singspiele that avoided all modernist tendencies and transported the viewer back to the ”good old days:“ Ännchen von Tharau, Hofball in Schönbrunn or Liebe in der Lerchengasse (including their respective film versions).
Since the entertainment industry of the Weimar Republic was considered a Verwesungserscheinung — something that was rotting from within, like an illness — the Reichsdramaturg recommended playing the ”ennobling“ nineteenth-century Viennese waltz operettas as a cure. These older titles were forthwith labeled ”Golden Operettas,“ and many long-forgotten works, such as Der Obersteiger, were suddenly put back on stage. These shows were given performances by the best available opera singers and were packaged as Spielopern, equal to the comic operas of Gaetano Donizetti (Don Pasquale) or Albert Lortzing (Der Wildschütz, Zar und Zimmermann).
Hans Severus Ziegler explained this equation and the new ideal in his introduction to the popular Reclams Operettenführer of 1939: ”The tasteful and musically cultivated operetta of older and newer times is nothing other than a modern singspiel and a sister of the farce [Schwank]. Obviously it would be desirable that in addition to current operetta treasures, the comic operas displaying the light-heartedness and real humor of Lortzing’s Wildschütz were put on again, which would be in the interest of educating the tastes of the audience, their sense of style and their understanding of entertainment, the level of which should not be lowered any further.“
Such operatic re-interpretations of operetta were useful, also because private theaters eventually disappeared, and operettas were performed, for the most part, at state houses with opera singers whose characteristics were different than those of the multi-talented pre-1933 operetta actors. As a direct consequence, the formerly booming commercial theater world of Berlin and Vienna — once equal to London’s West End or New York’s Broadway — disappeared. Operettas no longer followed the dictate of audiences’s tastes; they followed standards set by cabinet ministers and their political agendas.
Another advantage of returning to the classic Viennese operettas was the fact that most of those works’ composers were not Jewish, and it was easy to eliminate Jewish librettists’ names from playbills since the authors in question were already dead. Another side-effect that was positive, from the Nazis’ point of view, was that no royalties had to be paid to composers and librettists in exile.
Yet audiences accustomed to syncopated rhythms and Hollywood film musicals, which were still playing in Germany until 1939, did not wish to see only taste-refining classics in their theaters. A substitute for the former jazz operettas had to be found, and this need helped the careers of many second-rate composers who were now given a chance to be heard. The tradition of Ábrahám’s operettas was continued by Frey Raymond, whose Maske in Blau copies Ábrahám’s Ball im Savoy and whose Salzburger Nockerln is a replica of Im weissen Rössl/White Horse Inn. An additional benefit: already extant costumes and sets could be re-used for these new works that followed old patterns. As a substitute for Kálmán’s Gräfin Mariza there was Nico Dostal’s Ungarische Hochzeit; as a substitute for Leon Jessel’s Schwarzwaldmädel there was Dostal’s Monika; and so on. In his book Kulturgeschichte der Operette, Bernard Grun writes: ”The new generation of composers proved — without exception — to be incapable of living up to the situation. Not one of the new works created in those years managed to achieve more that ephemeral importance.“
One example of the ideological change that immediately occurred in 1933 is Heinrich Strecker’s Ännchen von Tharau; the piano score of this work contains the warning remark: ”Avoid anything jazz-like!” Instead of syncopated rhythms and frivolous songs, there are six stomping marches by Brandenburg regiments: ”Our Fatherland is in danger. Give your heart and hand to the Fatherland. Say goodbye to your beloved, even if it hurts. Whatever happens, we will protect our Land.“
Even more radical was Rudolf Kattnigg’s Prinz von Thule (1936), a battleship sailing into the smooth new operetta seas. The crew sings: ”If the proud flag leads the way, for the Lion’s banner, every man stands ready for the courageous fight.” Not coincidentally, this number was highly reminiscent of Baldur von Schirach’s famous Hitler Youth march.
In Kattnigg’s Balkanliebe a chorus, added in 1938, celebrates the annexing of Austria: ”Children, isn’t it unbelievable that now from every house and tree in Vienna German flags are happily waving in the wind! Who could have guessed that this could happen? Is it a dream? No! It is wonderful reality. The whole of Austria is proudly welcoming the new time. And all bells high up on St. Stephen’s cathedral are loudly proclaiming it.“
Until the outbreak of World War II, many foreign musical films played in Germany and Austria. To demonstrate the superiority of ”Aryan“ operetta, Nazi operetta films had to equal or surpass Hollywood productions, and the stage versions also had to compare favorably with their American counterparts. The best remaining popular musicians in Germany were commissioned to write songs for these enterprises. An ideal example is the film version of Gasparone, made in 1937, with Marika Rökk and Johannes Heesters presenting a re-worked Millöcker score by Peter Kreuder, who went on to adapt The Merry Widow, with Heesters as Danilo, for the Theater am Gärtnerplatz; this became Hitler’s favorite version of his favorite operetta. One could argue that such adaptations are similar to what Erik Charell or Hermann Haller had done with their jazz-updates of The Merry Widow or Csardasfürstin in the 1920s, except that now everything had become amazingly chaste and less radical, and the plots, instead of being moved into the present (as with Charell/Haller), took place in the nondescript Nirvana into which all ”modern“ operettas were exiled — close enough to seem contemporary, but remote enough to be unthreatening. This eventually led many to believe that operetta was escapist and irrelevant. A formerly cosmopolitan entertainment for sophisticated urban audiences was now redefined as an art form for ”those wider circles of the population that are caught up in the hard battles of life and are thankful for simple forms of musical relaxation” (Ziegler). The idea that operetta is entertainment for the poor stems from these years: this ideal stands in total opposition to the original character of the operettas written by Offenbach, Suppé and Strauss in nineteenth-century Paris, Vienna and Berlin.
Operetta as Resistance
Many composers driven into exile continued writing after 1933; most of them did so in Vienna until 1938. Since the authentic form of operetta always aimed to be up-to-date, the works written in exile picked up current topics, such as the new situation in Germany. One example is Ábrahám’s Märchen vom Grand Hotel, which is about a royal family driven into exile; they sit around in a hotel lobby waiting to return home and reclaim their kingdom. In 1937 Ábrahám wrote the football ”vaudeville operetta“ Roxy und ihr Wunderteam that ridicules the new Nazi ideals of cleanliness, hero worship and race, by showing the lust-driven side of humanity, laughing at the sports image the Nazis had propagated a year earlier at the Olympic Games and enshrined by Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia movies. In Roxy, an entire team of football players and female gymnasts cannot focus on sport, because all they think about is sex. They sing about it in black walks, shimmies, fox-trots, and all the ”degenerate“ rhythms forbidden in Germany. Roxy turned out to be the swan-song of authentic German-language operetta. Its film version, starring Rosy Barsony and Oscar Denes, came out in Austria one week before the Anschluss and disappeared immediately. It was not re-discovered until the new millennium. The stage show itself was not seen in a German theater until November 2014: the Nazis cast a long shadow.
On the Other Side
English and American composers also created works dealing with the new situation in Germany. One of them was Ivor Novello, whose The Dancing Years (1939) tells the story of a Jewish operetta composer in Vienna who is arrested by the Nazis, whose music is forbidden from one day to the next and who escapes deportation and death only at the very last minute. This operetta was exceptionally successful in England, but it has never been seen or heard in Germany or Austria.
On the other side of the Atlantic, exiled operetta artists also dealt with the new political landscape in Europe. Emmerich Kálmán worked with Lorenz Hart on Miss Underground, a 1943 show set in occupied Paris that ridicules the Nazi forces who are outwitted by a clever female agent of the Resistance. One could argue that this show continues the tradition of Hellzapoppin (1938), by Sammy Fain and Charles Tobias. Unfortunately, it was never completed, and the extant songs still await their world-premiere.
Turning Away
Most of the works and background stories presented here have been ignored by the German and Austrian operetta scene since the war. Many considered it inconceivable that in the glitter-and-be-gay world of operetta anything as horrid as the Holocaust could play a role. They simply turned a blind eye to anything that might be considered controversial, making operetta as a genre appear even more harmless than the Nazis had done. Additionally, any attempt by those exiled operetta composers who returned to Europe after 1945, trying to re-establish a modern operetta tradition, was boycotted. When Emmerich Kálmán wanted to present his final operetta, a wild cowboy piece called Arizona Lady, which sings of the glories of the new world, theater directors in Germany, Austria and Switzerland turned him down, claiming that audiences wanted only folkloric pieces with a Hungarian flavor from him, not American-style musical comedy, which might have heralded a fresh start for the operetta scene in central Europe.
It was not until 2005 that a conference, Operette unterm Hakenkreuz (Operetta under the Swastika), addressed some of the more pressing issues discussed here. Later exhibitions, such as Welt der Operette (2012), at the theater museums in Vienna and Munich, presented the genre as it existed under the Nazis and analyzed it critically. In everyday performances of operetta in Germany and Austria, however, the Spieloper ideal as well as the ”mindless entertainment“ approach are still alive and kicking, Lortzing figuring prominently in the repertoire of all major operetta theaters (as well as in the famous EMI post-war opera/operetta series starring Anneliese Rothenberger, Fritz Wunderlich et al.). Only very recently have stage director such as Barrie Kosky of the Komische Oper Berlin shown that there once was another way of playing operetta and that this way is worth rediscovering, by explicitly harking back to the pre-1933 ”Jewish“ tradition of Ábrahám, Kálmán, Strauss and Offenbach.
Most famous operetta films from pre-Nazi times — even those made in Austria or Hungary until 1938 — have never been issued commercially on DVD, whereas the movies of Marika Rökk and Johannes Heesters, despite their problematic ideological baggage, have been available for years in ”classics“ editions and have been broadcast frequently on German and Austrian TV ever since the 1950s. At least many historic pre-war sound recordings have meanwhile been restored and brought back into circulation; listening to Fritzi Massary, Max Hansen or Rosy Barsony helps us to understand what a glorious tradition was nearly lost. The rediscovery of these artists ultimately overthrows the malign influence of the Nazi regime on the wonderfully subversive art form that is operetta.
The Komische Oper Berlin, in explicitly re-connecting with that tradition, was voted ”opera house of the year“ by international critics of the magazine Opernwelt twice in a row. And it is even more significant that the operetta resurrections at the Komische Oper are constantly sold out. Modern cosmopolitan audiences seem to have made up their minds as to what to think of Paul Ábrahám, Oscar Straus and Emmerich Kálmán. Kálmán’s Arizona Lady triumphed in Berlin in December 2014, with a superlative cast of new, non-operatic stars who were far removed from the ”ennobling“ Nazi approach and as unlike the Rökk/Heesters ideal as possible.
Editor’s note: Arizona Opera’s new production of Kálmán’s Arizona Lady is scheduled for five performances in Tucson and Phoenix in October 2015.
With Hitler’s election on January 30, 1933, most of the political opposition optimistically assumed that things would proceed through established constitutional and democratic processes. An unpopular government would last only until it was voted out again. Checks and balances meant that there was no immediate danger to most Communists, Social Democrats or even Jews, although anyone who had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf suspected that he might be ruthless enough to rid himself of the constitution and rule by decree. Such suspicions were confirmed in less than a month, with the burning of the Reichstag and the beginning of numerous draconian measures. One of these was the dismissal of all Jews from publicly funded bodies.1
As music in Germany was largely financed by federal and state cultural budgets, and as Jews had gravitated towards music in surprising numbers over the decades since the enacting of the Constitution of 1871, thousands of Jewish musicians suddenly found themselves without work. Few thought immediately of emigration, and most had families to support with children attending local schools. The prescient among them may have decided that as long as Hitler was in charge, Germany was closed to all Jewish music teachers and performers, and they may have considered moving to another country in which German was spoken—Austria, for instance, or the German regions of Czechoslovakia and Switzerland. Those who felt confident with French, the most common second language taught in German schools, moved to Paris if they could. Few would have seen England as an obvious first option. Even at that late date, Britain remained cut off from the continent, isolated with and occupied by its slowly diminishing empire. Burma and Singapore seemed closer to the British than Berlin and Munich. Since the end of the war, in 1918, Britain had not only excluded itself to a large extent from artistic developments on the continent: it had also fallen out of love with its own Germanic heritage. England’s ruling Hanoverians had diplomatically changed their name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor, and aspiring British musicians who before the war would have headed towards Leipzig’s Conservatory, founded by Mendelssohn, now looked instead to Paris.
The official reaction to Hitler’s election and subsequent power grab was hardly alarmist in neighboring countries. Many political leaders abroad were no doubt sympathetic to the drastic means that they believed to be necessary in limiting the influence of Jews and Communists, who appeared in both the domestic and foreign media as the natural opposition to Hitler’s “revolution”. It was posited that the opponents were driven by craven self-interest to resist the measures imposed by the Nazis to get Germany back onto its feet. Anti-Semitism was by no means unique to Germany, although in Germany more than any other country, Jews had made great strides within all of the professions, such as medicine, science, the arts and academia. In Britain, the Jewish community was largely made up of refugees, who had arrived following Russian pogroms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Many had changed their names to sound British; some formed part of London’s East End community, others settled in the working-class districts of Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. There were, of course, Jewish families that had long been involved in banking and trading, but in general, British Jews had not overwhelmed the arts and liberal professions to the same degree as in Germany. The reasons had to do with the cost of education, the machinations of London’s clubs and a defiantly exclusive class system. An official quota system was therefore not required. The issue of who was acceptable and who was not was entirely self-regulating.
Nevertheless, England still offered one great attraction: access to a safer world beyond Europe. Most German musicians who opted for England from 1933 to 1935 saw it merely as a stepping-stone to the United States, the most desirable destination for anyone aspiring to a new life away from the deep-seated bigotry of the continent. A few who had earlier connections opted for England as a safe place from which to wait out the Hitler years. Most reckoned on a speedy resolution; few believed that a new war would be unleashed. The presumed safety of England, protected by the channel, was not a factor in their thinking, and in the early years of Nazi rule most assumed that they would return to their homes in Germany within a few years.
German and British views of each other
One notion was well-known to German and, later, Austrian musicians who took the plunge to come to England: it was the “country without music”. Most were acquainted with Oscar Schmitz’s Das Land ohne Musik, a polemic published in Munich in 1914 that outlined in some detail how the English lacked a self-produced school of serious music.
Berthold Goldschmidt
Berthold Goldschmidt was one of the very few who took a purely musical decision to come to England, based on the fact that Adrian Boult had conducted Alban Berg’s Wozzeck in 1934. As Goldschmidt had been involved as rehearsal pianist and assistant conductor to Erich Kleiber for the Berlin premiere in 1925, he felt encouraged by the fact that the BBC had even gone so far as to broadcast Boult’s performance. In addition, Carl Ebert, his former boss from Berlin’s Charlottenburg Opera, had landed in Glyndebourne and implied that he might have work for Goldschmidt.
If Schmitz overstated his case somewhat in the run-up to the First World War, he was not alone in his opinions. Even Ralph Vaughn Williams was moved to write the following, in 1942:
‘The problem of home grown music has lately become acute owing to the friendly invasion of these shores by an army of distinguished German and Austrian musicians. The Germans and Austrians have a great musical tradition behind them. In some ways they are musically more developed than we, and therein lies the danger. The question is not who has the best music, but what is going to be the best for us. Our visitors, with the great names of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms behind them, are apt to think that all music that counts must come from their countries. And not only the actual music itself, but the whole method and outlook of musical performance and appreciation. We must be careful that, faced with this overwhelming mass of ‘men and material’, we do not all become little Austrians and Germans. In that case either we shall make no music for ourselves at all, or such as we do make, will be just a mechanical imitation of foreign models. In either case, the music which we make will have no vitality of its own’2
It’s equally worth noting that Vaughan Williams does not extend his admiration of German music beyond Brahms, and indeed, following the First World War, Thomas Armstrong, a friend and protégé of Vaughan Williams, stated, in his position as Director of the Royal Academy of Music, that ‘we had to get rid of Brahms!’ He went on to explain that German Romantic influence was stifling English music.3
Kurt Weill
But if German Romanticism was stifling English music, German Modernism was seen as far worse.
The Saturday Review of 6 July 1935 described the music of Kurt Weill’s operetta ‘A Kingdom for a Cow’ as ‘a hotchpotch of various styles […] it landed nowhere.’ Frank Howes went even further in his book, A Key to the Art of Music:
‘‘Before [The Seven Deadly Sins] was over I had found my first sympathy with Hitler’s political actions; but I do not in point of fact approve of authoritarian politics, and nothing that happened in the first year of National Socialism encouraged me to have a better opinion of it. Imagine my astonishment, then, when a year later, hearing a very competent diseuse sing three songs by Weill, two from ” The Three-halfpenny Opera,” I once more found myself admitting that Hitler had done well to try and eradicate from German life the kind of mentality reflected in these songs.4
The Musical Times is less shocking in its review of what it calls ‘The Three Farthing Opera’ but writes the following condescending review:
‘Bert Brecht the librettist, and Kurt Weill the composer, have done a queer thing. The one has lifted and altered Gay’s plot, the other has thrown away the well-loved tunes and substituted his own post-war jazzy inanities. It is all very crude and painful. But (to be fair) they know nothing of Gay and [Sir Nigel] Playfair in Germany.’5
It did not bode well for new music coming from Germany and Austria, though there was the occasional bright spot, such as Sir Henry Wood scheduling Ernst Toch’s Second Piano Concerto for a Prom concert on 20 August 1934.
Musical Example 1. Toch piano concerto no. 2 Diane Andersen Philharmonisches Staatsorchester, Halle, Cond. Hans Rotmann (opening only)
As to be expected, the reviews of the work were tepid at best. It was also around this time that Benjamin Britten intended to spend a year in Vienna studying with Alban Berg, only to be dissuaded by parents and teachers eager to protect him from the decadence of Central European influences.
Nevertheless, there were concerted efforts made by the NSDAP (National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany’ – the official name of the Nazi Party)to promote British music in Germany, though the most that was managed was a concert in relatively provincial Wiesbaden in 1936 of composers such as Bax, Elgar, Holst and a few others, conducted by Carl Schuricht. 1936 would also see the first German tour by a British orchestra since 1912: the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. Another high-point, in 1938, was Ralph Vaughan Williams’ acceptance of Hamburg’s Shakespeare Medal, an award that was turned down by Neville Chamberlain owing to the appalling treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. At the same time, Michael Bell, writing for the Observer, would comment on the positive side of musical life in ‘the New Germany’ while mentioning that ‘naturally’ Jews were excluded, as they were not German.6 To a post-Holocaust generation, such confused ambivalence must seem willfully blind at best or murderously bigoted at worst.
Exit UK!
Events would soon overtake questions of where to go. If Austrian Jews working in Germany tended to return to Vienna in 1933, others such as Ernst Toch and Arnold Schoenberg went straight to Paris. To many, it was clear that Germany’s annexation of Austria was inevitable. As early as 1919, the Austrian parliament had passed a measure to be absorbed by its larger neighbor. Its enactment was blocked by the Americans and the French. When an Austrian became German Chancellor in 1933, it must have seemed clear that annexation could only be a question of time. The attempted Nazi coup and the assassination of Austria’s dictator, Dollfuss, in 1934 sent another signal to the politically prescient that it would be wise to leave. When the annexation finally occurred, in March 1938, it was accepted by most of the world as an inevitability that should have been permitted when proposed twenty years previously. The anti-Semitic pogroms that the annexation unleashed, however, astonished Foreign Offices around the world. With the criminalization of the Nazi Party (as well as the criminalization of the Communist Party) by Austria’s right wing dictatorship in 1933, the suppressed rage of a large minority of Austrians exploded.7 The photos of elderly Jews scrubbing sidewalks, along with stories of terrible brutality, galvanized Great Britain into requiring entry visas. In addition, it was made mandatory that they be acquired prior to departure. With even more deadly rampages against the Jewish population in November 1938, it was clear that the world stood on the brink of a major refugee crisis. Worse, most of the refugees were Jewish, and there were already sizeable anti-Semitic contingents in Britain, Canada and the United States.
Quite apart from the political turmoil on the continent, British musicians were not in a position to welcome better-qualified performers. They were aware of the superior training in Germany and Austria, and the financial crisis that had produced a Hitler in Germany had not left Britain immune to economic problems. The advent of sound cinema had closed down countless orchestras and left many musicians on the street.
Photo of George Dyson
As early as 1931, the Incorporated Society of Musicians (I.S.M.) under their chairman, Sir George Dyson, issued a manifesto in which it demanded restrictions on foreign musicians. 8Though there was considerable public antagonism to such insular views, in the editorial and letter columns of the press, the composers Cyril Scott and Arnold Bax went even further than the I.S.M. in their musical xenophobia.9
The BBC and Ministry of Labor issued the expected lip-service promises to the I.S.M. yet went on to intensify their invitations to German musicians after 1933. The Berlin Philharmonic became an established part of the London season until 1938, and the Dresden Opera took up residence at Covent Garden during the summer months of 1936. Though not yet part of Germany, Austria’s many top orchestras and choirs also put in annual appearances. Much to the annoyance of the I.S.M., the public and press welcomed such high standards of technical excellence.
By 1934, the I.S.M. had sharpened its message, and in its house journal, Professor W. Gillies Whittaker made the following astute observation:
The music profession is at the present time faced with a very serious situation on account of political and racial expulsions from Germany. Numbers of refugees are seeking a means of earning a livelihood in Britain. A turn of the wheel in Austria may produce a similar upheaval there, and there will be another invasion of our coasts.
Be it said from the outset that our sympathies are entirely with these unfortunate beings… Our nation has always been in the forefront of helping distressed peoples. But we must face facts. Can we absorb these musicians without dislocating our profession?10
A year later, the I.S.M. could claim success in curtailing the influx of musicians, limiting their opportunities and shortening their ability to remain in Great Britain; the organization openly referred to Jews as predominating amongst recent arrivals and described the ‘enervating influence such foreigners would have exerted upon native musical art.’11With the annexation of Austria, a new push was made against the influx of new arrivals, and it is interesting to see that the Society adopted the editorial position of warning its members not to help individual Austrian musicians without consulting the organization’s executive committee12. The I.S.M. eventually set up a Refugee Musicians’ Aid Committee in an attempt to support musicians who were in transit to other shores; indeed, they saw it as their duty to enable such transit rather than having refugee musicians remain in Britain.
The 1940 policy of internment of all ‘enemy aliens’ relieved the issue temporarily. Most refugee musicians were eventually released – they were considered to be of no danger to the war effort – and the I.S.M. renewed its efforts to curtail their ability to take up employment in any British institution.13 The society accepted, however, the compromise of refugee organizations mounting their own concerts and events. The grievances of the I.S.M. were not without foundation. The fact that refugees were largely Jewish had been downplayed, though not, as shown above, unremarked upon. It gave the distorted impression of a country at war with Germany while taking in Germans who were filling the places of British orchestral players and teachers who had been called up for active service. The Ministry of Labour tried to address these issues. From 1943, the I.S.M. focused its attention on the question of foreign music teachers. There had in fact been disturbing cases of enemy aliens deprived of legal work, offering local children instruction on piano, violin or cello. Some of these cases were followed up with alarming threats of deportation or arrest. Towards the end of the war, the stance had softened somewhat, and with the defeat of Hitler and confirmation of the Nazis’ terrible crimes, the I.S.M. appeared to have accepted the fact that German and Austrian musicians were in Britain to stay.
Music outlets and opportunities in wartime
Although the I.S.M. was defiant in its resistance to foreign musicians encroaching on British terrain, it was only partially successful. The tenor Richard Tauber could not be stopped from performing. Like Pavarotti in more recent times, his popularity extended well beyond opera audiences. The pianist Artur Schnabel, on the other hand, after spending 1933-1939 in Great Britain, while teaching summers in Tremezzo on the Italian/Swiss border, decided that it would be easier to perform in England if he lived somewhere else. In 1939, he and his family immigrated to the United States. But beyond such famous artists as Tauber and Schnabel, a vast assortment of musicians and performers of diverse talents and degrees of status were seeking work. Many were young students, while others were work-a-day voice coaches or orchestrators/arrangers for stage and cinema. There were also approximately seventy composers, of varying levels of prominence, who arrived with the intention of leaving for the United States as soon as possible. Wilhelm Grosz made it to America in time to compose the hit song Along the Santa Fe Trail, which was considered, but not used for the film The Santa Fe Trail, featuring Ronald Reagan, whereas the former Schoenberg pupil Karl Rankl remained stuck in London at the outbreak of war. Paradoxically, Grosz died shortly after arriving in America, whereas Rankl went on to head the re-launched Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, from 1945.
From 1939, the Soviet Union had started to exert its own “soft power,” in the guise of non-political refugee organizations that helped address the daily problems encountered by discombobulated émigrés. They offered language courses, guidance in finding employment, help in tracing relatives and acquiring affidavits and visas. Over time, the organizations branched out to offer a cultural program that included concerts, cabaret, theatre, readings and recitals. With Austrians being considered Germans since 1938, the decision was taken by local Communists, receiving guidance from Moscow, to open up separate Austrian Centers, thus openly refusing to acknowledge the legality of the Nazi ‘Annexation’.
The anti-Nazi propaganda, central to the activities of both the German and Austrian refugee centers, came to an abrupt halt almost as soon as the various organization were founded, with the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. Even British intelligence organizations were wary of overt anti-German campaigns emanating from refugee centers, and recent published research underlines the degree and nature of MI5’s infiltration of refugee organizations.14The outbreak of war would cause further conflicts of interest, as the centers were still not encouraged to agitate against the Third Reich as long as the Hitler-Stalin Pact remained.
Photo of Free Austria Soviet Friendship Concert
This obviously changed dramatically in 1941, with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, resulting in a redoubling of activities and outward displays of loyalty to the Soviet allies. In the same year, the painter Oskar Kokoschka, the sculptor Anna Mahler, the writer Elias Canetti, the violinist Arnold Rosé (former concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic), the composer Hans Gál, the musicologist Otto Erich Deutsch, and many others signed the following document, which announced the Soviet-led ‘Free Austria Movement’
Due to the aggressive annexation of Austria on March 11, 1938 and the resulting referendum held under the shadow of terror and manipulated by Nazi cheats; supported by the rights of self-determination as proclaimed by the Atlantic Charter in its guarantee of a new world order; and in respect of the fact that Austrians today remain in bitter conflict with the foreign occupation of Nazi Fascism, the enemy of mankind, freedom, democracy and justice; the Austrians now residing in Great Britain see as their duty to support the freedom fight of the Austrian people and support the victory of Great Britain and the Soviet Union as well as her allies, with all of their available power. For that reason, the undersigned names of individuals and organizations have set upon themselves the following tasks:
1) The retraction of legal recognition by the British government of the violent annexation of Austria
2) The guarantee of right of self-determination for the Austrian people as stated in the Atlantic Charter
3) To mobilize all Austrians living in Great Britain into its own civil defense militia, and to mobilize them in the production of all that is necessary to guarantee the defeat of Nazism by Great Britain and her allies. For this, it is also necessary to remove the status of ‘enemy aliens’ from all Austrians living in Great Britain as well as to strengthen and encourage Austrians still living in their homeland in their own acts of resistance.
The following organizations have signed the petition: The Association of Austrian Social Democrats; The Austrian Centre; Austrian Communists in Great Britain; The Austrian Democratic Union; The Austrian league; The Austrian Office; the Austrian Women’s Voluntary Workers; Austrian Youth Association; Council of Austrians; Kommendes Österreich and Young Austria.
Some background about the Austrian situation is necessary. As early as 1933 and 1934, while Hitler was purging Germany of Socialists and Communists, the right-wing Fatherland’s Front of the dictator Engelbert Dollfuss was doing the same thing in pre-Nazi Austria; most political refugees headed to France. With the fall of France in 1940, they then headed towards Great Britain. This meant that in 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria to the Reich, most of the powerful left-wing political resistance had been neutralized by Dollfuss several years earlier. Indeed, many non-Jewish Austrian Socialists actually believed that the annexation was the “lesser of two evils”: however bad Hitler was, he could not be worse than Dollfuss, or at least so they believed. In addition, they were convinced that Hitler’s policies would ultimately be ineffective and result in his inevitable downfall. This would leave Austria as part of a strengthened, Social Democratic Germany, as had been hoped in 1919, and would save it from the hand-to-mouth existence it had experienced ever since.
The Austrian Centre would play an important role in the specific story of exile for Austrian musicians living in the United Kingdom. Established on March 16, 1939, the Center had an executive committee that consisted of Anna Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka, and Sigmund Freud, who was its honorary president until his death in September of that year. The official opening took place in London’s Paddington district and was attended by Lord Hailley, numerous Austrians and 150 British friends. Patrons were the Lord Bishop of Chichester and parliamentarian Captain V. Cazalet. The Center was housed in a shabby building in Westbourne Terrace; it provided a library with English as well as German books, language classes, a debating club and a weekly newspaper, Der Zeitspiegel. A short time later, it would also become the home of the monthly Austrian newspaper Oesterreichische Nachrichten, with its own publishing company, Free Austria Books, as well as the Free Austria Pen Organization. There was also an employment agency, a lobbying group and an Austrian Self-Help Organization.15The Austrian Centre also included The Circle of Music Lovers; Georg Knepler, who, as a young pianist in Vienna, had accompanied Karl Kraus’s readings of Offenbach, relates the following:
Later, as emigration became a serious issue around 1938, someone founded an Austrian refugee organization where I could work. It was called ”the Austrian Centre,” and during its best years, around 1938 to 1940, it must have had 3,500 members. Most were middle class and non-political people who had to leave because of their Jewish origins.
They were mostly elderly people and politically, assuming that they had a view, it was [fairly evenly] mixed with everything from monarchists to communists. It was founded to make people’s lives easier – I have no idea where they found the money, but there were many people in England who wanted to help. We were able to rent two small houses in London’s Paddington district, where we put a restaurant, a café, a theater and a lecture hall. It wasn’t luxurious, but it was cozy, and people were able to make contact with one another. It made emigration bearable for many. The theater had some excellent actors and the musician wasn’t bad, that was me!16
One of its main propaganda functions, however, was to underline, for the British, the difference between Austrians and Germans. The British government, despite initial disappointment over the Nazi annexation of Austria, ultimately viewed it as legal, and therefore ceased to view Austrians as separate from Germans. The so-called Moscow Declaration of 1943 – the declaration of a separate, independent Austria – did little to alter this perception. Thus, the Austrian Centre’s events were always carefully identified as specifically Austrian, even when they involved nothing more than music, eating, dancing and drinking. The German groups could never allow themselves the luxury of calling themselves “German.” In order to avoid antagonizing their British hosts, they referred to their own events simply as “continental.”17
Competition between the two cultural organizations was evident in their musical activities as on other occasions. Demographic factors, as implied in Knepler’s statement (above), were also significant. In the aftermath of the horrific pogroms unleashed against Jews following the Austrian annexation, Great Britain and other countries barricaded themselves against waves of Jewish refugees by insisting that all would-be émigrés obtain entry visas prior to their departure. Those without foreign sponsorship or bank accounts, or a ticket to another destination, were simply denied entry. The result was that an older, wealthier and more professional class of people arrived from Austria than had been the case when refugees had begun arriving from Nazi Germany five years earlier. “Sponsorship”, always gratefully accepted, resulted in former doctors, lawyers, accountants, musicians, actors, journalists, and their wives and husbands, working as domestics. An entry visa to take a promised job as gardener, nanny or house cleaner would save the lives of many thousands of Austrian professionals and their families. Lord Plymouth, undersecretary for the Foreign Office informed the House of Lords on December 14, 1938, that Great Britain had to date taken in 11,000 refugees. With the annexation of Austria and the fall of Czechoslovakia, the number rose in the following months to over 70,000.18
Another demographic difference existed between Austrian and German Jews themselves. Austrian Jews had seen music as a legitimate career option that would provide security and acceptance. This was because Vienna, historically, had placed music far higher than other cultural disciplines. Although few of them came to the UK, prominent Austrian composers of opera and other serious music included Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, Erich Korngold, Egon Wellesz, Hans Gál, Ernst Toch and Hanns Eisler, whereas Germany’s most prominent banned composers of serious music were Kurt Weill and the half-Jewish but Catholic-born and -raised Walter Braunfels. (It should be mentioned, however, that many of the just-named Austrian-born musicians were working in Germany until Hitler’s appointment as Reich’s Chancellor.) The prominence of Austrian Jewish performers revealed a similar discrepancy. All of this meant that in British public awareness, the Austrian Centre could lead where the German Cultural League could only follow. Indeed, both Peter Stadlen and Georg Knepler, in separate interviews, mentioned that Mahler enthusiasm in post-war London was a result of Hans Gál’s four-hand arrangements of the symphonies, performed by the German pianists Franz Osborn and Berthold Goldschmidt at Austrian Centre concerts. Austrian dominance in musical matters played well to British audiences, which continued to accept Austrian composers while banning their German counterparts. In reality, the competition was friendly, and Germans, Poles, Czechs and other Central European refugees performed at Austrian concerts, just as Austrians and the same assortment of refugees from other countries performed for the German Cultural League.
Program Photo of Osborn and Goldschmidt
Within the various Austrian organizations, distinctive music groups began to form. One of them, in 1939, was the “Musicians’ Group of the Austrian Circle,” which put on performances by Arnold and Alma Rosé (this was presumably one of Alma’s last public performances before she fell into the hands of the Nazis in Holland). More significant was the “Refugee Musicians Committee,” later called the “Austrian Music Group,” which enjoyed the patronage of Myra Hess, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Adrian Boult and would form the basis for today’s Anglo-Austrian Music Society. The organization was founded by the Austrian pianist Ferdinand Rauter and a number of other musicians, including Hans Gál and Egon Wellesz.
Photo Max Rostal
Ferdinand Rauter describes the founding as having sprung from a wish to help the many still interned musicians. He was especially concerned for violist Peter Schidlof, violinist Norbert Brainin (both of whom would form part of the Amadeus Quartet) and the young pianist Paul Hamburger. To get them out of internment camps he needed political help, also to obtain work permits and permanent visas for them. After accompanying both Schidlof and Brainin at their auditions for Max Rostal, he secured funds so that they could continue their studies. Rostal, for his part, would not accept money for teaching them. Nevertheless, the experience highlighted the plight of the many refugee musicians trying to work in the United Kingdom. Attempts to form a dedicated refugee orchestra came to nothing, despite help from Karl Rankl. It was then decided that it would be most useful if Austrian musicians could form their own society. On the 31st of March 1940, the Austrian Cultural Committee was founded, with Rauter as director, Dr. Hermann Ullrich as secretary, and Georg Knepler as Rauter’s assistant. This new committee was called the Austrian Musicians Group. The first concert, a celebration of the Vienna Philharmonic’s centenary, took place at the Wigmore Hall on May 28, 1942 and included chamber works performed by the Philharmonic’s former concertmaster Arnold Rosé, Rauter and a number of others. The society was introduced at the concert by Sir John Christie, the founder of Glyndebourne Opera, and himself responsible for helping countless refugee musicians.19
In Rauter’s later explanation, he stressed that politics soured relations between the Austrian Musicians Group and the Free Austrian Movement. At some point, it became clear that a distancing of politics, especially from Soviet influence, was necessary to secure the long-term help that Austrian musicians needed from their British hosts. New contacts were established to secure finances outside the Free Austrian Movement. Social evenings were created, and in time, enough support was found to enable the Austrian Musician Group to be re-named the Anglo-Austrian Music Society (AAMS). Instrumental was the help of Sir John Forsdyke, director of the British Museum, who was married to Dea Gombrich, wife of the Austrian art historian Ernst Gombrich. Rauter’s arguments that political distance was necessary from Soviet influence are weakened, however, by the active participation in the founding of the AAMS by such well-known Communists as Georg Knepler and Hermann Ullrich.20 Another platform for refugee performers was Dame Myra Hess’s series of National Gallery Concerts. Both she and John Christie continued to engage Austrian and German musicians in the teeth of strong opposition and lobbying from the I.S.M. Indeed, the efforts of Christie and Hess overlapped as Glyndebourne, which had started as a vanity project for Christie’s wife, became a net into which the entire musical team of Berlin’s Charlottenburg Opera had fallen: conductor Fritz Busch, administrator Rudolf Bing and director Carl Ebert, along with a host of singers and coaches. What had started as a summer diversion, so that his wife could sing Mozart operas in a converted barn, turned into a major musical event that soon became a high point in the London season.
Photo Glyndebourne in the 1930s’
Performances ceased with the start of the war, which was precisely the point at which Myra Hess began her series of lunchtime concerts in the cavernous, emptied halls of London’s National Gallery; its priceless art collection been moved to safety. The Gallery’s director, Kenneth Clark, referred to a ‘cultural blackout’ with the declaration of war. Myra Hess approached Clark with the view that cultural events provided the ‘spiritual nourishment’ necessary for a country at war. With this in mind, she proposed using the National Gallery for lunchtime concerts in order not to violate the blackout regulations that had closed London’s theaters, cinemas, opera houses and concert halls. Performers who could not work elsewhere managed to perform occasionally under Hess’s auspices. Howard Ferguson was largely responsible for planning; inevitably, the material that best suited the venue was chamber music or works for chamber orchestra. Mainstream classics were central to planning, and Hess herself performed Beethoven, Mozart and Bach.
Photo Myra Hess
The BBC also started to provide work opportunities for refugees, although much German music was replaced with music from France and Russia, in addition to British works. But refugees such as Berthold Goldschmidt were able to work for the BBC’s propaganda broadcasts beamed towards Nazi Europe; his programs included works by Mendelssohn and Mahler along with any number of other banned, more contemporary composers. From 1943, the BBC, following the Moscow declaration, opened a special Austrian division that broadcast directly to Austria and underlined its independence from Greater Germany. The BBC also seemed to avoid implementing the otherwise corporation-wide ban on Austro-German musicians by having them perform for their foreign language services. In some rare cases, such as that of Louis Kentner, they were taken up by the entire service. Indeed, Kentner managed to elude the ban on Austrian and German musicians by virtue of his Hungarian citizenship, although he was born in Silesia, which at the time (1905) was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Indeed, Austrian birth before the break-up of the Habsburg monarchy would not inhibit those who had later taken Czech, Polish or Hungarian citizenship. German was still spoken widely in all of these countries and many who may have come across as totally Austro-German managed to evade proscriptive I.S.M. measures by virtue of a Czech or Hungarian passport.
The BBC would also rescue the occasional musicologist, such as Karl Geiringer. In 1935, three years before Hitler’s annexation of Austria, Geiringer had written to the BBC from Vienna and had persuaded the company to perform two Scarlatti cantatas that he had discovered. When forced out of Austria in 1938, he was able to use his BBC contacts to facilitate his emigration, although he was unable to procure steady employment. Ernst Hermann Meyer, who would later become the head of East Germany’s Composers’ Union, was also a valued musicologist who, in contrast to Geiringer, managed to find work at the BBC in a series of Home Service broadcasts on the history of Chamber Music.21
Photo Karl Rankl
The situation of the Austrian conductor Karl Rankl, however, perfectly underlines the complexity of nationalities and the difficulties faced by British broadcasting in the implementation of its ban on German (including Austrian) composers and musicians. This was in addition to the official injunction brought about by the I.S.M. on the employment of refugee musicians from Germany and Austria. At the time of the Munich Accord, Rankl was conductor at Prague’s German [opera] Theater, where he had just conducted Ernst Krenek’s anti-Fascist twelve-tone opera, Charles V. As it was obvious that the rest of Czechoslovakia would soon follow the Sudetenland into the expanding Nazi Empire, the theater was closed and all German speakers, whether Czechs or foreigners, found themselves endangered by their Czech-speaking compatriots. Rankl, who was not Jewish but had been active in the Communist Party, could not return to Austria, which the Nazis had annexed five months earlier. Krenek, along with Arnold Schoenberg, wrote letters of recommendation to Adrian Boult, then the BBC’s chief conductor, and eventually managed to assert enough pressure on the BBC that Rankl was invited to England for ”exploratory talks”. These talks came to nothing, as in Geiringer’s case, but served the useful purpose of saving Rankl’s life by bringing him to England. Nevertheless, when a later proposal to perform a symphony composed by Rankl was put forward, the answer from the BBC’s controller, K.A. Wright, made the dilemma clear: ”. . . .Rankl is in the unfortunate position of being a German Czech and he is therefore ignored by the national Czechs with whom we deal. Even the leading Czech musicians in London either profess complete ignorance of Rankl’s name, in spite of all he did at the German Czech Opera in Prague and in Vienna for people like Alban Berg, or at best shrug their shoulders and say they have never heard of him.”22 As we shall see, this would not be the end of Rankl’s problems in Great Britain.
Musical Example 2. ‘They’ from Rankl’s song cycle ‘War’ – Karl Rankl They from the song-cycle ‘War’ sung by baritone Christian Immler with Erik Levi on piano
Opportunities in Peace-time
Suspicion of Austro-German musicians did not abate with the end of the war. In 1945, countless émigrés who had obtained British citizenship were unable to gain visas to return to their former homelands, now under occupation and divided into French, British, Soviet and American sectors. The countries were destroyed, there was little infrastructure left, and the horrors of the attempted genocide against the Jews was such that they were hardly even mentioned. To have died in a concentration camp was almost a mercy compared with the means by which others had survived. It was not something to talk about, and, understandably, Austrians and Germans living in Great Britain showed little appetite for returning. The rebuilding process meant that former Nazis or passionate Nazi sympathizers had remained in their positions unless they had been personally responsible for criminal acts. Even when they were clearly implicated, as in the case of Prof. Erich Schenk, they often had sufficient connections to be let off. Schenk even went on to become Chancellor of Vienna’s University, yet he was accused of having acquired the valuable library of musicologist Guido Adler during the Nazi years by having Adler’s daughter murdered at the Maly Trostinets extermination camp. In spite of this, he was later honored for “having saved the valuable collection for the fatherland”.23Such sobering realities made a return difficult for most former refugees to consider. In letters to Hans Gál from Alfred Einstein and Georg Szell, the anger against the ease with which Nazi colleagues reentered professional life was palpable: “How could I shake hands with a former colleague who goes on to tell me that ‘now that it’s all over, I can say that I never really believed any of that nonsense?’” Einstein asks Gál, in explaining why he refused to return to Salzburg to accept the Mozart Medal. 24
Photo Hans Gál in Edinburgh
Musical Example 3. Gál cello concerto op. 67, 1944: cello: Antonio Meneses; Northern Sinfonia, Cond. Claudio Cruz (opening of concerto only)
Yet establishing a new British identity, especially as a composer with an established career prior to the Nazi dictatorship, was equally difficult. Youngsters such as Franz Reinzenstein, Joseph Horovitz and Alexander Goehr had an easier time than colleagues who, in some cases, were only a few years older. Composers Hans Gál and Egon Wellesz, for instance, had procured teaching positions at prestigious universities, but neither was engaged to instruct composition and both remained lecturers without ever achieving their previous status as full professors. Gál, for instance, had been Chancellor of Mainz’s famous Music Academy, on the recommendation of Wilhelm Furtwängler and Richard Strauss; Wellesz had been a professor at the University of Vienna and was an established musicologist as well as composer. His international reputation barely registered in Oxford, where being a lecturer in music history and musicology counted for little. Oxford University’s primary musical goal was to train organists for Britain’s Anglican cathedrals.
Photo of Wellesz teaching at Lincoln College, Oxford
Musical Example 4. Egon Wellesz: excerpt from Scherzo of III Symphony: Gottfried Rabl and the Austrian Radio Orchestra
Immediately after the war, Wellesz, in common with many other displaced Austrian and German composers, felt compelled to compose symphonies, as if returning to this classical Central European musical form would re-establish earlier cultural identities. Wellesz’s First Symphony was premiered by Sergiu Celibidache and the Berlin Philharmonic; his Second by Karl Rankl and the Vienna Symphony. Adrian Boult commissioned the Third Symphony for the BBC, but it was rejected by an internal panel of nameless controllers. In a letter to his daughter, Wellesz later complained that the people in charge of new music at the BBC were only interested in French music.25 Although the symphony must be counted among his strongest works, it was not heard until decades after his death.
Another opportunity seized upon by émigré composers was a competition put forward by the Arts Council of Britain for a new opera in English. The understanding, and overt suggestion, was that the winning operas would be performed at the upcoming Festival of Britain. Given the fact that such established British composers as Lennox Berkeley, Malcolm Arnold, Albert Coates and Cyril Scott also submitted entries, it comes as a surprise that operas by Karl Rankl and Berthold Goldschmidt were winning choices of the Jury. The submissions were anonymous, thus no one suspected that former enemy aliens would even compete, let along come out on top. Egon Wellesz also submitted an opera based on a William Congreve novel, Incognita. It does not appear to have got very far, though it did enjoy a performance in 1951 by the Oxford University Opera Club. The winning works, on the other hand, were quietly shelved following a flurry of embarrassed correspondence between Arts Council officials and the BBC. Indeed, all of the established émigré composers who remained in the UK gave up composing during various periods. During the war, there were obviously other priorities, but afterwards it was depressing to see how little acceptance was available. Rankl, who had been entrusted with building up the Royal Opera at Covent Garden following its closure during the war-years, was particularly annoyed and imposed a ban on performances of his own works in Great Britain; Berthold Goldschmidt simply gave up composing for the next twenty-four years. 26
Musical Example 5. Old Ships from Berthold Goldschmidt’s ‘Mediterranean Songs’ one of the last works before his 25 year break from composing
The final Balance
Were Austrian and German musicians able to make any impact on musical life in Great Britain? The question is not simple, as their contributions were often vicarious and institutional. There would have been no Glyndebourne or Edinburgh Festival without the contribution of fleeing Germans and Austrians – for instance, Hans Gál in Edinburgh and Rudolf Bing at both. The largest international artists’ agency today, Askonas-Holt Ltd., was partially founded by the Viennese refugee Lies Askonas. Music publishing was nearly overwhelmed by ousted Germans and Austrians. Mahler’s first publisher, the Weinberger company, moved to London, where it became the successful publisher of countless West End and Broadway hits. Although Benjamin Britten was prevented from studying with Alban Berg before the war, his musical mid-wife and closest confidant would be the former Schoenberg pupil Erwin Stein, Britten’s editor at Boosey & Hawkes.
Photo of Erwin Stein
The pianist Paul Hamburger would become the coach of Dame Janet Baker and countless other recitalists, and musicology, which had previously been dismissed as superfluous to university music departments, established itself as a central discipline at Oxford, Cambridge, York, Manchester and Edinburgh. Egon Wellesz’s own specialty was Baroque opera and original performance practices, and most of Britain’s subsequent generations of early music scholars could trace their academic lineage back to former teachers who attended Wellesz’s Lincoln College lectures.
The fact that refugee musicians appear to have made a more direct contribution to musical life in the United States probably has to do with the reluctance of Americans to fret about national identity being swamped by foreign influence. As American culture resulted from various waves of immigration, there was less sense of cultural chauvinism in America than in Great Britain or France. On another level, Ralph Vaughan Williams was not entirely off base when he wrote to Ferdinand Rauter about Germans and Austrians ”trampling the tender flower of British music”.27Britain did not have as strong an international musical reputation as other European nations, and as far as the Germans, Italians or Austrians were concerned, the country was irredeemably unmusical. Vaughan Williams was aware of Germany’s influence on English composers during the latter half of the nineteenth century. It was much later, after studying in France, when he started to develop a nationalistic trend of a sort already long established in Eastern Europe. As far as more soberly grounded Central Europeans were concerned, the “distinctive” British voice that was emerging was modal, impressionistic, conventional and rather shallow. Bartók’s incorporation of ethnic Hungarian music was more adventurous than the Celtic Pastoralism of British nationalist composers, whose works were dismissed by cynics as “cow-pat music.”
The ultimate truth, however, is that Britain did not and could not respond to its musical refugees in any meaningfully different way than other countries of refuge were able to do. No amount of assimilation within new homelands could impose a new cultural identity upon Austrian and German composers. The undeniable success that Kurt Weill found on Broadway was mitigated by the stress that caused his early death at the age of only 50. It could be argued that Joseph Kosma came to represent the quintessence of post-war French chanson with his Jacques Prévert collaborations, but he, like the younger generation of composers who arrived in the UK and America, had yet to establish himself as a composer prior to his departure from Berlin in 1933. If Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky are still considered Russian despite years in America, then what chance would Ernst Toch or Kurt Weill stand? This discrepancy was even more the case with composers who came to England and did not have the advantage of former colleagues, such as Klemperer, Steinberg, Szell and others who controlled the planning of some of America’s leading orchestras. With the exception of Karl Rankl, who rebuilt London’s Royal Opera at Covent Garden, and of a four-year stint (beginning in 1954) in Liverpool by Polish born Paul Kletzki, British musical bodies remained stubbornly in the hands of native British conductors. Berthold Goldschmidt, who perhaps more than others changed his natural musical language in order to fit in, was nearly destroyed when his new homeland deemed him a failure merely for being German. Yet it was never suggested that his actual music was not sufficiently “British;” he had, after all, composed one of the Arts Council’s winning English opera entries. More destructive was the chauvinism that dismissed his work merely because he was not British by birth. Indeed, the reasoning was as racist in nature as the persecution he had undergone as a Jew in his native Germany. With the better part of a century separating us from the defeat of Nazism, it should now be possible to see Germany’s widely dispersed musical exiles as Hitler’s ultimate cultural export. Nevertheless, their chapter in history is precisely that of export rather than import, and for this reason they remain firmly positioned within the story of Austro-German music in the twentieth century. To think of them otherwise is futile.
Posted October 26, 2014
—-
1 The burning of the Reichstag on 27/28 Feb. 1933 was followed by ‘The Re-Establishment of a Professional Civil Service’, passed on April 7, 1933. It forbade the employment of Jews in any publicly funded body unless they had served on the Front between 1914-1918. ↑
2 Erik Levi quoting RVW 1987, p. 156 in ‘Hans Gál und Egon Wellesz, Continental Britons’ Vienna, Mandelbaum 2004, p.71↑
3 Snowman, Daniel: The Hitler Emigrés‘ Chatto and Windus 2002, p. 56↑
4 The Musical Times, Review of Howe’s book: September 1935 p. 795↑
5 The Musical Time, March 1935 p. 260 Nigel Playfair (1874-1934) was an actor-manager who revived Gay’s Beggar’s Opera in 1920↑
6 Raab-Hansen, Jutta: NS-verfolgte Musiker in England, von Bockel Verlag, Hamburg, 1996 p. 76↑
7 Though photos show enthusiastic crowds welcoming Hitler, it was assumed that the referendum demanding Austria’s annexation by Germany that Hitler had demanded of the Austria government would not be won. Indeed, the vote went ahead in western Austria where the measure was rejected. ↑
8 ‘Music in the Present Crisis’, A Music Journal, The Official Journal of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, November 1931, no page number. ↑
9 See Erik Levi in ,Hans Gál and Egon Wellesz Continental Britons‘ Exhibition catalogue, Mandelbaum Verlag Vienna, 2004 p. 74↑
10 Ibid, p. 81: as quoted from Professor W. Gillies Whittaker, ‘The Foreign Artist Problem’, A Music Journal, The Official Journal of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, November 1934 , p. 9↑
11 Ibid, ‘The Incorporated Society of Musicians. What it has done and is doing for the Music Profession’, A Music Journal, The Official Journal of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, November 1935 , p. 11-12. ↑
12 Ibid, Editorial Notes: Austrian Refugees, A Music Journal, The Official Journal of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, May 1938, p. 63. ↑
13 The internment of enemy aliens is such a complex and dense subject that I have not covered it in this essay. The best account can be found in the recently published English translation of Hans Gál’s camp memoirs ‘Music behind Barbed Wire’ published by Toccata Press, London 2014↑
14 Brinson, Charmian, Dove, Richard: A Matter of Intelligence, Manchester University Press 2014 Chapters: ‘The largest Communist sideshow in London: The Free German league of Culture’; ‘The Austrian Centre’ and ‘The Czech refugee Fund’ pp 115- 157↑
15 Pross Eichborn, Steffen: In London treffen wir uns wieder AG Frankfurt am Main, April 2000. p. 167 ↑
16 musica reanimata Journal no. 40 Georg Knepler in conversation with the University of Hamburg Exile Music work group on December 3, 1992, Hamburg↑
18 Birgid Leske Exil in der Tchechsolowakei in Großbritannien, Skandinavien und Palästina, Reclam Leipzig 1987↑
19 Die Gruendung der Anglo-Austrian Musikgesellschaft Ferdinand Rauter datiert nur als 1976, Archive of the Anglo-Austrian Society↑
20 Bearman, Marietta; Charmian Brinson; Dove, Richard: Wien – London, hin und retour Czernin Verlag, Vienna 2004, p. 162↑
21 For the above and much of what follows, I am indebted to Jutta Raab Hansen and her invaluable NS-Verfolgte Musk in England, von Bockel Verlag, Hamburg 1996 References to Kentner, Geiringer and Meyer: pp 152-161 ↑
22 Ibid, p. 168 quoting a memo from K.A. Wright to Reginald Redman from 28.October 1941: found in the BBC ‘WAR, Karl Rankl, Artists, File 1: 1938-1943, p. 2 ↑
23 This extraordinary case is now well documented in the Egon Wellesz Collection at the Austrian National Library, nevertheless, Wikipedia has subsequently posted in German an usually detailed, and accurate account of the case in its entry on Erich Schenk↑
24 Letter from Alfred Einstein to Hans Gál 15 February 1947, Bavarian State Library #414↑
25 Egon Wellesz to Elisabeth Wellesz-Kessler, 16th November,1952. ÖNB-M, WF 13 ↑
26 Lewis Foreman offers an in-depth and somewhat subjective presentation of events concerning the Arts Council competition in his essay for the British Music Society, special number 2004↑
After the March 13, 1938 Anschluss, Jewish members of Austria’s society of authors, composers, and music publishers (Staatlich genehmigte Gesellschaft der Autoren, Komponisten und Musikverleger), known as the “AKM,” were blacklisted. The nature, scope, and ramifications of the AKM’s 1938-1945 history are the subject of new research in Austria, with the publication of a study expected soon. 1 This study follows on the heels of the first public exhibition of a recently discovered AKM blacklist in the Vienna City Library in 2012. 2 Name by name, this diminutive yet chilling red-lined Nazi-era artifact was a prelude to evolving persecution in Austria for those in the musical world.
AKM Directory Excerpts
Photo Credit: Vienna City Library 3
Catalogued as “A91314,” the 1937 AKM membership directory was annotated with bold red lines neatly hand-drawn through the names of Jewish AKM members, along with what appears to be a handwritten date in red of February 10, 1939, on the title page. It is not known who prepared this Nazi-era blacklist or how it ended up on the library’s shelves. Nor is it generally known whether similar lists of expelled AKM members from successive years up until 1945 are today in the AKM’s archive. Austrian scholar, Dr. Christoph Lind, found the red-lined directory in 2010 among the printed works in the Vienna City Library while he and Dr. Georg Traska were conducting research for their 2012 biography of pianist, composer, and cabaret performer, Hermann Leopoldi, who survived internment in Dachau and Buchenwald. 4
Founded in 1897, the AKM is a performing rights society engaged in the business of granting licenses and collecting copyright royalties for the public performance of the musical works of its members, and distributing such royalties. After Austria’s incorporation into the Reich, its cultural institutions rapidly implemented anti-Semitic policies. In 1938, the AKM was placed under the control of the German performing rights society, STAGMA, (Staatlich genehmigte Gesellschaft zur Verwertung Musikalischer Urheberrechte). 5 During the Nazi era STAGMA generally banned Jews from membership and was administered by the Reich Culture Chamber (Reichskulturkammer), and its Reich Music Chamber (Reichsmusikkammer), all under the direction of Joseph Goebbels and the Ministry of Propaganda. 6
“[O]n 17 March 1938, just four days after annexation, AKM’s council had been dismissed, a Commissar Chairman appointed, and a questionnaire sent to all members asking, among other matters, racial and religious questions.” 7 Béla Bartók, a member of the AKM, wrote from Budapest on April 13, 1938, regarding the changed conditions in Austria:
As regards my own affairs, I must say that things are not very good at the moment because not only has my publishing house (U.E.) gone Nazi (the proprietors and directors were simply turned out) but also the A.K.M., the Viennese Society for performing rights, to which I belong (and Kodály, too), is also being ‘nazified’. Only the day before yesterday I received the notorious questionnaire about grandfathers, etc., then: ‘Are you of German blood, of kindred race, or non-Aryan?’ Naturally neither I nor Kodály will fill in the form: our opinion is that such questions are wrong and illegal…we must insist on having nothing to do with this unlawful questionnaire, which therefore must remain unanswered….” 8
Universal Edition was one of many music publishers Aryanized or otherwise misappropriated during the Nazi era. 9 “After the Anschluss…a State Commissar was appointed by the German Ministry of Propaganda for UE and Mrs. [Jella] Hertzka [a member of the Universal Edition Board of Trustees] was compelled to sell her shares to him.” 10
A handwritten note inside the AKM directory found in the Vienna City Library explains that some members had not yet been crossed off the list because they had not submitted their completed questionnaires. The missing information was reportedly later provided by Heinrich Damisch and Helmut Wobisch, who identified Jewish AKM members. 11 Heinrich Damisch, music critic, writer, and former director of the Wiener Mozartgemeinde, despite his authorship of the 1938 anti-Semitic article Die Verjudung des österreichischen Musiklebens and other efforts, was honored post-war in Austria. 12 Helmut Wobisch, an ardent Nazi party member, was a trumpeter with the Vienna Philharmonic during and after the Nazi era, as well as managing director of the Vienna Philharmonic from 1953 to 1969. 13
According to one estimate, those persecuted by the AKM constituted approximately forty-two percent of the membership. 14 Throughout the Reich, musicians were similarly the subject of blacklisting in the Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, edited by Nazi musicologist and head of the Nazi Sonderstab Musik (a plundering task force), Dr. Herbert Gerigk and his co-editor Dr. Theo Stengel. 15
The 1935 Nuremberg racial laws were adopted in Austria on May 20, 1938. Performances of compositions by Jewish composers and authors were generally banned under the Reich.
Until 1942, catalogues that featured Jewish composers, along with printed scores by Jewish composers, were either consigned to be pulped, or marked as unavailable for sale or performance. Sales of scores by Jewish composers from antiquarian shops were to be restricted to music historians, and clearly marked with the letter ‘J’ along with a visible explanation as to its meaning. However, most publishers had taken the precaution of producing multiple copies, so that when some 30,000 printed scores and books were confiscated from Universal Edition, almost everything could be recovered later. 16
Copyright royalties due to persecuted AKM members or their heirs would primarily have resulted from performances outside Axis and occupied nations. Copyright royalties due to blacklisted AKM members and collected by the AKM inured to the benefit of the Reich under the Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law, passed on November 25, 1941. This legislation provided the Reich with legal authority to seize the assets of persecutees living outside the Reich’s borders, including those who had been deported or gone into exile.
Post-war claim files in the United States National Archive provide evidence reflecting alleged AKM copyright losses, amid claims for a vast range of confiscated property. This was the case with Viennese librettist and playwright Alfred Grünwald, who stated, “When Hitler marched into Vienna I was taken into ‘security-custody’ – which means imprisoned and released only under the condition that I leave Austria in four weeks!”
Among his many losses, Grünwald said of the AKM:
I was member of the directorium of the A.K.M. (Oesterreichische Autorengesellschaft, Wien III. Baumanngasse 8) and in this capacity co-owner of the whole assets of this great society and entitled to a lifelong pension. One day before my arrest they forced me to renounce my membership and to declare my disinterest in the A.K.M. 17
Grünwald fled from Vienna to Paris where he “had to escape in the middle of the night,” his residence plundered, then to Morocco and eventually to the U.S. After “a life long full of work and thriftiness,” Grünwald reported on November 23, 1945, all his property had been stolen, confiscated, or forcibly sold.
Song writer and playwright Hans Jan Lengsfelder similarly wrote to the U.S. War Department Headquarters in Vienna on June 7, 1946, making a claim against the “Gesellschaft der Autoren, Komponisten und Musikverleger [the AKM] Vienna III, Baumann Strasse 8, for royalties collected for public performances of my works plus claims against the pension fund and a share in the assets of the society.” Lengsfelder also sought from “Austromechana…royalties collected for records of my works.” 18
Music publisher Franz Sobotka, who owned several music publishing houses in Vienna, which he identified as “Edition Bristol,” “Europaton Verlag,” and “Sirius Verlag,” fled Austria in mid-May 1938 with his wife, immigrating to New York, after he learned he was at risk of imminent arrest by the Gestapo. He reported to the U.S. Military Government, Headquarters Vienna, “my entire fortune was confiscated,” claiming that his music publishing houses and proceeds due to him from the AKM had been misappropriated. 19
In an effort to recover lost AKM copyright royalties, on June 9, 1941, Franz Sobotka filed suit in New York for royalties collected by the American Society of Composers Authors & Publishers (ASCAP) for the AKM, resulting from U.S. performances. Sobotka alleged that under a contract between the AKM and ASCAP, which ran from January 1, 1933 to December 31, 1938, $62,809.85 had accrued to AKM’s account. The AKM had granted to ASCAP the exclusive right to license in the U.S. the public performance rights in certain musical works.
Sobotka’s claim was complicated by the fact that the AKM had allegedly been liquidated during the Nazi era, that AKM royalties in the U.S. had been tied up as “blocked assets” and characterized as “alien property” under U.S. law in light of a wartime order freezing such assets under the Trading With the Enemy Act. 20 Although the outcome of Sobotka’s claim against the AKM is unclear, his lawsuit and the post-war claims of other persecuted AKM members raise a host of unanswered questions, including whether, and to what extent, uncompensated royalties accrued to persecuted composers, authors, and music publishers on U.S. soil, and elsewhere, during the Nazi era.
The AKM was reestablished in Austria as a new institution after World War II. The content of the AKM archive is not generally known. The study of the AKM’s 1938-1945 history, and its aftermath, currently under preparation by musicologist Hartmut Krones and commissioned by the AKM in 2013, 21 will be a welcome addition to the evolving literature regarding music suppressed during the Third Reich and the many lives of those tethered to it.
Note: To view a PDF of the entire blacklist, click here.
Posted August 2014
Carla Shapreau teaches art and cultural property law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and is a Research Associate in the Institute of European Studies at U.C. Berkeley, where she is conducting research regarding music-related losses during the Nazi era and their 21st century ramifications. Dr. Shapreau is co-author of Violin Fraud—Deception, Forgery, Theft and Lawsuits in England and America, Oxford University Press, and has written and lectured broadly on the topic of cultural property. She is also a violin maker.
5. After World War II, STAGMA was renamed GEMA (Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs und mechanische Vervielfältingsrechte). David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, & the Americans, 1945-1953, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005, pp. 116-17; “GEMA ist an allem schuld,” Der Spiegel, July 4, 1951, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-29194282.html.↑
6. Michael Haas, Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013, p. 228; Eric Levi, Music in the Third Reich, London: Macmillan Press, 1994, pp. 24-34. ↑
7. Malcolm Gilles, “Bartók and Boosey & Hawkes: The European Years,” Tempo, New Series, No. 200, Cambridge University Press Apr. 1997, p. 4.↑
8. János Demény, ed., Béla Bartók Letters, New York: St. Martin’s Press 1971, pp. 267-268 (writing to Annie Müller-Widmann in Basle, Switzerland).↑
10. Robert Montgomery and Robert Threlfall, Music and Copyright: The Case of Delius and his Publishers, Aldershot, Hampshire, England; Burlington, VT : Ashgatem 2007, p. 396, Appendix 22 (May 19, 1950 letter by Ernst Roth to Philip Emanuel explaining the history of Universal Edition under the Nazi regime). Jella Hertzka (née Fuchs) was in 1938 the widow of Emil Hertzka, former Director of Universal Edition Vienna from 1907-1932.↑
11. Elisabeth Th. Fritz-Hilscher and Helmut Kretschmer, eds., Wien, Musikgeschichte: Von der Prähistorie bis zur Gegenwart, Vol. 2, “H. Das 20 und 21 Jahrhundert (vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis zur Gegenwart),” Hartmut Krones, Vienna: Lit, 2011, p. 461. ↑
12. Eric Levi, Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon, New Haven: Yale University Press 2010, p. 245.↑
17. November 23, 1945 letter from Alfred Grünwald to the Property Control Officer, American Military Government, Austria, Records of the Property Control Branch of the U.S. Allied Commission for Austria, 1945-1950, (USACA) DN 1929, Roll 152, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). ↑
18. June 7, 1946 letter from Hans Jan Lengsfelder to the U.S. War Department, Vienna, Attn. I.P. Nelson, Jr., 1 stLieut., F.A., USACA, DN 1929, Roll 217, NARA. Lengsfelder also listed claims for royalties against Verlag Max Pfeffer; Georg Marton Verlag; Verlag Ludwig Doblinger; Edition Bristol, Europaton Musikverlag and Adolf Robitschek (some of these publishing houses were also blacklisted). ↑
19. April 15, 1946 letter by Franz (aka Frank) Sobotka to U.S. Military Government, Property Control, Vienna Headquarters, USACA, DN 1929, Roll 158, NARA. ↑
20. See Markham v. Taylor, 70 F. Supp. 202, (S.D.N.Y. 1947); Propper v. Clark, 69 S. Ct. 1333 (1949).↑
21. Supra, endnote 1. After Christoph Lind discovered the red-lined AKM directory in the Vienna City Library, he and Georg Traska started a project on the history of the AKM and Austro Mechana, and they hope to gain access to the AKM’s historical records for their research soon. March 7, 2014 email communication with Dr. Georg Traska. ↑
A Review of the Conference at Arizona State University, 2013
In November 2013, a select group of international scholars met in Tempe, Arizona, to discuss the richness and diversity of music created and performed in Poland during the first half of the twentieth century. The event, hosted by the Center for Jewish Studies at Arizona State University (ASU) and co-organized with The OREL Foundation, took place over two days, both of them packed with presentations, and it concluded with a stellar concert by the ARC (Artists of the Royal Conservatory) Ensemble. Given the present-day abundance of musicological, ethnographic, and cultural studies, conferences such as this one risk becoming mere blips on the screen—but this was a gem of a blip! As sometimes happens when planning and participation align, each of the nine papers and the keynote address contextualized topics that were covered by others, and active participation in the freewheeling discussions among presenters, session moderators, and a small but engaged audience further extended the nexus of links. For the planning and forethought that made this event come together we are indebted to Robert Elias, from the OREL Foundation; Bret Werb, from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Anna Holian, from ASU's Center for Jewish Studies; and ASU professors Sabine Feisst and Anna Cichopek-Gajraj. Thanks must also go to Professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Director of the ASU Center for Jewish Studies, whose background and wide-ranging curiosity often nudged discussions in fruitful new directions. Professor Feisst also cajoled a fine group of student musicians into preparing an afternoon recital of music by Wanda Landowska.
Not surprisingly, the conference confirmed the difficulty of expanding the perimeters of what is acknowledged to be Central European music. During the past sixty years, fissures have appeared incrementally within those perimeters. But for every Karol Szymanowski and, more recently, Mieczysław Weinberg and Szymon Laks, who have broken through to international recognition, there are dozens of Tadeusz Zygfryd Kasserns, Józef Kofflers, and Roman Polasters who have not done as well, although they defined their times as vividly and variegatedly as did those whose names are better known. Not to mention the fact that cultural categories such as Yiddish theater music and klezmer music remain out in the cold. Given the conference title's references to plural "worlds," I expected from the outset to hear much that would be new to me. Yet I'm sure I was not alone in being astonished by the vastness of unexplored material that was shown to lie in shadows beyond the perimeters. With respect to Central European music and music-making during the first half of the twentieth century, the problem is clearly not just natural human resistance to the unfamiliar. And in this case we are further hampered by the wanton destruction and accidental loss of a shocking quantity of sources. Fortunately work can still be salvaged from the rubble, and as the scholars at this event presented their work it was heartening to hear so many of them conclude not with an explicitly final statement but, instead, with an implicit promise of work "to be continued."
Of course, all active fields of study are to some extent in medias res. In the case of Polish studies there may simply be a lower ratio of what is known to what remains unknown and of what is documented to what remains undocumented. It occurred to me that this may be a consequence of how diverse a region Poland is and was, of how wide-ranging and intersecting the cultural traditions were throughout this region, and how gnarled its political history has been. Poland is now bordered by Germany to the west; by the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; by Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania to the east; and, to the north, by the Baltic Sea, with, just a little farther east, the small Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. But this Poland is a fairly recent construction. Historically, and at its largest, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, but in the late eighteenth century this region was successively partitioned by its neighbors, and after 1795 Poland did not exist as an independent state: it consisted merely of sectors—Austrian, Prussian, and Russian—in which the occupiers gradually inculcated their languages, cultures, and traditions. The Versailles Treaty, at the end of the First World War, reconstituted the Polish nation, but the newly drawn borders remained in dispute for several more years. There was a Polish-Soviet War in 1919–1921, a Polish-Lithuanian War in 1920, and a Seven-Day War between Polish and Czechoslovakian troops. And within two decades, Polish independence was again wiped out when the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia led to new invasions and occupation.
Thus the time-span under review — 1920-1960 — may be divided into three periods: the time between the restoration of Polish independence and the invasions of 1939; the years of the World War II and the occupation; and the postwar years as a Soviet satellite country. Antony Polonsky's keynote address, "Jews in Polish Cultural Life: Between Acceptance and Rejection," provided an overview Poland's political history as it intersected with the history of Poland's Jews in general and with the lives of three Polish-Jewish artists in particular. Polonsky pointed out that Jewish acculturation and integration—the process of transforming Jews "from a religious and cultural community transcending national boundaries and linked by a common faith into citizens of the countries in which they lived"—was more gradual than in countries further to the west but nevertheless followed similar paths. In Polish lands, as in Western Europe, those who believed that their national culture required protection did all they could to thwart the inclusion within that culture of anything that they thought of as "foreign." Polonsky reached back a bit further than 1920—a demarcation of change not only in the country's borders and national status, he said, but also in social sensibilities—when he spoke about the Polish-Jewish painter Maurycy Gottlieb (1856–1879), one of the first Jews to make a name for himself in the plastic arts, both at home and abroad. He then summarized the career of Julian Tuwim (1894–1953), a kind of Polish Walt Whitman, born more than a generation after Gottlieb. Tuwim exemplified the very different difficulties faced by Polish Jews in the 1920s and early 1930s. Even when his career was at its apex, Polish modernists despised him for trying to bridge the gap between high and popular culture, whereas the petite bourgeoisie for whom he was trying to write was increasingly succumbing to anti-Semitic propaganda. Polonsky described Tuwim's 1930s Bal w Operze (A Ball at the Opera) as one of the most remarkable of the apocalyptic visions that date from the years preceding the World War II.
The third artist whom Polonsky chose to speak about was Józef Koffler (1896–1944), the first Polish twelve-tone composer, at one time considered equal in importance to Szymanowski. According to Polonsky, Koffler's music, like that of other Polish composers of the interwar period, reflects the many trends—Russian, German, French, neoclassical, and folkloristic, among others — that were current at the time. Koffler's music was better known Western Europe than at home, but he stayed in Lwów even after the German and Soviet invasions, and he and his family disappeared in or around 1944. To date, most of his unpublished works remain unrecovered.
As Polonsky pointed out in concluding his talk, the historical dispute "between two visions of Poland, one pluralistic, outward looking, and European, the other nativist and hostile to foreign influences," continues to this day. Those who chose to identify Polishness narrowly with Catholicism and national victimization tended to blend their rejection of Jewish elements, whether culturally high or low, into their rejection of cosmopolitanism in general. Conversely, many Polish Jews struggled to unite their Jewishness with their Polishness, and the same difficulties still beset anyone who tries to categorize Polish artists. Being Polish or being Jewish comprised a sense of cultural belonging, as well as a degree of geographic sense of place. There was and still is an uncomfortable area in which Polishness and Jewishness are not necessarily felt to overlap, for assimilated as well as unassimilated Polish Jews, and adherence to one group could make loyalty to the other difficult, perhaps even impossible.
How this problem manifests itself in art is a question that came up a number of times during the conference. Is the dichotomy even traceable if the artist does not make it explicit. Moreover, in differentiating people by their national or religious background or adherence, are we in danger of overriding an individual's self-identity? The question also came up as to whether an artist who had not previously identified with his Jewishness but was then hunted for that very condition might turn to Jewish traditions, not out of creative need but in order to make common cause. And if so, how does one assess that person's works? Viktor Ullmann, Walter Klein, and other non-observant Jewish composers started to create works with Jewish themes only after they were incarcerated in Terezín, although what motivated them will probably remain debatable. For the time being, most scholars who are intent on recovering the work of forgotten and suppressed Jewish artists will continue, quite sensibly, to include anyone with a Jewish background, regardless of that individual's relationship to Judaism or Jewish culture.
Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek's paper, "Presence, Absence, Identity, and the Musical Worlds of Polish Jews," was well placed to open the conference because she started with an overview of Poland's political history between the wars and how that history shaped its musical life. With Poland's restored independence after the First World War, Polish writers, artists, and musicians could participate in the artistic ferment that swept across Europe. In this new Poland, openness toward the West and increased secularization became possible, and many of the Polish artists and intellectuals born at the turn of the century who began their studies in Warsaw were able to expand their horizons and contacts in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere. Many of them participated in activities of the newly and optimistically founded Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, or IGNM (International Society for Contemporary Music). Just as they recognized their Polishness—and could celebrate it in their art if they so chose—so they could participate in the rebirth of international European culture. This period, during which Poland enjoyed what Naliwajek-Mazurek termed a "presence" within the broader European scene, was abruptly exchanged for the country's exclusion, or "absence," in and after September 1939. And after 1945, some of the survivors tried to rebuild their lives in Soviet-controlled Poland, but most went into exile.
To give depth to this history Naliwajek-Mazurek chose three musicians who helped to define Polish music in the interwar years and survived into the postwar period: Szymon Laks (1901–1983), Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern (1904–1957), and Władysław Szpilman (1911–2000). All three completed their artistic education outside Poland, and all three adopted an internationalist neoclassical style that included folkloristic and post-impressionist elements. In Paris both Laks and Kassern were members of the local Association of Polish Musicians, but whereas Laks chose to settle in Paris and returned there after having survived Auschwitz, Kassern returned to Poland and made a life for himself at home. During the interwar years he combined a successful career in law with continuing compositional productivity and recognition. After having managed, somehow, to survive the horrors of the war years in Poland, he would have been happy to remain there even under communist rule, but he soon ran into political difficulties and in 1947 emigrated to the United States. Szpilman, who made an early name for himself as a pianist and composer of classical, popular, and film music, also managed to survive the war in Poland but, unlike Kassern, he made a successful transition to life in postwar Poland, serving from 1945 to 1963 as director of the Polish Radio's Popular Music Department and at the same time continuing a glamorous international performing career. Roman Polanski's film The Pianist, which is based on Szpilman's memoir of surviving the Warsaw Ghetto and appeared two years after his death, has inssured his status as one of the best-known Polish musicians of the twentieth century.
The historian and poet Maja Trochimczyk focused on the tragic years after 1939 in her paper, "Jewish Composers of Polish Music in 1943," a sweeping overview of musicians whose lives were permanently altered or ended altogether by the events of the 1930s and 1940s. Those who left Poland before 1939—among them Bronisław Kaper (1902–1983), Karol Rathaus (1895–1954), and Alexandre Tansman (1897–1986), all of whom found refuge in the United States—had the best chance of surviving; in exile they resumed their careers, and they remained active long enough to assure themselves a place in music history; Tansman, however, who had been living in Paris before the war, returned there after the war and lived there until his death. Of those who were caught by surprise when the German bombing began in September 1939, by far the largest number—some hundreds of thousands of refugees—fled eastward to the Soviet Union, where, despite the volatility of Soviet refugee policy, they had a significantly better chance of surviving the war than if they had stayed in Poland, or even returned home after the fighting had ceased, as some of them did. Henryk Wars (later changed to Vars) (1902–1977) and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati (1919–1994) exemplify the tribulations of this means of survival, for they owed their lives to conscription into the Anders Army, which was sent to fight in Palestine and later in Africa. Other Poles fled south to Italy or west to France. The conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg (1879–1953), father of Jerzy Fitelberg, was among those who passed through Paris on the way to final exile in the United States. According to Trochimczyk, only twelve composers managed to survive in Poland, and of those only Szpilman presently enjoys any degree of recognition. It is a hopeful sign that Kassern's works have come back into view in Poland in recent years, and Roman Palester (1907–1989), who was once regarded as a composer of talent equal to that of Szymanowski, is also getting renewed attention, thanks to a 2005 monograph on him by Zofia Helman.
Trochimczyk pointed to the end of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on 16 May 1943 as the ultimate demarcation point for anything that might have been considered the purveyance of Jewish music in Poland. After that, most Jewish musicians who had remained in Poland were in hiding or in ghettos and concentration camps, and few of them survived. Many of those who had not died in the Warsaw Ghetto were killed in the death camps of Treblinka, Auschwitz, Dachau. For Trochimczyk the starting point for the work of recovery is the monumental and as yet unpublished Jews in Musical Culture in Polish Lands in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Dictionary, courageously initiated by Leon Błaszczyk and since expanded by others. These scholars cast have cast their nets wide in order to include composers of popular and art music, song writers, conductors, cabaret performers, concert singers, instrumentalists, and music teachers. Many of these individuals would have enjoyed only local importance even in normal times, and few of those in Trochimczyk's roll-calls of names would have maintained posthumous significance. But again and again during her talk I found my sympathy involuntarily stirred by a brief description of an active, productive life turned upside down, brutally ended, and forgotten. In shining a light, however briefly, on one brutally abridged existence after another, Trochimczyk painted an extraordinarily vivid scene of human and cultural devastation.
Devastation was likewise an undercurrent in Eliyana R. Adler's paper, "Singing Their Way Home," in which she considered the validity of a redemptive reading of songs and singing among Jews during the Holocaust period. Since the end of World War II, one scholar after another has attempted to counter the accepted view of Jews as passive victims, with evidence of active resistance. Given the paucity of such militant responses as the Warsaw and other ghetto uprisings, scholarly attention shifted to actions that might be considered political or spiritual resistance. High among these was music, specifically song and singing. Adler became interested in the many references to singing in memoirs written by survivors of the thousands of Polish Jews who became permanent refugees in the Soviet Union after 1939, in particular the memoir by Chaim Shapiro, (born 1922), who was seventeen in 1939 when he left his family in Lomza. He described several instances in which songs were sung to transmit private "coded" communications to others. Whatever it attempted to portend, such singing posed no threat to those in power. There are probably as many instances of Nazi guards forcing prisoners to sing during work duty or marches. I remembered the passage in Szymon Laks's memoir, translated into English as Music of Another World, in which he called playing in the Auschwitz camp orchestra a "demoralizing" supplemental torture. In her research Adler found that prisoners who sang voluntarily did so mainly to cheer themselves up and to remind themselves of home and of happier times. Adler's conclusion, although it affirms the capacity of individuals to attempt to live "normally" even in abnormal circumstances, thus also highlighted, poignantly, how severely choices were circumscribed, indeed practically nonexistent, for all those faceless, nameless victims.
Some of the melodies and poems sung by the subjects of Adler's talk may have been among those that Joseph Toltz discussed in his paper, "Moja pieśni tyś moja moc ("My song, you are my strength"): Personal Repertories of Polish and Yiddish Songs from Youth Survivors of the Łódź Ghetto." Toltz's oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors who settled in Melbourne, Australia, after the war are part of a larger project documenting the personal meaning of music in the lives of Jewish camp and ghetto inmates during the Nazi years. Toltz takes issue with the ways in which survivor recollections are often pressed into narrative reconstructions of a communal experience—for example in the postwar publication of songbooks organized by emotional tropes such as despair, destruction, resistance or combat, and renewal. Such neat divisions of experience can lead to a blurring of individual experience. In his research Toltz wrestles with the complexities of the relationship between witness and survivor, listener and testifier. Listening, in this context – as I understood Toltz to define it – should not be a method for determining objective facts but rather an opportunity for subjective reinterpretation of the moment of recall, involving the listener, the testifier, and what is testified. In this view, musical memory is less a matter of "truth" or veracity than of a dialogic encounter in which the listener's understanding opens itself to the testifier's subjective experience. Clips of several interviews, and especially camp songs rendered by old voices that occasionally cracked in the act of remembering, gave persuasive support to Toltz's point of view.
Also dealing with a single sphere of music-making was Joel Rubin's paper, "Szpilman, Baigelman, and Barsh: The Legacy of an Extended Polish-Jewish Musical Family on Three Continents." Joel Rubin—a highly knowledgeable master klezmer musician— spoke eloquently about a multigenerational extended family of professional Jewish instrumentalists active in Poland at least since the mid-nineteenth century. During the interwar period they dispersed and carried their traditions into exile in Canada, Brazil, and the United States, which is where the most famous member of this family, Władysław Szpilman, was able to continue his career as a film and song composer. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Rubin explained, Polish klezmorim played an important role as liaisons between shtetl Jewish culture and assimilated Polish-Jewish cultures and between popular Yiddish entertainment and art music. Klezmorim performed in all genres, from instrumental religious klezmer music to Yiddish entertainment theater, Polish folk and popular song, jazz, and chamber and symphonic music. Though there are many studies of klezmer music as practiced in the Ukraine, Belarus and, to a lesser extent, Austro-Hungarian Galicia and Romania, the klezmer tradition and the lives of klezmorin in Poland have largely been ignored. Rubin's research into this area began as historical ethnomusicology, but as he met more and more members of the Szpilman, Baigelmann, and Barsch families and learned of their activities, his project grew to include cultural history and enthnography and dealt more broadly with the diversity of music produced by several generations of professional musicians, all of whom could trace their origins to a few klezmer families. It is a compelling picture of cultural synthesis and evolution.
Over the course of the two conference days, the historical surveys and papers dealing with single genres and categories of music-making created an ever deepening informational backdrop for several papers that focused more narrowly on individual artists. In her paper, "Identity and Yiddish Nationalism in the Writings of Menachem Kipnis," Julia Riegel examined the work and aesthetics of a well-known folklorist, singer, music critic, and author. Kipnis (1878–1942), who was relatively fortunate inasmuch as he died a natural, non-violent death in the Warsaw Ghetto, is today remembered mainly for his collections of Jewish folksongs, but he ardently celebrated the contributions of all Jewish artists, whether they represented eastern European Jewish traditions or had assimilated into the world of Western European high culture, as was increasingly the case during the interwar period. Riegel believes that he himself should be positioned at the intersection of those two worlds, and this may explain some of the contradictions and idiosyncrasies in his writings. Scholarly attention has heretofore neglected Kipnis's more academic writings, yet although his unpublished papers were probably lost in the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, Riegel's work shows how much can be gleaned from his published works, most of which were in Yiddish and addressed primarily to Yiddish-speaking European Jews. Riegel focused on one of these works in particular, Di velt-berihmte yidishe muziker, a study of nine composers with very different musical languages, only two of whom were practicing Jews, but in all of whose works Kipnis nevertheless claimed to see something intrinsically and recognizably Jewish. In arguing for this commonality in the creations of anyone with Jewish roots, Riegl noted that Kipnis employed terms just as exclusionary and "racialist" as those used by such mid- and late-nineteenth century anti-Semites as Richard Wagner—although of course he used the same ideas to maintain a diametrically opposed view. Not only does Kipnis provide yet another instance of belief steering evidence: he also reflects the prevalence of ethnic- and race-based critical judgment at the turn of the twentieth century.
In a lecture demonstration, "Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern's American Years," Slawomir Dobrzanski complemented Naliwajek-Mazurek's earlier discussion of this artist by focusing on the composer's postwar life in a new country and on a comparison of works written before and after emigration. The story of Kassern's physical survival in Poland, where he lived openly (in Kraków, Warsaw, and Zakopane) under an assumed name, is a remarkable one, but after immigrating to the United States he never managed to reestablish himself as a composer. Dobrzanski's performances of selected compositions by Kassern confirmed his conclusion that the composer's musical languagedid not evolve significantly as a result of living and working in a new culture. (This was also true of quite a few other émigré composers.) Although Kassern's works seem miraculously to have survived the war years intact, almost all of them remain unpublished. Plans to publish his works were under discussion in communist Poland soon after the war but were scuttled when Kassern began to speak out against Poland's increasing communization. The only works that today remain in common use are two pedagogical pieces (Candy Music Box and Teen-Age Concerto) and the Sonatina for Flute and Piano, composed in 1952. Thus in this case as in others, works remains to be done.
A third artist viewed up close, the Polish keyboardist Wanda Landowska (1879-1959), received double attention, first in Carla Shapreau's paper, "The Theft of Culture, Persecution, and the Identity of Wanda Landowska," and then in an afternoon concert, introduced by Bret Werb, in which two of her compositions were presented. Carla Shapreau, a lawyer and expert in intellectual and cultural property law, told of Landowska's extensive collections of manuscripts, rare printed music, books, and historical musical instruments, which she kept in her home in France but had to leave behind when she fled Paris after the Nazis invaded Paris in June 1940. All of her property was confiscated in September 1940 by a subdivision of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Nazi agency in charge of appropriating artistic and intellectual assets in non-German occupied Europe. The story of what happened to the items plundered from Landowska's home remains incomplete, for only some of the valuable items have been recovered; the whereabouts of many others are still unaccounted for. A major player in this story is the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historical Monuments in War Areas, established in August 1943 by the Roosevelt administration, and its offshoot, the so-called Monuments Men, who, after the war, assisted in tracing and restituting plundered cultural properties, including those that were "souvernired" out of the country by U.S. servicemen. It is fascinating to follow the detective work of tracing such stolen art, but equally fascinating, as Shapreau pointed out, is the matter of what the items themselves reveal about the artistic sensibilities and aesthetics of their owners.
Certainly Landowska's Polish roots are apparent in a program of two of her chamber works—Five Polish Folk Songs for harpsichord (played here on the piano), winds, and strings, and a Berceuse for piano. The two works were performed by ASU Music Department students Jordan Sera, flute; Wilson Harmon, oboe; Ryan Cerulla, bassoon; Oswaldo Zapata and Josh Coffrey, trumpet; Yerim Kim and Artur Tumayjan, violin; Daemin Kim and Sungjin Park, viola; Beth Weser, cello; Tyler Smith, double bass; and Qiyanao Zheng, piano. Bret Werb introduced each work and also provided background on Landowska's career, productivity, self-identity, and superstar status. In 1907, for example, she personally presented a manuscript of the Berceuse to the work's dedicatee, Alexandra Feodorovna, the last empress of Russia. The Five Polish Folk Songs reflect Landowska's identification with her Polish background, but this theme also led Werb to discuss the degree to which she identified with her Jewishness. Landowska's husband, Werb pointed out, had been a pioneer of Jewish ethnography and folklore, and she herself composed at least two works with Jewish themes, a Hebrew Poem for orchestra (not yet recovered) and a Rhapsodie Orientale for orchestra, which has been found. Landowska's view of her cultural identity may eventually be better understood, because Werb mentioned that a cache of Landowska documents at the Library of Congress is presently off limits but will be released after all of her music has been catalogued.
The conference ended on a high note with a concert by the Toronto-based ARC Ensemble, which presented three chamber works by Polish-Jewish composers. Jerzy Fitelberg's Sonatina for two violins (composed in 1947), performed with high-wire technical brilliance by Erika Raum and Benjamin Boman, was imaginative and completely captivating. Two piano quintets (with the additional musicians Steven Dann, Bryan Epperson, Dianne Werner, and David Louie) followed: Szymon Laks's four-movement Piano Quintet on Popular Polish Themes (arranged in 1967 from a quartet composed in 1945), a fairly slight piece, as its title suggests; and Mieczysław Weinberg's five-movement Piano Quintet op. 18 (composed in 1944). Weinberg's was by far the most substantial work on the program; a recording of it by the ARC Ensemble was released in 2006 (on RCA Red Seal), and I'm sure that I was not alone in promising that I would listen to the piece again.
After two intense days of hearing tragic life stories and long rosters of names, it was heartening to know that the three composers featured in the event-concluding concert were survivors. It is true that all three of them lost their homeland and, with the possible exception of Weinberg, also lost the chance to fulfill their early promise, but all three were among the fortunate few most of whose works survived and remain accessible to performers and scholars. Some of Fitelberg's works have yet to be published (the performance of the Sonatina for two violins was possible thanks to Simon Wynberg, the ARC Ensemble's Artistic Director, who came across the manuscript at the New York Public Library), but Weinberg's music is distributed by Edition Sikorski and peermusic classical; the latter also carries some of Fitelberg's music. All of Laks's works were recently taken up by the "Suppressed Music/Musik verfolgter und exilierter Komponisten" series published jointly by Boosey and Hawkes and Bote und Bock. This series, plus brilliant live and recorded performances by groups such as the ARC Ensemble, will surely stimulate others to search for forgotten music from this period. The story will be continued.
On June 22, 1944, baritone Karel Berman and pianist Rafael Schächter premiered Pavel Haas's Song Cycle Four Songs on Chinese Poetry for an audience of inmates in Terezín. Although many features of the work brought it acclaim, one of the most striking aspects of the cycle is its use of an ostinato pattern that becomes the basis of the first and third songs; this results in a form that is at least reminiscent of the Baroque passacaglia and may even be a direct usage of it. In his review of the work, Viktor Ullmann noted the significance of the pattern, granting it the status of an idée fixe. Only six weeks later, on August 7, Hans Krása completed his work Passacaille et Fugue, and in the subsequent two weeks Viktor Ullmann completed his last piano sonata, which concludes with a set of variations and fugue on a Hebrew folk tune. Almost exactly one month later, on September 22, Gideon Klein completed the second movement of his string trio, which consists of a set of variations on a Moravian folk tune. The close succession of the creation of these works by composers living in such intimate proximity suggests some kind of connection between the expressive character of the variations form and the nature of this particular group's expressive needs. Why did all of the major composers in the camp simultaneously find this form most suitable for musical expression?
In his meditation on compositional process, the acclaimed Czech writer Milan Kundera connects the relationship between the “architectonic clarity” of a work and its fundamental core 1. For him, the formal structure represents a “deep, unconscious, incomprehensible drive” 2. that allows him to explore and articulate the themes and motifs within his compositions, with the aim of exploring and examining the “enigma of the self.” 3. This examination of the self, he argues, is the central concern of novelists (composers) and the foundation of thematic development in his own works. Although Kundera's focus is on the novel, he extrapolates his ideas to the field of music, thus affirming the connection between his use of theme and variations as an architectural model for his writing and the analogous musical manifestations of the form. His insightful connection of the formal structure of a work with its expressive capacity offers an entry point from which to begin examining the Terezín composers' use of this form.
Kundera defines a theme as an “existential inquiry” 4. and characterizes thematic variation as a means of transforming concepts into categories of existence. His arguments about and descriptions of that process, and the central concerns in his own writing, closely correspond to those of Viktor Ullmann, who wrote about the deep connection between his experience in Terezín and his own compositional process. For Ullmann, Terezín was the ultimate school of Form; it was there that he strove to displace the ephemeral aspects of the spiritual and emotional realm of human existence through the fixed form of musical composition 5. He, like Kundera, used the formal structures of music as a means to transform the conceptual aspects of self and existence into a tangible entity.
In the tradition of Western art music, the theme and variations form does not automatically conjure a sense of the transformation of the abstract into something concrete. In many ways, it is conventionally used in the opposite manner: a concrete, recognizable theme is subjected to techniques that alter and often fragment the melody while the harmonic foundation and periodic structure remain static. In the Classical tradition, the theme is varied and shown under many guises but fundamentally retains the Urlinie upon which it is based, rarely undergoing a complete metamorphosis. If, however, we approach variation form from Kundera's modern and personal point of view, we may consider the possibility that the Terezín composers used the fundamental stasis of variation form as a foundation upon which to base their own important existential meditations – in particular those related to themes of exile and deception.
In Haas's Four Songs on Chinese Poetry, the theme of exile is prominent throughout the work. The cycle is based on four selections of poetry from ancient China, translated into Czech and reinterpreted by Bohumil Mathesius. Opening with the statement, “My home is there, far away, far away, so far away, so far away,” the text of all four songs explicitly laments the author's separation from home. The poems contain imagery of home, lost love and nostalgic memories of the sun's rays, joy and magpies. Intertwined with this imagery are evocations of feelings of coldness, darkness, sadness and yearning. The texts themselves are meditations on the theme of exile, with words such as “foreign,” “strange,” “alone” and “yearning” further illustrating the sentiment of banishment.
Although the semantic context of the text is in itself evocative of exile, Haas explores the theme further by employing music's capacity to be expressive on multiple levels simultaneously. The musical theme is a cantus firmus of four notes that corresponds to the melody associated with the word “Václave” (Wenceslas) in the “St. Wenceslas Chorale” – a work that was firmly entrenched in the Czech nationalist psyche. The chorale's ostinato returns in the third song, connecting it musically to the first song and highlighting the textual references to the yearning for home that is central to both the original hymn and Haas's songs. By using the “Wenceslas Chorale” as the musical motif over which the variations unfold, Haas adds another dimension to the depiction of exile. The nationalist associations of the hymn run deep within the Czech historical narrative, and the use of the hymn as source material is a powerful evocation of Haas's native homeland.
Haas was not the only composer to construct his variations on a melody associated with a far-off homeland. Klein's variations, too, are based on a theme from his birthplace, Moravia, and Viktor Ullmann based his variations on a poem by the Zionist poet Rachel – a poem that refers to the biblical figure of Rachel and her exile from home. The explicit references to exile in the texts associated with these melodies vary in degree, but they all refer in some way to a distant homeland. Although we cannot know whether these composers reached any definitive conclusions or were making explicit statements through their works, it is apparent that by using this material Haas, Klein and Ullmann were able to manipulate, develop and transform the references into personal meditations on their own experience of exile.
The second theme that appears to be of central importance in these variations is that of deception, specifically the kind of deception that these composers encountered directly: the false pretence that concealed the true nature of their environment. The summer during which all of these works were completed was the summer of the Red Cross's well-known visit to Terezín. Although many prisoners had been deceived by the Nazis about many aspects of the camp, the physical creation of a façade that was intended to mask the reality of Terezín to outsiders in such a blatant and fraudulent manner was a major event in the lives of the inmates. No one could have ignored its meaning. All of the variations written during the summer of 1944 reflect some aspect or aspects of deception or of the façade – and of the deeper truth concealed beneath it.
The theme of deception is evident in the choices of texts for the musical themes used in these variations; at least within the titles, there is a sense of naivety and an evocation of a bygone era. Haas's songs are based on ancient Chinese poetry, as already mentioned, and Ullmann and Klein chose simple folk tunes identified by generic, seemingly innocuous titles – “Hebrew” and “Moravian” folk tunes. Krása's choice of “Passacaglia” is even more reminiscent of a historical period and has few if any politicized associations. These titles and the musical themes that they are based upon are conventional and project a simple, classic charm. As the movements unfold, however, this aesthetic gives way to a more troubled, unsettling sensibility.
Krása's musical exploration of the theme of deception is unique within the group, as his work has no explicit programmatic associations. Yet despite this, his approach is in some ways all the more representative of this existential inquiry, owing to the lack of textual content. His simple, ten-note ostinato pattern begins in a classical manner, easily evoking a Beethovenian sensibility; in fact, the theme itself is strongly reminiscent of the opening theme from the first movement Beethoven's Cello Sonata, Op. 69. As variation techniques are employed, however, a harsher and more unsettling sentiment is revealed. Classical elegance gives way to a contrapuntal melody that regularly forms an open fifth on the downbeat – a reference to the early contrapuntal technique associated with organum. This contrast with the harmonious introduction has a jarring effect. Another theme, even more unsettling than the previous one, is then introduced; a pizzicato motif in the lower register emerges in syncopation with the main ostinato theme, and this creates a strong sense of disjointedness. With each successive variation, Krása maintains the façade of the main theme and juxtaposes it against unexpected material that suggests that things are not as they seem. Not all of the material is dark or subversive (one of the variations becomes dance-like and has a folksy fiddle-like quality), but all of it seems to be a musical representation of a veneer that conceals a deeper reality.
Ullmann's variations follow a similar pattern, although dissonance is introduced at the outset. A countermelody that opens with an augmented second immediately situates the simple Hebrew folk tune within a discordant environment. Ullmann moves quickly away from the thematic material and pursues a more dissonant trajectory in which the melody is ultimately lost completely before it is regrouped and reframed into the anthem that forms his closing fugue.
Likewise, in Klein's variations the material quickly digresses from the Moravian theme's melodic material into a world of dissonance and multiplicity. The tempi and rhythmic figures move schizophrenically between a morose, dirge-like atmosphere and the maniacal energy of a diabolical dance. After the second variation, the work takes on a much different quality that contrasts significantly with the opening material. While the periodicity of the variation form (i.e., the length of each section) remains relatively intact, the internal explorations are unrecognizable, disconnected from the melody, rhythm, mood or character of the thematic material. The folksong material disappears until the very end, when it returns with a dissonant accompaniment. The final section communicates an aggravated sense of unease, heightened by the presence of a dissonant drone in the cello's lowest range. The piece does not resolve harmonically; it ends in unease and instability. Again, it is impossible to divine the composer's specific intent from these aspects of the work, but there is a clear digression from the expected trajectory that was set up at the outset, and this suggests a façade that conceals a darker subtext. Like the other composers, Klein accesses his larger meditation on façade and deception via a simple folk melody and within the larger framework of the variation form.
Although there are no obvious conclusions to be drawn from these composers' musical explorations, the grounding of their work in a form characterized by simplicity and repetition does appear to offer a means for exploring and expressing not just the musical thematic material but also personally relevant, existential themes, such as those of exile and deception. In the conclusion to his chapter, “Dialogue on the Art of Composition,” Kundera states, “To bring together the extreme gravity of the question and the extreme lightness of the form – that has always been my ambition.” 6. His reverence for this juxtaposition brings to light the artistic value of connecting two apparently disparate elements – an ambition seemingly shared with the Terezín composers.
Posted 2/2/2013. All Rights Reserved.
—————
1 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 72.↑
On March 4 and 5 of 2012, the OREL Foundation and the Center for Jewish Studies at Arizona State University (ASU) collaborated in sponsoring an international interdisciplinary conference in Tempe, Arizona, on the subject “Reimagining Erwin Schulhoff, Viktor Ullmann and the German-Jewish-Czech World.”
Schulhoff and Ullmann are no longer obscure names encountered only in ancillary relationships to the canonic figures of music history, as was the case a mere decade or two ago. Interest in them may have begun within the context of what, for brevity's sake, is often called Holocaust studies (both composers were incarcerated and died in Nazi camps), but closer acquaintance with their oeuvres over the past couple of decades has revealed each to have been a strong, highly individual voice in his time. Performances of their works are no longer rare, and a growing corpus of recordings attests to the acceptance of this music into the twentieth-century repertoire. As the conference organizers Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Michael Beckerman and Robert Elias stated in their synopsis, the decision to place the music of these two men at the center of a two-day conference was based on the recognition that, among the composers who died or were otherwise suppressed by the Nazi regime, Schulhoff and Ullmann “stand out for their productivity, the quality of their musical imaginations and the unusual and fraught contexts in which they worked.”
Schulhoff, born into a German Jewish family in Prague in 1894, received traditional musical training first in his hometown and then in Vienna, Leipzig and Cologne. After having served in World War I, he joined the Communist Party. He was a chameleon-like composer who experimented with Debussyian Impressionism, Straussian post-Romanticism, Schoenbergian atonal Expressionism, jazz, ragtime, Dadaism (he helped to create the first Dada event in Dresden and was heavily involved with that movement's Berlin exponents), Neoclassicism, Janáčekian nationalism and socialist realism. In the 1920s, Universal Edition published some of his compositions, thus further encouraging performances of his works, and during the same period, Schulhoff was also active as a successful concertizing pianist and as a German-language music critic in Prague.
Ullmann, born in 1898, four years after Schulhoff, in a small town in Silesia that was then part of Austro-Hungary and is now in the Czech Republic, was also, like Schulhoff, of Jewish descent, but he was raised as a Catholic; in 1909 his family moved to Vienna, where he studied and had varied contact with members of the extended Schoenberg circle: Josef Polnauer, Eduard Steuermann, Schoenberg himself and, most of all, Alexander Zemlinsky, under whom he subsequently worked as chorus master and repetiteur at the New German Theater in Prague. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Ullmann was active as a composer and conductor, and, like Schulhoff, he came to international attention during those years. But he was also in search of spiritual and esoteric knowledge, and when, in 1931, he became an adherent of anthroposophy, he moved to Germany and abandoned music for a couple of years. By the time he returned to Prague in 1933 to resume the life of a freelance composer, performance organizations and publishers were increasingly falling in line with Nazi policies; most of his works from this period remained unperformed in his lifetime.
Not atypically for members of their generation in that corner of Europe, Schulhoff and Ullmann grew up in shifting religious and cultural worlds, and both had early experiences as outsiders. Most crucially, they were German speakers in predominantly Czech-speaking Prague, and they were of Jewish descent, thus increasingly labeled as Jews, although both had been raised in nonobservant homes and apparently did not identify themselves as Jews. (How this might have changed after their incarceration is debatable, as is the significance of Ullmann's decision in Terezín to set Hebrew and Yiddish texts.) Both also had firsthand experience of active duty in World War I, which fundamentally changed their worldviews and the life choices that they made. Finally, both enjoyed promising early careers in the immediate postwar years and into the early 1930s, and both saw their professional options narrow to the vanishing point while they were still in their thirties, an age at which most creative individuals are just hitting their stride. Beginning in 1938, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, only emigration could have saved them. Schulhoff, who had become a Soviet citizen early in 1941, was arrested in June of that year as an enemy alien (rather than for his Jewish ancestry, although the latter was the cause of his father's deportation to Terezín, where he died of the harsh conditions in 1942). He was eventually transported to the internment camp of Wülzburg bei Weissenburg, in Bavaria, where many of those who weren't sent on to an extermination camp died of malnutrition and disease; he died there in August 1942, of tuberculosis. Ullmann, who tried desperately to procure emigration visas for himself and his family, was arrested on 8 September 1942 with his wife and deported to Terezín, northwest of Prague and not far from where he had been born; on 16 October 1944 he was transported to Auschwitz, where he was gassed two days later.
Since Wülzburg was a forced labor camp, it is doubtful that Schulhoff would have been able to carry on any musical activities there. Ullmann, on the other hand, was actively involved in the musical life of Terezín, where he not only served as pianist, conductor, lecturer and official camp music critic but also composed twenty-three works, including fourteen Hebrew and Yiddish choral pieces and arrangements; these remain the only works for chorus in his oeuvre, and they were undoubtedly inspired by the ready accessibility of performers — Terezín could boast of having at least ten choral groups. The Arizona conference focused primarily on the works that Ullmann produced in captivity, but some interesting comparisons were also made with his earlier compositions.
Nine talks, interspersed with musical performances; one panel discussion; and a preconcert discussion made up the four conference sessions. Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Theodore Solis, Sabine Feisst and Ben Levy (all from ASU), as well as Michael Beckerman (New York University) served as moderators, and Beckerman also presented a stimulating keynote address. The packed, two-day event concluded with an imaginative musical program devoted to Ullmann, titled “Music, Memory and Metamorphosis.” A rewarding bonus to the final event was its venue, the Cutler-Plotkin Jewish Heritage Center in Phoenix, home of the Arizona Jewish Historical Society; the center's exhibit of documents and artifacts charting the history of Jewish pioneers in the Arizona Territory was fascinating.
The talks — most of them read from prepared papers — ranged from close studies of particular works to synthesizing overviews of the cultural and musical contexts within which Schulhoff and Ullmann were active. The ever-returning questions that engagement with this chapter of music history must grapple with threaded through the papers and fueled energetic discussions, even in cases in which a presenter's focus was tangential to the main conference themes. As often happens at thoughtfully designed scholarly meetings, a number of vexed, and frequently unresolvable, questions came increasingly and repeatedly to the fore.
The two composers' Czech-German background and the question of Jewish identity, or lack thereof, appeared in various contexts. In his keynote address, Michael Beckerman visually demonstrated the peripatetic but often intersecting geographic lines traced by Schulhoff and Ullmann's life stages — from where they were born and grew to maturity to the succession of places in which they were professionally active. The area that contained these places — Vienna, Stuttgart, Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin, Teschen and, above all, Prague — is not geographically vast but held within it a number of cultural, social and political schisms. Hillel Kieval (Washington University) addressed some historical aspects of this backdrop in his talk “Imperial Embraces: The Politics of Jewish Identity in the Bohemian Lands, 1867—1914.” The closely related theme of Jewish identity, as reflected in the life and pronouncements of Arnold Schoenberg, was addressed by Klára Móricz (Amherst College) in one portion of her talk “The Presentness of the Past, or Looking at Pre-Holocaust European Jewish History with Its Side Shows.”
One of the most interesting recurring themes was the question of how to balance the consciously crafted aspects of a composer's personal musical language or style with the influences — some possibly still identifiable today — that may have shaped it then, perhaps even without the creator's awareness. The idea of synthesizing a recognizably personal musical style seems to have become less important to many composers of Schulhoff and Ullmann's generation than it was to earlier generations, when a personal stamp — a recognizable voice — was regarded not only as the consequence of composing in a certain style but also as one of the principal objectives of composing. Mahler, whose earliest formative years, like those of Schulhoff and Ullmann, were lived in proximity to nationally distinct local cultures, went far afield in injecting “foreign” vocabulary, syntax, even jargon, into the Austro-German musical language, but whatever may have been by nature “foreign” to that style he organically synthesized into it and made the resulting mélange his own. Schulhoff, on the other hand, experimented with most of the musical trends of his time and seems to have made no attempt to disguise his models, which leads one to wonder whether he even cared about crafting an individual, coherent voice. The sober ideal that had motivated composers of earlier generations — to find a recognizably personal voice by building on the best of what had gone before — was one among many ideals thrust aside after 1918 by many composers born between 1890 and 1900.
This set of themes was addressed by Thomas Svatos (Anglo-American University, Prague, Czech Republic), Yoel Greenberg (Princeton University), and Eli Lara (Austin Peay State University, Tennessee). Svatos, in “Fashioning the Socialist Realist Sound: Erwin Schulhoff's Symphony No. 3,” explored how Schulhoff, in 1931, came so whole-heartedly to embrace Soviet realism and the socialist-realist cause. The symphony, composed in 1935, is sonically and structurally emblematic of music written in the service of extramusical ideals, and it aims at immediately recognizable affect. Any number of related narratives can be read into the work; indeed, Schulhoff at one point considered superimposing on it stories of the 1935 Eastern Slovakian uprising. Svatos also speculated on what might have happened to Schulhoff had he managed to emigrate to the Soviet Union, which he had visited in 1933; he might well have become an important player there, though he might also of course have experienced a fate similar to that of Shostakovich.
Greenberg, in “Looking Back in Anger: Schulhoff's Postwar Works for String Quartet as a Rejection of Tradition,” argued that Schulhoff's “confusing” range of styles has obscured some important qualities common to all of his works. Four stylistically divergent works for string quartet — the early, Schoenbergian, unnumbered quartet op. 25; a suite of dance movements, the Fünf Stücke, from 1923; and the two numbered string quartets (1924 and 1925), which quote and parody Mozart and Haydn — provided Greenberg with evidence of an essential quality underlying all four. As he put it, “Although appearing to be preoccupied by the present, to shift allegiance in accordance with the current stylistic fads, Schulhoff in fact used these to engage the past and conduct a consistent yet provocative and original dialogue with tradition.”
Lara, in “Dance to This: Parallels in Harmonic and Metric Organization in Alla Valse Viennese of Erwin Schulhoff's Fünf Stücke for String Quartet,” gave a delightfully extemporaneous presentation, further enlivened by her illustrating particular points on the cello, which she had brought with her. (Both Greenberg and Lara are accomplished and active string quartet players.) Schulhoff was passionate about dance, and he intentionally used ostinatos, ostinato cells and rhythmic energy to forge visceral connections with his listeners. To learn that Schulhoff believed music to be something that is “first of all, supposed to induce the physical sensation of well-being, ecstasy, even; it is never philosophy,” proved a valuable key to a more informed hearing of this composer's works.
Closely related to the question of personal style versus external influences is that of the tension between what was or might have been a composer's intention and a listener's perceptions, interpretations and, ultimately — although we usually hesitate to put it so bluntly — judgments. An artist's intention is a highly volatile combination of conscious and unconscious internal and external factors that surpasses full understanding. A composer may start with a firm initial intention, but in the course of working on the piece all manner of large and small things will alter it; collectively, the factors that influence compositional decision making are sure to extend far beyond those that shaped the work's initial concept. The game of reading meaning and intention in (and into) particular works or passages was enthusiastically played and vigorously debated, particularly in discussions centered on Schulhoff and Ullmann's liberal incorporation of quotations into their works. When are quotes meant to be heard as quotes? And, even when it can be established that they are intentional, how are we to know what meanings they were intended to convey? Not everyone agreed that authorial intention might sometimes be so elusive as to be ultimately unknowable.
Just as the process of identifying intention is full of potential pitfalls, so too is that of analyzing works or events through hindsight. Móricz, in the historiographic portion of her talk, laid out the dangers of backward causation, the practice of considering historical events principally through the lens of what we know happened afterward. Adopting Gary Saul Morson's idea of side shadows to an alternative present — those multiple possibilities that, although lost to history by not having been lived, were as much part of that past's present as they are for us in our present — Móricz declared that “treating the Holocaust as a predestined future, the shadow of which affected the years that preceded it, inevitably leads to the distortion of history.” Similar dangers attend a teleological approach to pieces that “happen” to have become a composer's last works, though at the time the composer presumably saw them against a horizon of future projects.
Yet it is difficult not to read a premonition of catastrophe into works such as those produced in the Czechoslovakia of 1941. Caleb Boyd (Arizona State University), in his “Composition as Control and Transcendence in Viktor Ullmann's Six Sonnets de Louize Labé,” discussed an Ullmann work that dates from just before the composer's arrest and deportation to Terezín; Boyd analyzed the text (this seems to have been the first time that Ullmann set French literature to music, possibly in association with his wife, who was French, but perhaps also in defiance of the Germanification of Czechoslovakia) and the use of quotations from Wagner's Tristan and Josef Suk's 1906 Asrael Symphony. The latter work, which the widely revered Czech composer wrote in homage to his teacher and father-in-law, Antonín Dvořák, afterwards came to be played at times of national mourning, and the apocalyptic meaning of the “death motive” would have been clear to audiences of the time. Caleb suggested that this pre-Terezín song cycle by Ullmann was a response to Nazi terrorism, “a musical declaration of love to his wife [through which] he would be able to transcend the portending zero hour.”
Another good candidate in the hunt for eschatological meaning is Ullmann's one-act Der Kaiser von Atlantis, oder die Tod-Verweigerung (1943—1944), on a text by Peter Kien, a fellow Terezín inmate. Alessandro Carrieri (University of Trieste, Italy), in “Music Facing the Extreme: Political Expression in Der Kaiser von Atlantis,” addressed the subtle and not-so-subtle allegorical references in the text and musical setting of the work, and how they might have been both intended and perceived. Martin Hoffmann (Bonn, Germany) postulated in “Memory and Foreboding in Viktor Ullmann's Der Kaiser von Atlantis” that the work can be seen as a literal allegory of the Nazi reality being lived by the work's creators and the other inmates of Terezín. Particularly fruitful was Hoffmann's careful semantic analysis of the Haydn melody that in 1922 was adopted as the German national anthem; everyone in Terezín, Hoffmann argued, would have recognized Ullmann's satirical use of the tune in the context of two well-known earlier uses: Smetana's unambiguous incorporation of it into his Triumphal Symphony of 1853—1854 and Bartók's highly distorted references in his Kossuth of 1904.
Inevitably, conference discussions repeatedly circled back to Schulhoff's and Ullmann's fates as victims of the Nazi genocide. This established a thematic backdrop to the paper by Francesco Lotoro (Barletta, Italy), “In Search of Lost Music: Prolegomena to a Concentration Camp Music Literature,” which was read by Bret Werb (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC). Lotoro outlined an ambitious online project to catalogue all musical works produced in circumstances of imprisonment, not limited to Nazi concentration and extermination camps. This paper sparked a debate on whether music (or any art, for that matter) produced in captivity necessarily represents direct engagement with that situation — in the form of revolt, resistance, complicity or any combination thereof — or whether a prison might simply be the place in which a creator happens to create something. Is it at all useful to consider music composed in a concentration camp as a legitimate genre — Lagermusik (music of the camps), as it is sometimes called? Would the sole fact of having been thus produced suffice as a common quality?
By the time these questions were raised, Ullmann's essay “Goethe und Ghetto,” which he wrote in Terezín and in which he declared that “our efforts in regard to Art were commensurate with our will to live,” had already several times sparked discussion of creativity within the constraints of harsh incarceration. Would the likelihood that one may soon be killed free a creator's imagination or would the fear of losing even such minuscule privileges as may remain (things as basic as food, but also human contact and permission to participate in joint activities such as those permitted in Terezín) force inmates into complicity, shackle their daring or otherwise direct their creative choices?
The music of Schulhoff and Ullmann was never far from conference attention. Throughout the two-day conference, many talks were illustrated with aural examples. Schulhoff's Sonata for Violin was played in its entirety by the ASU DMA student Michelle Vallier. And the last afternoon brought a panel discussion of one of the works scheduled for that evening's concert, Ullmann's Piano Sonata No. 7, with Rachel Bergman (George Mason University), Jory Debenham (University of Lancaster, England), Sivan Etedgee (Boston) and Gwyneth Bravo (Los Angeles), who provided rich contextualization for the sonata and discussed its layers of structure and autobiographical meaning: Ullmann had dedicated the work, which he completed on 22 August 1944, just a few months before he was transferred to Auschwitz, to his three children. Steven Vanhauwaert discussed pianistic and formal aspects of the work.
The evening concert that then followed provided a satisfying and truly memorable conclusion to the conference. In the first half, Vanhauwaert performed Ullmann's Piano Sonata No. 7. Like many others in the audience, I had heard the sonata several times before but never in such a riveting and persuasive interpretation. The second half of the program was a multimedia production of Ullmann's monodrama The Lay of Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke (also 1944), based on excerpts from Rilke's poem of the same name. This poem, written in 1899, in which Rilke traces the fate of a soldier in the 1660s, became a runaway bestseller after its second printing in 1912, and during World War I that edition consoled thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers in the trenches. The production of Ullmann's setting presented at the conference was conceived and directed by Bravo, who also conceived many of the filmic images; technical production and design were by Paul Sidlow. The live portions of the production were shaped by Neal Stulberg (University of California, Los Angeles), in his role as a most compelling speaker, and Vanhauwaert at the piano. In the program notes, which warrant partial reproduction here, Bravo provided a lucid explanation of the process behind the piece:
In the spirit of early cinema and Erwin Piscator's experimental theater of the 1920s, our production reimagines the theater and concert hall as a cinematic space where the performance of these works takes place inside a filmic framework, where a kaleidoscope of projected and slowly shifting montage images serves as a visual counterpoint to the poetry and music. Employing a postmodern compositional superimposition and animation of a multilayered and harmonically conceived series of visual elements, include the early prints of the Czech photographer Josef Sudek, blurred and treated filmic stills and moving frames of cavalry from Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, among many others. These images suggest the ghostlike presence and profound absences of early photography and cinema, where the Bohemian landscapes that serve as both the historical and poetic context of these works is refracted through the sepia-hued lens of memory, to narrate the unfolding of a dreamscape evoked by the Jugendstil aesthetic of Rilke's work.
The production, whose many themes and media stimuli make for a dense weave of texture and content, received its premiere performance at this event. A documentary is planned.
* * *
As frequently happens in the recovery of a suppressed composer's oeuvre, every performance heard at the Arizona conference brought surprises, and with them the bemused question “Why did this work disappear so completely from the repertoire?” Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the gathering was the that its participants were able to leave that question behind them, since the answers to it are in any case multiple, complex and necessarily unsatisfactory. Instead, they demonstrated that the further the pre-1945 past recedes, the better Central European music of that time is able to regain some of its original rich diversity.
