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 recitals 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?

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.

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 21^st and 23^rd. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.”

A Dutch case study in the re-migration of European musicians after World War II¹

Early in February 1945, violinist Samuel Swaap received a liberating note that contained the following message: "You are placed in the February 5 transport to Switzerland. In order to get things settled, you are requested to go to the meeting point at Langestrasse 3 with your baggage, today: Sunday February 4, 1945, from 7:00 pm until 11:00 pm. Only hand luggage and one suitcase is allowed, because the journey will take place in an express train and no hand luggage carrier is made available." This little note for Swaap, former concertmaster of the the Hague Philharmonic (Het Residentie Orkest, meant the end of protracted hardships in the supposedly "beautified" concentration camp of Theresienstadt (Terezín)…

Józef Kropiński's Compositions in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp

In a 1945 publication titled "The Nazi Kultur in Poland," written in Warsaw under the German Occupation and published in London for the Polish Ministry of Information, the following summary assessment is given of the state of music in Poland at the height of the war:

Despite such difficult conditions of life, despite imposed limitations, persecutions, arrests, man-hunts and deportations to concentration camps […] music in Poland is not dead. Apart from […] public performances, which are much limited by official vetoes and regulations, many concerts devoted exclusively to Polish music are organized in private houses […]. In spite of the danger involved, they are well attended and steadily increase in number […]. [A]rtists give…

Music and Virtue

Music's purpose during the Hitler years and its relationship to officialdom and to the public is as complex as it is fascinating. Beyond the Nazis' incorporation of music into its racial policies and their exploitation of it as both rallying-cry and battle-cry, musical themes include the achievements of the Terezin composers; the use of music in concentration camps (and, latterly, as vehicles for Holocaust memorial projects); Hitler's appropriation of Wagner; the Reich's relationship with jazz, and music as an expression of internal political rivalry, between Goebbels and Goering for example. What accounts for our fascination? The visual art and literature of the Nazi period receive nothing like equivalent attention, although in the years just after the Holocaust, there were indeed significant responses across all the arts.

Most critics and historians of film music consider Max Steiner's soundtrack for King Kong to have been the first great Hollywood film score. The movie was released in 1933, the same year in which Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Thanks to one of the many ironies of history, politics and art, the “Golden Age” of film music was almost exactly coextensive with the sordid human tragedy known as the Third Reich (1933-1945). During those years, the fledgling movie industry in Hollywood attracted the genius of Old-World musicians from Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Budapest and elsewhere – composers at the height of their creative powers, versed in the classical and romantic musical tradition – to participate in this new form of mass entertainment. They were neither students nor pioneers, but rather established, active European composers, among the best of their generation. And they created what many consider to be the finest scores ever written for the film industry.

This month, we offer something a bit different as our featured piece. It is not an article, but a ten-minute multimedia work by Artist Rita Blitt, created in response to the music of Pavel Haas. Ms. Blitt is an American painter, sculptor and multimedia artist with studios in California, Colorado and Kansas. The work, “Collaborating with the Past,” as well as more information about the artist, may be found via the following link:

http://www.ritablitt.com/films/collaborating-with-the-past.cfm

Why didn't Eliška Kleinová play in Terezín? Let me open my essay with this seemingly superfluous question. It opens a door to illuminate how the category of gender can help us understand musical life in Terezín. To start, let us recount her biography, perhaps reading against the grain:

Work Recommendations

Seldom have I been asked to list works that I think might win over audiences on a single hearing. For one thing, much if not most great music demands at least a second hearing, and often many more, before its full message gets through. But we can't always assume that a second hearing will be available to repertoire that is more often regarded with suspicion than with curiosity. I've been asked to schedule and plan programs and festivals, but rarely has anyone asked me what works I believe will silence the doubters after a single performance. Until now, I have tried to strike a balance between the familiar and unfamiliar, and I have been able to rely on the good will of listeners whose curiosity was known to outweigh their suspicions.

“I find the subject fascinating, but I just don't know where to start” is a sentence every one of us has heard countless times. Of course there is no single answer and each person making this point will have his or her own preconceptions and requirements. If one is speaking to a string quartet, it hardly makes sense to rattle off lists of Lieder, and operas by suppressed composers probably won't be of much use to a pianist planning a recital program. Yet there must be some means of peering into this dense forest of opportunities and seeing more than just the trees while being wary of the gullies and crevices lurking in the underbrush.

Like a time capsule, unopened for nearly three quarters of a century, the music of Walter Arlen lay hidden until 2008. Full of emotional issues from a period most of us know only from history, it inevitably leads us to ask: What is the ‘cut-off' point, at which one can confidently say that Hitler's direct influence has dissipated from our emotional, cultural and musical lives? How many generations are necessary to bridge the dual states of “refugee” to “all-American” with no emotional ties to a distant country with a language no longer spoken at home? Refugees arriving with young families were astonished to see how quickly their children assimilated. Lawrence Weschler, grandson of the composer Ernst Toch, and the son of Viennese parents, has written of his incomprehension of a grandfather who was neither interested in, nor enthusiastic about baseball. Indeed, for many refugees, it was often their Americanized children and grandchildren who kept them from returning to their former homelands.

More than a hundred Jewish musicians who were forced to flee Europe during the Nazi years found refuge in Argentina. Most of them came to the country with excellent musical education and having achieved significant, successful professional lives in Europe. Composers, performers, critics, musicologists, educators and stage directors (many of whom were were born in Germany or Austria) had to leave their homes and jobs on the European continent and chose to come to Buenos Aires as a place of exile.

In 1927, Alexander Zemlinsky, the fifty-seven year old conductor of Prague's New German Theater, headed for Berlin, hoping for a fresh musical start. During the previous seventeen years he had given the Czech capital everything he had and had kept the city abreast of contemporary musical currents, but he had been longing all the while to be free of Prague's provincialism. Zemlinsky's preference was always to return to Vienna, the city of his birth, but Vienna seemed indifferent to what he had to offer, and offered him nothing in return. When Otto Klemperer invited the veteran conductor to join his staff at Berlin's newly formed Kroll Oper, Zemlinsky jumped at the chance. He would spend the next five years in the Prussian capital. Yet rather than providing true musical fulfillment and the recognition that was Zemlinsky's due, Berlin proved to be his undoing. His work as a conductor would be cut short when Klemperer's experimental theater was closed down after four years, and shortly thereafter Zemlinsky and his seventh opera, Der Kreidekreis, became early victims of Goebbels' yet-to-be defined—or refined—musical policies.

In the spring and summer of 1943, a theater piece with a stellar cast and an urgent message scooped the daily press to bring news of the genocide of European Jews to a scarcely believing American public. Subtitled “A memorial dedicated to the 2,000,000 Jewish dead of Europe,” We Will Never Die was the brainchild of the popular screenwriter Ben Hecht (1894–1964). Those unfamiliar with Hecht's name will probably recognize the titles of some of the more than 150 films to which he contributed: Scarface, Twentieth Century, Gone With the Wind, Notorious, A Star Is Born. An ex-newsman who had lived the fabulous-gaudy life that a Chicago newsman of the roaring teens and '20s was supposed to have lived, Hecht had an insider's grasp of the popular media and the confidence and enterprise to challenge its priorities openly.

Equal in fascination to the concept of creation is that of resurrection. The possibility that death might be reversed or transformed can serve as an irresistible trigger to imagination. Certainly the idea has generated some of the most powerful moments in religion and the arts, from the myth of the phoenix and belief in Jesus's resurrection to the story of Dickens's Dr. Manette, recalled to life during the French Revolution. The same fascination with recalling to life no doubt explains the satisfaction of excavation—recovering artifacts and voices that previous generations had consigned to oblivion.

The situation of composers who became former Polish citizens in September 1939 was defined by general policies and new jurisdictions introduced by the Nazi and Soviet authorities. Poland disappeared from the maps in 1939, divided into three parts: the General Government under German civil administration and military occupation, the Third Reich–incorporated territories and the USSR–annexed territories. The approaches to the inhabitants of these regions varied, yet their common feature was terror, directed first of all towards the intelligentsia. In the part of Poland that came under Soviet rule, arrests by the NKVD and deportations to Siberia were means of grasping control of the Polish population, but until June 1941, when these territories were seized by the Third Reich and incorporated into the General Government District of Galicia, musical institutions and schools still operated, even though their functioning was adapted to Soviet models and the most important positions were given to those who were willing to collaborate with the new regime.

There is a small town about an hour's drive northwest of Prague, close to the convergence of the Labe (in German, Elbe) and Ohře (Eger) rivers; it was originally called Theresienstadt. Built by the Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II in 1780 and named for his mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, it was designed to protect Prague from a potential attack by Frederick the Great of Prussia. The complex consisted of a small fortress on one bank of the Ohře and a garrison town on the other. The town itself, called the Big Fortress, contained three large military barracks (Sudeten, Brandenburg and Magdeburg) and was partially walled; altogether it could easily accommodate about 6,000 people. By the beginning of the twentieth century Theresienstadt was obsolete as a military bastion, the Little Fortress serving only as a maximum security prison (Gavrilo Prinzip, whose assassination of the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand provided the catalyst for World War I, was imprisoned there). When Czechoslovakia became a republic after World War I, the town's name was officially changed to the Czech equivalent, Terezín.

1. From the Rectangle to the Mona Lisa

It is a kind of truism that the past comes to us through some combination of testimony (oral or written), images, written documents, and artifacts. Of course, the previous things are just words, and exactly what an artifact is, and what an image is, or whether on some level we could consider all such things as “documents” of the past is not precisely clear. However, it is in this broad sense that I wish to ask: what kind of historical document is a musical score, and how might one go about extracting information from it – and what kind of information might that be?

We are familiar with documents that say such things as: “The King of So and So paid three bottles of fine wine and three geese to the composer Monsieur X.” Once we go through the tiresome, but necessary, process of verifying the document's provenance, we may conclude that someone wrote this statement on such and such a day, and unless we can think of a compelling reason why the document might contain mistaken information or be deliberately misleading or forged, we imagine that indeed, it is as it appears. Then we can check it against any other information that can be similarly verified and see whether any kind of coherent picture emerges, albeit of limited practices within a certain time and place. In the end, though, there is a great deal of guesswork involved in connecting these historical “points in space”, and in this cosmic game of follow-the-dots some will see rectangles as they connect four points in historical space, while others will insist that they have produced the Mona Lisa.

Dutch painting is world famous. Every year, thousands of tourists flock to the Netherlands to admire paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, Van Gogh and Mondriaan.

How different is the fame of Dutch music! Holland was always susceptible to the powerful cultural influences of its larger neighbors, France and Germany. This was certainly true in the 19th century when Holland was under the sway of German musical traditions, but the situation began to change toward the beginning of the 20th century, when French music became more influential. Although this was partly a result of the strength of a new school of French composers, the political and cultural climate in the Netherlands was also changing. Directly prior to the Second World War, affinity with French music even became a political statement, a declaration of opposition to the rising Nazi regime. During the war, that regime dictated new rules for the arts and for cultural life. Affiliation with French music was not sufficient cause for suppression of music by Dutch composers. There was no ‘Entartete Kunst’ as such. Music was forbidden simply because a composer either had a Jewish background or refused to comply with Nazi rules. Such composers had to give up their social positions, and their music was banned from all public performances. Most Jewish composers were deported, their personal belongings plundered. Many of them lost their lives. Their personal archives as well as their musical heritage were eradicated.

At Terezín, in what is now in the Czech Republic, opportunities for the performance of jazz and other forms of popular music – operettas, revues and cabaret music, for instance – emerged in the wake of the SS's decision to turn the concentration camp into a “model ghetto.” Throughout its existence, Terezín served a dual function within National Socialist policies – and specifically, those of Heinrich Himmler. Although it was originally conceived as a transit camp for Bohemian and Moravian Jews on their way to extermination camps in the General Government area, Terezín also fulfilled the propagandistic function of keeping up the appearance of Jewish autonomy and the “normality” of ghetto life. But this make-believe autonomy of the Jewish administration, presided over by the Jewish Council of Elders, was entirely subservient to the SS's dictatorship over Terezín and its prisoners.

Even though musicology was a relatively young and fairly small academic discipline when Hitler seized power, Germany lost more than one hundred of its music researchers to exile; they included Jews and opponents of the regime. ¹ The implementation of the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (Law for the Reconstitution of the Civil Service) of April 7, 1933, dismissing non-Aryans from any position in the public sector, also put an end to many university careers. It may come as a surprise that, compared with the number of those who had to leave the country, few musicologists lost proper university positions. The reason for this is that the years preceding the ‘Third Reich’ were already severely marked by anti-Semitic discrimination. In the Weimar Republic, German-Jewish scholars had had great difficulty obtaining professorships. ² Since academia at the time was predominantly conservative and anti-republican, often in conjunction with anti-Semitic ideology, Jews were rejected for their alleged liberal attitudes. Thus, the professional discrimination against Jewish scholars in the Weimar Republic should be considered more political than ethnic or religious.

When the Second World War began, on September 1, 1939, French musicians who were practicing or non-practicing Jews – conductors, instrumentalists, singers and composers – felt even more anxiety than did their compatriots who belonged to other religions. Since 1933 they had been aware of the persecutions being carried out in Germany, and later in Austria, against members of the faith of Abraham and Moses. These French Jewish artists belonged to several generations; they were active in education, opera, chamber music, orchestras and liturgical music – since some of them were cantors in synagogues. Many of them worked in the area of light music – cabarets, restaurants, bars in the principal hotels, revues at the Folies-Bergère and popular song – or in the movies. Furthermore, all of them had to face the emigration of their fellow Jews who had fled to France from Germany or Austria after Hitler's accession to power and the Anschluss; these people were the successors of Jewish musicians who had arrived in France during the 1920s from Hungary, Poland and Romania. All of them understood, however, that the universe that Stefan Zweig had described in Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday) – one of his most lucid works – was about to disappear forever.

Germany under the Nazis was deprived of a great number of talented artists who had to leave their country as a consequence of restrictions and persecution. But a majority of German musicians had rather different experiences. For them, Hitler's coming to power offered new opportunities and fulfilled some of their old dreams. The idea of a central organization of all German musicians, an office for music, was one such dream. After Hitler's arrival as German chancellor, it took only a few months until a Reich Music Chamber was established, in November 1933. Richard Strauss was named its president, Wilhelm Furtwängler his deputy. These experienced men discovered that music received much more state support than under any former German government.

The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954) was one of Germany's most celebrated performing musicians, and his reputation has grown to almost mythical proportions in the five-and-a-half decades since his death. But the controversy surrounding his political behavior during the 1930s and '40s has never let up. There are those who declare that Furtwängler – who was principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and State Opera when Hitler's National Socialists came to power in 1933, and who continued to work in Germany until three months before the end of the Second World War – approved of the Nazis; according to others, he merely used them to further his career; and many claim that he actively opposed them.

Germany and Austria were transformed by the forced expatriation of Jews during the 1930s and 1940s. No less transformative was the influx of exiles into the countries willing to give them refuge. Artists, writers, scientists and intellectuals who established vital spheres of activity in their new homelands seminally affected the arts, sciences, humanities and even national sensibilities. Most easily identifiable as agents of transformation were those figures who had already achieved some degree of public stature, but regular folk – workers and professionals living private lives in circumscribed spheres – likewise had a significant, if more subtle, collective cultural impact, as can be seen in changes to national cuisines and fashions, and in the more intangible areas of international awareness and tolerance of the Other.

Unlike the so–called Terezín composers — Viktor Ullman, Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas and Hans Krása — whose names and works have become relatively well known in recent years, the Hungarian Jewish composers who were murdered during the Holocaust remain nearly unknown. All seven of those who have been rediscovered so far died young, before they had fulfilled their potential. Yet, in spite of adverse circumstances, all had produced work of value. The amount of work that appears to have survived varies; what they shared was an untimely, tragic end, followed by artistic oblivion. The following information about the seven Hungarian Jewish composers (presented here in alphabetical order) is the fruit of my attempts, so far, to rectify the situation.

In considering musical life during the Third Reich, and especially the consequences of Nazi policies regarding music, one inevitably comes across a variety of people: perpetrators, collaborators and followers – creators and representatives of the National Socialist German state – as well as victims and opponents of the regime. The approach to research may differ: banned professions and censorship may be the subjects, as may the development of professions, schools, musical institutions and branches of musical economy; musical life in the Jewish Cultural League, in the ghettos and concentration camps; aspects of assimilation and “brain gain” in the countries of exile; “brain drain” and the loss of traditions and knowledge in Europe; internal exile and remigration; and, finally, the history of composition, conditions of reception etc. Whatever perspective one chooses, every subject is connected with musicians whose lives were disrupted or even destroyed, or who at least were turned in another direction.

“In Italy there is absolutely no differentiation between Jews and non–Jews, in all fields, from religion to politics to the military to the economy… Italian Jews have their new Zion here, in this adorable land of ours.” These words by Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, were published in 1920 in Il Popolo d'Italia, the newspaper of which he was editor–in–chief. And yet, one year earlier Mussolini had inveighed, in the same newspaper, against the occult powers of “International Judaism.” Thus, by following denigration with reassurance, he began the slow process of building up racist philosophy, which had seemed completely extraneous to the history and culture of Italy once the country's reunification was complete (1870).

It was in the mid–1980s when, as a producer for London Records, I first discussed a short series of works by Alexander Zemlinsky to be recorded with Berlin's Radio Symphony Orchestra and its new music director, Riccardo Chailly. The manager of the orchestra and source of this suggestion was the composer and conductor Peter Ruzicka.

The Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture League), originally called the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden (Culture League of German Jews), was a performing arts ensemble by and for Jews, created in Berlin in collaboration with the National Socialist regime. The Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (Law for the Reconstitution of the Civil Service) of April 7, 1933, generally dismissed non–Aryans — defined at that time as any person descended from a Jewish parent or grandparent — from holding positions in the public sphere, especially at cultural institutions such as state–run music conservatories, opera houses, concert halls and theaters. From 1933 to 1941, the League was the most significant site in Nazi Germany that still allowed, and, paradoxically, even encouraged Jews to participate in music as well as theater.

During the twelve years of the Third Reich's existence, there was no shortage of hyperbole in the representation of art's role and artists' obligations within the new state. Anyone who approaches the subject will be familiar with Leni Riefenstahl's brilliant piece of film propaganda, Triumph of the Will, with the sleek and imposing neoclassicism of the Olympic stadium and Reich Chancellery, with their muscle bound statuary and with Paul Ludwig Troost's House of German Art. Digging deeper, one discovers that Hitler laid the cornerstone for this art museum amidst a pompous procession of the history of “German” art that borrowed shamelessly from ancient Greece, and that the museum's grand opening in 1937 featured not only a hand-selected collection of works considered truly German but also an accompanying exhibit of illegally seized modernist art displayed, mockingly, as the “degenerate” work of charlatans, racial inferiors and the mentally deranged.

Two generations of composers shaped the musical landscape during the first half of the twentieth century. The first transformed the inherited world of late Romanticism with vertiginous flights of fantasy. A second generation, which came of age in the 1920s, turned away from Romantic ecstasy and mixed high and low, serious and popular, bourgeois and proletarian. These generations shared a common heritage but pursued widely disparate cultural, aesthetic, and even political and philosophical preoccupations.