"Some Jewish Colleagues are Back at Their Desks…"

by Emile Wennekes | May 13, 2012 | Articles & Essays

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). Together with approximately 1,200 other Jews, Swaap was sent on a transport to Switzerland as part of an exchange program that was the outcome of a series of cloak-and-dagger stories and secret police games, in which personalities like Heinrich Himmler, the former Swiss president Jean-Mary Musy and the Jewish activist Recha Sternbuch each played a part. Even the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Switzerland were involved in a string of events that illustrate the grotesque side of Nazi power.

Among Swaap's acquaintances in this complicated exchange were several other Dutch Jewish musicians, including—to name just two fellow sufferers—Rosa Spier, the former solo harpist of the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, and Samuel Tromp, former associate leader of the same orchestra's second violin section. As late as August 1945 musicians were still being repatriated to the Netherlands. For some of them the process took only a few days, but for others weeks went by before they could resume their places in the orchestras and music academies in which they had played and taught before the war.

The group of Terezín survivors exemplified a category of Dutch Jewish musicians who managed to survive the National Socialist atrocities. Coming back to their home country after the war, they were confronted with new and hardly less critical difficulties, not least of which was the attempt to regain their former positions. It is important to try to classify this group within the broader perspective of the "re-migration" of the survivors of German persecution.

The subject of musicians' post-Second World War re-migration has barely been studied, in part because it was not a mass phenomenon. The number of musicians deported from Germany during the war has been estimated at 4000.²
Of these, a mere five to ten percent returned to their fatherland, and among that small number many were no longer able to function in their former positions. Statistics for other countries are not yet available and are merely a subject for speculation. Thus far, in individual biographies or in research relevant to certain institutions (conservatories, orchestras and so on), re-migration has functioned only as a coda to the issue of exile. But this does not do justice to the specificity of the subject. In the case of exile, the persecutor drove the events, whereas re-migration was a secondary, subsequent consequence for the persecuted.³
Survivors had to ask themselves crucial questions: "Can I return home?" "Do I want to return home—and if so, under what conditions?"

Some preliminary conclusions indicate that there were substantial differences from country to country. By limiting the comparison to Germany and the Netherlands, one might tentatively conclude that the number of exiles in the latter was substantially lower than in the former. And there is a crucial psychological difference: in the Netherlands the occupiers, rather than fellow countrymen, had forced the persecuted to leave the country. Thus, the question as to whether or not one ought to return to the nation that was responsible for the atrocities was irrelevant. Nevertheless, the larger moral question retained some relevance, inasmuch as fellow Dutchmen had acquiesced to the terror, willingly or unwillingly, and some of them had even benefited from the absence of the refugees or deportees.

Whatever scholarly attention has been paid so far to the exiled musicians has focused mainly on well-known names, whereas re-migration has less to do with the elite than with the relatively unknown. This survey focuses on a group of Jewish musicians who, coincidentally or not, shared to a large extent, similar wartime experiences, but who, on returning home, were confronted with different circumstances, from which they drew different conclusions.

The Nazi occupation of the Netherlands began with the invasion by German military forces on May 10, 1940. At first, much remained as before; concert life and radio programming continued after only a short break. But by the following autumn the varnish of correctness and tolerance had worn thin. Censorship was proclaimed and performances of music by Jewish composers were banned. In March 1941, all Jewish musicians were banned from music academies and orchestras. Living conditions became very harsh for these unemployed musicians. Only occasionally were financial arrangements made between individual musicians and the orchestras that had been forced to fire them. An alternative was offered—although for a total of only seventy-three seemingly lucky musicians of Jewish descent—through the creation of the Amsterdam-based Jewish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Albert van Raalte.⁴
For eight months, from November 1941 until July 1942, this orchestra, like the Jewish Kulturbund in Germany, created deceptive expectations of survival. But as soon as deportations began, in the summer of 1942, the Jewish orchestra was forced to end its activities. What happened next is well known: substantial numbers of Holland's Jewish musicians were brutally killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Sobibor. Nevertheless, fifty percent of Dutch Jewish orchestral musicians survived, a substantially higher percentage than members of many other professions.

In April 1941, fifty-seven so-called volljüdische (hundred-percent Jewish) musicians had been employed in the eight Dutch symphony orchestras extant at that time, a figure of more than eleven percent.⁵
Amazingly, twenty-nine of them survived the war. Fourteen of these were members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, five of them played with the Hague Philharmonic and four with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. The remaining six were employed by local symphony orchestras.

One of the musicians shunted around Europe, from one concentration or transit camp to the next, was the above-mentioned Rosa Spier (1891-1967), who had been principal harpist of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra since 1932 and had taught at the leading music academies of Amsterdam and The Hague. After she was sacked from the Concertgebouw Orchestra, in 1941, she joined the Jewish Symphony Orchestra. She must have expected that this orchestra would survive the German atrocities, since she stipulated that, should she get a good offer from abroad, her contract could be annulled.⁶
This proved to be a vain hope. She went into hiding immediately after the orchestra was disbanded in mid-1942, but she was soon betrayed and deported, first to the Westerbork transit camp and then to Theresienstadt, from which, at war's end, she was sent to Switzerland.

In May 1945 Rosa Spier wrote from Switzerland to Amsterdam that she looked forward to playing again in her Concertgebouw Orchestra. In August she was finally able to return home, or rather, to the city that she had always called home. In reality, post-war Amsterdam meant a "huge deception" for Rosa Spier, as she later wrote in her as yet unpublished memoirs. Directly after her return, she was allowed to reclaim her former position in the Concertgebouw, but as early as October 1, 1945, she resigned to accept a position in the newly established radio orchestra. In this job she would earn a higher salary and, as the minutes of the orchestra's board indicate, she especially hoped to have more possibilities to perform as a soloist in her new working environment.

But matters are never as simple as they seem in the minutes of board meetings. A remarkable detail in Spier's correspondence is her application, almost two years later, to join the Concertgebouw Orchestra on a tour of Scandinavia: "Payment doesn't play any role," she wrote to the orchestra's board; clearly, she was not anticipating a permanent return to her old job. But, she said, "this travel would work as a balm for the wound which my last travel abroad—in a cattle truck—has created […], a very painful memory that is still very much alive." Her application was rejected.

What exactly had happened during the first two months, when Spier had performed again with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, remains a mystery. Not even her memoirs provide any idea of her disappointments, nor do the board's minutes or Spier's correspondence. Could it be that her former student Phia Berghout had practically taken over the position of principal harpist? Officially, Berghout was given the position only after Spier had resigned.⁷

Rosa Spier was but one of several Jewish musicians in the Concertgebouw Orchestra who were confronted with the postwar results of the wartime "Aryanization" of musical life in the Netherlands. Nearly twenty percent (sixteen out of eighty-eight) of the orchestra's musicians had been forced to resign,⁸ among them, the second and third concertmasters, the principal viola, the assistant principal cellist, the assistant principal bassoon and the first trombone. All of the vacancies that they left were filled during 1941 and 1942.

The position of assistant principal second violin also needed to be filled after the dismissal of Samuel Tromp. Tromp (1902-1987) had joined the Concertgebouw Orchestra during the 1928-29 season and was fired in June 1941, as a result of Aryanization, after which he became a member of the Jewish Symphony Orchestra. Within a few months, deportation had become inevitable; via the transit camps of Barneveld and Westerbork, he ended up in Theresienstadt as a Verdienstjude (here indicating a Jew of recognized social standing). Tromp and all the other Jewish musicians mentioned were part of the so-called "Barneveld Group," a privileged list of wirtschaftliche wertvolle Juden (economic or socially relevant Jews) of Dutch origin. They were deported as a group to the Westerbork polizeiliches Durchgangslager (police transit camp), where they also enjoyed a few small privileges, and from there to Theresienstadt, still mainly as members of a separate group of prisoners.

After the war, and following the Swiss detour, Tromp finally returned to Amsterdam, where the orchestra welcomed him back on September 11, 1945. Instead of returning to his old position, however, he was made a section player in the first violins;  ⁹ his former position had been officially given to Piet Heuwekemeijer. Did this seemingly uncomfortable situation cause any conflicts or hard feelings? No, according to the surviving archival material. Apparently it was the newly appointed chief conductor, Eduard van Beinum, who proposed this compromise.  Van Beinum had replaced Willem Mengelberg when the latter was banned from the orchestra as a result of his reprehensible compromises with the Nazis. Van Beinum suggested that Heuwekemeijer could remain in his position as section leader, whereas Tromp would achieve a sort of promotion by moving to the first violins, but as a section player with fewer responsibilities. By way of compensation, Tromp would receive a monthly bonus in order to make his salary comparable to that of his former position.¹⁰
This job rotation seems to have taken place in a friendly atmosphere. In 1946 Tromp was even named Secretary of the Concertgebouw Orchestra's Association (Vereniging Het Concertgebouworchest. He was twice elected president of this highly influential peer pressure group of orchestra musicians. In this position he had to collaborate closely with Heuwekemeijer, who became the orchestra's managing director in the 1950s.

The Association's minutes of May 16, 1945 (shortly after the liberation of Holland), mention the preparations for the first post-war concerts. They state that the musicians could only temporarily assume any given position: "The definite placing can be decided only when all colleagues are again present." Tromp had not yet returned to the Netherlands, but he must have written to the Association shortly thereafter, because on June 23 the secretary and president jointly responded to him in Switzerland: "It is very remarkable that someone who, after suffering a long time, at the start of some improvement in his personal situation first expresses the hope that all his friends have been spared the things he has experienced. Your heartfelt interest in the well-being of your colleagues is proof that the warm feelings of solidarity within the orchestra could not be destroyed by the humanly disgraceful experiences of the war." The letter ends with the words: "Some Jewish colleagues are back at their desks; they received a warm welcome. The ones still missing are the colleagues from Switzerland. We are looking forward with pleasure to your safe homecoming to our good Amsterdam."

One need not doubt the sincerity of these Association board members; even during the occupation the influential organization always acted with social conscience and fraternal sensibility. As early as 1944, post-war plans were being made, and the first point on the list of actions to be undertaken was the restoration of Jewish colleagues to their former posts. The second, and somewhat contradictory, point, however, was that orchestra members hired during the occupation should retain their new positions. These two conditions could have caused conflicts between the hired and the fired, but that was not the case; at least the orchestra's official minutes make no mention of any such problems. The strategy relevant to the job rotation of Samuel Tromp seems exemplary. Moreover, new vacancies were created in the midst of the Katharsis, the post-war purification of Dutch society; Nazi sympathizers were dismissed on the spot.

In comparison with other countries, it appears that the possibilities for Jewish instrumentalists to return to their former posts in the orchestras of the Netherlands were indeed quite good. The cases of Tromp and Spier at the Concertgebouw Orchestra seem to have been similar to those of Jewish musicians returning to other Dutch symphony orchestras. Nor should it be forgotten that those who returned were often in terrible physical and psychological condition, without means of survival, sometimes even without a roof over their heads. In general, they had lost all their possessions in the chain of events, which, for many musicians, meant that they had also been deprived of their instruments. Moreover, insurance premiums hadn't been paid in years. No one — state or city, insurance company or orchestra – accepted financial responsibility for the losses that had been incurred as a result of the wartime situation.

In other words, although these musicians were still alive, many of them were ill and impoverished. As early as the summer of 1945, the board of the Concertgebouw Orchestra discussed what the official date of re-hiring of the returning musicians (and those expected to return) should be: should it be the day on which they would actually reappear at their desks, or should the organization perhaps adhere to a more symbolic date? After ample consideration, the second option was chosen: all musicians fired during the occupation were officially re-hired as of May 8, 1945, three days after the capitulation of the German forces in Holland and the actual day of the Third Reich's official collapse.

Another difficult matter was the question of compensation for missed wages. It took years, and in some cases decades, before this complex matter could be settled to the reasonable satisfaction of all parties concerned. Closely related to this issue was the matter of pre-paid pension claims. Two and a half years after the liberation of Holland, none of the Jewish musicians had been given any compensation payments whatsoever. Confronted with this situation, the board of the Concertgebouw Orchestra established a fund in which they deposited a quarter of the monies owed. Not until halfway through 1949, however, was an official settlement reached. In the end, the wages due were paid out over four to five years. The total amount paid in compensation was first reduced by the amounts earned in the Jewish Symphony Orchestra.

Violinist Sam Swaap (1889-1971) also belonged to the Theresienstadt Group. He had made his debut as a soloist with the Concertgebouw Orchestra at the age of sixteen, and he had entered the ensemble's first violin section in 1909, remaining there until 1913. In 1914 he was named concertmaster of the orchestra of The Hague. Like other Jewish musicians, he was fired in 1941 and subsequently joined the Jewish Symphony Orchestra. In 1944 he was deported via Westerbork to Theresienstadt, and finally returned via Switzerland to The Hague and regained his former position. A single letter from him in Switzerland was sufficient for him to be re-engaged. "Of course you can regain your former position of first concertmaster the moment you arrive," responded the orchestra's board. By the time Swaap's contract for compensation was finally signed, he had retired.

It is evident that both during and after the war, the musicians of the Concertgebouw Orchestra were better off than their colleagues in The Hague, and far better off than those in other parts of Holland. The fact that fourteen of the twenty-nine surviving Jewish orchestra musicians were members of the Concertgebouw Orchestra can be explained by the great prestige that the orchestra and its conductor, Mengelberg, enjoyed with the Nazis, augmented by the great efforts made by the board time and time again to obtain privileged positions for those musicians who had been sent to the concentration camps.

The Amsterdam orchestra led not only in musical quality and international reputation, but also in setting the standards for post-war financial compensation for Jewish musicians. Nevertheless, it took years—too many years for those involved—before Amsterdam's settlements were completed, and in the end the settlements were largely symbolic.

Prof.dr. Emile Wennekes is chair professor of Post-1800 Music History and former Head of School, Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He has published on diverse subjects including Amsterdam's Crystal Palace, Bernard Haitink, Bach and Mahler reception, and contemporary music in the Netherlands; some books are available in translation (six European languages and Chinese). Wennekes previously worked as a journalist for leading Dutch dailies and was artistic advisor and orchestral programmer before intensifying his academic career.  His current research focuses on the remigration of musicians after WW II, as well as on the topic of Mediatizing Music. He chairs the Study Group Music and Media (MaM) under the auspices of the International Musicological Society.
See for details: http://www.uu.nl/gw/medewerkers/EGJWennekes

Article published May 12, 2012

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More Music for the Kinohalle!

by Barbara Milewski | Mar 4, 2012 | Articles & Essays

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 their services free. Polish composers continue to work and have created various new [compositions] […]. Some of them are already being performed at private concerts. Thus everything possible is being done to preserve musical life in Poland from demoralization and extinction.  ¹

The author’s principal concern here is to demonstrate the extent of Polish resistance in the face of Nazi oppression, especially in Warsaw and other urban centers of occupied Poland. Given the deprivations, chaos and terror that were an everyday part of Polish civilian life during the war, it is indeed difficult to imagine who would risk the consequences of organizing something as seemingly frivolous as concerts of Polish music. Yet as impressive as this effort on behalf of Polish culture may have been, Poles in fact were composing new music and organizing concerts in dramatically more improbable circumstances than the article’s author, in Warsaw, could have known about. In the Nazi concentration camps, the same need to preserve their cultural identity motivated Polish prisoners to engage in some of the most remarkable music-making of the World War II period.

Józef Kropiński was among the most prolific composers in the camp system. By narrowly focusing on his activities in Buchenwald, this essay provides not only a glimpse of Polish music during the War, but also a more detailed portrait of music-making within the Nazi camp universe, underscoring the complexity of circumstances that allowed for cultural life to flourish there from the summer of 1943 until the camp’s liberation in April 1945.

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Józef Kropiński was born in Berlin on December 28, 1913, and moved with his family to Bydgoszcz (formerly Prussian Bromberg) after the First World War. There Kropiński attended a business high school and passed his diploma exam in 1933. Gifted and ambitious, he simultaneously pursued music studies, first at the Leon Jaworski School of Music, then at the Bydgoszcz Music Conservatory, where he studied violin. Kropiński fully participated in the city’s fairly sophisticated musical life: he was the organist at his church, gave viola lessons at the Jaworski school and, until 1938, was a member of Jaworski’s acclaimed orchestra, which was made up of the school’s faculty.

Józef Kropiński (at right) with his siblings Alfons and Sofia

Thanks to the wide range of classical music that he performed in public and the more popular pieces with which he and his brother frequently entertained their family at home, Kropiński amassed an impressive repertoire before his father redirected his professional pursuits in December 1938, encouraging him to take a job in the administration of the Polish-French Railway Society. There, Kropiński worked in the coal division, but, unable to abandon music, in a short time he became the assistant conductor of the newly formed Railway Orchestra as well as the director of the Railway choir, “Haslo.” His Railway Society responsibilities as well as his year-long military reserve training ultimately prevented him from graduating from the conservatory before the start of the war.

Like many young Polish patriots determined to do anything to undermine the Nazis, Kropiński aided in the distribution of anti-fascist leaflets after the occupation, and, on May 7, 1940, he was arrested by the Gestapo on conspiracy charges. After a brutal interrogation followed by over a year in prison, he was sent to Auschwitz on November 27, 1941, and registered as a Polish political prisoner, number 23,468. Kropiński was assigned to an Aussenkommando, or outside work detail, which meant all but certain death for prisoners, especially those who arrived at the camp during the harsh winter months. Early in April 1942, he approached the camp orchestra conductor, Franciszek Nierychło, and asked to audition for the orchestra. (According to Kropiński’s son, Waldemar, he often spoke of that audition as the hardest exam of his life.) Despite his weakened physical state and injured hands, Kropiński impressed Nierychło enough to be made a first violinist. He was also appointed copyist for the orchestra. Over the following year, he composed seven short songs in folk-like, religious and lyrical styles, in addition to a march. Four of the songs were settings of poems written by fellow inmate Kazimierz Wójtowicz.

On March 10, 1943, Kropiński was transported to Buchenwald along with nearly a thousand other inmates, most of them Polish. At least a dozen of these prisoners were talented and would figure prominently in the cultural life of their new camp. Buchenwald was a markedly different place from Auschwitz. People still died in preposterous numbers as a result of hard labor, hunger and disease, but Polish prisoners who were healthy enough to be able to work and careful enough not to draw attention to themselves could feel they might be spared being killed outright. In part this was because the camp’s criminal elite — German prisoners who served as high-ranking Kapos — had been removed from power, leaving the camp in the hands of relatively less brutal German leftists. In addition, the recent German defeat at Stalingrad had caused the SS camp commanders to make better use of their human resources, working the prisoners to death in armaments factories and stone quarries rather than simply killing them for sport.  ²

Perhaps most importantly, there was the International Camp Committee (ICC). ³ The ICC was an illegal prisoner organization formed in the summer of 1943 through an accord among several covert national communist cells already working in the camp.  ⁴  This highly organized, international communist resistance movement performed acts of sabotage in the arms industry, smuggled weapons into the camp, and saved prisoners from imminent death whenever possible. According to some estimates, the ICC may ultimately have saved thousands of lives.

Significantly, the ICC also promoted cultural events at Buchenwald. ⁵  Such activities were planned in the Abteilung Pathologie, or Pathology Department, which along with the Revier, or camp hospital, served as the ICC’s headquarters. Pathology was located in Block 2, an annex to the camp crematorium. There, inmates prepared “specimens” to be used at medical institutions throughout the Reich. ⁶  The specimens were in fact human skins removed from prisoners’ cadavers, preserved in glass containers and neatly arranged on shelves to await shipment. Tatooed dissections were most in demand. When the “specimens” were not directly serving science, they were turned into useful leather sundries such as eyeglass cases, purses and book covers, and they were given as presents to SS officers and visiting Nazi dignitaries. ⁷

It was in the Pathology Department, in a tiny six-by-five-foot room, that Kropiński created over a hundred original compositions in a wide range of styles and genres, including songs, marches, characteristic pieces, dances, orchestral and piano works, chamber music, an opera, an operetta and nearly four hundred arrangements of already extant music. He composed only at night and by candlelight, often working into the early hours of the morning. This allowed him to retreat from the realities of camp life and to compose music, uninterrupted, for the numerous concerts planned at the camp. Before Kropiński gained this position within the Pathology Department (it was arranged for him toward the end of 1943 by the communist writer Bruno Apitz), Kropiński had managed to create seven short compositions — songs and dances — like the following little waltz melody without words.

Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 audio. Here is a link to the audio instead.

Example 1: Walc (played by Mariusz Adamczak)

After Kropiński had been “discovered” by the ICC and had become involved in the organization’s cultural undertakings, he achieved the astonishing average of one composition a day until the end of the war. This was accomplished even while Kropiński worked his officially assigned eleven-hour details, first in the Strumfstrickerei (sock-mending unit), then as a gunsmith in the Gustloff Werke munitions factory.

Although almost every national group organized its own illegal literary-artistic “Merry Evenings,” which were held in different barracks across the camp (Polish communists apparently organized thirty-eight such gatherings, beginning in 1943), the international Kinohalle concerts were by far the best attended and most prestigious cultural events in Buchenwald. Each nationality had its own performing group for which recruitment was zealous and rehearsals serious. As Józef Pribula characterized it in his camp memoir:

People who were hungry, beaten, overworked and maltreated started to organize themselves, searching for talent, artists. They started to think, plan things, to organize equipment, costumes […]. Practices were held in the recesses of warehouses, shacks and sheds, lavatories, washrooms. In time, the barracks concerts were moved to the movie theater, which was empty for some time. I talk here of a “movie theater,” but in reality this was a large wooden shack, in which prisoners were once shown films on fascist themes and ideology. A podium was built in this “theater” without the permission of the SS, and efforts were made to have a curtain and lighting. ⁸

Kinohalle interior image

Kinohalle exterior image

Photos of the exterior and interior of the barrack.

The first Kinohalle concert was held on August 1, 1943, with an all-classical music program, and between then and the spring of 1945 at least twenty-seven Kinohalle concerts were eventually organized with permission from the camp command. Most were held on Sundays, after evening roll call. At least eight complete programs for these concerts survive.

Kropiński’s value to the so-called “Polish Theater,” the group of amateur and professional Polish performers, as well as to the Kinohalle concerts more generally, cannot be overestimated. As camp poet Edmund Polak tells us:

The soul of these performances was the talented composer and violin soloist Józef Kropiński, the creator of musical scores for skits, arrangements of Polish music, as well as the author of dozens of original and pseudo-folk compositions. [He was also] a tireless reconstructor of classical works both light and serious.  ⁹

The atmosphere among the performing inmates was collegial, intimate and supportive. The Lwów ballet master Władysław Targalski provided choreography, with help from the Soviet POW and one-time clown and juggler Jakov Nikiforov, allegedly a member of the famous Brothers Nikitin circus (memorialized in Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog). Pribula and Czesław Ostańkowicz lent their talent as theater directors; Edmund Polak and the Czech prisoner Zdenĕk Dlouhý wrote scripts. Kropiński, Kazimierz, Tymiński, and Zdenĕk Hradec took turns conducting, while Bruno Apitz, an actor by profession, provided brilliant monologues and served as make-up artist. (This is, of course, only a very partial list.)

The Kinohalle concert programs were arranged to feature as many national groups as possible, but Germans, Czechs, Poles and Russians tended to dominate. By the end of January 1944, the ICC had taken over the organization of the concerts in order to ensure that themes of solidarity were regularly a part of the programs and that they were easily understandable through music, gesture, mime, and clear-cut character types.

To give a sense of what these concerts were like, here is the program for Kinohalle concert number 16, held on March 19, 1944, recorded in Kazimierz Tyminski’s camp diary, now housed in the Collections of the Auschwitz Museum.

At left are red triangles indicating the status of political prisoner, with letters indicating nationality. Among the offerings that day were: an overture by the camp orchestra; a performance by Russian acrobats; a monologue by Bruno Apitz; old camp songs (likely communist); jazz by the Czech jazz orchestra; “Parodies” by a French group; Czech songs performed by the group “Bohema;” the circus skit “Musik-Exzentrik,” featuring Nikiforov and other Soviet POWs; and Kropiński’s “grotesque”  march, “O Pepita,” performed by the Polish group “The Seven,” with interpretive dance by Targalski. Tyminski humorously writes that “O Pepita” was so popular it was subsequently performed “about 8,758 times.” ¹⁰  Extremely popular, too, was “Kopf hoch,” the march from which the program gets its title. With Apitz’s multilingual text encouraging comrades to persevere — heads held high — and Kropiński’s defiantly jaunty tune, it immediately became a hit and was widely sung among inmates.

Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 audio. Here is a link to the audio instead.

Music Example 2: Kopf hoch (played by Mariusz Adamczak)

Kopf Hoch, Concert program No. 16, camp diary of Kazimierz Tyminski

Image: Watercolor by Valentin Jermakowicz of Jokov the clown’s closing act.

If pieces such as Kropiński’s “O Pepita” and “Kopf hoch” raised prisoners’ spirits, it was the skit “Dream of Southern Seas” (also known as “Five from the Albatross”) that went down in camp history.  ¹¹  It premiered on June 16, 1944 during concert number 19, just before the intermission.

Image: Concert program No. 19

Dream of Southern Seas watercolor, camp diary of Kazimierz Tyminski

Polak’s scenario about a group of carefree mariners who reach a port of call and are loved by the enchanting taverner’s daughter before they once again sail off for unknown adventures, borrowed its basic narrative from a 1939 Polish ballad, “Pięciu chłopców z albatrosa” (Five Boys from the Albatross), written by the pop composer known as Ref-Ren and popularized by matinee idol singer Mieczysław Fogg. Polak’s truly inspired moment, though, was the belly dance added at the center of the tale that he himself performed. As Polak describes it:

I danced a pseudo-original “wild” dance to the sounds of a tam-tam […]. I made my own costume by hand in the water-supplies barrack and smuggled it myself into the camp along with a black wig I had made from dyed hemp “organized” from the warehouse. This was serious sabotage against the military of the Third Reich. Maybe thanks to this I helped by a fraction of a second to speed up the end of the war. I danced in a shredded rag painted with colored spots and a special supplement of asbestos insulation that helped take care of the anatomical deficiencies of the top part of my torso. My rather prominent un-Hawaiian nose was “flattened” in a special way by Bruno Apitz…  ¹²

For some of the music for Polak’s scenario Kropiński also borrowed from the Ref-Ren ballad — as well as from a 19th-century Polish sailors’ song, “Choć burza huczy wkoło nas” (Though the storm roars around us) — but for this “Hawaiian” dance he composed his own orchestral work titled “Utwor characterystyczny” (Character piece).

Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 audio. Here is a link to the audio instead.

Musical Example 3:  Piano reduction of the work (performed by Mariusz Adamczak)

Leaving aside for the moment the work’s perhaps problematic juxtaposition of stereortypical Western musical folk tropes — static harmony and rhythmic ostinato in the bass, repeating melodic fragments — with the image of a Polynesian belly dancer in drag, we have here a rather fine piece of popular musical exoticism, which Kropiński turned out in just over an hour.

“Dream of Southern Seas” was a huge success, affording Polak the opportunity to wear a rag skirt, wig and hazardous-if-inhaled brassiere five more times before the end of the war. One can understand why. With its rhymed verses describing open seas and distant, exotic lands, the skit’s message was unequivically one of freedom. Polak writes:

Our reward was the joy of the prisoners, the smiles on their emaciated faces, their gratefulness to us for allowing them, for several minutes, to escape from reality, to sail off with the crew of the Polish ship to a fabulous Hawaiian island, to dream of hot maritime love, to forget about hunger, exhaustion, fleas.  ¹³

During this busiest season of cultural offerings at Buchenwald, the camp faced its most hideous overcrowding as other camps further east were evacuated to the west. Buchenwald’s inmates experienced illness and a hunger that was new to even the most seasoned of prisoners. Yet a network of well-placed inmates safe-guarded at their own peril the lives of talented, generous-spirited men like Kropiński, to ensure their continued artistic creativity. As strange as it may sound, circumstances at that particular moment in time had created a perfect convergence, an “ideal” setting in which inmates readily found opportunities to create deep bonds of friendship and trust.

Kropiński was evacuated from Buchenwald on April 10, 1945, and endured a so-called “death march” before being liberated by US Armed Forces on April 24. Abandoning the camp, he took with him his violin and as many compositions as he could. By his own tally (made eight months before his death, in 1970) he returned to Bydgoszcz having salvaged 117 original compositions. The scores to his opera and several other compositions were sacrificed along the way, to build a fire to keep fellow prisoners warm.

After the war, Kropiński never composed again. In part this was because he could not secure a professional music post without a conservatory diploma. Moreover, four years in the camps brought on premature heart disease and a nervous disorder that prevented him from finishing his studies while supporting a new family. Waldemar, his son, believes he had given so entirely of his creative energies in the camp that their was nothing left. But it is also possible that Kropiński felt his music simply could not be as essential as it had been in the camp. There was no longer a need to mobilize people to work together with such solidarity, no more need to lift people’s spirits and to save one’s own life with music. For Kropiński, the battle of Polish culture against its Nazi oppressors had already been won.

Article posted March 2012.  All rights reserved.

Barbara Milewski is Associate Professor of Music at Swarthmore College. She earned a PhD in Musicology from Princeton University. Her research focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Polish musical nationalism, and music of the Nazi camps, and has been generously supported by fellowships and prizes awarded by the Fulbright Program, American Musicological Society, USHMM, U.S. Department of Defense, Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, and Kosciuszko Foundation. In 2008, along with colleague, Bret Werb, she produced the compact disc recording, Aleksander Kulisiewicz Ballads and Broadsides: Songs from Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1940-1945. She is presently writing a book that explores the musical-poetic activities of prisoners in Birkenau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald.

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Music, Conscience, Accountability and the Third Reich

by Simon Wynberg | Jan 1, 2012 | Articles & Essays

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.

We know that a musical work, or a specific section of a musical work, can arouse feelings of transcendence — of involvement, connection and satisfaction that are rarely offered by other artistic forms. But music in its purest form, without text or programmatic substance, refers only to itself. Its power lies in its ability to subvert and satisfy expectation simultaneously. And, one assumes, the more experienced and sensitive the listener, the keener, the more discriminating and intense the response. The state of grace that music encourages is sui generis, unrelated to any external morality or ideals of purity, decency or generosity. Of course music can express a variety of emotions and conjure up all manner of associations, which are generated not only by the music itself but also by the circumstances of its performance. But whatever these qualities may be, they are disconnected from concepts of innate good or evil.¹

Yet it is precisely a perceived connection of this kind that provides the unacknowledged background to our preoccupation with music and the Holocaust; the conflation of non-referential musical beauty—created through technique, experience and, for want of a better word, “inspiration”—with a refulgent human goodness. This helps to explain why stories of SS officers, delighting in Mozart one moment and overseeing murder on an industrial-scale the next, seem so shocking and incongruous. In fact, the seamless incorporation of murder and degradation into the rhythm and routine of day-to-day life is even more conspicuously horrific. In December 1941, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler advised his officers that it was their "sacred duty" to ensure that their men's emotional and mental health remained uncompromised. To soothe the souls of the death squads, faced with "sometimes difficult tasks," he recommended regular musical performances. Paradoxically, while music was serving the psychological needs of Himmler's Einsatzgruppen, it was also providing sustenance for the lives of Terezin's inmates, possibly by means of the same Haydn or Mozart string quartet.

Perhaps it is this conflation that also leads listeners to feel so particularly betrayed by the musicians who actively collaborated with the Third Reich. On a practical level, their gradual embrace of, and collusion with, Nazism was no different from those who worked in industry or commerce; all of these men and women were incrementally pressured either to conform, collaborate and coexist, or to face the repercussions of resistance. Were expectations of musicians in some way tied to fantasies about their exceptionality, or their capacity to tap into the spiritual and the sublime? In any case, by the end of the war it was impossible to claim that art-music was intrinsically improving or ennobling. Although it might have soothed a mass-murderer's savage breast, it had also steadied his gun. And if this realization encouraged a more mechanistic, less spiritual appraisal of music's power, it also raised the possibility that music itself had betrayed society. Given the country's rich intellectual history, its sophistication and cultural pre-eminence, the question of how Hitler had managed to win over the German people and enact Nazi policy became a leitmotif of post-war discussion.

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Music and Principle

Do we have to judge artists' ethics before we are able to embrace their work? Richard Wagner 's venomous anti-Semitism, notoriously expressed in his essay Das Judentum in der Musik (“Jewishness in Music”) as well as in his autobiography, Mein Leben, was integrated into the dramaturgy of several of his operas. The evidence of this conscious overlay is now overwhelming, ²and yet we are still more than willing to accept his works as an integral part of our musical inheritance. In Israel there is a residual resistance to Wagner performances, not necessarily because of his anti-Semitism or its dramatic projection, but because Hitler co-opted his music as the Reich's call to arms. In July, 2011, in a much-publicized attempt to separate the composer from the man, the Israel Chamber Orchestra performed Wagner's Siegfried Idyll in a program that included works by Mendelssohn and Mahler. The venue: Bayreuth, the bosom of Wagner worship.

A miasma of anti-Semitism wafted through much of 19th century Europe, with barbs from composers such as Schumann, Chopin and Liszt that ranged from the flippant to the vicious. The good Lutheran J.S. Bach was evidently comfortable in employing an anti-Semitic text for his St. John Passion, and most of us are unfazed by this today. Clearly this particular thread of moral shortcoming played little if any part in preventing their works from entering the musical canon. And in literature, witness the casual (and not-so-casual) anti-Semitism of Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Graham Greene – not to mention the fanatical anti-Semitism of Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

If we defer to Wagner's music and ignore the man, we must surely do the same for the tolerant and righteous. But moral scruples are no substitute for creative genius, and the murder of an unimaginative composer, however monstrous, does not oblige us to program his symphonies. So, ultimately, is it only the work that matters? Although biographical information provides a context to a piece, is it an indispensable part of its appreciation? And if morals and ethics play no role in qualifying art, why should we care how artists behave? Should we be required to spend any time examining the actions or loyalties of specific composers during the dozen years of the Third Reich's authority? Can we accurately imagine the environment in which German musicians lived and worked? And, if we can, how do we begin to measure individual accountability? Furthermore, is such a reckoning appropriate, given that most of these men and women are no longer alive and able to explain or defend their decisions?

Hindsight has a habit of derailing sound judgment, especially when one attempts to appraise the actions of those who chose compromise over self-sacrifice. At the best of times, self-interest and the protection of one's family and livelihood are instinctive priorities. The process is further clouded by a contemporary culture that urges us to create heroes and demons and to ignore anything in-between. A nuanced view is anathema in a society that gravitates to oppositional extremes, and so we manufacture cartoon-like reductions: the sadist, the saint, the defiler, the rescuer, the victim, the conqueror. But German behavior under the Nazis cannot only be defined at the farthest ends of a spectrum. This is not to excuse or ignore egregious conduct (several examples of which are discussed below) or to forswear criticism, but to caution against exaggeration: the creation of the “one good German,” http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/050127-NL-hartmann.html as the composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann has been labeled, or the damnation of all Germans, as Daniel Goldhagen proposes in Hitler's Willing Executioners.

Attempts to determine degrees of collaboration and to apportion blame generally produce few conclusive answers. Rather, they reveal endless shades of grey. Michael Haas has pointed out that both Ernst Krenek, whose Jonny Spielt Auf was reviled by the Nazis, and Alma Mahler, the wife of one of the Nazis' most despised composers, reveal a bilious level of anti-Semitism in their respective memoirs and letters. Yet both had Jewish spouses, as did the operetta composer and Hitler favorite Franz Lehár, who remained in Germany and saw his wife's family taken off to the gas chambers. How does one begin to discuss accountability when anti-Semitism weaves its way through society in so capricious and irrational a fashion?

Music and Opportunity

Many Germans saw opportunity in the rise of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), a chance of reversing the country's economic woes, re-establishing national pride and stifling Bolshevism. Others, both within and without Germany, considered Hitler no more than a hysterical nut and a temporary nuisance. But the NSDAP's enthusiasm for culture, both as a means of defining and promoting German identity and as a way of severing it from “foreign” influence—specifically the work of Jewish or partly-Jewish creative artists—became apparent early in its reign. Among musicians particularly, there was a growing sense that with increased subsidy and centralized support, widespread unemployment might be reduced and an underfunded industry revitalized. Richard Strauss accepted the directorship of the newly created Reichmusikkammer with this very much in mind, although within two years his independence of mind and his Jewish connections, both familial (his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren) and professional (the librettist Stefan Zweig), had soured Goebbels's view of him. By the mid-1930s, opportunities for musicians who were well trained, talented and prepared to make political and moral concessions had increased considerably.

It is not entirely surprising that most German musicians, faced with opportunity on the one hand and the risk of reprisal on the other, chose something between compromise and complete capitulation. True altruism and heroism are rarities, particularly during times of economic hardship, unbridled fascism and civic paranoia, when neighbors and family members are encouraged to spy on one another, and a network of secret police probes life at its most quotidian. The gifted young pianist Karlrobert Kreiten, whose German tours had provoked comparison with Walter Gieseking, was hanged for listening to a BBC news broadcast. In addition to this capital offense, Kreiten had idly shared his criticism of Hitler with his landlady, who promptly informed the Gestapo. Perhaps artists would have taken more risks had they known of the privations and brutality that were to come.

While self-preservation is a powerful instinct, self-interest can be as intensely seductive. One need only recall the stars who happily broke the UN's cultural boycott and signed contracts to perform in South Africa during the apartheid years — among them, Frank Sinatra, Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Linda Ronstadt, Julio Iglesias, Ray Charles, Boney M., Black Sabbath, Rod Stewart, Tina Turner and Dolly Parton. None was a struggling artist.

Ethical behavior was at a premium between 1933 and 1945, as the Reich gradually compelled German citizens to make ever more difficult and dishonorable decisions and, later in their rule, as members of Jewish Councils (Judenräte) were presented with choices that were as agonizing as they were morally impossible. At the same time there were countries, companies and individuals outside Germany who had the freedom to make sound choices and instead chose very badly indeed, spurred either by anti-Semitic conviction or simple greed. Among US companies, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil, Alcoa, Singer and Chase Bank all gained substantially from business associations and high-level relationships with the Nazi regime, before and sometimes even during the war.

There was almost total international participation in the 1936 Berlin Olympiad (only Spain and Russia were unrepresented) and, two years later, as Austria welcomed Hitler's Wehrmacht, the world responded to the Anschluss with only muted criticism. At a more regional level, two months after that annexation, England's football team played the German squad in Berlin. Prior to kick-off, in front of a crowd of 110,000, England's players raised their right arms in a Hitler salute that had been requested by the British Foreign Office. London had welcomed the teams' previous meeting in December 1935, hosted at Tottenham Hotspur's grounds at White Hart Lane. Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic performed regularly in England during the 1930s; Beecham and the London Philharmonic reciprocated by performing in Nazi Germany. The story of this widespread and sometimes unthinking collaboration provides a broader context to the actions of German nationals.

If we are to examine the issue of self-sacrifice, we should first explore the careers of prominent German musicians who nurtured cordial relations with the Reich, how they developed after the war and how the post-war establishment treated them. The pianists Elly Ney and the above-mentioned Walter Gieseking present two very good examples

When confronted by Allied interlocutors in 1945, Gieseking, one of the most influential pianists of the last century, responded with protestations that were almost childlike: “What did I do?” he asked. He had served the Reich well, performed happily in occupied territories and fulfilled the regime's every request. An opportunist and a fervent Nazi, Gieseking had refused to play with Jewish artists and had diligently signed his letters with the Hitlergruß. Yet when the denazification committee attempted to clarify his political sympathies, he replied that “it was difficult to tell who started the war,” which, he opined, had largely been prosecuted to fight communism. In any case, Gieseking claimed, his status as an artist inoculated him against political enquiry. Initially his post-war recitals were met with vociferous protests, notably in Australia and the USA, where he was obliged to cancel a tour. Nevertheless, Gieseking still managed to rehabilitate his career and salvage his reputation.

Elly Ney, a charismatic, leonine performer whose Beethoven captivated European audiences, spent the Nazi years yearning for an opportunity to give a private recital for the Führer, an honor ultimately granted to Wilhelm Backhaus, whom she deeply envied thereafter. Ney was obliged to find fulfillment in Hitler's handshake, an encounter that she later described as her life's apogee. Her commitment to National Socialism barely faltered after the war, and it is this, and her sustained anti-Semitism, that makes her case so particularly compelling. Although Ney ultimately renounced Hitler (in 1952!), declaring that the “Nazis had betrayed Germany,” her true allegiance remained constant, even as her touring career gradually petered out. It is more than a little depressing to note that her biography (on a website that is devoted to her life and the promotion of her recordings: http://www.proclassics.de/EllyNey/elly-ney-1e.htm) skips over her devotion and sterling service to the Third Reich–a dedication so enthusiastic that she regularly preceded her concerts with a devotional peroration on the glories of National Socialism.

And yet, like so many narratives of the time, there are fascinating inconsistencies. Both Gieseking and Ney were enthusiastic advocates of Ernst Toch's piano concerto. Gieseking premiered the work in 1926; Ney's many performances included one with the Leipzig Gewandhaus under Furtwängler, and, in 1928, its American premiere in New York. But the moment the Jewish Toch was deemed unacceptable, both pianists promptly dropped the work from their respective repertoires, a reflection of both their anti-Semitic “flexibility” prior to 1933, and their shameless hypocrisy. Gieseking also performed music by the Italian Jewish composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who was forced into exile in the United States after Mussolini adopted a Nazi-like anti-Semitic policy, and the two musicians resumed their friendship after the war.

The primacy of self-interest is again on display with Herbert von Karajan, who was as delighted to co-operate with the Nazi regime as he was to renounce it, and as skilled in this duplicity as he was in his self-promotion. He actually joined the party twice, the first time as early as 1933, when there was no professional need or urgency to do so. His conduct during his lengthy denazification process was both charming and strategic. He asked for little, expressed his full support for the committee's work, and offered to help in whatever way the authorities considered appropriate. His musical and political influence eventually grew so powerful that any enquiries into his past (which were invariably met with misleading obfuscation) were simply overwhelmed by his ubiquity and the might of the Karajan promotional machine. By the time of his death in 1989 he was generally regarded as the twentieth century's most successful conductor. With assets worth over 200 million dollars, he was certainly its wealthiest.

Karajan's colleague, the soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, remained tight-lipped about her party associations and rôle as a leader of the Nazi Student League. She claimed that joining the Nazi Party had been a pro forma action with no ulterior motive; that she was apolitical; and that, quoting Tosca, she simply lived for her art—“Vissi d'arte.” Variations on this rationalization were also offered by the conductors Karl Böhm, Eugen Jochum and Wilhelm Furtwängler, the self-appointed curator and protector of German musical tradition. There was a raft of other, less prominent, musicians, teachers, critics and musicologists who quickly rejoined schools and other institutions in post-war Germany. Composers and fellow-travelers, some of whose works survived their tainted past, include Carl Orff, Hans Pfitzner, Wolfgang Fortner and Cesar Bresgen.

The upper echelon of German conductors was deeply involved in the Nazis' propaganda and promotional machine. They understood their importance to the Reich and realized, some sooner than others, that they were being exploited. We are obliged both to register their actions and to remember that the majority were not intrinsically “party men.” In an era in which conductors were granted substantial authority, they were careerists, opportunists and narcissists. Although Knappertsbusch and Furtwängler did at first intervene on behalf of Jewish musicians, and Böhm programmed works of which the party disapproved, their first and most urgent loyalty was not to any particular political orthodoxy but to anything that guaranteed the promotion of their musical views and expanded their influence. It was this allegiance to themselves that all other allegiances served — an observation that is offered not as an excuse but as context. And when their colleagues Erich Kleiber and Fritz Busch resigned their conducting posts and went into voluntary exile, they knew that there were few, if any, opportunities elsewhere that could match the positions that they had occupied in Germany.

The behavior of the composer Wolfgang Fortner is a model of collusion. He furnished sufficient evidence of his pre-Nazi interest in serial technique—condemned by the Reich and formerly disowned by Fortner, with the customary anti-Semitic shibboleths—to convince the denazification tribunals that, by implication, his party associations had been tenuous. In effect, Fortner was using his twelve-tone scores as get-out-of-jail-free cards, since his actual contributions had included celebratory works commemorating Hitler's 1933 accession (Tag der Machtübernahme), conductorships of orchestras associated with the Nazi labor union and Hitler Youth, and the compilation of Nazi song anthologies. It is no small irony that after the war he and Herman Heiss—whose war work had included Kein Tor der Welt ist uns zu hoch and the Flieger-Fanfare, celebrating the glories of German airpower—were significant figures in the development of the Darmstadt summer school; its purpose was to advocate the music and methods that they and the Nazis had condemned. Fortner and Heiss' pre-1933 enthusiasm for twelve-tone composition had magically returned, and both were fully integrated into post-war musical life.³

With the profitability of Nazi collusion and post-war protestations—an almost unanimous chorus of excuses and fabrication—comes a question: How much more effective would it have been to admit some culpability, or to express a modicum of regret or shame? Would this not have repaired a small part of the damage and ultimately helped to re-calibrate public opinion? After all, “coming clean” is now a given in the world of “reputational control.”

But to imagine this is to project contemporary practice onto a very different cultural scene. We live at a time in which the media habitually expose, sometimes in forensic detail, not just large-scale political and financial malfeasance, but also the trivial goings-on of personalities whose sins lie at the most prosaic end of the domestic spectrum. This “gotcha!” journalism was far from common practice after the war, when reconciliation, reconstruction and a coming-to-terms with the losses and horrors of the Second World War were the priorities.⁴Things changed after the Eichmann trial, when longstanding questions surrounding complicity gradually began to receive wider attention. There was seldom a satisfactory response or acknowledgement. Perhaps public engagement would have opened too many cupboards, revealed too many skeletons, and invited too many inconvenient and compromising questions.

Musical Casualties

The list of composers who were marginalized after the war includes those who prospered under the Third Reich, the émigrés who fled to America and England and the internal exiles, who disassociated themselves from German musical life. Composers on opposite sides of the political divide, like Walter Braunfels and Hans Pfitzner, who had once been hugely popular, were similarly pushed aside, although by the 1990s a Pfitzner revival was well under way and almost all of his symphonic and chamber works have been recorded and are now commercially available (a few of his operas remain unrecorded, including some that were popular during his lifetime). The musical traditionalism and conservatism that the Reichsmusikkammer had generally supported were considered retrogressive, passé and inherently authoritarian. The practices that the Nazis had damned—serialism, expressionism, jazz, ⁵“excessive dissonance,” and any work that employed a text or narrative that ran against the grain of National Socialism—were now legitimate, and rightly so. With experimental music in the ascendant, the core European repertoire (with the reintegration of Mendelssohn) became increasingly predominant in mainstream concert programming.

In opposition to the expediency of Fortner and others, there were composers who had had the prescience to recognize the Nazi threat and the courage to follow their principles—and, in the case of Adolf Busch, to resist substantial blandishments. They deserve our attention. Busch, Eduard Erdmann, Max Butting, Heinz Tiessen, Felix Petyrek, Boris Blacher and Karl Amadeus Hartmann were, like Braunfels, soon almost forgotten; their reputations were diminished and their works infrequently performed. If there is any truth in the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished, their fates confirm it.

In ignoring these composers and in sidelining works that genuinely deserve our attention, we prolong the Nazis' boycott of them and eventually become complicit in their continued obscurity. Given the fact that both the music industry and the musical public generally turned a blind eye to the actions and allegiances of former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, surely we have an obligation to audition the works of those who had the backbone to resist the regime's temptations, not to mention the legacy of those who were obliged to flee Europe. We owe them this at least.

But rather than address this challenge, our attention is being directed to rather less edifying activities. As survivors dwindle in number and the war recedes into distant history, and as contemporary culture's more brutish, consumerist qualities insinuate themselves into works that draw on the Holocaust, we are gradually being desensitized to its exploitation. Projects that purport to memorialize and educate—or, still more presumptuously, to somehow turn us into better people—are routinely motivated by no more than political opportunism or mercenary ambition. But this commodification of the Holocaust, now variously described by its shrinking number of critics as “Shoah-business” or “Holo-porn,” is becoming increasingly difficult to condemn. Indeed, condemnation is now almost an irrelevance. Discussing and weighing accountability requires a public capable of identifying some kind of delinquency in the first place. But when every notion of appropriateness has evaporated, and all convictions and traditions relating to taste are on sale, the subject of Holocaust exploitation becomes purely theoretical: no one is listening, and no one can be held to account. This aesthetic myopia is revealed in recent projects like the Defiant Requiem, a bastardization of Verdi's masterpiece that attempts to recreate the conditions of its Terezin performances as presented by Rafael Schächter's choir. The requiem is transformed into a multimedia pageant, incorporating narration, film, survivor testimony, an out-of-tune piano (a nod to the minimal accompaniment available in Terezin) and, inevitably, a train whistle.

The mawkish Anne & Emmett (“http://anneandemmett.com/the-play) is possibly still more egregious. It unites the young Amsterdam diarist, Anne Frank, in an imaginary conversation with Emmett Till, a black fourteen-year-old whose brutal murder in 1955 marked a turning point in the civil rights movement. The play rationalizes their deaths, conferring on them some sort of sacred significance, and the two innocents, who meet in an imaginary place, called (with some shortage of imagination) “Memory,” are used as the catalyst for a redemptive fantasy—ciphers that slather the author's sticky sentimentality and haphazard thinking onto two bestial but quite separate realities.
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Is there equivalent dross from fifty and sixty years ago? Works such as Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Penderecki's Dies Irae, Yevtushenko's Babi Yar and Shostakovich's eponymous symphony, or Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, scored by Hanns Eisler, now seem to have been created on another planet.

An examination of artistic integrity and accountability cannot be confined to historical contexts. The questions asked of those who saw the end of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler are not dissimilar to the ones that should be asked today. Conclusions are hard-won, but the discussion remains essential. Ultimately the journey is far more important than an arrival.

© Simon Wynberg, December 2011

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“A Steppe is a Steppe”: How Hitler Helped to Create Hollywood Music

by Paul Chihara | Oct 2, 2011 | Articles & Essays

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.

In addition to Steiner, this early group of émigré composers included Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Dimitri Tiomkin and Miklós Rózsa. Born and educated in Central and Eastern Europe, they were already prominent musicians, eminently successful in the world of classical music and opera. All of them escaped the Holocaust – several just barely – and made their way, often precariously, to a new world and a new industry. They brought with them the music of their old world, just as that world was beginning to destroy itself.

Both Korngold and his friend Steiner were considered Wunderkinder in early twentieth-century Vienna: Korngold was so designated by Mahler, and Steiner by Richard Strauss, who was his godfather. Steiner studied piano with Brahms, and Korngold studied composition with Alexander Zemlinsky. Dimitri Tiomkin studied composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Alexander Glazunov, who also taught Prokofiev and Shostakovich. And perhaps the most significant influence on the music of the new industry in Hollywood was a composer who left Berlin just as Hitler was coming to power and who never wrote a complete film score, but who immigrated to Los Angeles and taught at UCLA: Arnold Schoenberg. Without his teaching and influence on such composers as Bernard Herrmann, David Raksin, Alfred Newman and Leonard Rosenman the music of film noir would have developed very differently than it did. It would never have become a successful marriage of expressionism with jazz – arguably the most original and profound of musical styles to emerge from Hollywood films.

Korngold made no attempt to make his score for Robin Hood–still considered by many to be the greatest film score ever–sound particularly English. Other than a passing reference to “Sumer is icumen in,” there are no British folk tunes in the score, no parallel progressions of chords in first inversion, no kitsch diaphanous, modal string textures, no pipes or viols or simple pastoral percussion. What we hear is not pastoral chamber music but a full symphony orchestra in all its glory. The voluptuous score is closer to the romantic world of Der Rosenkavalier than to Sherwood Forest. (What a blessing for a young Japanese-American like myself, growing up in a relocation camp during the Second World War, in Minidoka, Idaho, and later in Seattle–far from the opera houses or concert halls of Vienna or of New York–to hear such magical music, married to equally magical images. That's entertainment – and a lot more!)

In 1920, at the age of 23, Erich Korngold had composed a successful opera, Die tote Stadt (The Dead City), which became a worldwide success, with performances throughout Germany as well as at the Staatsoper in Vienna and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. This was among the works banned by the Nazis after they came to power in 1933. Korngold first came to Los Angeles in 1934, at the invitation of director Max Reinhardt, also a Viennese Jew, to adapt Mendelssohn's music from A Midsummer Night's Dream for a film version of the Shakespeare play, with Mickey Rooney as Puck and choreography by Bronislava Nijinska. He then returned to Vienna, where he was conducting opera and teaching at the State Academy when, in 1938, Warner Brothers invited him back to Hollywood to score the music for a lavish, swashbuckling movie, The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn. Shortly thereafter, the Anschluss occurred that linked Germany and Austria together–the first major step in Hitler's master plan to create the New World Order. Korngold was lucky to have escaped when he did. Robin Hood won him an Academy Award for Best Original Score, and Korngold said later that this movie had saved his life. It was appropriate that his first international success as a movie composer should have been in his own romantic operatic style of composition, an “opera without singing,” as he himself described his scores. (This is an approach to film scoring that was mastered two generations later by John Williams, another genius trained in classical music–and in his case also jazz–who studied at UCLA and at Juilliard.)

Korngold himself commented on his style of film composition in these wonderful words, which for me, as a composer of film and concert music, are an expression of honest and modest integrity: “Never have I differentiated between my music for the films and that for the operas and concert pieces. Just as I do for the operatic stage, I try to give the motion pictures dramatically melodious music, sonic development, and variation of the themes.”

In all, Korngold would compose eighteen film scores, all of them excellent, as well as adaptations of music by Mendelssohn and Wagner. Although the number of his movies is modest in comparison with that of others of his generation and background, those relatively few scores were hugely influential and left an indelible impression on all the film composers who followed him.

Korngold's friend and fellow Austrian Jew Max Steiner was working in London in 1914 when the First World War broke out. He was declared an enemy alien by the British government, but was allowed to leave for New York. He worked on Broadway for eleven years, with George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Victor Herbert, among others, and moved to Hollywood in 1929, soon to be joined by his friend Korngold. Among the movies that Steiner scored are many of the most beloved masterpieces of cinema: Gone With the Wind, King Kong, Casablanca, The Gay Divorcee (starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers), Now, Voyager, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Searchers. The number of his scores is staggering (300 films are credited to him, although he was supported by a staff of excellent composers and orchestrators), and the great variety of musical genres and styles is equally impressive. Perhaps the most astonishing element in his work is its consistently high quality, whether in fantasy, musicals, adventure, romance, historical drama or comedy–there was nothing he could not do, and his work was characterized by outstanding technique, panache and emotional lyricism. He was an old-school composer who wrote from the heart with little concern for academic theory or adventurism. The same could be said of Korngold and for almost all the other expatriate composers who migrated to Hollywood from Western Europe.

When complimented on having helped to create Hollywood music, Steiner replied, “Nonsense. The idea originated with Richard Wagner. Listen to the incidental scoring behind the recitatives in his operas. If Wagner had lived in this century, he would have been the Number One film composer.”

Richard Wagner, despite his well-known and often-declared anti-Semitism, remained Steiner's musical model from King Kong to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, from Casablanca to The Searchers. How ironic that the very people who were hounded, defiled and persecuted mercilessly by the Nazis would remain steadfastly loyal to Germany's musical traditions! When some of these expatriate composers returned to their native countries after the war, they discovered to their dismay that the shell-shocked survivors were no longer receptive to the romantic vocabulary of the nineteenth century, which they and other Hollywood composers still employed. The great musical tradition they had nurtured during the darkest years of Fascism had been replaced by a contemporary musical language that scorned the music of their “old-fashioned” German predecessors. Korngold, among many others, felt rejected and ignored by his own countrymen and former colleagues.

Franz Waxman, born in Silesia (now Poland) in 1906, began his film compositional career in Germany (orchestrating the classic film The Blue Angel (1930), starring Marlene Dietrich) and after 1933 in France with Friz Lang. He arrived in Hollywood in 1935, and composed the score for what what would become a cult classic Bride of Frankenstein, his first American film. Shortly thereafter he began his association with Alfred Hitchcock with haunting scores for four immortal films (Rebecca, Suspicion, The Paradine Case, and Rear Window). Perhaps his greatest score is also his greatest film A Place in the Sun (1951), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Cliff. This won an Oscar, as did his previous score for the legendary Sunset Boulevard (1950). Like other Jewish composers arriving in Hollywood, Waxman had a sublime lyric gift: he was perhaps one of the greatest melodists of them all.

Another artist from Central Europe was the brilliant pianist, folklorist and composer Miklós Rózsa, destined to become one of Hollywood's most beloved and successful composers and the winner of three Oscars. He was born to Jewish parents in Budapest, converted to Lutheranism and studied music at Leipzig. But in 1934, as the Nazis' power was increasing, he moved to Paris, and five years later he came to Hollywood with the famous director Alexander Korda, another Hungarian Jew, to work on The Thief of Bagdad. His score for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound is a classic–the ever-popular version of it as a piano concerto appears frequently on pops concerts–and so is his music for the biblical epic Ben Hur and the uplifting Christian dramas Quo Vadis and King of Kings, which are accompanied by appropriately religious music. Rozsa's passion for the folk music of his native Hungary colors his melodies, his orchestration and the drama of his music, which is closer to the world of early Bartók than to that of Richard Strauss. His music is different from the German romanticism of Korngold and Steiner, closer to the harmonic world of German Expressionism in film noir, as, for instance, in his influential scores for Double Indemnity, Lost Weekend and The Killers, whose melody was later used as the main theme for the popular TV show Dragnet. Though Rozsa was not fond of Schoenberg's twelve-tone system of composition, he excelled in writing film noir scores, as did Schoenberg's principal Hollywood students Bernard Herrmann (Psycho, Vertigo) and David Raksin (Laura, The Bad and the Beautiful). The three of them were among the principal creators of the music for film noir, which remains one of Hollywood's unique achievements.

Is there anything more American than the cowboy? And is not the Western the quintessential movie form of the rugged individual that we Americans honor as an idealized role model, and whose music we most associate with such paragons of male Americana as John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster? But the composer most often credited with having created the musical style for the American western is Dimitri Tiomkin, who was born in the Ukraine to a scholarly and musical Jewish family. He was educated in St. Petersburg and was recognized as an accomplished pianist and composer even before his graduation. More than any other composer, Tiomkin created the grand themes so often associated with the Big Sky of the American West–as with the steppes of Central Asia. He once said, comparing the vast expanses of Asiatic Russia to the American West: “A steppe is a steppe.” He composed the memorable scores for High Noon, Giant, Rio Bravo, Gunfight at the OK Corral, Friendly Persuasion and Duel in the Sun, among many other glorious Western soundtracks. In his orchestration, melodic style, harmony, and grandeur we hear echoes of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, although one must also acknowledge the significant influence of Aaron Copland, whose lyric grace and impressionistic loneliness, learned in Paris from Nadia Boulanger, also became the voice of the American Southwest. Tiomkin left Russia shortly after the Revolution, traveling to Berlin and then Paris (1922-1925) before immigrating to New York (1929) and eventually moving to Hollywood, where he scored his first major triumph, Alice in Wonderland, in the fateful year 1933. The theme of his most famous film song, “Do Not Forsake Me,” from High Noon, has been described by several Russian film historians and Jewish music scholars (primarily Jack Gottlieb in his authoritative Funny, It Doesn't Sound Jewish) as an adaptation of a Yiddish song, “Dem milners trern,” by the Ukrainian entertainer Mark Warshavsky.

Arnold Schoenberg, who, more than any other composer, changed the course of twentieth-century music, predicted that his twelve-tone system would “ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.” And indeed, after the war his system and the music of his famous disciples Berg and Webern inspired the new music of Western Europe. To the younger generation of German composers, Korngold, Rozsa and other film composers had become unpleasant reminders of the romantic music of the ‘thirties and ‘forties that they now associated with the Nazi era.

Schoenberg himself made several forays into film composition: his haunting concert piece Begleitungmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene (Accompaniment for a Film Scene) and his unfinished sketches for the Paramount adventure film Souls at Sea (1937) and the Pearl Buck feature The Good Earth. He wrote: “I have at last learned the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year [1933], and I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely a human being (at least the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me) but I am a Jew.”

—

Paul Chihara is a Professor of Music at UCLA and the Chair of Visual Media (film music). He received his doctorate from Cornell University and studied with the renowned pedagogue Nadia Boulanger in Paris, Ernst Pepping in Berlin, and with Gunther Schuller at Tanglewood. He has received many commissions from major symphony orchestras and won numerous awards, including Composer of the Year by the Classical Recording Foundation in New York in 2008. He has composed more than 100 motion picture and television scores.

The Schoenberg Family has recently given Mr Chihara the sketches for Arnold Schoenberg's unfinished film score The Good Earth, with permission to examine the sketches and decide if it might be possible “to create a film composition based on those sketches” and, if so, to proceed.

Article revised: October 19, 2011

Something a Little Different

by Bob Elias | Jun 30, 2011 | Articles & Essays

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

Posted July 1, 2011

The Piano Virtuoso Who Didn't Play in Terezín, or, Why Gender Matters

by Anna Hájková | May 7, 2011 | Articles & Essays

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:

Eliška Kleinová was born in 1912 in a Southern Moravian town; she was the middle of three children who survived infancy. Her older sister, Edita, had strong political opinions and emigrated to Palestine. The family was assimilated and was perhaps less religious than other Moravian Jews. The Klein business did not do particularly well, but the family was keenly interested in music and encouraged Eliška to pursue her strong musical talent. She moved to Prague to study at the city's superb conservatory. Eliška was an excellent student, despite economic hardships, and despite being a young Jewish woman from a provincial town alone in a metropolis.ⁱ Her brother Gideon Klein, six years younger, showed huge musical promise, so she arranged for him to come to Prague. He moved in with her, and she earned money as a private music tutor to support them both. She finished her conservatory studies with great success and attended master classes at the Academy of Musical Arts, but by then Nazi Germany had taken control of Czechoslovakia and antisemitic measures prevented her from graduating. Gideon also finished his conservatory studies and gave a public graduation recital that left enthusiastic audience. By then, however, the Kleins were increasingly excluded from Gentile society, and they held concerts at home that became extremely popular within the Jewish community living in “the ghetto without walls”. Eliška became romantically attached to the poet Jiří Orten, who, however, died in a car accident. In the time before the deportation, she increasingly played a supporting role to her mother and brother. In November 1941, Gideon was deported to Terezín with the Aufbaukommando, the very first transport. Its members became the admired veterans who set up the ghetto infrastructure; together with their core families, they are mostly protected from the dreaded transports to the East. Eliška arrived eight months later. She was never active as a musician at Terezín; indeed, she did not participate in any way in the musical life of the ghetto. Gideon, on the contrary, became one of the prominent celebrities in Terezín's cultural life.ⁱⁱ Eliška worked in one of the youth homes and later in a bakery. Like many other prisoners, she became sick several times. In the fall of 1944, when the old protections no longer functioned, the entire Klein family was sent to Auschwitz in the liquidation transports. Eliška survived, but the rest of her family perished. After the war, she became a conservatory teacher, published numerous music pedagogical manuals, and was instrumental in promoting Gideon's posthumous fame. In this context, it may indeed seem strange that the more experienced, older and very gifted Eliška, who, unlike her brother, had been able to complete her education, did not participate in the rich musical life of Terezín.

Although we will never be able to establish entirely the reasons for Eliška's not playing, her story strongly invites us to consider the role of gender, not only in her specific case but also in the Terezín history as a whole. In this essay, I highlight several gendered mechanisms that shaped the intricate society within Terezín. I focus on both listeners and performers, on the place of music and sexuality in the inmates' lives, as well as on gendered differences within the Jewish self-administration. In considering the category of gender, it is crucial to realize that gender studies are not only women's studies. Women are not the only people endowed with gender, with men a genderless, neutral part of the binary — a popular perception, gendered in its own right. Rather, masculinity is a relevant gender; moreover, both genders function only in relationship to each other, in contrast.

Although Terezín was a ghettoized society, it was still a society. The people who were sent there were not passive, nor did all societal mechanisms cease; the inmates continued to react, think, judge others — these are the activities that structure a mass of people into an organized society. Of course there are major differences between our “normal” world and the “ghetto” world, notably, the brevity of life in the latter, and the finality of consequences. But as in “our” world, in Terezín, too, some people were “rich,” some were “cool,” and still others were underdogs. Class was one of the central organizing principles of society in Terezín, as in any other society. Terezín did represent a special situation, as Jews from Central and Western Europe were deported there by the Nazis, creating, as I have described elsewhere, a laboratory of the middle class.ⁱⁱⁱ Everyone deported to Terezín was Jewish, at least according to the Nazis' racial definition of Jews (many of the inmates were actually Christians or atheists), but the ghetto's residents were as much shaped by the countries they came from as they were by the dynamics of ghetto society, which never produced a sense of common Jewishness. Soon, ethnic and cultural group boundaries determined people's positions within the social hierarchy: the young Czech Jews became the jeunesse dorée, whereas the passive, uninterested Dutch Jews were situated at the margins.^iv

Similarly, the social elite had priviliged access to many of the cultural events, thanks to their networks and the items they were able to barter: Hana Rutarová, a young postal clerk living in her own kumbál (a tiny self-built wooden room in the attic – an ultimate status symbol in the crowded ghetto), had tickets for the sold-out production of The Magic Flute, with seats so good that she was next to the ghetto's big shots.^v The performers soon became celebrities of sorts: the young tenor Alexander Singer, for instance had fans who brought him pork cracklings. Translated into our terms, he could just as well have been given a Rolex.^vi

We cannot observe gender separately from such factors as culture, age, ethnicity and class; they function in connection with each other. I have discussed elsewhere the “pragmatization” of romantic and sexual life in Terezín: ^vii genuine romantic feelings, beyond a practical, give-and-take mentality, were the privilege of a tiny elite. Similarly, attendance at cultural performances was a statement of one's position on the ghetto's social ladder. Both music and love — matters that we usually understand as existing beyond structural lines — very much constituted the social economics of Terezín, albeit in different ways.

By the fall of 1942, the FZG, Recreation Department (recreational department)^viii had become a massive, well-established organization that decided who would be supported and what resources they would receive. The department was directed for a long time by Otto Zucker, who also headed several other offices and had been also the deputy of the Elder of the Jews. When transports were leaving, the self-administration had to put together the lists, and each department would petition for exemptions for its “indispensable” workers. The FZG, Recreation Department, under Zucker's leaderership, was particularly effective in petitioning for its people.^ix

While the FZG, Recreation Department took care of both men and women performers, stage designers and organizers, as well as their relatives, as far as the transports were concerned, there was a discernible gender gap in the department itself because of a gendered job distribution. First, all of the conductors and almost all of the directors were men — and the directors and conductors were the people who decided who would get what roles. Secondly, only a few of the performers actually worked for the Freizeit. Most of them were assigned other jobs (there was general labor duty for everyone between the ages of 16 and 65); they rehearsed and performed in their spare time. Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas and Karel Švenk were eventually hired by the Freizeit and could rehearse and compose full-time. The singer Heda Grab-Kernmayer was among the very first first female artists hired by the Freizeit. Grab's pioneering position was even explicitly mentioned in the annual report of the Hamburg barracks, then a women-only housing unit. Grab's pioneering position was even explicitly mentioned in the annual report of the Hamburg barracks, then a women-only housing unit. ^x Grab summarized it this way after the war: “I can say that Terezín was the longest and at the same time the worst-paid engagement of my entire theatrical career.”^xi A lesser appreciation of women artists was expressed in a statement of the last commandant, Karl Rahm, when he was putting together the list for the last of the liquidation transports, Ev, on October 28, 1944. He decided to let the last seven remaining women singers and musicians stay in the ghetto. “So what,” he said. “They can as well stay. Then can they play and sing again.”^xii Rahm's condescending remark is relevant because he was fairly familiar with the FZG, Recreation Department. He had been assigned to Terezín to prepare the ghetto for the Red Cross visit, and many of its activities in 1944 were indirectly linked to the beautification program.

A different relationship to musical performance is strongly expressed even in the postwar narratives: surviving male performers describe their work, how they organized something meaningful, how they were envied and respected by colleagues, how objectively good their performances were; indeed, they often describe Terezín as an important moment in their careers. ^xiiiWomen, on the other hand, tend to stress their service to the community, “somehow putting things together,” making music to make others feel good. The surviving male performers often became virtually official chroniclers of musical life in Theresienstadt —Karel Berman, for instance, almost turned into a professional music witness. Traces of many of the women performers, like Heda Grab and Marion Podolier, were lost, those who did bear witness, like Alice Sommer-Herz, provided markedly more emotional narratives, free from organizational and competitive statements.

It is often the exception that proves the rule. Two women did achieve success within the Freizeit hierarchy: Vlasta Schönová and Irena Dodalová, the only two female directors. They were outspoken and had a clear idea of what they wanted to do, even if they met with resistance. They were also unattached or had no long-term official partners. In all of this they were no different than many of their male colleagues. However, ghetto society did not look kindly upon these “career women,” who were considered too driven — for women. They were not well-liked. People criticized them, and they were rumored to be too pushy, artificial, hysterical and promiscuous.^xiv Now, the importance of societies thematizing, or criticizing, of others' sexuality as deviant – e.g., marking a woman as promiscuous – cannot be overstated. Such criticism occurs, among other instances, when an individual breaks the crucial social rules of his or her community. Thus, sexualized critique helps us to trace such cases and to discover underlying behavioral expectations – the inner rules of a social body. The message here is not the sexual deviance; it is, rather, effective public ostracization, an act of social gardening (to borrow a term from Zygmunt Bauman).

To conclude: the fact that Eliška was not active in the musical life of Terezín is quite symptomatic of the intricate and intrinsic gender structures of the place. There were four main reasons for her not performing:

First, as a woman and a product of her time, she was implicitly expected to play a supporting role to her brother and her widowed mother. Once she had assumed this role, before her deportation, it became very difficult for her to shed it — especially since the role, or framework of meaning, may have helped her to regain a sense of control and agency after she had arrived in Terezín, with its chaos and misery. For someone in her position it was possible to get a decent job (and jobs in a youth home and, especially, in a bakery were excellent, by Terezín standards). Moreover, in Terezín there were only a few musical instruments, and musicians had to struggle to get to use them; most of those who succeeded were men. (I have mentioned above how Terezín's ghettoized society treated women perceived as too ambitious.)

Secondly, Eliška was the wrong generation. She was too old and educated to be nurtured as a gifted teenager, like Pavel Kling or Zuzana Růžičková. Nor was she yet an established musician, like Heda Grab or Alice Sommer Herz, for whom the continuation of a performing career was more obvious. Furthermore, the FZG, Recreation Department, with its minimal hiring of women, made participation in musical life extremely difficult for women with a family. Indeed, women who had families to take care of mentioned that they never had time to attend cultural performances: the double burden of labor duty, which was often ten hours a day, and taking care of one's family — organizing family get-togethers, washing clothes and so on — combined with a general curfew at 8 or 10 p.m., made any spare time activities a sheer impossibility. Most of the women who participated in cultural events either were single or had help with their familial obligations.

Last but not least, the examples discussed above demonstrate the genderedness of organizational structures. Eliška didn't perform music despite the fact that she belonged to the ghetto's social elite and that several of her and Gideon's friends were high-ranking members of the Freizeit. When Eliška arrived, her role in Terezín was largely determined by her gender, at least as far as performing was concerned. When men and women behave in the same manner, it is not perceived as the same: indeed, the ostracization mechanisms for “pushy” women reveal the extent to which power hierarchies were gendered. In Terezín, just as in the “normal” world, gender was closely connected with power structures.

Eliška Kleinová's story is so fascinating because it is full of contradictions: in telling it, she took pains to make clear how gifted and successful she was; and yet her main ambition, be it during the war or after, became the guardianship of her brother's legacy. One could argue that the society in which she lived strongly encouraged such a choice, or that that choice was her way of making amends for having lost her beloved younger brother while she herself survived. Ironically, Eliška was very successful in her undertaking. Today, when we compare Gideon Klein with Irena Dodalová, Vlasta Schönová or even Magda Spiegel, he is the Terezín celebrity, the stuff of legends, and his story is narrated over and over again.^xv In the end, Eliška was successful, but her success, and her very goal, were very much gendered.

I cannot help but add, as an afterthought that what we know of Eliška's musical life in Terezín — or its absence — is only what she chose to tell. Perhaps she did play, but didn't want us to know about it.

Posted May 6, 2011

Anna Hájková is PhD candidate in the History Department of the University of Toronto. She is writing her dissertation on the social history of Terezín. Between 2006 and 2009, she was co-editor of the Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente.

————

Where to Start or How to Start? (Part II)

by Michael Haas | Apr 4, 2011 | Articles & Essays

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.

The nature of Central European music from the late 19^th to the mid-20^th century forces me to make some very broad generalizations that must be kept in mind as I go through my list. Music from Austria and Germany was often meant for participation, meaning there is a lot of music for small ensembles and Lieder. I differentiate even further by separating these small ensemble categories into “chamber music” and “Hausmusik.” Chamber music is for the listener – in other words, for performance in front of audiences; Hausmusik is for the performer at home with other musicians who simply enjoy making music together. With Hausmusik, playing the music is the central task; with chamber music, listening is the main factor. I have therefore not listed anything I count as Hausmusik.

It is ironic that the composers whom Hitler banned as un-German saw themselves as quintessentially German and thus composed a large amount of Hausmusik as part of a thoroughly German tradition of performing at home with family and friends. Of course, the German tradition was most exemplified by the genres it considered its own creations: symphonies, quartets and instrumental sonatas along with art-songs, operas and chamber music. The fact that German anti-Semites declared Jews to be non-German made German Jews all the more determined to be more German than the Germans, and some of them fanatically pursued this course even in exile. When one looks at the names of the foundation-shaking avant-garde composers of the early 20^th century, there are astonishingly few Jews, with the exception of Arnold Schoenberg. And even Schoenberg proclaimed his twelve-tone system to be the guarantor of the future supremacy of German music. In other words, German Jewish composers tended to stick to the German compositional rule-book, and those who broke the rules did so in order to preserve German musical predominance. It is no coincidence that all of this Germanic posturing came predominantly from Austrian Jewish composers, but that is too complex a story to deal with here.

In listing the works that I consider to have the capacity to make first-time listeners drop their jaws in disbelief and wonderment, I have proceeded by genre: quartets, other chamber music, solo instrumental, orchestral, orchestral-vocal, opera and Lied, and I have mentioned only four or five pieces in each category that I consider to be winners – although I have allowed myself the luxury of also referring to other works that are certainly worth investigating.

Quartets

Over the past four years, I have participated in the programming of an annual series of concerts given by the Aron Quartet at Vienna's Laudon Palace. Each summer, we take a specific theme of “banned” music and feature representative works within a program of repertoire by non-banned, established-name composers. This helps to form a musical context. Many quartets written in exile often have a unique, “samizdat” quality and contain biographical references. Before coming to the subjects of exile and composers murdered at Auschwitz, I would like to highlight two works written in Vienna: Arnold Schoenberg's Second Quartet (1908) and Hans Gál's First Quartet (1916). Schoenberg, despite being the elder of the two composers, wrote more adventurous music than Gál. His Second Quartet uniquely embodies fin-de-siècle Vienna. There are soprano solos in the third and fourth movements, and few other works can guarantee the sort of shivers created by Stefan George's lines, “Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten” (“I feel air from another planet”). In general, the work demands a good deal of the listener, but the rapture of the poetry combined with Schoenberg's gentle gliding over vestiges of tonality envelops us with the sensuality of Vienna's “gay apocalypse.”

Schoenberg's teacher Alexander Zemlinsky was for a short period a pupil of Brahms, and Brahms's circle included Joseph Fuchs, who taught nearly every significant Austrian composer of the period from Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler, Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker right up to the precocious youngsters Ernst Toch and Erich Korngold. Brahms's austere classicism and contained passion were dominant features of Vienna's musical landscape. Early works by Fuchs's pupils Schreker and Toch sound so Brahmsian that little of the future uniqueness of either composer can be deduced from them. For that reason, my second choice is a work by Gál, who, although influenced by Brahms, did not study with Fuchs but rather with another Brahms associate – indeed, Brahms's musical executor – Eusebius Mandyczewski. Gál was able to develop his own identity from an early age, and his First Quartet was premiered by the celebrated Rosé Quartet when he was 26 years old. (Arnold Rosé, Mahler's brother-in-law, was concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic and the quartet's first violin.) The Rosé Quartet went on to premiere Gál's Second Quartet, a work that was quickly taken up by the Kolisch Quartet, led by Schoenberg's future brother-in-law, Rudolf Kolisch. Unlike Schoenberg's work, Gál's remains firmly on the cusp of the new century while looking back into the old. It has a Schubertian tunefulness but remains engagingly individual by means of what may be described as militant conventionality.

My third choice is Pavel Haas's Second Quartet, composed in 1926 and evocatively subtitled “From the Monkey Mountains.” Despite its exotic name, it actually refers to a hilly region of Haas's native Moravia. Haas is a major composer who is now enjoying an overdue revival in his native Czech Republic, and the quartet proves, if proof is needed, that the composers who could find the strength to write under the inhuman conditions of a concentration camp had even more important works to their credit, many of which still await discovery. Haas's Study for String Orchestra, composed and performed in Theresienstadt, is certainly impressive, but it seems almost pale next to his Second Quartet, the slow movement of which is one of the most poignantly beautiful works in the literature. The impressionistic tones he paints are dark and far removed from the British and French pastoral composers we're more familiar with. Along with his teacher Janáček, Haas created a distinctively Central European and often jagged-edged musical environment. There is even an optional percussion part for the quartet’s final movement.
My fourth and final quartet describes, in musical terms, the despair of having to grab a half-packed suitcase and leave in the middle of the night. Berthold Goldschmidt's nerve-jangling Second Quartet, composed in 1936 after his arrival in England, offers a frantic opening that autobiographically recalls the escape from Germany and arrival in a country with an promise of work that was not fulfilled and a fear of possible deportation: he had been led to believe that Carl Ebert would be able to find him employment at Glyndebourne, but the job didn't materialize and Goldschmidt, in common with many other refugees, had to try to find a means of survival. The quartet keeps listeners on the edge of their seats.

Other Chamber Music

Appropriately enough, given its title, Franz Schreker's 1909 chamber work, Der Wind, scored for violin, clarinet in A, horn in F, cello and piano, is guaranteed to blow the listener away. It was composed for the Wiesenthal Sisters – dancers who were Vienna's answer to Isadora Duncan – and it was inspired by a poem by Greta Wiesenthal. Although it lasts a mere ten minutes, it magically transports the listener to the same sort of sunlit glade that we “hear” in Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun, although in Schreker's Central European sound-world (possibly the Vienna Woods). Der Wind demonstrates the degree to which French Impressionism influenced a generation of Viennese composers, and Schreker – who, in his day, was often referred to as a magician of musical color – was able to create a kaleidoscope of moods and images. Schoenberg reacted much earlier than Schreker to the influence of French Impressionism, most notably with his Sextet Verklärte Nacht, or Transfigured Night (1899), which was inspired by Richard Dehmel's poem of the same name. In its original version it is the perfect companion piece to program with Korngold's Sextet op. 10 (1916), but the version I wish to recommend is an arrangement for piano trio by Schoenberg's pupil Eduard Steuermann. As a composer, Steuermann was accorded considerable respect by his colleagues, if not always by the public; today his works are largely forgotten, but he remains known as the pianist who was the most idiomatic exponent of the so-called Second Viennese School.

Steuermann's arrangement of Verklärte Nacht offers a greater variety of textures than Schoenberg's original. Many of the musical ideas are given greater prominence, and the piano adds a percussive, rhythmic foundation that tightens the piece architecturally, so that its mood is less impressionistic and creates a very different effect. By coincidence, this version, too, is almost perfectly coupled with another Korngold work: the Piano Trio op. 1, written in 1910, when the composer was only thirteen years old.

My next choice is the Quintet in F-sharp Major (1944) by Walter Braunfels. For Braunfels, as for Gál, “modern” did not necessarily mean dissonant or atonal, but merely “recent.” They were not particularly upset if critics thought that their music sounded as if it had come from the previous century. Like Gál's quartet, Braunfels's quintet wins its audience over from the very first bar. Unlike Gál's quartet, however, it is a work of “inner exile” and presents the musical reaction of a very profound thinker who must have been devastated to see such friends as the philosopher Martin Heidegger welcome National Socialism. It is a work of great beauty but also of dashed dreams, though never without hope. Braunfels was racially well outside the tolerance levels of the Nuremberg Laws, and it is a miracle that he survived the war undetected in a small village on the shores of Lake Constance. His mood is reflected in the quintet's dark passages, but the work's sheer beauty never allows that darkness to dominate. That it is harmonically conventional does not detract from its position as a (still) virtually undiscovered masterpiece. But Braunfels will not remain virtually undiscovered for long: in Germany, his music is being resurrected at a colossal pace through performances at many major venues, and his opera Die Vögel was recently performed by Los Angeles Opera. The quintet will surely find a secure place in the repertoire.

Far less known than Braunfels's music is the music of Hugo Kauder – a real discovery. I was present at a performance of Kauder's Trio for viola, oboe and piano (1916) at the Jewish Museum in Vienna in 2010, and I wondered how such an original and unusual composer could have remained so obscure among music lovers. His considerable output includes a number of quartets and sonatas for wind instruments. I was surprised to learn that there is a Hugo Kauder Society in the United States, and I would encourage any interested chamber music player to contact it for material (http://www.hugokauder.org). Kauder, like Pavel Haas, was a Moravian; unlike Haas (but like Mahler), he was a German-speaking Moravian, and his music has little of Haas's craggy pastoralism. Indeed, there were moments in the concert when I felt that Kauder was closer to Delius than to any Central European composer I could think of. In the 1920s and '30s Kauder was a frequent contributor to the progressive music publication Anbruch. He was also Erich Zeisl's teacher, and it was under Kauder's tutelage that Zeisl's musical language became more confidently “modern.” It came as a surprise to discover in Kauder a composer who facilitated and even encouraged an abrasive modernity in others while apparently not regularly practicing it himself.

Other Instrumental Works

When it comes to “killer applications” in this category, I have to admit to being somewhat at a loss. Among the composers under consideration, Erwin Schulhoff and Ernst Toch composed the most brilliantly pianistic works of the period, and Schulhoff's Jazz Etudes and Toch's Der Jongleur are real winners. But I can’t say that they make the strongest case for the repertoire as a whole. Ullmann's piano sonatas are impressive, and Gideon Klein's unfinished Sonata is a masterpiece – as is Klein's String Trio, which was written in Theresienstadt. If forced to choose a single work, I would have to pick the Klein sonata – a worthy companion to Berg's Sonata (1911).
As mentioned above, I would suggest that woodwind players get to know the works of Hugo Kauder. His Sonata for piano and clarinet or oboe and Sonata for piano and horn are irresistible.

I recommend one of Hans Gál's sonatas for piano and violin to performers who may be looking for a work that will come across strongly in concert. The First Sonata, a youthfully extroverted work that galvanizes an audience from its opening bars, reminds me of Hugo Wolf's music; the Second, which dates from 1933, is more melancholic and introverted, possibly as a musical response to the shock of being relieved of his position as head of Mainz's Music Academy. Having produced recordings of both works, I cannot decide which one I prefer, and therefore suggest that interested performers have a look at both.

There are attractive cello sonatas by Weigl, Toch and Gál, but my final two recommended works in this category are by Egon Wellesz. The brief Prelude for viola op. 112 is Wellesz's last work. It began life as a sketch for a concerto that was never completed, but its few, difficult bars are instantly and movingly communicative. Given the date of composition (1920) of Wellesz's Sonata for solo cello op. 30, it cannot really be considered a companion work to the viola Prelude, although it, too, is rather short. Nevertheless, it takes a special kind of genius to write instantly engaging music for solo string instruments, and this work is immediately appealing without ever patronizing its audience with gratuitous “easy listening” material. Both the cello sonata and the viola prelude are surprisingly charismatic works, perfect for chamber music programs that need strong fillers.

Orchestral

I doubt that many would argue that the one work in this genre that grabs an audience by the throat every time it's performed is Franz Schreker's Vorspiel zu einem Drama (1914), a stand-alone version of the overture to his opera Die Gezeichneten. It is now starting to gain its much-deserved toe-hold in the repertoire, and it demonstrates why Schreker was considered a wizard of tonal coloring. Perhaps the description by his pupil Ernst Krenek, to the effect that Schreker was to music what Gustav Klimt was to painting (Krenek did not mean this as a compliment), sums the situation up. Vorspiel zu einem Drama is not only the musical equivalent of Klimt's famous portrayal of The Kiss: it seems to take the narrative of the painting and expand its full erotic potential.

To remain in Vienna's Jugendstil world for its pure beauty and opium-den sensuality one could, without hesitation, recommend Webern's Im Sommerwind or Zemlinsky's Die Seejungfrau. And if shorter works are called for, I would suggest the Prelude and Interlude of Zemlinsky's opera Es war einmal.

A pupil of Schreker – though one who, like Krenek, had little time for his teacher's opulent late-Romanticism – was Karol Rathaus, born in Tarnopol, which today is part of Poland but belonged to Austria until 1919. Few composers could assimilate musical styles as easily as Rathaus, who was described in contemporary accounts as one of the most naturally brilliant musicians to enter Schreker's Viennese composition class. His output varied between colorful theater music, such as the “Jewish Dance” movement from his Uriel Acosta suite (which can be guaranteed to bring the house down and makes a wonderful encore), and highly expressive modernism. The opera Fremde Erde was well received in its day, as was the ballet Der letzte Pierrot. However, it is Rathaus's Third Symphony that I believe, is most convincing on several levels. This dizzying work, composed in America, leaves the audience sonically charged. Although its dissonances fly by fast and furiously, its abrasive modernism is never cacophonic. The work remains tonal and is never less than exhilarating. As an orchestral show-piece, it can be placed next to works by Stravinsky or Bartók without apologies.

I also highly recommend the first four of Wellesz's nine symphonies. Like Toch and Korngold, Wellesz felt an urge to write a symphony only after years in exile. No musical form so clearly embodied the Austro-German tradition, and in Wellesz's first four symphonies there is a poignant nostalgia that becomes almost unbearably painful in the slow movements. I once described the Adagio of the Fourth Symphony as Elgar's Nimrod variation colliding with Hindemith. Each symphony lasts just under half an hour; Wellesz's obvious models were the symphonies of Bruckner, but he tightens and roughs up the forms and the musical language. There is something deliberately derivative in these first symphonies, yet it does not spring from a lack of imagination; it is willfully employed as an homage to the composer's musical past and a desire to reconnect with it. Given the fact that the First Symphony's premiere was presented by the Berlin Philharmonic and Sergiu Celibidache, its credentials could hardly be better. Start with Wellesz's first four symphonies, but don't be afraid of the remaining five, which are highly expressive works that make greater demands on the listener. The extraordinary thing about Wellesz's atonal and free-tonal works is that they are so clearly structured that one rarely feels at sea. Even his most difficult works require only a second hearing before one is able to follow their musical narrative. Wellesz has a way of gradually getting under one's skin. It takes time, but there are great treats in store for those who allow their ears to grow accustomed to his unique musical language.

If an orchestral curtain-raiser is called for, one might consider Goldschmidt's Passacaglia, which was premiered by Erich Kleiber in Berlin in 1925. It lasts seven minutes and emerges from the pianissimo of a shimmering tam-tam to a full orchestral fortissimo. This impressive piece makes us understand Kleiber's continued support for Goldschmidt. A work that makes a very different effect but works equally well is Boris Blacher's Concertante Music for Orchestra. Blacher is a fascinating figure. Born in China in 1903, the same year as Goldschmidt, he was the offspring of German-Russian bankers and was raised equally fluent in Mandarin, English, Italian, German and Russian. The Nazi discovery of one Jewish grandparent meant that his music was withdrawn relatively late in the day. Their classification of his music as “degenerate” came despite his success with both musicians and the public – indeed, there were many within the regime who had hoped to make him the poster-boy of new music in Germany – a view that would explain why the 1937 premiere of his Concertante Music for Orchestra was given by the Berlin Philharmonic under Carl Schuricht. Unlike Goldschmidt's Passacaglia, which builds and builds, the ten-minute-long, three-movement Concertante Music starts off as a typical neo-classical Concerto Grosso, which recalls Hindemith's Kammermusik. Only in the final moments – and seemingly out of nowhere – do the violins start to weave a lyrically energizing subject in and out of the highly rhythmic counterpoint provided by the rest of the orchestra. This work can raise the hairs on the back of the neck!

Concertos

The most obvious choice is Korngold's violin concerto, but – since I can't seem to escape my own Viennese background – I would like to mention that a recent pleasant surprise has been getting to know Karl Weigl's Violin Concerto (1928). Like Zemlinsky and Schreker, with whom he is often compared, Weigl could create works of finely spun gold. In this concerto each instrument has its own musical role to carry out, and this creates a tapestry that sparkles and shimmers. The work certainly has impressionistic colors, but it is so Viennese that there is nothing even remotely Gallic about it. Erich Zeisl's Piano Concerto (1951) produces a similar effect, although it was written 23 years later and Zeisl was a full generation younger than Weigl. Both works have a distinctively Viennese sheen, although Zeisl's is the more obviously modern. Toch's First Piano Concerto (1926) is outstanding – a largely forgotten masterpiece that has yet to re-establish its rightful place. Like much of Toch's other music, this is a high-energy score, and it was performed by many of the greatest names of the day. As curator of the Toch exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, I had to choose among stacks of programs, and I selected the one with Walter Gieseking, Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic. The work is riveting; it gallops chromatically up and down the keyboard, leaving the audience jumping to its feet at its conclusion. It was the work that made Toch's reputation during Germany's interwar Weimar Republic years. In 1930, the New York Times published a picture of Toch and Hindemith as part of a full-page story entitled “The Faces of New Music in Germany.&#148 Considering Toch's extraordinary success and the high esteem in which the world held him until his departure from Germany in 1933, I suspect that his absence from today's concert programs exemplifies what I wrote earlier: his prolific body of post-war American works was performed, possibly more out of loyalty than conviction, by his many Austro-German friends in charge of American orchestras; following the passing of that generation, audiences who knew only Toch's American works were not convinced that his Weimar Republic output was worth investigating.

There are some fine cello concertos by Toch, Zeisl, Weigl, Goldschmidt and Gál, but the one that moves even the most blasé audience is Julius Bürger's Cello Concerto. The date of its composition is given as 1932, but the second movement carries the inscription “To my mother, shot in her 82^nd year while on transport to Auschwitz,” which means either that the inscription was added later or that the movement was composed and/or modified later. Its effect is devastating. Indeed, it is more effective than any other “Holocaust work” I know. It has a melancholic, liturgical feel, without anger – a profound sadness without bitterness, resignation but with hope. This movement has been played on a number of occasions as a stand-alone work, and as such it is impressive, but Gary Hoffman – in a performance I heard in Taipei last year – managed to bring the outer movements into an organic and coherent relationship with the central slow movement that made the entire concerto worth hearing.

Orchestral Vocal

Bürger, as a young Schreker pupil eager to please his teacher, composed two orchestral songs that out-Schrekered the master himself. The texts of Bürger's Stille der Nacht and Legende are by Gottfried Keller and Christian Morgenstern, respectively, and are written for large orchestra and bass-baritone. Each song lasts approximately eleven to twelve minutes. Like Schreker's Vorspiel zu einem Drama, they are guaranteed to tingle even the most ossified spine.

Moving on to another orchestral song-cycle, this time by Schreker's Berlin pupil Goldschmidt, we find ourselves in the midst of a quite different musical landscape. Though Goldschmidt, like Krenek and Rathaus, had little sympathy for Schreker's Klimtian qualities, he applied some of Schreker's tonal magic to a series of six orchestral songs for tenor or soprano. Goldschmidt's 1958 cycle, Mediterranean Songs (which, with its Greek references, should perhaps have been called Aegean Songs), is a highly evocative work. I don't believe I'm overselling it if I say that it is at the very least equal to Britten's Les Illuminations and Our Hunting Fathers. The comparison with Britten is not random. Britten came to rely on the advice of Erwin Stein, a Schoenberg pupil, and this gave a continental edge to his angular British pastoralism. Goldschmidt developed in the opposite direction. He acquired the softening touches of pastoralism after coming to the United Kingdom from Germany. The Mediterranean Songs are impressive on every level, and it is particularly astounding that a non-native speaker could deal so sensitively with some of the English language's most evocative poetry. The songs are set to texts by Lord Byron, James Stephens, Lawrence Durrell, Bernard Spencer, James Elroy Flecker and Shelley – a Goldschmidt favorite. The lyrical writing is masterly, and the use of orchestral colors creates a surprising environment tempered, perhaps, by its Germanic meticulousness. The cycle lasts approximately 22 minutes.

Schreker's compositional career was divided between his Viennese years, up to 1920, and his Berlin years, from 1920 until his stroke in 1933 and death in 1934. As he matured, the opulent, Klimtian style of his Viennese period gave way to a much sparer approach. “New Objectivity” was the watch-word of New Music's youthful practitioners, and Schreker's idiosyncratic response to this development was ridiculed by younger composers, who continued to see him as an unreformed 19^th-century Romantic. Yet despite the sneers and jeers of his own pupils, the contained emotion of his settings of two poems from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass must rate among his best Berlin works. They date from 1923 and 1927. The orchestration is spare, yet Schreker's brilliance in conjuring up memories, recalling forgotten dreams or simply evoking non-musical sensations through the juxtaposition of only a few instruments placed strategically under the vocal line remains unsurpassed. His orchestral song cycle, Vom ewigen Leben, needs to be sung by a pure, child-like soprano. It seems to indicate that his response to “New Objectivity” was to focus on aspects of purity and innocence rather than removing expression.

Opera

I didn't originally intend to list operas. Opera productions are expensive, require years of preparation and are dependent on many factors within any given ensemble. They can't be put on easily even within a university's music department, although any music department could and should look at Viktor Ullmann's Kaiser von Atlantis, if only for the didactic process of examining the textual and musical variants. As I have written elsewhere, this opera and the chamber works of Gideon Klein remain, in my opinion, the most eloquent works to have emerged from the camps.

Los Angeles audiences have had the opportunity to hear a number of important operas thanks to LA Opera's “Recovered Voices” series – the brainchild of Music Director James Conlon. Many of the operas that have already been featured or are planned for the future would certainly be on my list of sure-fire winners: Braunfels's Die Vögel, Korngold's Die tote Stadt, Zemlinsky's Der Zwerg and Schreker's Die Gezeichneten were often heard in German and Austrian opera houses in their day and have lost none of their ability to enchant or intoxicate.

I predict that Korngold's entire operatic output will eventually gain the popularity it deserves. His two mature operas, however, demand sensitive musicians and directors: Das Wunder der Heliane (The Miracle of Heliane; 1927) is a work of such gigantic dimensions and has such an apparently awful story line that it is usually dismissed as toe-curling, Hollywood-inspired rubbish. Michael Tanner in his review for the British Spectator as recently as November 28, 2007, wrote the following about a concert performance of the work: “It is, of course, profoundly unfashionable to subject operas to moral judgment, but I find this corrupt, at the least decadent and fully meriting the description ‘degenerate’, which has had to be abandoned since the Nazis used it as a category.” Another wrote that he needed to shut himself into a darkened room for three hours after having heard it. These comments came from critics who seemed to have no issues with the obvious model for Heliane – Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten. Heliane, like Frau, is not meant to be taken at face value. If it were, it would come across as the overblown religious ecstasy of a fanatical convert. Like Strauss's opera, it takes the subjects of sex and love and tries to place them within a broader human context. On a deeper level, it explores the malevolence spawned by impotence and the sanctity of the sexual act when it is an act of love. It also looks at the eternal issues of power and fear being toppled by freedom, tolerance and joy. Given the political systems that were engulfing Europe at the time, it was not irrelevant. Korngold achieves all of this in a musical language that is by no means rehashed Hollywood; for that matter, Hollywood scores did not exist in 1927. The music anticipates and exceeds what Korngold and other film composers would achieve a decade later. Korngold's Die Kathrin, from the mid-1930s, is an altogether different type of work. The almost operetta-like music delights from start to finish, and the unapologetic sentimentality of the libretto was made even more implausible than it was originally meant to be thanks to changes imposed as a result of political tensions. It would cost little to return to the original story: a French soldier in Germany's occupied Saarland is abruptly posted away from his pregnant German girlfriend. Renée Fleming has recorded some of the arias, and the entire opera is full of highly appealing music. Its premiere was halted by the Nazis, and its reception immediately after the war was colored by the horrors of the intervening years.

Although Korngold's most obvious influence was Puccini, it is hard to believe that he could ever have composed works such as Die tote Stadt without the wide popularity of Schreker's Der Ferne Klang (The Distant Sound; 1912). Together with Strauss's Salome, Schreker's opera must be the most bracingly sensual work of the early part of the century; surprisingly, it has not yet made its way to Los Angeles, but it did have its first American staging at the Bard Festival in the summer of 2010. Would I place it beside Salome and Elektra? The answer is yes, and thanks to its contemporary setting – as opposed to the biblical and mythological settings of the Strauss works – audiences of the day agreed. Together with Rosenkavalier, its senior by only a year, it dominated Austro-German stages right through the 1920s. Another opera I believe could win over even the severest doubters is Zemlinsky's Es war einmal (Once Upon a Time), a fairy-tale piece that Mahler accepted for performance at Vienna's Imperial Opera in 1900, with Zemlinsky conducting. Some musicologists have even suggested that Mahler might have had a hand in some of the orchestration. In any case, the music is enchanting and the opera is only a little longer than Der Zwerg.

Lieder

I have left the most complex area until last.
It would be possible to write at least an additional twenty pages on Lieder, as every composer Hitler threw out of Germany, Austria, Moravia or Bohemia wrote art-songs; it was almost part of the job description. Anyone who has persevered this far in my essay will realize that my tastes in this repertoire lean towards the Viennese – and the truth is that every one of the important Judgendstil composers wrote beautiful and accessible songs for every voice type. We can start with Schreker, Zemlinsky and Korngold and continue on through Gál, Wellesz and Zeisl: for me to pick one cycle over another depends only on what mood I'm in. Today I could suggest that mezzo-sopranos look at Schreker's Mutterlieder, or the posthumously published songs of Zemlinsky, which cover every vocal register, or the theater songs of Weill and Eisler and the witty cabaret songs by Friedrich Holländer and Mischa Spoliansky. Tomorrow, I might mention Korngold's gorgeous songs, many of which – such as Liebesbriefchen or Sommer from his Einfache Lieder op. 9, or Sterbelied and Mond, so gehst Du wieder auf from his Abschiedslieder op. 14 – are always winners. For English speakers who prefer not to sing in German, there are even some English songs by Korngold, one of the most beautiful of which is Tomorrow. These songs exist in orchestral arrangements as well as for voice and piano. Wilhelm Grosz, another noted Viennese composer and Schreker pupil, won international recognition much later for hit-songs such as “The Santa Fe Trail,” “Red Sails in the Sunset,” “Isle of Capri” and “When Budapest was Young” – some of them published under the pseudonym Hugh Williams. In 1930 Grosz's Bänkel und Balladen op. 31, a hybrid of cabaret and art-song, represented “crossover” avant la letter.

I shall end by referring readers to my article on the 91-year-old Walter Arlen. Arlen is a recent discovery, a composer who, through the process of internalizing the experience of exile, has composed a number of songs that win listeners over from the very first hearing. Some of them, such as his settings of texts from the Song of Songs, are simple and moving; others, such as his Poet in Exile, which was performed in New York in 2009, are more angular and expressive; but all are exquisitely crafted in a distinctive musical language. Arlen's music dates from the final backwash of the Third Reich, and it resonates with us today by reminding us that the fall of the “Thousand-Year Reich” took place barely a lifetime ago.

Note: This article is accompanied by a chart. To view the chart in pdf format, click here.

Published April 2011

Where to Start or How to Start? (Part I)

by Michael Haas | Mar 4, 2011 | Articles & Essays

Part I

“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.

“Where” to start should not be treated as the principal question; it should come after posing the problem of “how” to start — which, in turn, can be raised only after the “why” is resolved. There is rarely if ever a single fail-safe answer that works for everyone who wishes to know more. The repertoire is like a thick wood, but as one works through the issues it becomes possible to identify some of the trees, avoid the gullies and make worthwhile choices.

In my experience, the first thing that needs to be established is the basis of a musician's interest. There are no legitimate or illegitimate reasons, but there are perhaps motivations that could either enhance an existing project or leave the performer painted into a musical corner. In talking about “music banned by the Nazis,” I always point out that the word “music” comes before “banned” or “Nazis.” At the Jewish Museum in Vienna, where I was music curator for eight years, we avoided anything that might look like a Nazi exhibition. People frequently suggested exhibitions about the suppression of this or the banning of that. We weren't a Holocaust museum; we preferred to mount exhibitions about Viennese musical life, whether it took place in Austria, elsewhere in Europe or, later, in enforced exile abroad. We didn't pussy-foot around the issue of why exile was enforced, but in examining this field it is too easy to concentrate on the perpetrators and forget the music.

The most obvious examples of this are the many well-intentioned projects that are set up to examine music in various types of Nazi camps — or indeed in any camp, including detention camps run by the French, Swiss and British. Gideon Klein undoubtedly composed his best works in Theresienstadt, but whether or not the other composers interned there did so is debatable. Hans Krása is a far more significant composer than his children's opera, Brundibar, would suggest, yet the fascination with the camps means that this is the work we most often hear. Similarly, I don't believe that Hans Gál would wish to have his reputation rest on his “Huyton” Suite, which was composed while he was in a British detention camp. There is nothing wrong with mounting projects centered on music from the camps, depending on what the organizers are trying to communicate. Is it a message of human resilience in the face of Nazi brutality? (Heads usually nod vigorously at this suggestion.) If so, is this message more important than the one that may be communicated by far better works that the composer wrote before detention? Some first-class works certainly came out of the camps: Viktor Ullmann's Der Kaiser von Atlantis, for instance, continues to astound in every way because it offers a supreme message that seems to transcend mortality, demonstrates bravery in the face of certain annihilation and contains profoundly great music. If one opts for the texts preferred by Ullmann over those argued for by his librettist, Peter Kien, then one has a work of such astonishing humanity that it soars above the earthbound evils of the Third Reich. But miracles such as Kaiser von Atlantis are infrequent.

Nothing galvanizes the mind as much as clarifying the intentions behind a project: is it to be about Nazis or is it to be about the composers? Few works allow for both, and setting off on a project about the Holocaust, with the assumption that some great music will be heard, is usually the first of the “heffalump” traps that well-intentioned musicians often stumble into. My rule of thumb remains: position the composers' music above their ”story.”

But my example regarding projects based on “music from the camps” is only meant to demonstrate the unintended consequences of presenting a composer's music because it has an interesting tale to tell. Before arriving at these tales, it's important to try to cut through some thick underbrush.

We inevitably have to start with the Nazis and look at whom they banned and why – and there is no easy or even coherent answer to this issue. For every avant-garde composer banned, another enjoyed the support of the regime. Trying to revive certain types of Modernist music from the Nazi years can be a difficult undertaking, because some audience members may think, “Hitler didn't like it, but then, I'm not keen on it either.” This is perhaps not the message that should be conveyed, and the truth remains that for nearly twenty years well-intentioned European programmers filled concerts with lots of difficult music, gleeful in the knowledge that it would have irritated their anti-Semitic, Nazi-supporting elders. Surely, therefore, in setting up programming concepts, the safest and most efficient policy is to start with works by Jewish composers, whether or not they were representatives of the avant-garde. Yet even this obvious criterion raises the question of the many nineteenth-century composers of Jewish origin who were also banned by the Nazis: Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer and Mahler, for instance, or a number of semi-forgotten figures such as Joseph Joachim, Karel Goldmark, Anton Rubinstein and Ignaz Brüll. Much of Hitler's work was done long before his arrival by Wagner's henchmen — many themselves Jewish — who removed from programming the composers Wagner disparaged. Meyerbeer was a central figure in the nineteenth century, yet his Robert der Teufel – the single most frequently performed opera in Vienna prior to 1900 – was gone from local opera houses by 1920. Another forgotten gem from the past can be gleaned from a notice in Vienna's newspaper, Neue freie Presse, in which Franz Schalk celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Ignaz Brüll's opera Das goldene Kreuz, a work that by 1926 had enjoyed over a hundred local performances. The issues involved in revising these works are less evident. This music will not jangle any nerves with unresolved dissonances or departures from tonality; but it hasn't survived the test of time, either.

The situation becomes clearer if we limit our investigation to composers who were active during the Nazi period. Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold are now familiar names, and they present the fascinating contradiction of a forward-looking, more radical older composer (Schoenberg) and a musically nostalgic, conservative younger one (Korngold). Sandwiched between them are some of the glories of fin-de-siècle Vienna's, “gay apocalypse” (a translation of the writer Hermann Broch's term, “die fröhliche Apokalypse.”

Alexander Zemlinksy, Franz Schreker and the non-Jewish Alban Berg and Anton Webern, not to mention the lesser-known composers Egon Wellesz and Hans Gál – or Karl Weigl who fits comfortably between Schreker and Zemlinsky – were strikingly individual voices of the younger generation.

In Germany, the permutations of musical movements and developments included “New Objectivity,” “Machine Music” and “Applied Music.” There was experimentation with jazz and rag-time. Events, gossip and advertisements from the daily papers were brashly chosen as subjects for operatic treatment, in preference to the traditional stories from Renaissance Italy or mythology. Indeed, the music of composers banned simply for being of Jewish extraction runs the gamut from post-Romanticism to Modernism and thus offers endless programming possibilities. With such choices available, one wonders what conceivable “heffalump traps” there could be, and where one should start.

The most obvious one is the re-ghettoization of Jewish composers. Mirror-imaging Nazi policies in order to resurrect the composers they banned may be inevitable, but taking them from one ghetto and plunking them into another can be a real danger.
If one wishes to enter a special plea on behalf of German Jewish composers before the Nazi takeover, a good place to start is in the area of light music. In both Berlin and Vienna, Jews had a virtual monopoly on light music, including operetta. Ralph Benatzky, composer of ”The White Horse Inn,” said in his memoirs that only he and Franz Lehár were non-Jews, and as for librettists, he couldn't recall a single one who wasn't Jewish. This is a bit of an exaggeration – he leaves out the composers Robert Stolz and Willi Kollo – but it proves the point that the biggest gap left by Hitler's ban was in the field of popular music. Much of it had to be falsely attributed to other composers, because removing it would have caused public dissatisfaction.

A less obvious trap, but one that more and more people seem to be falling into, is the side-lining of “composers of conscience” — those non-Jewish composers who would have nothing to do with the Nazi regime and who gave up successful careers at home to live in exile. Ernst Krenek, Karl Rankl, Adolf Busch, Ralph Benatzky, Béla Bartók, Bohuslav Martinů and Friedrich Hartmann are among those who took risky political stands, yet today they are often relegated to a secondary category. Some were married to Jewish women, while others were prominent communists, socialists or, in the cases of Friedrich Hartmann, Ernst Krenek and (attention, fans of The Sound of Music) Baron von Trapp, supporters of the pre-1938 anti-Nazi Austro-Fascist dictatorship. Egon Wellesz, who could never bring himself to mention his own Jewishness (he and his wife viewed Judaism solely as a religious confession; both were devout Catholics), relates in his memoirs that he left Austria in 1938 because he was “a monarchist” and, like Krenek and Hartmann, a supporter of the Austro-Fascist regime. Regardless of their reasons for leaving, significant composers should not be excluded from programming merely because they were not persecuted under the Nuremberg laws. Perhaps there is a peculiar sort of reverse justice at play, since at the time, leaving Germany as a political refugee was considered more honorable than leaving it as a Jew. When Germany annexed Czechoslovakia, the British government went so far as to give priority to political refugees over Jews.

As the Nazi period fades into the distant past, it is becoming possible to look objectively at a third group of composers to whom programmers rarely allow so much as a nod. This group may also be described as “composers of conscience,” although they chose to stay within the Third Reich's borders. Karl Amadeus Hartmann, for instance, took an uncompromising stand against the Nazis and became an inspiring and nearly unique figure among German composers of the day. Yet it mustn't be forgotten that he was in a privileged position that was not shared by many of his colleagues. “He was supported throughout the Nazi tyranny by his in-laws, during which he did not allow any of his works to be performed in Nazi Germany” with the single exception of music for a staging of Macbeth. On this subject, I was fortunate to have been able to gather the thoughts of the composer Berthold Goldschmidt (1903—1996) during the final years of his life. He, more than most, had suffered not only the injustices of persecution by the Nazis but also the prejudices he found in exile. A remarkably well-balanced person who lacked bitterness, Goldschmidt often pointed out that not only his friends but also his enemies were all dead. On only two occasions did I see him react angrily at remarks made by others: one concerned Wilhelm Furtwängler, against whom he could barely contain himself: “He conducted Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in front of the Nazi flag!” The other concerned composers whom I presumed to be Nazis or at the very least sympathetic to the regime. “Every non-Jew who managed to get out of Germany meant one less visa for the Jews who needed to get out,” Goldschmidt said. “If you weren't a Jew or a member of a banned political party and had a family to support, why would you risk all to leave? It was best to stay and keep your head as far down as possible.” After the war, many of these composers, such as Heinz Tiessen and Max Butting, were labeled as opportunists or Mitläufer (fellow travelers). Goldschmidt used to dismiss such claims with a loud harrumph. Even Max von Schillings was no Nazi, according to him. “For goodness sake, he died in 1933, before Franz Schreker, whom he removed from the Prussian Academy of Arts. He was desperately tormented and few people helped me as much as he. It was the stress placed on him by the new regime that undoubtedly killed him.” Von Schillings' track record was more checkered than Goldschmidt was willing to admit, but the story highlights the great ambiguity of the situations of composers who chose not to leave. In some cases, this ambiguity transcends the existing boundaries of acceptability. One need only look to the cases of Eduard Erdmann or Felix Petyrik, both extremely fine composers who actually went so far as to join the Nazi Party despite the fact that many of their own compositions were black-listed. Anton Webern and Josef Matthias Hauer also found their works banned and yet voiced sympathy for the regime. In the cases of Petyrik and Erdmann, party membership was required in order to continue performing and teaching. They, along with Tiessen and many others, were sidelined after 1945, and their reputations never recovered.

This inevitably brings us to the subject of exile — another theme that programmers love to explore and that offers many fascinating possibilities. It too, however, is not without booby-traps and pitfalls. And with this matter, as with the chronicle of music written in the concentration camps, the story is so dramatic that it can reduce the musical significance of a composer's work to secondary status. Indeed, the danger is even greater in this case, because the changes that came about in many composers' works were more subtle and subjective. Are Kurt Weill's American musicals less important than his pre-Nazi-era German collaborations with Georg Kaiser and Bertolt Brecht? Is Korngold's Hollywood music weaker than his 1920 opera, Die tote Stadt? Many composers simply stopped composing after they went into exile: in Britain, for instance, Goldschmidt, Karl Rankl and Arthur Willner continued to work as musicians but not as composers. Others, such as Wellesz, Korngold and Ernst Toch, embraced, with varying degrees of success, the quintessentially Viennese form of the symphony as a cultural expression of solidarity with a past from which they felt physically but not intellectually or emotionally disconnected.

Others became assimilated in their new homelands — especially the United States – to such an extent that popular music in the 1950s without Jewish refugees would be impossible to imagine. Apart from Weill, who wrote numerous successful Broadway musicals, one could point to Wilhelm Grosz and his country-western hit, The Santa Fe Trail, or Fritz Spielmann, who composed many hit songs from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Girls Girls Girls. Elsewhere, Joseph Kosma, in partnership with Jacques Prévert, became the father of post-war French chanson, and in Brazil Hans-Joachim Koellreutter taught composition to Antonio Carlos Jobim, the father of the bossa nova.

The story of Central European refugees as the source of a considerable amount of international post-war popular music has been insufficiently explored. But exile is a highly delicate subject and is most often a chronicle of decline. As the curator of an exhibition on Toch, I became convinced that the creative surge that followed his Hollywood studio years only rarely resulted in works that matched the brilliance of his output during the decade and a half before the war. The “lack of echo,” as Krenek wrote, would mean that exiled composers either traded in their former identities, as happened with Kosma and Weill, or tried to reconnect to their pre-exile incarnations while being unable to make allowances for different times, changing tastes and a general sea-change in cultural ideals. When Adorno said that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, he unwittingly torpedoed many composers who were trying to refloat their pre-war identities. Some began to re-examine their Jewishness and tried to create a musical identity that was ethnically or at least culturally Jewish without being liturgical. Others relied on the support of fellow exiles: Toch's post-war successes, for instance, declined with the deaths of exiled conductors such as George Szell, Otto Klemperer, William Steinberg and Erich Leinsdorf; today, few American-born performers pay any attention to his music. And confronted with this harsh reality, we end up facing an additional fundamental truth: a German, Austrian, Hungarian or Czech composer does not become a British or American composer simply because he takes British or US citizenship. Ask the archivists of American university libraries: Which researchers are most interested in examining the legacies of exiled composers? The answer, almost invariably, is: European musicologists. As in life, so also in death these composers remain in exile, and their host countries show scant interest in their now forgotten contributions.

Thus, the question of where to start leads inevitably to the question of how to start. And I hope that at least a few guidelines can help. The first rule — I repeat — is that a composer's work takes priority over his personal history. A composer's biography remains the same regardless of which work is chosen for performance, so go for the strongest one. The second principal is to avoid re-ghettoization. Composers didn't think of their works as primarily “Jewish” or “banned,” and it is the responsibility of programmers to re-integrate them into the musical narrative from which they were ejected. Placing works by one of the banned composers with, for example, Brahms or Schubert is preferable to placing them in a program of only banned composers. Third: try not to allow political correctness to influence programming choices. We still perform Wagner, Liszt and Chopin despite their repulsive and well documented anti-Semitic views. Germany and Austria remained major engines of musical creativity in the 20^th century; politics and a quest for utopia dragged many of their finest spirits into disrepute. Some simply made the wrong decisions, while a number actively supported Hitler and his murderous policies. Every story must be judged separately. As a performer, one offers a platform to a composer, and what ultimately counts is the quality of the music. The pitfalls of tidy concepts such as “exile” or “music from the camps” must be avoided if we are to rediscover great works that have been lost through the vicissitudes of history.

End Part I

Posted March 2011

Walter Arlen: ‘Things turn out differently’

by Michael Haas | Jan 19, 2011 | Articles & Essays

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.

On the other hand, Walter Arlen, who was born more or less around the time of Weschler’s parents, became an intriguing mixture of two cultures. Born in 1920, he was 18 when he left Austria for America in March of 1939. His dreams of studying music had been dashed, and he was fortunate to have escaped. Miraculously, his father had been released from Buchenwald days before a visa expired, and could leave for England with Walter’s mother and sister, where they arrived as penniless refugees. From Otto Erich Deutsch’s pronouncement that the five-year-old Walter had absolute pitch, to spending his teen-age years larking about with best friend Paul Hamburger, who would become the accompanist and teacher of a generation of British singers such as Dame Janet Baker, the young Arlen found himself working for a furrier in Chicago in 1939. To the wrecked plans of studying composition, there followed the humiliation of the family’s businesses and homes being appropriated by the Nazis, the suicides of his mother and other close relatives, the concentration camp deaths of friends and family and the separation throughout the war years from his immediate family, who remained at the mercy of London’s bombing raids. After Hitler’s defeat, the family was subjected to the full brunt of Austrian shabbiness in its treatment of Jews trying legally to regain what had been stolen from them: foot-dragging, stone-walling and the bureaucratic bully-boy re-possession of property damaged in the war which refugees living abroad had difficulty paying to have repaired. Destroyed not only were his youthful dreams, but also his memories of a happy childhood in Vienna and at the family’s summer villa near the Hungarian border. The country that had kicked them out showed no remorse, let alone interest, in having them return. Thus unimaginable pain was heaped on top of the humiliations already inflicted.

Photo 1: Walter Arlen hiking in the woods near Sauerbrunn, Austria, in 1935. From left, sister Edith Aptowitzer (changed later to Arlen); cousin Peter Silberstein; grandfather Leopold Dichter, founder of Warenhaus Dichter in Vienna; Walter (Aptowitzer) Arlen.

Through sheer talent, ambition and luck, Arlen was able to make the transition from furrier to musician. For four years he was the pupil and amanuensis of Roy Harris, one of the best known and most frequently performed American composers of the 1930s and 1940s. His musical calligraphy and fastidious inner-ear meant he was able to spot mistakes, correct and transcribe the Harris scores that now reside at the Library of Congress. From Harris he moved to Los Angeles for graduate studies in composition at UCLA and fell in with the remaining group of Austrian and German émigrés. He worked as a critic for The Los Angeles Times, founded, built up and chaired the music department at Loyola Marymount University and began a friendship with Howard Myers who became his devoted companion for the next fifty years. Arlen’s English, both written and spoken, was flawless and showed no trace of his Austrian origins. He and Myers travelled widely and were welcomed into the most important circles of American and international musical life; they were friendly with Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Carlos Chávez and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.

Photo 2: Walter Arlen on a Chicago street in 1940.

Yet beneath the appearance of recovery and cultural assimilation surged frustration and anger over the events of the past. Writing music, which he had done since his earliest years, became a form of therapy. In his “free time” after mornings working at the newspaper, afternoons teaching classes and evenings reviewing concerts, he added songs and piano pieces to the manuscripts he had kept before leaving Vienna. Most were put into desk drawers, but some received private performances by Arlen’s friend, singer Marni Nixon, thanks to encouragement from the likes of Milhaud and Chávez.

A series of chance meetings in 2005 led to a concert of Arlen’s works at Vienna’s Jewish Museum on March 12^th 2008, the 70th anniversary of Austria’s annexation by Germany. In attendance were the country’s leading politicians along with various representatives of Exile-Music groups in Austria and Germany. Walter Arlen was interviewed between works and although performances were far from perfect, a strong enough impression was made so that his music was quickly taken up by both German and Austrian institutions. The Austrians brought him back for educational workshops, and the Germans mounted a festival with Arlen as the featured composer. A series of concerts was taken on tour and Arlen’s music started to be heard in numerous cities throughout Europe. Subsequent performances took place in Berlin, Milan, Los Angeles, San Diego and New York. In 2010 the Vienna-based Exile-Music Organization exil.arte paid to have baritone Christian Immler, soprano Rebecca Nelsen and the pianist Danny Driver record a selection of Arlen’s songs on two CDs to be released in 2011 by the Austrian label Gramola.
Walter Arlen is now ninety years old, nearly blind and he has not composed for more than a decade. Many of the songs chosen for recording had never been heard, even by the composer himself. Although he can no longer read a score, his keen ear and crystalline memory proved infallible in spotting wrong notes and incorrectly balanced harmonies. It confirmed the degree that each work had been meticulously crafted and remained indelibly etched onto his memory. The musical language is immediate; most of the songs are poignant and many are painfully intimate. They range from the mystical eroticism of the poetry of St. John of the Cross’ Five Songs of Love and Yearning, to the despair and nostalgia of displacement in the cycle of Czesław Miłosz’s texts, Poet in Exile. There are songs with texts by Robert Frost, Shakespeare, Rilke and Cavafi, among many others. One, the aptly named “Es geht wohl anders” (“Things turn out differently”) was written following Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany when the composer was still in his teens; others were composed as late as the onset of his blindness in the 1990s.

Photo 3: From left, Walter Arlen, conductor Varujan Kojian and composer Aram Kachaturian at a private home in Beverly Hills in 1974.

Inevitably, another question arises: “What actually constitutes an ‘exile” composer?” Arlen has lived in America since his late teens. His ties to Austria exist today only through his music as he has neither relatives nor possessions in the country of his youth. Yet his music is not that of an American composer — nor is it the work of an Austrian. It is a unique fusion of the two and offers a singular expressive cosmos that is, quite literally, neither here nor there but reaches all who listen to it.

Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 audio. Here is a link to the audio instead.

Audio: ‘Island’ from Poet in Exile Text Czesław Miłosz; Baritone: Christian Immler; pianist: Danny Driver

ISLAND

—Czeslaw Milosz (co-translated by Robert Hass)

Think however you like about this island, its ocean whiteness, grottoes overgrown with vines, under violets, springs.

I’m frightened, for I can hardly remember myself there, in one of those mediterranean civilizations from which one must sail far, through the gloom and rustle of icebergs.

Here a finger points at fields in rows, pear trees, a bridle, the yoke of a water carrier, everything enclosed in crystal, and then I believe that, yes, I once lived there, instructed in those customs and manners.

I pull my coat around me listening to the incoming tide, I rock and lament my foolish ways, but even if I had been wise I would have failed to change my fate.

Lament my foolishness then and later and now, for which I would like so much to be forgiven.

http://www.exilarte.at/editor/ausgabe_composer.php?id_composer=14

January 2011

Between Two Wars, Between Two Worlds

by James Conlon | Dec 6, 2010 | Articles & Essays

The first half of the twentieth century was to see an explosion of creativity in all the arts, not least in classical music and opera. It was also an era of profound political and social upheaval, tumultuous transition, revolution and warfare. The art and music of the time reflect this and, like a cardiogram, tracked its movements. Out of the growing pains came new, formidable, innovative impulses. In the first third of the century, a vibrant, dynamic and liberal artistic culture nourished this even before the First World War.

But in 1933, with the Nazi accession to power in Berlin, the German-speaking world was to experience the greatest rupture of the over two-century-old cultural milieu. It interrupted, at best, destroyed and uprooted at worst, one of the supreme and enduring cultural traditions in Western Civilization: German Classical Music. The loss cut across all genres, and included opera.. This article focuses only on a fraction of the music that was silenced, operas of several German, Austrian and Czech composers. The long silence has been tragic, but the good news is that most of this music is published and readily available. Better news will come the day that much more of it will have been re-integrated into the repertory, where most of it was born and still belongs.

Of the two generations affected by the Nazi suppression, the older one was led by a pair of Vienna-trained composers, Alexander Zemlinsky (1871- 1942) and Franz Schreker (1878-1934). Both trained in the Brahmsian tradition and, fully versed in Wagner (together with the former’s student and brother-in-law Arnold Schoenberg), they would be the first to seek a new synthesis, born of the Brahms/Wagner polemic of their youths. In Vienna, and later in Berlin and Prague, they would teach and inspire a younger generation that would include Alban Berg (1885-1935), Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944), Ernst Krenek (1900-1991) and Berthold Goldschmidt (1903-1996). Berg needs no introduction. Korngold’s precocious genius produced extravagant post-Romantic music under the influence of Zemlinsky. Krenek would display an extraordinary virtuosity and command of different styles and genres, including jazz and operetta. His 1933 dodecaphonic political tract, Karl V, was offered as a humanist antidote to the political wave of the moment. It was banned and not played until the 1980’s. Ullmann’s three operas all bear a sharp and often witty extension of Schoenberg and Zemlinsky. Der Kaiser von Atlantis, written in the concentration camp at Terezin, is a brilliant mixture of social satire and inspirational humanism. Goldschmidt, with the Magnificent Cuckold and Beatrice Cenci, through a dissonant lyricism, made his political points more subtly.

Two young German composers developed far away from Viennese influence: Walter Braunfels (1882-1954), a strong advocate of neo-Romanticism, and Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), who, after his early years in the avant-garde, came to embrace neo-classicism. Like Krenek, his most significant political opera and masterpiece, Mathis der Maler, ran afoul of the Nazis.

Figure 1: LA Opera's Production of Die Vögel composed by Walter Braunfels. Front: Brandon Jovanovich (Good Hope) James Johnson (Loyal Friend) Back: Desiree Rancatore (Nightingale), Martin Gantner (The Hoopoe) Stacey Tappan (The Wren). Photo credit: Robert Millard/LA Opera

Czech by birth and German by culture, Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942), outsider and maverick iconoclast, wrote a single opera, Flammen. Even today, this psychodrama would be considered “out of the box.” Also Czech, but French “by adoption,” Bohuslav Martinu (1890 -1959) wrote prolifically during a life of exile. Kurt Weill (1900-1950) moved from Berlin to Paris to New York, from early dodecaphonic music, to tonal social criticism to, finally, reinventing himself in the popular theater.

All of these men made significant contributions to the world of twentieth-century opera. Yet, with the exception of Berg, and to a lesser degree Schoenberg and Hindemith, they lost their rightful places in twentieth-century opera houses. Why and how that came about merits some comment.

After the end of the Second World War, our knowledge of the broad repertory of the generation that immediately preceded, and had lived and died in, the era of Nazi Germany was significantly limited. The lacunae were part of the legacy of the atrocities committed between 1933 and 1945. The Third Reich effectively silenced these two generations and, with them, important links in the chain of music history.

The first of these generations was transforming Late Romanticism into twentieth-century idioms. The younger, post-War generation moved from the extravagant emotionality of that world into an intense period of experimentation. Nothing was excluded as a starting point for a new art after 1920. High and low, beauty and ugliness, Dada and Marx, Freud and Picasso, jazz and neo-classicism—all were to be stirred in a broth of polemics. Hitler removed these artists from public view and, with them, a vibrant artistic document of the times.

Though some of this music is lost, an enormous amount of it has survived and is published and available. Insofar as it is physically preserved, one could argue that it has survived. But music “lives” only if it is performed and heard, and in this respect, it remains to be discovered by our music-loving public.

Since 1945, the classical music world has enjoyed enormous creativity. At the same time it has been impoverished by the disappearance of part of an entire musical era. On a moral level alone, this is unacceptable. In the Western world, our common patrimony of literature, music, architecture and dance is among our most prized possessions. We cannot allow a part of it to remain permanently excised by the actions of a repressive authoritarian regime.

The spirit of these “lost generations” needs to be heard in its entirety. The twentieth century is now behind us, and the community of classical musicians, musicologists and historians are re-writing its history. Seemingly authoritative judgments already have been proffered, without serious consideration of a great quantity of music. One of the moral mandates of the historian is to revisit any past era as new information is available. Whether it is Ancient China or Persia, Greece or Rome, nineteenth-century Europe or twentieth-century America, or revelations from last week’s newspaper, the historian must place the past in an informed context.

No detail is too small to be taken into consideration. French historian Fernand Braudel maintained it is not in the recounting of great battles, kings and warriors that the essence of history is to be found, but in the minutiae of everyday life. Without the complete picture, we have a distorted picture. Far from suggesting that these composers and musicians are “minutiae” (quite the contrary), I am advocating their resuscitation as genuinely significant creators. The fact that they were on the unfortunate side of history and destiny does not invalidate their work; conversely, neither should their status as victims give them rank for their fates rather than for their accomplishments.

Musical creativity of the first half of the twentieth century is far richer and pluralistic than we think. We, today, also live in a time when compositional styles are highly varied, inventive, open-minded, searching and fluid. The orthodoxies of post-war classical music are now history. The accepted authority of those orthodoxies impeded the revival of all that was not itself, sweeping away the musical ferment of this earlier, era, as well as those musicians who composed in competing and contradictory styles.

As monumental as the accomplishments of the disciples of dodecaphonic, electronic music and the post-war avant-garde were, they nevertheless did not have the authority to stake an exclusive claim on the twentieth century. In their way, these composers and critics perpetuated some of the very consequences of the policies of their Nazi nemesis, albeit with a commitment to the tenets of artistic prerogatives and legitimate rights to their own beliefs. No one doubts the fact that they were qualified to prefer their own music; but many who were less qualified were inspired to promote an overzealous condemnation of all in the past, that had a relationship to Late Romanticism, or trafficked in tonality, lyricism, cabaret and jazz. It was proclaimed, and accepted, that tonality was dead. From today’s perspective we know it clearly did not die, but migrated to the popular world, sometimes to the impoverishment of the world of “high art.”

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. It would be ludicrous to suggest that every piece of art from ancient Greece and Egypt, Pre-Columbian civilization and Dynastic China has been recovered. This cliché suggests that Art’s past is already complete. It implies that no unknown art or music can be good art. Furthermore, and more perfidious, it suggests that things are unknown because they are not good. It presumes that sound artistic judgment is the only factor in the gradual selection of that art which has value and is worth preserving. The history of the 1930’s and 40’s clearly contradicts that premise. Throughout history, the ravages of war, politics, and autocratic suppression of art have also “selected out” what we know and admire. Various forms of censorship have repeatedly affected artists and their works.

However, the suppression of certain composers and musicians during the Nazi era caused the greatest single rupture in what had been a continuous seamless transmittal of German classical music. The policies of the Third Reich destroyed the environment in which this music could flourish, murdering an entire generation of its greatest talents, uprooting a tradition with its creative polemics and dialectics, forcing those who survived to scatter to places where there was no comparable artistic milieu in which to live and create. This immense—ultimately self-destructive—act seriously damaged a most cherished tradition, killed its caretakers, and buried much of two “lost generations” and the spirit living within them.

In reviving this music, there are three aspects to take into consideration: moral, historical and artistic. Undoing injustice, when 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, do the one thing that would mean more to them than any other: play their music.

Figure 2: LA Opera's Production of Die Vögel composed by Walter Braunfels. Desiree Rancatore (Nightingale), Martin Gantner (The Hoopoe), Stacey Tappan (The Wren)
Photo credit: Robert Millard/LA Opera

Historically, our perspectives on twentieth-century classical music are incomplete because an enormous quantity of works has remained unperformed, and the lives of its composers largely ignored. The twentieth century needs to be re-scrutinized after we acquaint ourselves with the voluminous music cast out during the Nazi suppression.

Neither moral nor historical considerations would be reason enough for revival were it not for the artistic quality of what was lost. That quality is manifest, and, I believe, demonstrable. But, for the quality of this music to be more clearly apparent, it must be played so that musicians and music lovers can experience its live performance. Its value cannot be judged by a single hearing or the occasional tokenistic performance. Judgments, if indeed they must be made, can only be so after those performing and listening to this body of work over the course of years have given the spirit of the era sufficient time to be fully digested.

A fully valid argument maintains that some of this music has gained and kept a place in the repertory after the bans of the 1930’s and the composers’ deaths and this is, arguably, a testament to its quality. The inverse argument—namely, that music that does not currently enjoy such status is due to a lack of quality—is, in my opinion, invalid. Such false arguments are, unfortunately, sometimes made on the basis of hearsay about, if not total ignorance of, the actual works themselves.

Zemlinsky and Schreker

Theodor Adorno described Zemlinsky as a “seismograph of his time.” This is a very apt observation. If one could listen to all of his music chronologically, one would feel his development step by step with that of the musical world around him. Some see this as a weakness, a lack of identity. Others see it as measure of his genius of adaptability and immense craftsmanship. To my ears, he has a voice and, above all, a character of his own, which reveals itself throughout to those who know his music in its breadth and entirety. With his sometimes stubborn determination to follow his own path, he alienated both the avant-garde (by his rejection of dodecaphonic techniques) and the conservatives (who found him too threatening). It is this lack of a convenient label that hurt his place in a century often characterized by reductionism, dependency on labeling, and discomfort with that which does not fall into tidy categories.

Zemlinsky’s early period, which is late-Romantic Viennese in character, produced music of great lyricism, grace and charm. Sarema (1893-5) Es war einmal (1897-99; conducted by Mahler) and Kleider machen Leute (1908-09) comprise the early period. Der Traumgörge (1904-06; commissioned by Mahler for Vienna, but cancelled during rehearsals when Mahler was forced to resign) is a transitional work that, despite a confusing story, contains a great deal of powerful music. It also reflects more of Mahler’s influence than the previous works.

The middle-period masterpieces (if I may) are both one-act operas based on Oscar Wilde. Zemlinsky, having conducted the Viennese premiere of Salome, had thoroughly digested and assimilated its compositional and orchestral techniques. This is reflected strongly in Eine florentinische Tragödie (1915-16). Like Salome, it is a word-for-word translation of the original Wilde, with a prelude of pre-curtain eroticism (Der Rosenkavalier) and polytonal shock at the finale. But by now, he has brought Mahler clearly into the mix and organized it all into an over-arching and subtle symphonic form. (Aside from some small details to be found ten years later in Wozzeck, the seminal idea of organizing an opera and its scenes on baroque and classical structures embodied in this work clearly was not lost on the young Berg, who attended one of the premieres the Tragödie and admired and knew the score intimately.)

Der Zwerg (1920-21) was premiered at the Cologne opera under the direction of Otto Klemperer. It is a free adaptation of Wilde, based on the short story, “A Birthday for the Infanta.” Its protagonist, a misshapen dwarf with a poetic and generous soul, is rejected in love by the unattainable and coldly mischievous young daughter of King Phillip II of Spain. It is a deeply personal and confessional work.

This opera had a long gestation. A decade earlier, Zemlinsky had commissioned his friend Franz Schreker to write him a “tragedy of an ugly man.” Schreker complied, and became so enthralled with his own story that he asked to withdraw from the commission and keep it for himself. That is what happened, and the result was one of Schreker’s great achievements, Die Gezeichneten. Zemlinsky, who was the first of the long line of geniuses to have been passionately involved with Alma Schindler, was, by her assessment, small in stature and ugly. She referred to him as a “gnome.” The unceremonious and abrupt end of their frustrating and tantalizing relationship in 1902 left the composer deeply scarred. Twenty years after, he was still exorcising its ghost.

Tastes, of course, are very personal, but I believe Der Zwerg stands not only at the summit of the composer’s power, alongside its contemporaneous Lyric Symphony, but is one of the great operas of the twentieth century. Having learned what he needed from Strauss and Mahler, Zemlinsky integrated the former’s theatrical genius with the latter’s paradoxical melding of the metaphysical and the personal, injecting his own brand of searing eroticism. The entire work is a tour de force.

Subsequent to his move to Berlin, where he collaborated with Klemperer, Zemlinsky conducted, among many works, the Berlin premiere of Kurt Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Fascinated with the neue Sachlichkeit and his new surroundings, he produced a Brechtian work of his own, complete with alternating dialogue, Der Kreidekreis (1930-2). It was this work that was specifically banned and led directly to Zemlinsky’s flight from the Nazis, first from Berlin to Vienna in 1933, and a second time, from Vienna to the United States, in 1938. His final opera Der König Kandaules, which he did not live to complete, features dark, tortured harmonies, demonstrating that in his maturity, the man who had taught and influenced Berg had also learned from him, and the posthumous completion and orchestration of this work by Anthony Beaumont shows this clearly.

Franz Schreker was perhaps the most successful opera composer of his time. He was considered in some quarters to be the worthy successor to Wagner and Strauss. Though this assessment was clearly over-inflated, it shows the measure of the admiration and success he enjoyed for a period between 1912 (Der Ferne Klang) and his first significant set back (Irrelohe) in 1924. Die Gezeichneten (1913-15, premiered in1918) and Der Schatzgräber (1915-18, premiered 1920), exemplify and demonstrate the best of Schreker.

Among his debts to Wagner (and all of these composers had them) is reflected in his choice to write his own stories and libretti. Though not mythical in subject matter, they are far removed from contemporary life. But under the surface, they reflect the moving tectonic plates of fin de siècle Vienna: the gradual dissolution of the Empire, the world of Freud and the subconscious, Klimt and Schiele. If not exactly autobiographical, the protagonist is clearly the young striving artist. The subject is Art, and the search for, and value of, Beauty in a world of ugliness and despair.

His musical style, immediately lauded for its evocative use of orchestral timbres, is tonal in base with a strong admixture of poly- and atonality. The composer conducted the world premiere of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, and the coloristic possibilities of that immense orchestra were not lost on him. Schreker’s style is Romantic Expressionism, strongly seasoned with morbid eroticism and its whiff of decadence. By nature and early experience more in contact with greater Europe than some of his contemporaries in Vienna, Schreker submitted also to the influences of Impressionism. Schreker scholar Christopher Hailey sees him also as the missing link between Mahler and Puccini. The attraction to Italy, demonstrated in the scenarios of Die Gezeichneten and Der Ferne Klang, is reflected in tinges of Verismo opera.

Walter Braunfels and Die Vögel

Considering all that was going on around him, it is difficult to situate Braunfels amongst his contemporaries. His music inhabits a very different world, both geographically and aesthetically, nurtured far from Vienna’s charged, multi-cultural atmosphere., Deeply rooted in German Classicism and Romanticism, he conceals none of his admiration for the inherited past and sees himself as building on its fundamentals. By almost any standard, he was a conservative. Like Schreker, Krenek and Hindemith, he followed Wagner’s example in writing most of his own libretti. Almost diametrically opposed to Schreker’s highly coloristic, polytonal eclecticism, his music is tonal, polyphonic, lyrical and formal. Equally at odds with Zemlinsky and Schreker, his choices of subject matter show a penchant for Classical Antiquity, German Romantic literature and Christian mysticism. In Braunfels’ best-known opera, Die Vögel (The Birds) , his admiration for Bruckner and Mozart and Mendelssohn is reflected throughout. Some contemporary critics saw this work as a rejection of Wagner and Schreker, under the banner “forward to Mozart.” This seems partially mistaken to me, as this work owes debts to both Die Meistersinger and Parsifal. This view held that the music was stepping out of its role as the servant to drama: the music is the narrative.

Braunfels himself related that he simultaneously wrote text and music. Very telling is the composer’s decision not to “recount” Aristophanes, but to recast him for his own purposes and, in so doing, show us where his soul and sensibilities lay. The subject is Sehnsucht (yearning), the omnipresent dynamo of nineteenth-century German music. It is no longer only comedic social and political satire; it is a spiritual testament wrapped in fantasy. It is in this sense that a deeper relationship to the The Magic Flute becomes apparent.

Two young men, Good Hope and Loyal Friend, set out on an adventure to escape disappointment with human affairs in Athens, determined to find a new life amongst the birds. Like Tamino and Papageno, one will come home changed from a mystical experience, the other, chastened and resigned, if not exactly wiser. Mozart’s flute is magic, charms humans and animals alike. Braunfels’ Nightingale, with her plaintive song, strikes the deepest chord of Sehnsucht imaginable. The enchantment scene of the second act symbolically re-creates the trials, not of fire, water and silence, but of the mystical realm of Parsifal’s Karfreitagzauber. Good Hope, having fled rejection by the city girls, will discover cosmic yearning and transcendence through his erotic “encounter” with the Nightingale, as Parsifal will eventually find the grail through his confrontation with Kundry.

Figure 3: LA Opera's Production of Die Vögel composed by Walter Braunfels. Desiree Rancatore (Nightingale).
Photo credit: Robert Millard/LA Opera

The juxtaposition of Loyal Friend’s buffo chatter to Good Hope’s spiritual transformation captures the Mozartian model with finesse. Loyal Friend pushes the narrative forward, much like dialogue in Singspiel and recitative in opera buffa. Good Hope dreams and reflects in Schumannesque reverie. All this, in the lunar, nocturnal forest described by another contemporary writer as “kunstheiliges Land;” holy land, made so by art, made so by the composer peering into the depths of his own soul and transforming this into the sound world.

This is the stuff of high Romanticism, clearly not what we associate with post-World War I Germany. Yet even Strauss did not disdain to return to the past, and there is no question that Die Vögel has also been influenced by Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos. The purposeful use of musical anachronism to evoke the past is one of the key departure points for Strauss. In a very different context, and less as a “technique” than the expression of the state of his soul, Strauss will return to it at the end of his life with Capriccio, Metamorphosen and the Vier Letzte Lieder. The classical/Romantic juxtaposition of Ancient Greece and the Commedia dell’arte in the latter are direct role models for Braunfels, as exemplified by the Nightingale’s Zerbinetta-like prologue.

One of the great charms of Die Vögel is just this anachronistic (neo-Romantic) atmosphere. It is not so much a Straussian “use” of the musical means, but a concordance of the essence of Braunfels’ musical language with that aspect of the subject matter. It perfectly evokes a non-existent world, a garden of paradise imagined, only to be found beyond the limits of urban life and reality. Its choice of setting from Classical Antiquity lends itself well to a genus of “non sectarian spirituality.” Later, Braunfels will immerse himself in Catholicism and, large works will reflect this (the Te Deum, Verkündigung (1935), Die Heilige Johanna (1943) being the most significant of that genre.

It is not hard to imagine why the composer was marginalized after the war. On the aesthetic spectrum he was a life-long conservative, a category that was regarded with total disdain in the post-war milieu. Those who had opposed the progressive and avant-garde currents of the pre-war years were considered by definition, reactionary, and invited to join their confreres in the dustbin of history. The notion that only composers who were progressive, pioneering ground-breakers in their eras are worthy of our attention, had, and still has, great currency. The fact that, in a majority of cases, these “progressives” did happen to be the same persons, however, is more a corollary than a causal relationship.

Figure 4: LA Opera's Production of Die Vögel composed by Walter Braunfels. Brandon Jovanovich (Good Hope), James Johnson (Loyal Friend), Martin Gantner (The Hoopoe).
Photo credit: Robert Millard/LA Opera

To scrutinize compositions from the past on the basis of their location on the progressive/conservative divide is to prefer categorization based on anterior knowledge to the immediacy of non-prejudicial listening. The earth has shifted below many of the questions that divided aesthetic viewpoints from the past. The importance of knowing who was part of the avant-garde and who was not, fades with time. It is the essence of the music, in my opinion, not its historical/musicological placement, that matters. Had Die Vögel been written in 1875, would we listen to it differently because, at that time, it would have been progressive? Should we continue to ignore a work such as this because we consider it old fashioned? In their way, Bach and Brahms were so considered in their own times, and it would be absurd to discard their music on that basis.

The premiere of Die Vögel in Munich in 1920, under the direction of Bruno Walter (who still lauded the work as late as 1950), was a huge public and critical success. The number of productions and performances in the following years was staggering. However, in the post-World War II years of his “rehabilitation,” Braunfel never regained a foothold. Die Vögel was not produced until 1971 in Karlsruhe and 1994 in Berlin. The beautiful Decca recording gave it new life after 1996.

Had some major recording company believed in it in the 1950’s or 60’s, this opera might have regained its past popularity in no time at all. A recording with, say, Dame Joan Sutherland, Fritz Wunderlich and George London, might have assured its future on the stage.

There is a striking irony within Braunfels’ history with the Nazis. He embodied everything that represented the best of the German Romantic legacy. Had the Nazis wished to see him as a model of all of their professed ideas about Germany and Art, he would have seemed an ideal choice. He was versed in Goethe and Antiquity, Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. He clearly emulated the Wagner of Parsifal and Die Meistersinger (the work most misappropriated and abused by Hitler) and shared certain esthetic viewpoints with Pfitzner (who also subsequently fell under Nazi opprobrium). He resisted almost all of the trends and movements the Nazis professed to despise. Their hatred of him resided not so much in the fact that he was a “Halbjude,” as they defined him, but because he had openly opposed and criticized them already in the 1920’s, refusing to write an anthem for their movement.

Braunfels, like the vast majority of assimilated German Jewish artists and writers of the time, viewed himself first and foremost as German and secondarily, if at all, as Jewish (he converted to Catholicism in 1917). His immediate dismissal in 1933 and subsequent disappearance from public life simultaneously reveal the utter depth of the Nazis’ intellectual ignorance of their own professed belief in “pure” German Art, as well as their vindictiveness in overlooking an obvious “cultural model.” There was no one more quintessentially “Deutsch” than Braunfels, who embodied the very best of inherited German art, and who honored the tradition (in the best sense of the word), of its great culture.

Originally published in Opera magazine, April 2009. Reprinted with permission.