The Musical Worlds of Polish Jews, 1920-1960: Identity, Politics, and Culture

by Juliane Brand | Jul 5, 2014 | Articles & Essays

In November 2013, a select group of international scholars met in Tempe, Arizona, to discuss the richness and diversity of music created and performed in Poland during the first half of the twentieth century. The event, hosted by the Center for Jewish Studies at Arizona State University (ASU) and co-organized with The OREL Foundation, took place over two days, both of them packed with presentations, and it concluded with a stellar concert by the ARC (Artists of the Royal Conservatory) Ensemble. Given the present-day abundance of musicological, ethnographic, and cultural studies, conferences such as this one risk becoming mere blips on the screen—but this was a gem of a blip! As sometimes happens when planning and participation align, each of the nine papers and the keynote address contextualized topics that were covered by others, and active participation in the freewheeling discussions among presenters, session moderators, and a small but engaged audience further extended the nexus of links. For the planning and forethought that made this event come together we are indebted to Robert Elias, from the OREL Foundation; Bret Werb, from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Anna Holian, from ASU's Center for Jewish Studies; and ASU professors Sabine Feisst and Anna Cichopek-Gajraj. Thanks must also go to Professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Director of the ASU Center for Jewish Studies, whose background and wide-ranging curiosity often nudged discussions in fruitful new directions. Professor Feisst also cajoled a fine group of student musicians into preparing an afternoon recital of music by Wanda Landowska.

Not surprisingly, the conference confirmed the difficulty of expanding the perimeters of what is acknowledged to be Central European music. During the past sixty years, fissures have appeared incrementally within those perimeters. But for every Karol Szymanowski and, more recently, Mieczysław Weinberg and Szymon Laks, who have broken through to international recognition, there are dozens of Tadeusz Zygfryd Kasserns, Józef Kofflers, and Roman Polasters who have not done as well, although they defined their times as vividly and variegatedly as did those whose names are better known. Not to mention the fact that cultural categories such as Yiddish theater music and klezmer music remain out in the cold. Given the conference title's references to plural "worlds," I expected from the outset to hear much that would be new to me. Yet I'm sure I was not alone in being astonished by the vastness of unexplored material that was shown to lie in shadows beyond the perimeters. With respect to Central European music and music-making during the first half of the twentieth century, the problem is clearly not just natural human resistance to the unfamiliar. And in this case we are further hampered by the wanton destruction and accidental loss of a shocking quantity of sources. Fortunately work can still be salvaged from the rubble, and as the scholars at this event presented their work it was heartening to hear so many of them conclude not with an explicitly final statement but, instead, with an implicit promise of work "to be continued."

Of course, all active fields of study are to some extent in medias res. In the case of Polish studies there may simply be a lower ratio of what is known to what remains unknown and of what is documented to what remains undocumented. It occurred to me that this may be a consequence of how diverse a region Poland is and was, of how wide-ranging and intersecting the cultural traditions were throughout this region, and how gnarled its political history has been. Poland is now bordered by Germany to the west; by the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; by Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania to the east; and, to the north, by the Baltic Sea, with, just a little farther east, the small Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. But this Poland is a fairly recent construction. Historically, and at its largest, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, but in the late eighteenth century this region was successively partitioned by its neighbors, and after 1795 Poland did not exist as an independent state: it consisted merely of sectors—Austrian, Prussian, and Russian—in which the occupiers gradually inculcated their languages, cultures, and traditions. The Versailles Treaty, at the end of the First World War, reconstituted the Polish nation, but the newly drawn borders remained in dispute for several more years. There was a Polish-Soviet War in 1919–1921, a Polish-Lithuanian War in 1920, and a Seven-Day War between Polish and Czechoslovakian troops. And within two decades, Polish independence was again wiped out when the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia led to new invasions and occupation.

Thus the time-span under review — 1920-1960 — may be divided into three periods: the time between the restoration of Polish independence and the invasions of 1939; the years of the World War II and the occupation; and the postwar years as a Soviet satellite country. Antony Polonsky's keynote address, "Jews in Polish Cultural Life: Between Acceptance and Rejection," provided an overview Poland's political history as it intersected with the history of Poland's Jews in general and with the lives of three Polish-Jewish artists in particular. Polonsky pointed out that Jewish acculturation and integration—the process of transforming Jews "from a religious and cultural community transcending national boundaries and linked by a common faith into citizens of the countries in which they lived"—was more gradual than in countries further to the west but nevertheless followed similar paths. In Polish lands, as in Western Europe, those who believed that their national culture required protection did all they could to thwart the inclusion within that culture of anything that they thought of as "foreign." Polonsky reached back a bit further than 1920—a demarcation of change not only in the country's borders and national status, he said, but also in social sensibilities—when he spoke about the Polish-Jewish painter Maurycy Gottlieb (1856–1879), one of the first Jews to make a name for himself in the plastic arts, both at home and abroad. He then summarized the career of Julian Tuwim (1894–1953), a kind of Polish Walt Whitman, born more than a generation after Gottlieb. Tuwim exemplified the very different difficulties faced by Polish Jews in the 1920s and early 1930s. Even when his career was at its apex, Polish modernists despised him for trying to bridge the gap between high and popular culture, whereas the petite bourgeoisie for whom he was trying to write was increasingly succumbing to anti-Semitic propaganda. Polonsky described Tuwim's 1930s Bal w Operze (A Ball at the Opera) as one of the most remarkable of the apocalyptic visions that date from the years preceding the World War II.

The third artist whom Polonsky chose to speak about was Józef Koffler (1896–1944), the first Polish twelve-tone composer, at one time considered equal in importance to Szymanowski. According to Polonsky, Koffler's music, like that of other Polish composers of the interwar period, reflects the many trends—Russian, German, French, neoclassical, and folkloristic, among others — that were current at the time. Koffler's music was better known Western Europe than at home, but he stayed in Lwów even after the German and Soviet invasions, and he and his family disappeared in or around 1944. To date, most of his unpublished works remain unrecovered.

As Polonsky pointed out in concluding his talk, the historical dispute "between two visions of Poland, one pluralistic, outward looking, and European, the other nativist and hostile to foreign influences," continues to this day. Those who chose to identify Polishness narrowly with Catholicism and national victimization tended to blend their rejection of Jewish elements, whether culturally high or low, into their rejection of cosmopolitanism in general. Conversely, many Polish Jews struggled to unite their Jewishness with their Polishness, and the same difficulties still beset anyone who tries to categorize Polish artists. Being Polish or being Jewish comprised a sense of cultural belonging, as well as a degree of geographic sense of place. There was and still is an uncomfortable area in which Polishness and Jewishness are not necessarily felt to overlap, for assimilated as well as unassimilated Polish Jews, and adherence to one group could make loyalty to the other difficult, perhaps even impossible.

How this problem manifests itself in art is a question that came up a number of times during the conference. Is the dichotomy even traceable if the artist does not make it explicit. Moreover, in differentiating people by their national or religious background or adherence, are we in danger of overriding an individual's self-identity? The question also came up as to whether an artist who had not previously identified with his Jewishness but was then hunted for that very condition might turn to Jewish traditions, not out of creative need but in order to make common cause. And if so, how does one assess that person's works? Viktor Ullmann, Walter Klein, and other non-observant Jewish composers started to create works with Jewish themes only after they were incarcerated in Terezín, although what motivated them will probably remain debatable. For the time being, most scholars who are intent on recovering the work of forgotten and suppressed Jewish artists will continue, quite sensibly, to include anyone with a Jewish background, regardless of that individual's relationship to Judaism or Jewish culture.

Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek's paper, "Presence, Absence, Identity, and the Musical Worlds of Polish Jews," was well placed to open the conference because she started with an overview of Poland's political history between the wars and how that history shaped its musical life. With Poland's restored independence after the First World War, Polish writers, artists, and musicians could participate in the artistic ferment that swept across Europe. In this new Poland, openness toward the West and increased secularization became possible, and many of the Polish artists and intellectuals born at the turn of the century who began their studies in Warsaw were able to expand their horizons and contacts in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and elsewhere. Many of them participated in activities of the newly and optimistically founded Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, or IGNM (International Society for Contemporary Music). Just as they recognized their Polishness—and could celebrate it in their art if they so chose—so they could participate in the rebirth of international European culture. This period, during which Poland enjoyed what Naliwajek-Mazurek termed a "presence" within the broader European scene, was abruptly exchanged for the country's exclusion, or "absence," in and after September 1939. And after 1945, some of the survivors tried to rebuild their lives in Soviet-controlled Poland, but most went into exile.

To give depth to this history Naliwajek-Mazurek chose three musicians who helped to define Polish music in the interwar years and survived into the postwar period: Szymon Laks (1901–1983), Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern (1904–1957), and Władysław Szpilman (1911–2000). All three completed their artistic education outside Poland, and all three adopted an internationalist neoclassical style that included folkloristic and post-impressionist elements. In Paris both Laks and Kassern were members of the local Association of Polish Musicians, but whereas Laks chose to settle in Paris and returned there after having survived Auschwitz, Kassern returned to Poland and made a life for himself at home. During the interwar years he combined a successful career in law with continuing compositional productivity and recognition. After having managed, somehow, to survive the horrors of the war years in Poland, he would have been happy to remain there even under communist rule, but he soon ran into political difficulties and in 1947 emigrated to the United States. Szpilman, who made an early name for himself as a pianist and composer of classical, popular, and film music, also managed to survive the war in Poland but, unlike Kassern, he made a successful transition to life in postwar Poland, serving from 1945 to 1963 as director of the Polish Radio's Popular Music Department and at the same time continuing a glamorous international performing career. Roman Polanski's film The Pianist, which is based on Szpilman's memoir of surviving the Warsaw Ghetto and appeared two years after his death, has inssured his status as one of the best-known Polish musicians of the twentieth century.

The historian and poet Maja Trochimczyk focused on the tragic years after 1939 in her paper, "Jewish Composers of Polish Music in 1943," a sweeping overview of musicians whose lives were permanently altered or ended altogether by the events of the 1930s and 1940s. Those who left Poland before 1939—among them Bronisław Kaper (1902–1983), Karol Rathaus (1895–1954), and Alexandre Tansman (1897–1986), all of whom found refuge in the United States—had the best chance of surviving; in exile they resumed their careers, and they remained active long enough to assure themselves a place in music history; Tansman, however, who had been living in Paris before the war, returned there after the war and lived there until his death. Of those who were caught by surprise when the German bombing began in September 1939, by far the largest number—some hundreds of thousands of refugees—fled eastward to the Soviet Union, where, despite the volatility of Soviet refugee policy, they had a significantly better chance of surviving the war than if they had stayed in Poland, or even returned home after the fighting had ceased, as some of them did. Henryk Wars (later changed to Vars) (1902–1977) and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati (1919–1994) exemplify the tribulations of this means of survival, for they owed their lives to conscription into the Anders Army, which was sent to fight in Palestine and later in Africa. Other Poles fled south to Italy or west to France. The conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg (1879–1953), father of Jerzy Fitelberg, was among those who passed through Paris on the way to final exile in the United States. According to Trochimczyk, only twelve composers managed to survive in Poland, and of those only Szpilman presently enjoys any degree of recognition. It is a hopeful sign that Kassern's works have come back into view in Poland in recent years, and Roman Palester (1907–1989), who was once regarded as a composer of talent equal to that of Szymanowski, is also getting renewed attention, thanks to a 2005 monograph on him by Zofia Helman.
Trochimczyk pointed to the end of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on 16 May 1943 as the ultimate demarcation point for anything that might have been considered the purveyance of Jewish music in Poland. After that, most Jewish musicians who had remained in Poland were in hiding or in ghettos and concentration camps, and few of them survived. Many of those who had not died in the Warsaw Ghetto were killed in the death camps of Treblinka, Auschwitz, Dachau. For Trochimczyk the starting point for the work of recovery is the monumental and as yet unpublished Jews in Musical Culture in Polish Lands in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Dictionary, courageously initiated by Leon Błaszczyk and since expanded by others. These scholars cast have cast their nets wide in order to include composers of popular and art music, song writers, conductors, cabaret performers, concert singers, instrumentalists, and music teachers. Many of these individuals would have enjoyed only local importance even in normal times, and few of those in Trochimczyk's roll-calls of names would have maintained posthumous significance. But again and again during her talk I found my sympathy involuntarily stirred by a brief description of an active, productive life turned upside down, brutally ended, and forgotten. In shining a light, however briefly, on one brutally abridged existence after another, Trochimczyk painted an extraordinarily vivid scene of human and cultural devastation.

Devastation was likewise an undercurrent in Eliyana R. Adler's paper, "Singing Their Way Home," in which she considered the validity of a redemptive reading of songs and singing among Jews during the Holocaust period. Since the end of World War II, one scholar after another has attempted to counter the accepted view of Jews as passive victims, with evidence of active resistance. Given the paucity of such militant responses as the Warsaw and other ghetto uprisings, scholarly attention shifted to actions that might be considered political or spiritual resistance. High among these was music, specifically song and singing. Adler became interested in the many references to singing in memoirs written by survivors of the thousands of Polish Jews who became permanent refugees in the Soviet Union after 1939, in particular the memoir by Chaim Shapiro, (born 1922), who was seventeen in 1939 when he left his family in Lomza. He described several instances in which songs were sung to transmit private "coded" communications to others. Whatever it attempted to portend, such singing posed no threat to those in power. There are probably as many instances of Nazi guards forcing prisoners to sing during work duty or marches. I remembered the passage in Szymon Laks's memoir, translated into English as Music of Another World, in which he called playing in the Auschwitz camp orchestra a "demoralizing" supplemental torture. In her research Adler found that prisoners who sang voluntarily did so mainly to cheer themselves up and to remind themselves of home and of happier times. Adler's conclusion, although it affirms the capacity of individuals to attempt to live "normally" even in abnormal circumstances, thus also highlighted, poignantly, how severely choices were circumscribed, indeed practically nonexistent, for all those faceless, nameless victims.
Some of the melodies and poems sung by the subjects of Adler's talk may have been among those that Joseph Toltz discussed in his paper, "Moja pieśni tyś moja moc ("My song, you are my strength"): Personal Repertories of Polish and Yiddish Songs from Youth Survivors of the Łódź Ghetto." Toltz's oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors who settled in Melbourne, Australia, after the war are part of a larger project documenting the personal meaning of music in the lives of Jewish camp and ghetto inmates during the Nazi years. Toltz takes issue with the ways in which survivor recollections are often pressed into narrative reconstructions of a communal experience—for example in the postwar publication of songbooks organized by emotional tropes such as despair, destruction, resistance or combat, and renewal. Such neat divisions of experience can lead to a blurring of individual experience. In his research Toltz wrestles with the complexities of the relationship between witness and survivor, listener and testifier. Listening, in this context – as I understood Toltz to define it – should not be a method for determining objective facts but rather an opportunity for subjective reinterpretation of the moment of recall, involving the listener, the testifier, and what is testified. In this view, musical memory is less a matter of "truth" or veracity than of a dialogic encounter in which the listener's understanding opens itself to the testifier's subjective experience. Clips of several interviews, and especially camp songs rendered by old voices that occasionally cracked in the act of remembering, gave persuasive support to Toltz's point of view.

Also dealing with a single sphere of music-making was Joel Rubin's paper, "Szpilman, Baigelman, and Barsh: The Legacy of an Extended Polish-Jewish Musical Family on Three Continents." Joel Rubin—a highly knowledgeable master klezmer musician— spoke eloquently about a multigenerational extended family of professional Jewish instrumentalists active in Poland at least since the mid-nineteenth century. During the interwar period they dispersed and carried their traditions into exile in Canada, Brazil, and the United States, which is where the most famous member of this family, Władysław Szpilman, was able to continue his career as a film and song composer. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Rubin explained, Polish klezmorim played an important role as liaisons between shtetl Jewish culture and assimilated Polish-Jewish cultures and between popular Yiddish entertainment and art music. Klezmorim performed in all genres, from instrumental religious klezmer music to Yiddish entertainment theater, Polish folk and popular song, jazz, and chamber and symphonic music. Though there are many studies of klezmer music as practiced in the Ukraine, Belarus and, to a lesser extent, Austro-Hungarian Galicia and Romania, the klezmer tradition and the lives of klezmorin in Poland have largely been ignored. Rubin's research into this area began as historical ethnomusicology, but as he met more and more members of the Szpilman, Baigelmann, and Barsch families and learned of their activities, his project grew to include cultural history and enthnography and dealt more broadly with the diversity of music produced by several generations of professional musicians, all of whom could trace their origins to a few klezmer families. It is a compelling picture of cultural synthesis and evolution.

Over the course of the two conference days, the historical surveys and papers dealing with single genres and categories of music-making created an ever deepening informational backdrop for several papers that focused more narrowly on individual artists. In her paper, "Identity and Yiddish Nationalism in the Writings of Menachem Kipnis," Julia Riegel examined the work and aesthetics of a well-known folklorist, singer, music critic, and author. Kipnis (1878–1942), who was relatively fortunate inasmuch as he died a natural, non-violent death in the Warsaw Ghetto, is today remembered mainly for his collections of Jewish folksongs, but he ardently celebrated the contributions of all Jewish artists, whether they represented eastern European Jewish traditions or had assimilated into the world of Western European high culture, as was increasingly the case during the interwar period. Riegel believes that he himself should be positioned at the intersection of those two worlds, and this may explain some of the contradictions and idiosyncrasies in his writings. Scholarly attention has heretofore neglected Kipnis's more academic writings, yet although his unpublished papers were probably lost in the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, Riegel's work shows how much can be gleaned from his published works, most of which were in Yiddish and addressed primarily to Yiddish-speaking European Jews. Riegel focused on one of these works in particular, Di velt-berihmte yidishe muziker, a study of nine composers with very different musical languages, only two of whom were practicing Jews, but in all of whose works Kipnis nevertheless claimed to see something intrinsically and recognizably Jewish. In arguing for this commonality in the creations of anyone with Jewish roots, Riegl noted that Kipnis employed terms just as exclusionary and "racialist" as those used by such mid- and late-nineteenth century anti-Semites as Richard Wagner—although of course he used the same ideas to maintain a diametrically opposed view. Not only does Kipnis provide yet another instance of belief steering evidence: he also reflects the prevalence of ethnic- and race-based critical judgment at the turn of the twentieth century.

In a lecture demonstration, "Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern's American Years," Slawomir Dobrzanski complemented Naliwajek-Mazurek's earlier discussion of this artist by focusing on the composer's postwar life in a new country and on a comparison of works written before and after emigration. The story of Kassern's physical survival in Poland, where he lived openly (in Kraków, Warsaw, and Zakopane) under an assumed name, is a remarkable one, but after immigrating to the United States he never managed to reestablish himself as a composer. Dobrzanski's performances of selected compositions by Kassern confirmed his conclusion that the composer's musical languagedid not evolve significantly as a result of living and working in a new culture. (This was also true of quite a few other émigré composers.) Although Kassern's works seem miraculously to have survived the war years intact, almost all of them remain unpublished. Plans to publish his works were under discussion in communist Poland soon after the war but were scuttled when Kassern began to speak out against Poland's increasing communization. The only works that today remain in common use are two pedagogical pieces (Candy Music Box and Teen-Age Concerto) and the Sonatina for Flute and Piano, composed in 1952. Thus in this case as in others, works remains to be done.

A third artist viewed up close, the Polish keyboardist Wanda Landowska (1879-1959), received double attention, first in Carla Shapreau's paper, "The Theft of Culture, Persecution, and the Identity of Wanda Landowska," and then in an afternoon concert, introduced by Bret Werb, in which two of her compositions were presented. Carla Shapreau, a lawyer and expert in intellectual and cultural property law, told of Landowska's extensive collections of manuscripts, rare printed music, books, and historical musical instruments, which she kept in her home in France but had to leave behind when she fled Paris after the Nazis invaded Paris in June 1940. All of her property was confiscated in September 1940 by a subdivision of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Nazi agency in charge of appropriating artistic and intellectual assets in non-German occupied Europe. The story of what happened to the items plundered from Landowska's home remains incomplete, for only some of the valuable items have been recovered; the whereabouts of many others are still unaccounted for. A major player in this story is the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historical Monuments in War Areas, established in August 1943 by the Roosevelt administration, and its offshoot, the so-called Monuments Men, who, after the war, assisted in tracing and restituting plundered cultural properties, including those that were "souvernired" out of the country by U.S. servicemen. It is fascinating to follow the detective work of tracing such stolen art, but equally fascinating, as Shapreau pointed out, is the matter of what the items themselves reveal about the artistic sensibilities and aesthetics of their owners.

Certainly Landowska's Polish roots are apparent in a program of two of her chamber works—Five Polish Folk Songs for harpsichord (played here on the piano), winds, and strings, and a Berceuse for piano. The two works were performed by ASU Music Department students Jordan Sera, flute; Wilson Harmon, oboe; Ryan Cerulla, bassoon; Oswaldo Zapata and Josh Coffrey, trumpet; Yerim Kim and Artur Tumayjan, violin; Daemin Kim and Sungjin Park, viola; Beth Weser, cello; Tyler Smith, double bass; and Qiyanao Zheng, piano. Bret Werb introduced each work and also provided background on Landowska's career, productivity, self-identity, and superstar status. In 1907, for example, she personally presented a manuscript of the Berceuse to the work's dedicatee, Alexandra Feodorovna, the last empress of Russia. The Five Polish Folk Songs reflect Landowska's identification with her Polish background, but this theme also led Werb to discuss the degree to which she identified with her Jewishness. Landowska's husband, Werb pointed out, had been a pioneer of Jewish ethnography and folklore, and she herself composed at least two works with Jewish themes, a Hebrew Poem for orchestra (not yet recovered) and a Rhapsodie Orientale for orchestra, which has been found. Landowska's view of her cultural identity may eventually be better understood, because Werb mentioned that a cache of Landowska documents at the Library of Congress is presently off limits but will be released after all of her music has been catalogued.

The conference ended on a high note with a concert by the Toronto-based ARC Ensemble, which presented three chamber works by Polish-Jewish composers. Jerzy Fitelberg's Sonatina for two violins (composed in 1947), performed with high-wire technical brilliance by Erika Raum and Benjamin Boman, was imaginative and completely captivating. Two piano quintets (with the additional musicians Steven Dann, Bryan Epperson, Dianne Werner, and David Louie) followed: Szymon Laks's four-movement Piano Quintet on Popular Polish Themes (arranged in 1967 from a quartet composed in 1945), a fairly slight piece, as its title suggests; and Mieczysław Weinberg's five-movement Piano Quintet op. 18 (composed in 1944). Weinberg's was by far the most substantial work on the program; a recording of it by the ARC Ensemble was released in 2006 (on RCA Red Seal), and I'm sure that I was not alone in promising that I would listen to the piece again.

After two intense days of hearing tragic life stories and long rosters of names, it was heartening to know that the three composers featured in the event-concluding concert were survivors. It is true that all three of them lost their homeland and, with the possible exception of Weinberg, also lost the chance to fulfill their early promise, but all three were among the fortunate few most of whose works survived and remain accessible to performers and scholars. Some of Fitelberg's works have yet to be published (the performance of the Sonatina for two violins was possible thanks to Simon Wynberg, the ARC Ensemble's Artistic Director, who came across the manuscript at the New York Public Library), but Weinberg's music is distributed by Edition Sikorski and peermusic classical; the latter also carries some of Fitelberg's music. All of Laks's works were recently taken up by the "Suppressed Music/Musik verfolgter und exilierter Komponisten" series published jointly by Boosey and Hawkes and Bote und Bock. This series, plus brilliant live and recorded performances by groups such as the ARC Ensemble, will surely stimulate others to search for forgotten music from this period. The story will be continued.

Reimagining Erwin Schulhoff, Viktor Ullmann and the German-Jewish-Czech World: A Conference Overview

by Juliane Brand | Dec 29, 2012 | Articles & Essays

On March 4 and 5 of 2012, the OREL Foundation and the Center for Jewish Studies at Arizona State University (ASU) collaborated in sponsoring an international interdisciplinary conference in Tempe, Arizona, on the subject “Reimagining Erwin Schulhoff, Viktor Ullmann and the German-Jewish-Czech World.”

Schulhoff and Ullmann are no longer obscure names encountered only in ancillary relationships to the canonic figures of music history, as was the case a mere decade or two ago. Interest in them may have begun within the context of what, for brevity's sake, is often called Holocaust studies (both composers were incarcerated and died in Nazi camps), but closer acquaintance with their oeuvres over the past couple of decades has revealed each to have been a strong, highly individual voice in his time. Performances of their works are no longer rare, and a growing corpus of recordings attests to the acceptance of this music into the twentieth-century repertoire. As the conference organizers Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Michael Beckerman and Robert Elias stated in their synopsis, the decision to place the music of these two men at the center of a two-day conference was based on the recognition that, among the composers who died or were otherwise suppressed by the Nazi regime, Schulhoff and Ullmann “stand out for their productivity, the quality of their musical imaginations and the unusual and fraught contexts in which they worked.”

Schulhoff, born into a German Jewish family in Prague in 1894, received traditional musical training first in his hometown and then in Vienna, Leipzig and Cologne. After having served in World War I, he joined the Communist Party. He was a chameleon-like composer who experimented with Debussyian Impressionism, Straussian post-Romanticism, Schoenbergian atonal Expressionism, jazz, ragtime, Dadaism (he helped to create the first Dada event in Dresden and was heavily involved with that movement's Berlin exponents), Neoclassicism, Janáčekian nationalism and socialist realism. In the 1920s, Universal Edition published some of his compositions, thus further encouraging performances of his works, and during the same period, Schulhoff was also active as a successful concertizing pianist and as a German-language music critic in Prague.

Ullmann, born in 1898, four years after Schulhoff, in a small town in Silesia that was then part of Austro-Hungary and is now in the Czech Republic, was also, like Schulhoff, of Jewish descent, but he was raised as a Catholic; in 1909 his family moved to Vienna, where he studied and had varied contact with members of the extended Schoenberg circle: Josef Polnauer, Eduard Steuermann, Schoenberg himself and, most of all, Alexander Zemlinsky, under whom he subsequently worked as chorus master and repetiteur at the New German Theater in Prague. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Ullmann was active as a composer and conductor, and, like Schulhoff, he came to international attention during those years. But he was also in search of spiritual and esoteric knowledge, and when, in 1931, he became an adherent of anthroposophy, he moved to Germany and abandoned music for a couple of years. By the time he returned to Prague in 1933 to resume the life of a freelance composer, performance organizations and publishers were increasingly falling in line with Nazi policies; most of his works from this period remained unperformed in his lifetime.

Not atypically for members of their generation in that corner of Europe, Schulhoff and Ullmann grew up in shifting religious and cultural worlds, and both had early experiences as outsiders. Most crucially, they were German speakers in predominantly Czech-speaking Prague, and they were of Jewish descent, thus increasingly labeled as Jews, although both had been raised in nonobservant homes and apparently did not identify themselves as Jews. (How this might have changed after their incarceration is debatable, as is the significance of Ullmann's decision in Terezín to set Hebrew and Yiddish texts.) Both also had firsthand experience of active duty in World War I, which fundamentally changed their worldviews and the life choices that they made. Finally, both enjoyed promising early careers in the immediate postwar years and into the early 1930s, and both saw their professional options narrow to the vanishing point while they were still in their thirties, an age at which most creative individuals are just hitting their stride. Beginning in 1938, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, only emigration could have saved them. Schulhoff, who had become a Soviet citizen early in 1941, was arrested in June of that year as an enemy alien (rather than for his Jewish ancestry, although the latter was the cause of his father's deportation to Terezín, where he died of the harsh conditions in 1942). He was eventually transported to the internment camp of Wülzburg bei Weissenburg, in Bavaria, where many of those who weren't sent on to an extermination camp died of malnutrition and disease; he died there in August 1942, of tuberculosis. Ullmann, who tried desperately to procure emigration visas for himself and his family, was arrested on 8 September 1942 with his wife and deported to Terezín, northwest of Prague and not far from where he had been born; on 16 October 1944 he was transported to Auschwitz, where he was gassed two days later.

Since Wülzburg was a forced labor camp, it is doubtful that Schulhoff would have been able to carry on any musical activities there. Ullmann, on the other hand, was actively involved in the musical life of Terezín, where he not only served as pianist, conductor, lecturer and official camp music critic but also composed twenty-three works, including fourteen Hebrew and Yiddish choral pieces and arrangements; these remain the only works for chorus in his oeuvre, and they were undoubtedly inspired by the ready accessibility of performers — Terezín could boast of having at least ten choral groups. The Arizona conference focused primarily on the works that Ullmann produced in captivity, but some interesting comparisons were also made with his earlier compositions.

Nine talks, interspersed with musical performances; one panel discussion; and a preconcert discussion made up the four conference sessions. Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Theodore Solis, Sabine Feisst and Ben Levy (all from ASU), as well as Michael Beckerman (New York University) served as moderators, and Beckerman also presented a stimulating keynote address. The packed, two-day event concluded with an imaginative musical program devoted to Ullmann, titled “Music, Memory and Metamorphosis.” A rewarding bonus to the final event was its venue, the Cutler-Plotkin Jewish Heritage Center in Phoenix, home of the Arizona Jewish Historical Society; the center's exhibit of documents and artifacts charting the history of Jewish pioneers in the Arizona Territory was fascinating.

The talks — most of them read from prepared papers — ranged from close studies of particular works to synthesizing overviews of the cultural and musical contexts within which Schulhoff and Ullmann were active. The ever-returning questions that engagement with this chapter of music history must grapple with threaded through the papers and fueled energetic discussions, even in cases in which a presenter's focus was tangential to the main conference themes. As often happens at thoughtfully designed scholarly meetings, a number of vexed, and frequently unresolvable, questions came increasingly and repeatedly to the fore.

The two composers' Czech-German background and the question of Jewish identity, or lack thereof, appeared in various contexts. In his keynote address, Michael Beckerman visually demonstrated the peripatetic but often intersecting geographic lines traced by Schulhoff and Ullmann's life stages — from where they were born and grew to maturity to the succession of places in which they were professionally active. The area that contained these places — Vienna, Stuttgart, Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin, Teschen and, above all, Prague — is not geographically vast but held within it a number of cultural, social and political schisms. Hillel Kieval (Washington University) addressed some historical aspects of this backdrop in his talk “Imperial Embraces: The Politics of Jewish Identity in the Bohemian Lands, 1867—1914.” The closely related theme of Jewish identity, as reflected in the life and pronouncements of Arnold Schoenberg, was addressed by Klára Móricz (Amherst College) in one portion of her talk “The Presentness of the Past, or Looking at Pre-Holocaust European Jewish History with Its Side Shows.”

One of the most interesting recurring themes was the question of how to balance the consciously crafted aspects of a composer's personal musical language or style with the influences — some possibly still identifiable today — that may have shaped it then, perhaps even without the creator's awareness. The idea of synthesizing a recognizably personal musical style seems to have become less important to many composers of Schulhoff and Ullmann's generation than it was to earlier generations, when a personal stamp — a recognizable voice — was regarded not only as the consequence of composing in a certain style but also as one of the principal objectives of composing. Mahler, whose earliest formative years, like those of Schulhoff and Ullmann, were lived in proximity to nationally distinct local cultures, went far afield in injecting “foreign” vocabulary, syntax, even jargon, into the Austro-German musical language, but whatever may have been by nature “foreign” to that style he organically synthesized into it and made the resulting mélange his own. Schulhoff, on the other hand, experimented with most of the musical trends of his time and seems to have made no attempt to disguise his models, which leads one to wonder whether he even cared about crafting an individual, coherent voice. The sober ideal that had motivated composers of earlier generations — to find a recognizably personal voice by building on the best of what had gone before — was one among many ideals thrust aside after 1918 by many composers born between 1890 and 1900.

This set of themes was addressed by Thomas Svatos (Anglo-American University, Prague, Czech Republic), Yoel Greenberg (Princeton University), and Eli Lara (Austin Peay State University, Tennessee). Svatos, in “Fashioning the Socialist Realist Sound: Erwin Schulhoff's Symphony No. 3,” explored how Schulhoff, in 1931, came so whole-heartedly to embrace Soviet realism and the socialist-realist cause. The symphony, composed in 1935, is sonically and structurally emblematic of music written in the service of extramusical ideals, and it aims at immediately recognizable affect. Any number of related narratives can be read into the work; indeed, Schulhoff at one point considered superimposing on it stories of the 1935 Eastern Slovakian uprising. Svatos also speculated on what might have happened to Schulhoff had he managed to emigrate to the Soviet Union, which he had visited in 1933; he might well have become an important player there, though he might also of course have experienced a fate similar to that of Shostakovich.

Greenberg, in “Looking Back in Anger: Schulhoff's Postwar Works for String Quartet as a Rejection of Tradition,” argued that Schulhoff's “confusing” range of styles has obscured some important qualities common to all of his works. Four stylistically divergent works for string quartet — the early, Schoenbergian, unnumbered quartet op. 25; a suite of dance movements, the Fünf Stücke, from 1923; and the two numbered string quartets (1924 and 1925), which quote and parody Mozart and Haydn — provided Greenberg with evidence of an essential quality underlying all four. As he put it, “Although appearing to be preoccupied by the present, to shift allegiance in accordance with the current stylistic fads, Schulhoff in fact used these to engage the past and conduct a consistent yet provocative and original dialogue with tradition.”

Lara, in “Dance to This: Parallels in Harmonic and Metric Organization in Alla Valse Viennese of Erwin Schulhoff's Fünf Stücke for String Quartet,” gave a delightfully extemporaneous presentation, further enlivened by her illustrating particular points on the cello, which she had brought with her. (Both Greenberg and Lara are accomplished and active string quartet players.) Schulhoff was passionate about dance, and he intentionally used ostinatos, ostinato cells and rhythmic energy to forge visceral connections with his listeners. To learn that Schulhoff believed music to be something that is “first of all, supposed to induce the physical sensation of well-being, ecstasy, even; it is never philosophy,” proved a valuable key to a more informed hearing of this composer's works.

Closely related to the question of personal style versus external influences is that of the tension between what was or might have been a composer's intention and a listener's perceptions, interpretations and, ultimately — although we usually hesitate to put it so bluntly — judgments. An artist's intention is a highly volatile combination of conscious and unconscious internal and external factors that surpasses full understanding. A composer may start with a firm initial intention, but in the course of working on the piece all manner of large and small things will alter it; collectively, the factors that influence compositional decision making are sure to extend far beyond those that shaped the work's initial concept. The game of reading meaning and intention in (and into) particular works or passages was enthusiastically played and vigorously debated, particularly in discussions centered on Schulhoff and Ullmann's liberal incorporation of quotations into their works. When are quotes meant to be heard as quotes? And, even when it can be established that they are intentional, how are we to know what meanings they were intended to convey? Not everyone agreed that authorial intention might sometimes be so elusive as to be ultimately unknowable.

Just as the process of identifying intention is full of potential pitfalls, so too is that of analyzing works or events through hindsight. Móricz, in the historiographic portion of her talk, laid out the dangers of backward causation, the practice of considering historical events principally through the lens of what we know happened afterward. Adopting Gary Saul Morson's idea of side shadows to an alternative present — those multiple possibilities that, although lost to history by not having been lived, were as much part of that past's present as they are for us in our present — Móricz declared that “treating the Holocaust as a predestined future, the shadow of which affected the years that preceded it, inevitably leads to the distortion of history.” Similar dangers attend a teleological approach to pieces that “happen” to have become a composer's last works, though at the time the composer presumably saw them against a horizon of future projects.

Yet it is difficult not to read a premonition of catastrophe into works such as those produced in the Czechoslovakia of 1941. Caleb Boyd (Arizona State University), in his “Composition as Control and Transcendence in Viktor Ullmann's Six Sonnets de Louize Labé,” discussed an Ullmann work that dates from just before the composer's arrest and deportation to Terezín; Boyd analyzed the text (this seems to have been the first time that Ullmann set French literature to music, possibly in association with his wife, who was French, but perhaps also in defiance of the Germanification of Czechoslovakia) and the use of quotations from Wagner's Tristan and Josef Suk's 1906 Asrael Symphony. The latter work, which the widely revered Czech composer wrote in homage to his teacher and father-in-law, Antonín Dvořák, afterwards came to be played at times of national mourning, and the apocalyptic meaning of the “death motive” would have been clear to audiences of the time. Caleb suggested that this pre-Terezín song cycle by Ullmann was a response to Nazi terrorism, “a musical declaration of love to his wife [through which] he would be able to transcend the portending zero hour.”

Another good candidate in the hunt for eschatological meaning is Ullmann's one-act Der Kaiser von Atlantis, oder die Tod-Verweigerung (1943—1944), on a text by Peter Kien, a fellow Terezín inmate. Alessandro Carrieri (University of Trieste, Italy), in “Music Facing the Extreme: Political Expression in Der Kaiser von Atlantis,” addressed the subtle and not-so-subtle allegorical references in the text and musical setting of the work, and how they might have been both intended and perceived. Martin Hoffmann (Bonn, Germany) postulated in “Memory and Foreboding in Viktor Ullmann's Der Kaiser von Atlantis” that the work can be seen as a literal allegory of the Nazi reality being lived by the work's creators and the other inmates of Terezín. Particularly fruitful was Hoffmann's careful semantic analysis of the Haydn melody that in 1922 was adopted as the German national anthem; everyone in Terezín, Hoffmann argued, would have recognized Ullmann's satirical use of the tune in the context of two well-known earlier uses: Smetana's unambiguous incorporation of it into his Triumphal Symphony of 1853—1854 and Bartók's highly distorted references in his Kossuth of 1904.

Inevitably, conference discussions repeatedly circled back to Schulhoff's and Ullmann's fates as victims of the Nazi genocide. This established a thematic backdrop to the paper by Francesco Lotoro (Barletta, Italy), “In Search of Lost Music: Prolegomena to a Concentration Camp Music Literature,” which was read by Bret Werb (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC). Lotoro outlined an ambitious online project to catalogue all musical works produced in circumstances of imprisonment, not limited to Nazi concentration and extermination camps. This paper sparked a debate on whether music (or any art, for that matter) produced in captivity necessarily represents direct engagement with that situation — in the form of revolt, resistance, complicity or any combination thereof — or whether a prison might simply be the place in which a creator happens to create something. Is it at all useful to consider music composed in a concentration camp as a legitimate genre — Lagermusik (music of the camps), as it is sometimes called? Would the sole fact of having been thus produced suffice as a common quality?

By the time these questions were raised, Ullmann's essay “Goethe und Ghetto,” which he wrote in Terezín and in which he declared that “our efforts in regard to Art were commensurate with our will to live,” had already several times sparked discussion of creativity within the constraints of harsh incarceration. Would the likelihood that one may soon be killed free a creator's imagination or would the fear of losing even such minuscule privileges as may remain (things as basic as food, but also human contact and permission to participate in joint activities such as those permitted in Terezín) force inmates into complicity, shackle their daring or otherwise direct their creative choices?

The music of Schulhoff and Ullmann was never far from conference attention. Throughout the two-day conference, many talks were illustrated with aural examples. Schulhoff's Sonata for Violin was played in its entirety by the ASU DMA student Michelle Vallier. And the last afternoon brought a panel discussion of one of the works scheduled for that evening's concert, Ullmann's Piano Sonata No. 7, with Rachel Bergman (George Mason University), Jory Debenham (University of Lancaster, England), Sivan Etedgee (Boston) and Gwyneth Bravo (Los Angeles), who provided rich contextualization for the sonata and discussed its layers of structure and autobiographical meaning: Ullmann had dedicated the work, which he completed on 22 August 1944, just a few months before he was transferred to Auschwitz, to his three children. Steven Vanhauwaert discussed pianistic and formal aspects of the work.

The evening concert that then followed provided a satisfying and truly memorable conclusion to the conference. In the first half, Vanhauwaert performed Ullmann's Piano Sonata No. 7. Like many others in the audience, I had heard the sonata several times before but never in such a riveting and persuasive interpretation. The second half of the program was a multimedia production of Ullmann's monodrama The Lay of Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke (also 1944), based on excerpts from Rilke's poem of the same name. This poem, written in 1899, in which Rilke traces the fate of a soldier in the 1660s, became a runaway bestseller after its second printing in 1912, and during World War I that edition consoled thousands of German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers in the trenches. The production of Ullmann's setting presented at the conference was conceived and directed by Bravo, who also conceived many of the filmic images; technical production and design were by Paul Sidlow. The live portions of the production were shaped by Neal Stulberg (University of California, Los Angeles), in his role as a most compelling speaker, and Vanhauwaert at the piano. In the program notes, which warrant partial reproduction here, Bravo provided a lucid explanation of the process behind the piece:

In the spirit of early cinema and Erwin Piscator's experimental theater of the 1920s, our production reimagines the theater and concert hall as a cinematic space where the performance of these works takes place inside a filmic framework, where a kaleidoscope of projected and slowly shifting montage images serves as a visual counterpoint to the poetry and music. Employing a postmodern compositional superimposition and animation of a multilayered and harmonically conceived series of visual elements, include the early prints of the Czech photographer Josef Sudek, blurred and treated filmic stills and moving frames of cavalry from Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, among many others. These images suggest the ghostlike presence and profound absences of early photography and cinema, where the Bohemian landscapes that serve as both the historical and poetic context of these works is refracted through the sepia-hued lens of memory, to narrate the unfolding of a dreamscape evoked by the Jugendstil aesthetic of Rilke's work.

The production, whose many themes and media stimuli make for a dense weave of texture and content, received its premiere performance at this event. A documentary is planned.

As frequently happens in the recovery of a suppressed composer's oeuvre, every performance heard at the Arizona conference brought surprises, and with them the bemused question “Why did this work disappear so completely from the repertoire?” Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the gathering was the that its participants were able to leave that question behind them, since the answers to it are in any case multiple, complex and necessarily unsatisfactory. Instead, they demonstrated that the further the pre-1945 past recedes, the better Central European music of that time is able to regain some of its original rich diversity.

Posted January 7, 2012.  © Juliane Brand, December 2012.

Recalled to Life: A Review of the UCLA Conference “Recovered Voices”

by Juliane Brand | Jul 1, 2010 | Articles & Essays

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

Many voices disappear gradually, as a result of natural processes of time, neglect and changing sensibilities; with or without disjunctions of social upheaval and war, production of the new will remorselessly silt over the old. But voices from the past can resonate anew, and when they do they can shake up our understanding of what was already familiar. Large chunks of music history, as it stands today, consist of composers and styles that had been silted over before being recovered, often decades or centuries later. A recent conference on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), was devoted to just such a project of recovery. Here, however, attention focused not on music that had disappeared “naturally” but on composers who had been made to disappear—voices from the first half of the twentieth century silenced as a result of the National-Socialist dictatorship's cultural policy in Germany from 1933 to 1945. Of course lacunae exist in the history of every era, and every age is more diverse and multivoiced at ground level than in teleological hindsight. But never before was an entire body of cultural production so calculatingly expunged as during the Nazi era. And what disappeared in those twelve years comprises a surprisingly varied corpus of music.

The conference, which took place on 7 and 8 April 2010, was jointly sponsored by the OREL Foundation and the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies; Kenneth Reinhard of UCLA and Robert Elias of the OREL Foundation organized the event. Titled “Recovered Voices: Staging Suppressed Opera of the Early 20th Century,” the conference grew out of the concurrent production of Franz Schreker's Die Gezeichneten at the Los Angeles Opera (LAO), whose music director, James Conlon, is also the OREL Foundation's inspiration and artistic advisor. This production was the first American performance of Die Gezeichneten; indeed, this was the first time any Schreker opera has been staged in North America. (For more information on the production, see http://www.losangelesopera.com/production/0910/stigmatized/index.aspx )

Ancillary to the conference were two evening events: a concert and a keynote address. The concert, in UCLA's Schoenberg Hall, presented chamber music of Erwin Schulhoff (1894–1942), the multifaceted, prolific and at one time internationally known Czech composer who stayed too long in Prague and was arrested and deported to the Wülzburg internment camp in Bavaria, where he died. Engaged performances by Jeffrey Kahane, Daniel Hope and members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra were aural evidence of how exciting it can be to hear music by an idiosyncratic composer whose voice matches and complements more familiar voices. The following evening's keynote address by Maestro James Conlon showed him to be a man with a mission. He spoke with the kind of passionate belief that persuades, even though in this audience he could take for granted a common purpose and shared convictions. So he concentrated not so much on the whys and wherefores of recovering works suppressed during the Nazi era as on where recovery efforts stand, and on what needs most pressingly to be done. The points of view of this distinguished conductor and practicing musician provided a satisfying final cadence to the two-day meeting.

Cultural politics in Germany in the prewar Nazi years was the topic of a talk by Albrecht Dümling, chair of musica reanimata, who presented the complicated back story of the Degenerate Music exhibit held in Düsseldorf as part of the Reich Music Days of 1938. This exhibition, the brainchild of an untrained musician named Hans Severus Ziegler, targeted jazz, atonality and the putative Jewish domination of German music. The project highlighted the problem that the Nazis faced in trying to establish ideologically and racially based criteria for “cleansing” German art of impure and “degenerate” influences. For how could race be objectively detected in art? A composer could conceivably be defined as Jewish on the basis of ancestry, but what could be thought to make music Jewish? There was, even among anti-Semitic Nazis, no agreement on this issue. At one point during the 1930s, a man named Nobbe proposed a simple formula: the triad and tonality are German, and atonality is Jewish. Others—among them Herbert Gerigk, infamously associated with the 1940 Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, mit einem Titelverzeichnis jüdischer Werke (Dictionary of Jews in music, with a list of Jewish works)—countered that atonality, in the right hands, could be an effective musical device. Most politicians chose to steer clear of the debate and, like Goebbels in his “Ten Principles of German Music Creativity” delivered at the opening of the Degenerate Music exhibit, restricted themselves to vague statements about the incompatibility of German Germanness and un-German Jewishness. Unlike the previous year's Degenerate Art exhibit on which it was based, the Degenerate Music exhibit was a failure and had to close early. Foreign coverage, on the other hand, was apparently favorable; Dümling quoted from British and American reviews that did not even mention the racist overtones, accepting the idea of government control of art, as of so much else in Nazi Germany, at face value.

The radio host and writer Martin Goldsmith presented a corollary to Dümling's talk with his overview of the Reichsverband der jüdischen Kulturbünde (National association of Jewish cultural leagues). This network of independent performing arts ensembles in Germany, run solely by and for Jews, was sanctioned and even encouraged by the Nazi government between 1933 and 1941. Originally named Kulturbund deutscher Juden (Cultural league of German Jews), the league began in Berlin in response to the Law for the Reestablishment of the Civil Service (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums) of 7 April 1933, which had led to the dismissal of thousands of non-Aryans working in schools, universities and all government and cultural institutions. The idea of recruiting unemployed Jewish musicians and performers for putting on plays and concerts originated with Kurt Baumann and Kurt Singer, both formerly with the Städtische Oper in Berlin, who succeeded in persuading Hans Hinkel, head of the Prussian Theater Commission, to support the idea. From the Nazis' point of view, a Jewish arts organization for Jews was splendid propaganda; from the point of view of out-of-work performers and culture-hungry citizens, the Kulturbund offered employment and solace. And it was an immediate success. Soon after opening in Berlin in September 1933, the organization had close to 20,000 members, and smaller leagues soon sprang up in other cities around Germany, including Hamburg, Munich and Frankfurt. The national association of Kulturbünde flourished for eight years, though under constant and increasingly repressive surveillance. Goldsmith brought this by now fairly well documented story alive by telling it through the prism of the experiences of his parents, Günther and Rosemarie Goldschmidt, one a flutist, the other a violist, who met in 1936 when they both got jobs playing in the Frankfurt Kulturbund orchestra. The complete story of their experiences in Germany and emigration in 1941 to the United States is told in Goldsmith's book, The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany (2000).

In his talk “Opera in Mussolini's Italy,” the writer and music historian Harvey Sachs, who also teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music, shifted the conference's attention to conditions in fascist Italy. Cultural upheaval in Italy during the fascist years was not, as in Germany, the result of the government's censoring undesirable artistic or ideological philosophies or, indeed, of pursuing anti-Semitic policies: Italy did not have that many Jews to begin with, and when Mussolini made anti-Semitism a plank in fascist philosophy in 1938 it was only in to strengthen his alliance with Hitler. The danger originated, rather, in Mussolini's expanding government control over cultural institutions. Opera was already in a precarious situation by the time the fascists took over in 1922, as the once popular art form was steadily losing ground to the cinema and becoming, as elsewhere in the Western world, an elite genre requiring subsidization. (Concurrent with this development is what Sachs called “the petrifaction” of the repertoire, when interest in new works transformed into a passion for new interpretations of familiar works.) Sachs used the history of La Scala to show how the price for receiving subsidies from the fascist regime was to submit to whatever the government demanded, from hiring to operational matters. Opera house administrators became, by definition, political toadies. Unfortunately, the traditions then put in place have had long-term effects to which Italian opera houses of today still bear witness.

A description of contemporaneous conditions in England were the welcome byproduct of a talk by Michael Haas (read by Gerold Gruber) devoted to an overview of the Austrian composer Hans Gál and his 1924 opera Die heilige Ente. Gál had established a successful career in Germany when he became director of the prestigious Mainz Music Academy in 1929. With the Nazi takeover in 1933, Vienna became for him, as for many other persecuted German-speaking Jews, his first refuge. When he had to flee yet again, after Germany's 1938 annexation of Austria, he must have considered himself fortunate to have been allowed into England. However, details of Gál's earliest experiences as an exile must darken the long-held image of that country as a comfortable safe haven. His family was broken up almost immediately. His younger son was deported, his elder son committed suicide, and Gál himself in 1940 underwent months of imprisonment in two camps; in addition to German-speaking and Jewish refugees from the Continent, these camps (the British government, like that of the United States a couple of years later, preferred to call them internment, not concentration, camps) held British citizens of German descent, German businessmen and suspected fifth-columnists and Nazis—anyone with the remotest connection to Germany. After his release for medical reasons Gal had to try to support himself and his family despite the official ban on employing refugee musicians outside the confines of refugee organizations. The parallels with Germany are striking. Haas, who produced Decca's groundbreaking “Entartete Musik” recording series and is presently music curator of the Jewish Museum of Vienna, had much of interest to say about Die heilige Ente (1924), which had been a repertoire favorite with German and Austrian opera-goers for years; astonishingly, its rehabilitation still awaits. Haas also briefly outlined the problems of those who, like Gál, composed in musical styles that in the postwar years were regarded as regressive and possibly even tainted by resemblances to music and compositional languages propagated by the Nazis.

Conditions in the United States during the Nazi era were fascinatingly illuminated in a talk by Bret Werb, the music collection curator for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. The subject of Werb's talk, “We Will Never Die (1943): A Pageant to Save the Jews of Europe,” was the staging not of a work but of a message. The instigator of the enormous touring propaganda event, the screenwriter Ben Hecht, intended it to be a political wake-up call for Americans who might not yet be aware of the need to save the Jews of Europe; ultimately he hoped to secure support for an autonomous Jewish army. Yet Hecht encountered great difficulties in raising funding and other forms of support; Werb quoted Hecht's descriptions of rebuff from prominent Jewish Americans who were afraid that affiliating themselves with the project would undermine their status as “true” Americans. As collaborators for We Will Never Die, which was subtitled “a memorial pageant dedicated to the two million Jewish dead of Europe,” Hecht succeeded in recruiting the Zionist activist Peter Bergson, the producer Billy Rose, the director Moss Hart, the exiled composer Kurt Weill, and a host of celebrity actors and performers. The first performance, at Madison Square Garden on 9 March 1943, was sold out, as were most of the additional performances; Eleanor Roosevelt attended the one in Washington, DC. Rafael Medoff, Peter Bergson's biographer, links the production of We Will Never Die directly to President Roosevelt's creation of the War Refugee Board in January 1944. Werb was able to show a number of photographs and a rare broadcast recording of the final performance of the pageant, at the Hollywood Bowl, conducted by Franz Waxman.

Not surprisingly, Franz Schreker (1878–1934) got a good deal of attention in the course of the conference: in passing references throughout; in a concluding panel discussion with Ian Judge, the stage director of LAO's new production, and Michael Hackett of UCLA's School of Theater, Film, and Television; and above all in two talks by scholars known for their Schreker studies, Peter Franklin of the University of Oxford and Christopher Hailey, director of the Franz Schreker Foundation. Schreker, who has become one of the more familiar “recovered voices,” was among the first wave of victims targeted by Hitler's opening salvo of racial housecleaning, the infamous Law for the Reestablishment of the Civil Service of 7 April 1933; the stresses of that first year of Nazi rule led directly to the composer's early death. Yet he had been one of the few opera composers of the 1920s whose works had become repertoire staples; it is often said, but bears repeating, that for several years during the Weimar Republic the number of Schreker performances rivaled those of Richard Strauss.

Hailey's talk, “‘Ecco le plebi’: Schreker, His People, and the Ambivalence of Modernity,” included a brief overview of Schreker's early life and influences, particularly his itinerant childhood and lack of formal education, which set him apart from many of his class and chosen profession. But he compensated for this with extensive reading. Among his formative aesthetic influences were E.T.A. Hoffmann, Strindberg, Maeterlinck and Hauptmann. He was also unusually open to non-German musical influences, particularly Verdi, from whose use of choruses and staging devices he learned much. Schreker's libretti, which he wrote himself, are a mix of realism and symbolism; some of them are disturbingly personal, even self-confessional, and they articulate his ambivalences toward the prevailing dogmas of high art and modernism. Schreker infused his secondary characters, in particular, with his own self-reflexive detachment, thus creating a perspective on stage that can be said to be informed by the “view from below.” He often structured his choruses, too, as if they were intended to comment on the artifice of the theatrical enterprise. All of these disparate elements are consciously subsumed in and reflected through the heterogeneity of musical styles that make up Schreker's musical language. Die Gezeichneten, Hailey said, represents the work in which Schreker came closest to creating a true Gesamtkunstwerk, a phantasmagoric world encompassing all the senses. And yet here, too, he made use of distancing effects and, in taking opera to unprecedented heights of sensuous intoxication, simultaneously exposed the form's vulnerability.

Peter Franklin, in his “Lost in Spaces: Recovering Schreker's Spectacular Voices,” continued the exploration of Schreker's intentions, taking as his starting point the relationship between scenic and discursive space. The theatrical effects and sensuous seductiveness that are integral to the experience of a Schreker opera, particularly the early ones that first established his reputation, are the very aspects that so offended many of his contemporaries and still today have the power to disturb. Franklin found it useful to adapt theories and points of view from the film theorist Laura Mulvey's work on the gendered camera lens (the lens of the camera, that of the characters on screen, and that of the spectators) and from the musicologist Rose Theresa's work on spectacle, narrative and enunciative modes of address in late nineteenth-century opera. According to Mulvey, a film director can position the camera lens on a scene or character so as to constrain the viewer to respond in certain ways. In the gendering of spectacle as other, static and feminine, and narrative as same, active and masculine, it follows that the camera lens, when it is directed on a quiescent, non-active character on screen, can establish an immediate rapport between that character and the spectator, even to the point of merging—or implicating—spectator with spectacle. Franklin made a persuasive case for Schreker's achieving just this effect in his operas, drawing on examples from Der ferne Klang, Der Schatzgräber, Die Gezeichneten, and Der Schmied von Ghent. Interestingly, Schreker himself tackled the dichotomy of opera as spectacle and “pure” music as narrative in his penultimate opera, Christophorus.

Questions of staging and intent also figured in the talk titled “Schlusschoral: History and Meaning in Ullmann and Weill” by Ryan Minor, of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook, who compared the dramatic role and meaning of the closing chorale in Weill's and Brecht's Threepenny Opera, written at the height of the Weimar culture in 1928, with the chorale that concludes Viktor Ullmann's and Petr Kien's Der Kaiser von Atlantis, written in Terezín in 1944. Addressing the ways in which the composer-librettist collaborators of both pieces worked with and against the fourth wall, that perceptual boundary between any fictional work and its audience, Minor argued that the Brecht libretto shows a fundamental discrepancy between the earnestness of the chorale text and the ironic distance in the rest of the libretto. Weill's setting reflects that discrepancy somewhat differently, but he too, in Minor's reading, interprets the chorale earnestly and without the critical distance that characterizes the musical style up to that point in the work. The closing chorale of Kaiser von Atlantis resembles the one in Threepenny Opera in a number of aspects, but here, strikingly, the chorale text welcomes death—another instance of premonition, for both Ullmann and Kien were murdered at Auschwitz shortly after they completed the work. As in the Brecht text, Kien's breaks the fourth wall by marking itself as a theatrical performance. Ullmann, however, set the text with the chorale melody from “Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott,” which, so Ryan concluded, can be variously interpreted as a moment of Brechtian estrangement and declaration of adherence to Weimar theatrical precepts, an act of defiance reclaiming the German (non-Nazi) heritage symbolized by Bach, or possibly as a reminder, for comfort, that the fourth wall did still exist and the chorale text was not yet true on the spectators' side of the stage.

In “Opera after the Bauhaus: Wolpe's Zeus und Elida and the Ethics of Montage,” Brigid Cohen of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill tackled the conundrum of Stefan Wolpe (1902–1972), who is one of those iconoclastic figures almost impossible to categorize. His stylistic experimentation and resulting creative heterogeneity were always inextricable from both his multiple affiliations with Dada, agitprop, the Bauhaus and other avant-garde movements, and his lifelong exploration of social visions of human plurality and collectivity. These issues continued to engage and sustain him in his long exile, first in Palestine and then, after 1938, in the United States. Cohen drew on aural examples from the short operetta Zeus und Elida of 1928, where Wolpe uses montage structurally on aesthetic, narrative and musical levels. The work would probably be impossible to perform as conceived, and after hearing the excerpts one could understand why for most of his life Wolpe was the paradigmatic outsider. He was largely ignored by the contemporary musical establishment until the last decade of his life, when his works finally began to be championed by such ensembles as Continuum and the Group for Contemporary Music. Yet Cohen made a strong argument for considering the incongruities of Wolpe's stylistic experimentation as perhaps a truer reflection of the complex interconnected texture of modernism than any tidily ordered collection of schools and isms.

Three talks–by David Levin, Adrian Daub, and Sigrid Weigel–dealt with Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942), particularly his operas Der Zwerg and Der Traumgörge. David Levin, who teaches at the University of Chicago (for the Committee on Theater and Performance Studies, the Committee on Cinema & Media Studies, and the Department of Germanic Studies), explored Zemlinsky's operatic world in a talk titled “‘Das Schönste ist scheusslich'”: Alexander von Zemlinsky's Der Zwerg,” based on Wilde's “The Birthday of the Infanta.” The quote in the title of the talk is drawn from the moment in the opera when the Chamberlain introduces the Infanta's final present, the dwarf, with the words “the loveliest [present] is awful.” This opera was Zemlinsky's contribution to the “opera of the ugly man,” also represented by Schreker's Die Gezeichneten. Zemlinsky's identification with the figure of the ugly man, and with victims generally, is a strong autobiographical component in the work but not, said Levin, the whole story. He took interesting approaches to that larger story, beginning with an exploration of Wagner's articulation of Jewish voices on stage as something both dreadful and comical, and thus representative of what is deformed, disorderly or monstrous. This might explain the discipline that Wagner's concept of Gesamtkunstwerk imposed on the disorderly form of opera and the violent unmasking and expulsion of outsider characters in Wagner's dramas. Levin's second line of approach started with Lacan's theory about the traumatic moment of self-recognition, which can be equated with the moment when the dwarf sees himself in a mirror for the first time and recognizes himself as ugly. Unlike Wagner, Zemlinsky treats this moment with empathy. One of the questions Levin left his audience with was whether such empathy, which has no power to effect change for the better, is not perhaps itself embedded in trauma.

Adrian Daub of Stanford University also discussed the meaning and musical treatments of the outsider figure. In a talk titled “Total Work of Art, ‘Degenerate’ Artists and Ugly Detail: The Birthdays of the Infanta of Wilde, Schreker and Zemlinsky,” Daub began by pointing out that a suspicion of degeneracy had connected itself to opera long before Nazi cultural policy-setters got into the game, and that post-Wagnerian composers themselves grappled self-consciously with the concept and its association with elements outside the norm. Both Schreker's and Zemlinsky's settings of the same Wilde fairy tale concentrated on the story of the dwarf, the outsider, and in both works the dwarf is isolated from the malicious external world by his ugliness and self-delusion. Yet he is ugly in appearance only; unlike Wagner's Mime, whom the composer cruelly exposes as ugly in appearance and voice, Schreker's dwarf character dances, and Zemlinsky's sings, just like all the other characters on stage. Daub argues, among other points, that in these scores the ugly has been liberated from the cruel, rejecting, unifying world of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

Sigrid Weigel, director of the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin, sounded similar tones in her “Zemlinsky's Der Traumgörge: A Post-Wagnerian Pentecost Play, or: On the Emergence of a Pogrom from the Midst of a Christian Community.” Zemlinsky's avowed inspiration for the opera Der Traumgörge was Heinrich Heine's figure of Poor Peter, a young enthusiast and dreamer who is excluded from society. According to Weigel, the opera is a combination of fairy tale, social commentary and Pentecostal revival. She referred to the passage in Act 1 in which a character tells Görge the dreamer that his books should all be burned; this is reminiscent, Weigel pointed out, of the oft-cited and premonitory passage from another Heine work, “Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned, too.” In Act 2 the latent violence becomes explicit when the Christian village attacks the outcast Gertraud and torches her house. Although it is unlikely that Zemlinsky in 1906 would have consciously associated any of these fictional moments with the position and possible fate of Jews in Germany, they certainly carry prophetic force now.

The subject of premonition was tackled head on in the talk given by Michael Beckerman, of New York University, on “Haas's Charlatan and Other Forecasts of Disaster.” Correspondences between plot and subsequent historical events can, we learned, be found in such pre-Holocaust works as, among others, Kafka's The Penal Colony, Berg's Wozzeck, Janáček's House of the Dead and Hans Krása's Brundibár—this last-named work, in particular, seems explicitly to evoke the concentration camp experience, though it was originally composed in 1938. The tragicomic Charlatan by Pavel Haas (1899–1944), a kaleidoscopic mix of fairy tale, drama and balladic tableaux composed in 1934–1937, depicts the wandering life of a quack doctor named Pustrpalk. The shifting persona of this character over the course of the work makes it unclear whether he was meant to represent Jews or Nazis—or perhaps both. Premonitory events include botched medical experiments and operations, a crowd singing joyfully while a man is burned alive and a village that vanishes as a result of war. Musical examples that Beckerman played to illustrate these moments supported his thesis that Haas, though he could not have known how prophetic his opera's story would be, must have wanted the work to be heard on multiple levels. (Beckerman also slipped in an excerpt that could have been mistaken for a passage from the Haas work but was actually Martinů's Memorial to Lidice, written after the war to commemorate the Nazi destruction of that town; the aural resemblance was striking.) And yet, as Beckerman noted, it is not entirely clear what meaning Haas intended the opera to convey—how, for example, to interpret the fact that Pustrpalk sings “in the voice of Papageno.” The recovery of a work such as Charlatan would require wrestling with just such interpretive philosophical and political as well as straightforwardly artistic questions.

Those who have specialized in the area of musical, cultural, and political recovery come from a variety of backgrounds. Many have German roots or were born of parents who lived through the Nazi time; many, indeed, are German; exile studies began in Germany in the 1960s, at least a decade before they were taken up on this side of the Atlantic. I am glad that Albrecht Dümling mentioned the German music historian Fred K. Prieberg, who died on 28 March 2010, just days before the conference opened; Prieberg's pioneering Musik im NS-Staat (1982), the first attempt to address, objectively, the politics of music history in Germany in the years 1933–1945, remains a canonic reference work.

For German nationals, Wiedergutmachung is a shorthand term that encapsulates a nexus of complex motivations, including family or national guilt. But work on behalf of suppressed composers need not be just an act of political reversal or memorialization, and many of those who work on suppressed music have no personal connection to the time, the perpetrators or the victims. For them, the impetus may well have been a wow moment when they were bowled over by hearing an unfamiliar work. It was good to be reminded, during this conference, that the project of recovering suppressed voices will be re-energized every time one of those voices is recalled to life and again resounds in performance.

Posted July 1, 2010

The Dispersion of Hitler’s Exiles: European Musicians as Agents of Cultural Transformation

by Juliane Brand | Sep 1, 2009 | Articles & Essays

The Dispersion of Hitler's Exiles: European Musicians as Agents of Cultural Transformation

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

In the initial wave of forced expulsion from Germany after the Machtübernahme of 1933, the choice of safe haven for many was Vienna. Despite the possibility that Austria and Germany might eventually unify, Vienna offered the greatest equivalence of professional possibility. The rest of Europe, particularly Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Scandinavia, also experienced an immediate influx of Jewish and progressive refugees.

Those who suspected that National Socialism might threaten the entire European continent set their sights further afield, above all on England and the United States. Palestine, too, attracted a number of musician exiles, particularly after the energetic organizer Karel Salmon (1897–1974; originally Karel Salomon) arrived in Jerusalem in 1933 and the violinist Bronislaw Huberman (1882–1947) founded the Palestine Symphony Orchestra in Tel Aviv in 1936. The greater a musician's previous international exposure, the greater the chance that s/he had some choice about country of refuge. A conductor such as the Hungarian-born George Szell (1897–1970; originally György Széll), for example, who had toured internationally and made his debut in the United States in 1930, had no trouble relocating to that country in 1939, though at first he had to support himself partly by teaching. Increasingly however, those fleeing Europe had no choice of destination. After Nazi Germany's invasion of Austria – the so-called Anschluss, in March 1938 – and then again after the Kristallnacht pogroms of 9–10 November of that year, the angle of Jewish dispersion from Central Europe necessarily widened significantly, eventually encompassing not only the United Kingdom, North America and Palestine but also China, Japan, most of Central and South America, Australia, New Zealand and even some portions of Africa.

Exiles from the highly saturated (and competitive) cultural centers of Europe who came to localities with little or no receptivity for European culture could consider themselves fortunate if they found opportunities to practice their profession, and when they did, they usually had to start from scratch. Depending on an individual's viewpoint and attitude, this was either a burden or a challenge. Polish-born Josef Rosenstock (1895–1985), for example, who found refuge in Japan in 1936, relished the opportunity to introduce Western music in Tokyo; he and other foreigners in Japan, including the pianist Leo Sirota (1885–1965) and the violinist Leonid Kreutzer (1884–1953), were interned in the 1940s as “enemy aliens,” but Rosenstock was revered in the postwar period for having helped to make Japan's first professional orchestra, established in 1926 and today named the NHK Symphony Orchestra, an internationally recognized institution. Erich Eisner (1897–1956; also known as Erich Erck), who was given refuge in Bolivia, founded several performance organizations there, the most prominent of which – Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional – remains a vital institution to this day. In Brazil the German-born flutist, conductor and influential pedagogue Hans-Joachim Koellreutter (1915–2005), a student of Hermann Scherchen, promoted interest in international contemporary music and initiated the activities of a composer's organization, the Grupo Música Viva; he helped a number of European musicians find opportunities in Brazil, including the Berlin-born pianist and composer Henry Jolles (1902–65; originally Heinz Jolles), who eventually established a successful teaching career at the Escola Livre de Música in São Paulo. Among the exiles who had a profound impact on Australia – a country that most exiles probably regarded as virtually a cultural tabula rasa – was the German-born Hermann Schildberger (1899–1974), who had been one of the cofounders in Berlin of the Nazi-sanctioned Kulturbund Deutscher Juden (later the Jüdischer Kulturbund). In exile, Schildberger was responsible for establishing a number of choruses and orchestras in the Melbourne area; he headed the National Theatre Opera School from 1949 to 1971, as well as conducting the State Service Concert Orchestra from 1950 to 1971, and in 1970 he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to Australian music.

In Canada, the Austrian-born musicologist and composer Arnold Walter (1902–73) was one of the founders of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music; the Viennese harpsichordist Greta Kraus (1907–98), a pupil of Heinrich Schenker, was one of the country's influential early music pioneers; Frankfurt-born Herman Geiger-Torel (1907–76; originally Hermann Geiger) and Moravian-born Nicholas Goldschmidt (1908–2004) laid the groundwork for what is now the Canadian Opera Company; and the Karlsruhe native Walter Homburger (b. 1924) became one of Canada's leading music administrators and impresarios. Other émigrés from Nazi-controlled Europe also immeasurably enriched the country's musical life.

Countries with European-oriented musical institutions in place included Argentina, where the Teatro Colón offered opportunities to such European musicians as the conductors Georg Pauly (1883–1950; originally Georg Plaut), Erich Kleiber (1890–1956), Fritz Busch (1890-1951) and Thomas Mayer (1907–2002). Argentina also welcomed jazz musicians such as Leon Golzman (better known as Dajos Béla; 1897–1978), Efim Schachmeister (1894–1944) and Samuel Baskind (also known as Sam Baskini; 1890–unknown). Shanghai, too, which provided safe haven to thousands, thanks first to the enlightened Chinese consul general in Vienna, Dr. Feng Shan Ho, and subsequently to the Japanese policy of indifference to Nazi racial agendas, had a number of institutions in place, foremost among them the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra and Guoli Shanghai Yinyue Zhuanke Xuexiao (today, the Shanghai Conservatory of Music). Musicians who spent their first years of exile in Shanghai included the Berlin-born violinist Wolfgang Fraenkel (1897–1983), who taught theory and composition and was a seminal influence on several dozen Chinese students, including the composers Ding Shande (1911–1995) and Sang Tong (b. 1923) and the prominent conductor Li Delun (1917-2001). Refuge was also available in other parts of China, including Nanjing, Harbin and even Inner Mongolia, where the Berlin-born violinist Helmut Stern (b. 1928) spent several years.

Above all, of course, England and the United States provided familiar institutional and cultural opportunities for exiled musicians. During the post-World War I era, cultural exchange among continental Europe, England and the United States had flourished, thanks in part to the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (International Society for Contemporary Music) but also as a result of the English and American tradition of completing one's musical training in Vienna, Berlin or Paris. The Viennese composer Karl Weigl (1881–1949), for example, found his foreign students to be immeasurably helpful to him when he was forced into exile. A number of refugee aid organizations, including the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (originally Council for Assisting Refugee Academics), administered by Tess Simpson, assisted several thousand artists and intellectuals to obtain positions in the United Kingdom between 1933 and 1939. But England's borders gradually closed, and after 1940 many immigrants already legally in the country were either imprisoned in internment camps or deported to Australia and Canada. Among conductors who found refuge in England was Karl Rankl (1898–1968), who arrived in London three weeks before war broke out and in 1946 became music director of the newly reopened Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. Erwin Stein (1885–1958) and Alfred Kalmus (1889–1972), both from Vienna, and Leipzig-born Richard Schauer (1892–1952) were among those who continued their careers in music publishing. Notable performers who left their mark on England include the Amadeus Quartet members Norbert Brainin (1923–2005) and Peter Schidlof (1922–87), both from Vienna, and Munich-born Siegmund Nissel (1922–2008), who met in the internment camp on the Isle of Man. Composers who succeeded in relocating to England include Hans Gál (1890–1987), who taught for many years at the University of Edinburgh, and Berthold Goldschmidt (1903–96), who after early struggles eventually found a job with the BBC and late in life again came into his own as a composer. The BBC, in offering jobs to a number of other Continental exiles – among them the brilliant critic and thinker Hans Keller (1919–85) and the multifaceted writer and performer Mosco Carner (1904–85), both from Vienna, and the Berlin-born composer and conductor Walter Goehr (1903–60) – became an important voice in shaping contemporary British musical life.

Immigration to the United States, which was still recovering from a deep economic depression, was much more difficult than the size of the country seemed to suggest to the thousands of refugees who hoped to settle there. Despite having initiated the multinational Evian Conference of 1938 to discuss the refugee situation, the Roosevelt administration decided to keep the number of Austrian and German immigrants allowed into the United States at their combined 1924 quota levels, and U.S. consuls were ordered to keep the number of visas from German territory well below even that figure.

Those who succeeded in legally entering the United States were dispersed throughout the country, their destinations usually determined by a serendipitous combination of luck and connections. A first job by no means guaranteed stability; most exiles needed to enter the job market several times during their first ten or more years in the country. They usually assimilated quickly into American society, at the same time taking comfort, as new immigrants have always done, from local communities of fellow immigrants, with whom they could speak their mother tongue and share experiences. Yet these exile communities often reflected the same political and ideological splits that had divided individuals in Europe. Moreover, exiles had to compete for jobs not only with Americans but also with each other.

Then as now, Europeans believed in the connection between scholarship and performance, and performers were often composers as well. Thus most exiles with musical training were able to reorient their professional activities according to need – and flexibility was certainly one of the main requirements for a successful transition. The Moravian-born violinist, pedagogue and composer Hugo Kauder (1888–1972) joined the faculty of The Music House, Herman de Grab's private music school in New York, where he also conducted a student chorus; the writer and conductor Paul Bekker (1882–1937), who had been active as the Wiesbaden Opera's artistic director, returned to his earlier career as a music critic; the Polish-born composer and conductor (1909–94) accompanied such artists as Lauritz Melchior and worked for both the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera as rehearsal pianist, vocal coach and conductor. Even composers who were able to continue their teaching careers usually found that their new students' prior training demanded a revised approach.

The largest and most diverse collection of exiled musicians settled in the Northeast, where the high density of schools and cultural organizations offered a range of job possibilities. Among conductors who found performance opportunities in New York City were Cologne-born William (originally Hans Wilhelm) Steinberg (1899–1978), who led a number of NBC Symphony Orchestra concerts before going on to become conductor of the Pittsburgh and Boston symphony orchestras, and Vienna-born Fritz Stiedry (1883–1968), who in 1937 had the good fortune to be Ira Hirschmann's choice of director for his newly founded New Friends of Music Chamber Orchestra; from 1945 on he conducted principally for New York's Metropolitan Opera and Chicago's Lyric Opera. Among university-trained musicians who settled in the Northeast were Alfred Einstein (1880-1952), who taught at Smith College until retiring in 1950, when he moved to the West Coast, and the Bach scholar Hans T. David (1902–67), who initially found a job with Carleton Sprague Smith, head of the New York Public Library's music division. Smith worked with refugee aid organizations to find temporary work for other exiles as well, including the pioneering musicologist Curt Sachs (1881–1959), who also taught at New York and Columbia universities, and Smith's former teacher Weigl, who, over the course of his eleven years in exile, held a succession of short-term teaching positions at such institutions as the Hartt School of Music in Connecticut, the New York YMCA, Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, Brooklyn College and Boston Conservatory. Other teachers of note in the Northeast included the Hamburg-born Alfred Mann (1917–2006), for decades an influential figure at both Rutgers University and the Eastman School of Music; and the composer Karol Rathaus (1895–1954), who, after having spent his first four exile years in London, found a position at New York's Queens College in 1940, only three years after its founding.

At Yale University, Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) taught composition from 1940 to 1953; his students there included Lukas Foss, Norman Dello Joio, Mel Powell, Harold Shapero, Hans Otte and Ruth Schonthal. Hindemith was also among those who initiated interest in the performance of medieval and renaissance music. The violinist Adolf Busch (1891–1952), who settled in Vermont, became cofounder, in 1951 – along with his son-in-law, the pianist Rudolf Serkin (1903–91), and their friend, the flutist Marcel Moyse (1889–1984) – of the Marlboro School of Music and the annual Marlboro Festival; all were refugees from Europe. Serkin was hired to teach at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, of which he eventually became director, and whose faculty included the newly arrived cellist Emanuel Feuermann (1902–42). Philadelphia also had the Settlement Music School, led for forty years by the Dutch-born Johann Grolle, who provided short-term employment to a number of newcomers.

Black Mountain College, in North Carolina, likewise proved to be a magnet for exiles. From its founding, in 1933, the school – which gave the Bauhaus artists Josef and Anni Albers their first refuge – incorporated European thinking into its progressive teaching agendas. Musicians hired by the school included the violinist Rudolf Kolisch (1896–1978); the musicologist and conductor Heinrich Jalowetz (1882–1946), who remained at the school until his death; the composer Charlotte Schlesinger (1909–76), who went on to teach for many years at the Wilson School of Music in Yakima, Washington; and the musicologist Edward E. Lowinsky (1908–85), who subsequently taught at Queens College, the University of California in Berkeley and, after 1961, the University of Chicago.

Exiles who came to the Midwest included the Hungarian-born violist and composer Marcel Dick (1898–1991), one of the founding members of the Kolisch Quartet; after initial stints in New York and Detroit he became principal violist of the Cleveland Orchestra in 1943, and after 1949 he taught theory and composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Kenyon College and Western Reserve (now Case Western Reserve) University. Indiana also attracted a number of exiles, among them the musicologist Paul Nettl (1889-1972), who exerted a profound influence during his long career at the Indiana University School of Music. Among musicians who found academic positions in the Chicago area were Siegmund Levarie (b. 1914), who taught at the University of Chicago for most of his professional life, and Hans Tischler (b. 1915), who was at Roosevelt University from 1947 to 1965 before settling into an even longer career at Indiana University. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under its longtime German-born conductor Frederick Stock, also provided a number of émigré musicians with jobs.

On the West Coast, the greatest chances for a musical career were to be found in Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area. The Viennese conductor Kurt Adler (1905–88), after starting his exile as an assistant chorus director at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, eventually went on to serve as general director of the San Francisco Opera from 1953 to 1981. The Hamburg-born composer Bernhard Abramowitsch (1906–86), after finding first refuge in Portland, Oregon, likewise moved to the Bay Area, where his students included David Del Tredici, Leon Kirchner and Leonard Rosenman. Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), who fled from occupied Paris in 1940, found a position waiting for him at Mills College, in Oakland, which he retained until 1971; Dave Brubeck, Steve Reich and Burt Bacharach were among his students there.

The community of exiles in Southern California may be the best-documented and, thanks to their connection with the Hollywood studios, most glamorous group of émigrés. Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957), Kurt Weill (1900–50), Walter Jurmann (1903–71) and Bronsilaw Kaper (1902–83) had paved the way in the film studios for later exiled arrivals such as Franz Waxman (1906–67; originally Franz Wachsmann) and the versatile Frederick Hollander (1896–1976; originally Friedrich Hollaender). The Italian-Jewish émigré Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895–1968) also wrote film scores after he settled in the Los Angeles area, as did, part-time, the two Vienna-born composers Ernst Toch (1887–1964) and Eric Zeisl (1905–59). But Hollywood remained closed to most “serious” composers. Most of the European musicians who came to Southern California – exiled “into Paradise,” as the experience has often been described – found that their opportunities lay primarily in the areas of performance and teaching. The conductor Harold Byrns (originally Hans Bernstein; 1903–77), who also worked for the studios and Broadway, founded the Harold Byrns Chamber Orchestra and later the Los Angeles Chamber Symphony. The conductor Otto Klemperer (1885–1973) began his American career as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1933 to 1939. The pianist Jakob Gimpel (1906–89) found work concertizing and recording for the studios; like many others he was not able to win the level of acclaim he had enjoyed in Europe, and after the war he returned often to perform in Europe, as well as becoming an influential teacher at California State University at Northridge. The harpsichordist Alice Ehlers (1887–1981) was more successful in continuing her performing career; she was also, like Hindemith, an important proselytizer for early music, and for many years she taught at the University of Southern California (USC), where she had a large following of students. USC's faculty from the 1930s on also included, in the composition and theory department, the Viennese composers Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), Ernst Kanitz (1894–1978) and Toch, as well as Hamburg-born Ingolf Dahl (1912–70). Ernst Krenek (1900–91), who survived his first years of U.S. exile by teaching at schools in the East and Midwest, moved to Southern California hoping to be able to live as a professional composer, but he too was constrained for many years to rely on such teaching opportunities as he could find, including at Los Angeles State College and the Southern California School of Music and Art.

Among the various strands of tradition, imported influence and spontaneous change that have often created national cultural transformations, surely one of the most easily traced is that which was created by the worldwide dispersion of European exiles in the mid- twentieth century. The life stories of the musicians briefly spotlighted here reflect some of the ways in which exiled Europeans contributed to the cultures of the countries that took them in. This is not to say that the process was straightforward: just as exiles regarded assimilation with an ambivalence that was not infrequently tinged with convictions of cultural superiority, so the welcome extended to newcomers was often less than wholehearted. Yet the effect of this interaction was unarguably one of mutual enrichment, the legacy of which continues to this day.