Music, Conscience, Accountability and the Third Reich

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

Music and Virtue

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

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

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

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

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Music and Principle

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

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

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

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

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

Music and Opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Musical Casualties

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Simon Wynberg, December 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

Article revised: October 19, 2011

Something a Little Different

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

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

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

Posted July 1, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted May 6, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

Part I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End Part I

Posted March 2011