by Philippe Olivier | Dec 1, 2009 | Articles & Essays
When the Second World War began, on September 1, 1939, French musicians who were practicing or non-practicing Jews – conductors, instrumentalists, singers and composers – felt even more anxiety than did their compatriots who belonged to other religions. Since 1933 they had been aware of the persecutions being carried out in Germany, and later in Austria, against members of the faith of Abraham and Moses. These French Jewish artists belonged to several generations; they were active in education, opera, chamber music, orchestras and liturgical music – since some of them were cantors in synagogues. Many of them worked in the area of light music – cabarets, restaurants, bars in the principal hotels, revues at the Folies-Bergère and popular song – or in the movies. Furthermore, all of them had to face the emigration of their fellow Jews who had fled to France from Germany or Austria after Hitler’s accession to power and the Anschluss; these people were the successors of Jewish musicians who had arrived in France during the 1920s from Hungary, Poland and Romania. All of them understood, however, that the universe that Stefan Zweig had described in Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday) – one of his most lucid works – was about to disappear forever.
This essay will not deal exhaustively with the subject, given its vast proportions. Furthermore, this task is currently limited by the fact that the French authorities still do not allow researchers to examine all of the archives related to what is called the “Vichy” period. This term refers to the collaborationist government headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain from July 1940 to August 1944. The memory of this regime, which was subservient to Nazi Germany and which, in particular, installed the celebrated pianist Alfred Cortot (1877-1962) as president of its Committee for the Professional Organization of Music, 1remains, in part, a taboo in France even in 2009. It is also true that the activities of cultural historians concerned with that period are not facilitated by the public authorities – sixty-four years after the end of the Second World War. Amaury du Closel, 2a pioneer in this area, and the members of his Forum Voix étouffées (Stifled Voices; FVE) have sometimes experienced this. Thus the very existence of the FVE is made possible thanks to subsidies that come mainly – and this is highly significant – from the European Union and the Austrian Federal Republic.
The gradual disappearance of the last witnesses of that sinister period does not help researchers in their work. I recall the reticence expressed, during the 1980s, by Irène Aïtoff (1904-2006) and Gabriel Dussurget (1904-96) when I repeatedly attempted to discuss the events that they had lived through between 1939 and 1944. Yet Aïtoff, a pianist, had been not only Charles Munch’s associate and Yvette Guilbert’s accompanist: she had helped the singer Marya Freund (1876-1966), who had given the French premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, to be hidden in a secure place after having escaped from the Gestapo’s claws. Dussurget, who became artistic director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 1947, was one of the most highly placed members of the French musical elite during the dark years; Olivier Messiaen wrote part of his Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus on Dussurget’s piano, and the latter had connections with Jacques Rouché, director of the Paris Opéra, and was close to Francis Poulenc. But he did not like to talk about the period of the Occupation. Yet once Paris had been liberated from the Nazis, he was made a member of the committee that “purged” musicians who had collaborated with the Propaganda-Staffel and with one of its branches, the German Institute of Paris. The duty of this organization had been to arrange the visits of Herbert von Karajan, Clemens Krauss, Wilhelm Kempff, Elly Ney and the Berlin Philharmonic in the France that the writer Vercors evoked throughout Le Silence de la Mer.
Another peculiarity regarding the subject of documentation is related to the anti-German attitudes demonstrated by certain observers decades after the war’s end. Thus Olivier Merlin (1907-2005), a journalist for the daily newspaper Le Monde, refused to deal at any point in his book, L’Opéra de Paris, with the history of that institution during its four years under the German jackboot. In describing the fate of singers who were part of the Opéra’s ensemble, he wrote: “Many of them accepted only reluctantly to have contact with the military Siegfrieds who professed eternal German feeling for music.” 3 The impossibility of expressing themselves also marked numerous Jewish victims of Vichy’s collaborationist policies. Violette Jacquet-Silberstein, one of the last survivors of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra conducted by Alma Rosé (1906-44), is now eighty-four years old; she regrets “a heavy silence that has lasted too long.” 4 Yet it was broken, as long ago as 1948, by the publication of Musiques d’un autre monde – the account of the concentration camp experiences of Simon Laks (1901-83), who conducted one of the Auschwitz complex’s orchestras. 5 This Polish-born composer later became a French citizen. It is also to be deplored that the notebooks written in those dark years by Max Deutsch (1892-1982), one of Schoenberg’s last European pupils, are not yet accessible to the public at large. Among other things, we still do not know the final fate of the clarinetist Henri Akoka, one of the original interpreters of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, performed in a camp at Görlitz on January 15, 1941. Finally, we are still awaiting statistics that clearly indicate the professions of the adults among the 75,000 deported French Jews, 6 therefore also of the professional musicians among them.
A definition in terms is necessary: by professional French Jewish musicians we mean those individuals who were citizens of Victor Hugo’s native land of as of September 1, 1939. Within the limits of this study it is not possible to take into systematic consideration those artists who had moved to France and had not left it, such as the Lithuanian-born pianist Vlado Perlemuter (1904-2002), a worthy specialist in the works of Maurice Ravel, or the composers Alexandre Tansman (1897-1986) and Wolf Simoni (1907-91). Tansman had arrived during the 1920s from a working-class Poland described by the Yiddish-speaking writer Isroel Rabon in his novel, Di Gas. As for Wolf Simoni, who later took the name of Louis Saguer: he had fled from Nazi Germany, and he became a French citizen in 1947. It was not the same for Hanns Eisler, Schoenberg or Kurt Weill, who were refugees in Paris in 1933. The fate of the refugees is well known: they were forbidden to exercise any professional activities whatsoever; they could not become members of the S.A.C.E.M. (Association of authors, composers and music publishers), thus they also could not receive royalties from performances of their works; and, once the armistice had been signed between Pétain’s French nation 7 and the Reich’s representatives, they had to live in the Milles internment camps near Aix-en-Provence, Pithiviers or Beaune-la-Rolande. This last measure meant, in effect, that these unfortunate people would be delivered to Nazi Germany.
The guarantees that had been included in the law regarding the emancipation of the Jews, put into effect by the French Constituent Assembly in September 1791, 8 no longer existed for French Jews. Having been so naïve as to believe that France carried the torch of enlightenment among the nations, they now saw themselves basically grouped together with their foreign or stateless fellow Jews. Regardless of whether they were of Alsatian or German origin or had established themselves in one or another of France’s North African départements, they became victims of a state of mind that had gradually been deployed over several decades: the bogey-man of a Jewish-Communist conspiracy that had brought about the Front Populaire; virulent anti-Semitism represented by the Dreyfus Affair and stirred up by La Croix, the Catholic daily newspaper; anguished nationalism that viewed the Jews as agents of a concerted campaign to destroy French culture. Thus the École Normale de Musique that Cortot had founded in Paris in 1919 was conceived as a weapon meant to weaken the prestige of superior Germanic musical instruction, which was feared to have been “infested with Jewish influence.” 9 As to the radical modernism of a Hindemith or of the Second Viennese School – it was discredited by the French academic milieu, which saw in it the supposedly pernicious work of the Jewish avant-garde. The first Paris performance of Pierrot Lunaire, in 1922, aroused the indignation of nationalist and conservative circles, whose representatives then dusted off a vocabulary that had been developed during the last quarter of the 19th century.
Let us consider, for instance, the diatribes of Vincent d’Indy (1851-1931), an assiduous deprecator of Meyerbeer, Halévy and Offenbach and a notorious anti-Dreyfus man, who was convinced that French taste had been “swallowed up by Jewish opera.” 10 Throughout Siegfried et le Limousin (published in 1922), by the writer and German scholar Jean Giraudoux, there is a sculptress who was incapable, like “most French people, [of] recognizing Jews” 11 by their noses! When the English scholar Pierre Messiaen – father of the composer of the Turangalîla-Symphonie – described his years as a teacher at Paris’s Lycée Charlemagne before the Second World War, he picked on his former Jewish students because they had, he said, a “hybrid, vulgar, Semitic look.” 12 The times were ripe for the spreading of anti-Semitic rumors; thus it was said that Erik Satie and Maurice Ravel were Jews. Ravel’s name even appeared in the Dictionary of Jews in Music, by Theo Stengel and Herbert Gerick, published in Germany in 1940. Florent Schmitt (1870-1958), one of the best-known figures in Parisian musical life, caused a xenophobic scandal during a concert of Kurt Weill’s music given at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on November 26, 1933: three days later, Lotte Lenya wrote to her husband: “Florent Schmitt stood up and shouted, ‘Heil Hitler! Enough of this music by the German émigrés!’” 13 This incident illustrates the general atmosphere between 1933 and 1939. Professional French Jewish musicians felt increasingly ill at ease, although some of them used chastising irony toward their refugee colleagues from Central Europe. In his book Exile, the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger describes the situation, showing the cynicism of part of the French aristocracy, represented by one Léa de Chassefierre, whose sexual appetite for the Third Reich’s diplomats earned her the nickname of “Notre-Dame-des-Nazis.” 14
Nevertheless, certain French musicians of Jewish origin were ingenuous enough to believe that they would not be persecuted if Hitler decided to invade their country. For a long time, they did not understand at all their unfavorable situation with respect to the mysterious criteria that then as now ruled Parisian and French musical life. Worse still, the novelist and journalist Irène Nemirovsky (1903-42) oppressed her brothers and sisters in misery throughout her writings. Still, they represented less than 1% of the profession, 15 as opposed to approximately 1.5% in Germany before the election that brought the National Socialist Party to power on January 30, 1933. The great French Jewish conductors, soloists and singers were a minority within a minority, even if you think of Manuel Rosenthal (1904-2003), who gave first performances in France of music by Bartók and Prokofiev, or the tenor Edouard Kriff (1905-66), a member of the Paris Opéra celebrated for his interpretation of Saint-Saëns’s Samson and of Lohengrin and Siegfried. On the other hand, Jews seem to have been strongly represented in the world of vaudeville and film music.
With respect to composers of so-called “serious” music, two names stand out – those of Paul Dukas (1865-1935), who wrote the symphonic poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), an international celebrity in the field of contemporary creativity. The events that followed the Nazi invasion of France obviously concerned the composer of Le Boeuf sur le Toit: Milhaud’s apartment in Paris’s Boulevard de Clichy and his home in Aix-en-Provence were pillaged; before the Liberation, some twenty members of his family were arrested and assassinated by Hitler’s bootlickers. In July 1940, Milhaud and his wife fled to the United States, where they were welcomed by Lotte Lenya and Kurt Weill, and they lived there in America until 1947. It was forbidden to play so-called “degenerate” music in the occupied zone. Thus, in January 1942 Charles Munch was denied the right to conduct Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire de Paris. This did not stop German soldiers at the Moulin Rouge from delighting in the famous French can-can of Jakob Eberst, alias Jacques Offenbach, son of a cantor in a German synagogue, nor did it stop the Casino de Vichy from performing Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène on July 5 and 16, 1942! And his opera Tales of Hoffmann was given three times during the same summer season. Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947) saw his Ciboulette listed in the same venue on July 9, 1942. This Venezuelan-born Jew, who was also a noted homosexual and confirmed man of the world, was forced to go into hiding. But it seems that the Germans’ decrees were not carried out to the letter in the occupied zone.
For their part, Alfred Cortot and his assistants set up a Committee for the professional organization of music. It was in fact noteworthy for its complete exclusion of Jews from the profession; thus it was modeled after the Reichsmusikkammer (RMK) that had been created in Berlin at the end of 1933. In January 1943, Cortot sent to Abel Bonnard, who was then Minister of National Education in the Laval government, a translated summary of the official German text that the RMK had instituted a decade earlier. This plan by a virtuoso who had become a high-ranking functionary not only denied the Rights of Man: it condemned to the most abject misery people who had already been stricken by the promulgation of the first Jewish Statute, in 1940. Beginning in 1942, following the decisions made at the Wannsee Conference, their lives were hanging by a thread; that meeting, with its catastrophic consequences, had taken place near Berlin on January 20. Ten months later, the Germans invaded the free zone 17 and a pitiless manhunt began. Arrests and raids became more and more frequent. In Paris, beginning with the raid of the Winter Cycling Arena on July 16 and 17, 1942, nearly 13,000 people were deprived of their freedom. The collaborationist press – of which the ringleader was the writer Robert Brasillach – saw hidden Jews everywhere. It was suspected that the popular singer Charles Trénet’s real name was Netter. French Jews, whether or not they were professional musicians, were tracked down. Eugène Adler (1890-1942?), cantor at the synagogue of Sarreguemines – a small town in the Moselle département, was questioned at Jarnac, where he and his family had hidden; he reached Auschwitz on November 6, 1942, on Convoy No. 42, and perished there, probably upon arrival.
Jewish artists joined the ranks of the Resistance. The aforementioned opera singer Edouard Kriff, who had left Marseilles following the German raids in the Vieux-Panier quarter, fled from the train that was heading toward the extermination camps and joined up with the snipers and partisans operating in the Ardèche. As for Max Deutsch, his combative streak (he had been active during the First World War, in the Foreign Legion and during the Spanish Civil War) led him to take part in Resistance fighting in central France. He “will bear witness, on November 24, 1944, in favor of the prefect of Corrèze who had protected him […] from the denunciations of which he had been the victim on several occasions.” 18 Some interpretive and creative artists who later became internationally famous went into hiding, in town or country, without taking part in offensive actions. The harpist Lily Laskine (1893-1988) was hidden together with the pianists Clara Haskil (1895-1960), Youra Guller (1895-1981) and Monique Haas (1909-87) in the magnificent residence of Countess Lily Pastré at Montredon, near Marseilles. Although Guller’s history during that period was recently brought to the attention of the general public thanks to the writer Dominique Fernandez, 19 this was not the case for a long time with respect to Monique Haas. “The war interrupted her musical activities”: this is the mysterious formula applied to the subject by Alain Pâris, a writer on musical matters. 20
The composer and conductor René Leibowitz (1913-72) – one of the young Pierre Boulez’s teachers – fled toward the southern zone during the summer of 1940. He returned to Paris at the end of 1943 and lived there completely illegally, like some of his fellow Jews from Berlin and Warsaw. He was concealed at the time – thanks to the writer Georges Bataille and the painter Louis Balthus – not far from the attic in the Rue des Grands-Augustins in which Pablo Picasso received the German officer Ernst Jünger, author of a Journal that would one day delight President François Mitterand. This journal demonstrates the hateful game played by an unpatriotic, depraved sector of Parisian society in its relations with the occupying Nazis. René Leibowitz did not leave this hiding place until the Liberation of Paris, which took place from August 19 to 25, 1944, thanks to the Allied forces assisted by the Resistance. He then organized a rebroadcast by Radio-Paris – freed at last from the Nazis’ grip – of Arnold Schoenberg’s Quintet for Winds, Op. 26. His great joy was shared by true democrats and other survivors who belonged to the Jewish milieu, including members of several generations. Worthy of mention are artists who had been members of the Paris Opéra, such as the singing coach Maurice Franck, whose life had been saved by Germaine Lubin (1890-1979), a Wagnerian soprano lacking in political sense to such an extent that she performed at Bayreuth in 1939 and was the mistress of a German officer, Hans-Joachim Lange. 21 In 1940, she was Mélisande in Debussy’s opera during performances given at the Opéra-Comique that later became legendary. Irène Joachim later joined the French Communist Party.
Some thirty Jews belonged to the Paris Opéra at the beginning of the war; they constituted about 8% of the institution’s artistic team. The orchestra included three Jewish players: the associate principal cello, Alfred-Mathieu Barraine; the principal double-bass, Ernest Weiller; and the second harp, Isaac Cauderer. 22 It would be very useful if a detailed study of their fates were one day undertaken. By way of comparison, in 1933 four members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra were of the same faith. 23 What happened at the beginning of the latter institution’s 1935-36 season is well known: the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated.
The composer Henri Dutilleux, who was a choral coach at the Paris Opéra in 1940, recalled the wartime period with deep emotion: “Jewish artists were fired in the fall of 1940.” 24 Nevertheless, the Opéra’s general manager, Jacques, Rouché, tried to soften their fate temporarily: “He did his best to see that those who lost their jobs received severance pay and at the time of the Liberation were reimbursed for lost income.” 25 If they were still alive! Be that as it may, Jacques Rouché supported these unfortunate people until December 1942 and kept track of their seniority. After that, they were removed from the Opéra’s administrative control.
The Paris Conservatoire, another of the most prestigious public institutions, suffered through equally painful episodes. In October 1940 the first Jewish Statute imposed the same quota on it as on all other institutions of higher education. Two years later, the Conservatoire numbered only three Jewish professors 26 – André Bloch, the aforementioned Maurice Franck and the famous piano pedagogue Lazare Lévy (1882-1964) – out of a 75-member faculty – and twenty Jews among the 580 students. Moreover, fifteen future professional musicians enrolled at the Conservatoire were considered partly Jewish according to the discriminatory legislation that then obtained. The institution’s director, Claude Delvincourt (1888-1954), joined the Resistance in September 1942. Jules Boucherit (1877-1962), one of the most respected violin professors at the Conservatoire, who taught Ginette Neveu and Christian Ferras, was revolted by the fate of his Jewish students. He was scandalized by the Second Statute and the deportations, and at that point he decided to hide five of these aspiring violinists.
“Under the pretext of ill health, and in agreement with the administrative director, [Jules Boucherit] moved his courses to a villa at Bourron-Marlotte, very near Fontainebleau. This house had been made available to him by […] the pianist Magda Tagliaferro, who had been forced to flee to South America.” 27 Those hidden at Bourron-Marlotte were Devi Ehrli, a future professor at Paris’ École Normale de Musique; Ivry Gitlis; Charles Cyroulnik; Denise Soriano (1916-2003); and Michel Schwalbe, who later became Herbert von Karajan’s concertmaster in the Berlin Philharmonic. None of these young artists was arrested, nor was their protector. At the very time when the cellist Pierre Fournier (1906-86) was regaling his Nazi listeners with Bach’s Suites; when troops of the Wehrmacht were applauding their country’s opera ensembles and great orchestras on tour in occupied France; when Radio-Paris, Radio-Vichy and the regional networks of Lyon, Toulouse or Marseilles were broadcasting endless hateful propaganda; and when hundreds of thousands of deported Jews were dying at Treblinka or Sobibor, these future high-level professional musicians were learning their art and hoping for peace. This was possible thanks to the complicity of the people of Bourron-Marlotte, in spite of difficulties such as those encountered by Denise Soriano before her arrival there: she had been denounced as a Jewess.
On February 28, 1993, Jules Boucherit was posthumously proclaimed “Righteous among the Nations” at a ceremony organized by the Yad Vashem Institute of Jerusalem. His memory is blessed not only by the world’s Jews, citizens of the Jewish state, promoters of Jewish-Christian friendship and all believers in democracy: it also does honor to France forever, and the light that it spreads pushes back into the shadows of opprobrium and damnation the evil beings who, from 1940 to 1944, contributed to discrimination against and marginalization and physical liquidation of the children of Israel, whatever their social status or their profession.
Philippe Olivier (b. 1952) is associate musicologist of Forum Voix étouffées, as well as guest professor at the Institut Elie Wiesel in Paris, the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Rostock. He has published some twenty books in France and Germany; in the latter, his Der Ring des Nibelungen in Bayreuth von den Anfüngen bis heute (Schott, 2007) earned the praise of Marcel Reich-Ranicki in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He has won many French and foreign awards and has written documentaries for Arte and for Télévision Suisse Romande.
Posted December 1, 2009
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by Albrecht Dümling | Oct 31, 2009 | Articles & Essays
Germany under the Nazis was deprived of a great number of talented artists who had to leave their country as a consequence of restrictions and persecution.
1But a majority of German musicians had rather different experiences. For them, Hitler's coming to power offered new opportunities and fulfilled some of their old dreams. The idea of a central organization of all German musicians, an office for music, was one such dream. After Hitler's arrival as German chancellor, it took only a few months until a Reich Music Chamber was established, in November 1933. Richard Strauss was named its president, Wilhelm Furtwängler his deputy. These experienced men discovered that music received much more state support than under any former German government.
The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra is a good example. In the early 1930s it was in a desperate situation, with financial problems growing from year to year. When neither the German state nor the city of Berlin was able to give more support, Furtwängler contacted Joseph Goebbels. The new Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda promised to help, and he kept his promise, since Hitler regarded his coming to power as a cultural revolution and defined music as the most German art. Supported by the Third Reich, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra became a “Reich's Orchestra” and, at least economically, was in a safe haven.2One could also mention the situation of the Performing Rights organizations, which had been deeply divided before 1933. Goebbels decided that the rival organizations had to be united. Serious composers like Richard Strauss in the new Stagma (Staatlich genehmigte Gesellschaft zur Verwertung musikalischer Urheberrechte) now regained the executive power that they had lost in previous years.3No wonder that Strauss welcomed the new government with open arms! A majority of German musicians had similar experiences,4and this explains why many of them joined the Nazi Party. 5
After the war, the commissions responsible for denazification soon realized that party membership alone would not qualify someone as a Nazi.6On the other hand, far too many Germans then claimed to have been victims or even members of the Resistance. It proved to be extremely difficult to verify those confessions and reports. There was a bitter dispute between artists who had fled Germany and those who had stayed – between refugees on one side and non-refugees on the other. The first group tended to regard members of the second – like Furtwängler or Strauss – as supporters of the regime. On the contrary, artists who had not left their native country quite often claimed that they had actually suffered more under the dictatorship because they had been under constant threat of bombardment during the war and had lived in destroyed cities. Some of them declared that they had stayed in Germany in a state of “internal exile.”
The English-speaking world and Germany have somewhat different notions of Innere Emigration, or internal exile. In English-language publications, the term mainly describes forced special settlement.7In German-speaking countries, the term ”Internal Exile“ or “Inner Migration” is understood as the self-imposed isolation of artists who remained in their native country. This is the sense in which the term is widely accepted in studies of German literature.8In music history, however, the category remains largely unfamiliar – with one exception: Karl Amadeus Hartmann.9There was no official banning of his music; it was the composer himself who refused to allow any of his works to be performed in his native country.10His boycott of German concert halls was possible because only one of his compositions had been published. All the other works existed only as manuscripts, which gave the composer complete control over them. In his biography of Hartmann, Andrew McCredie used the term “internal exile” without any attempt to define the term. Even today, it is difficult to tell exactly what it means. Is this term, which Thomas Mann used as early as 1933, valid only for the first years after Hitler's accession to power, as musicologist Ludwig Holtmeier suggests?11
Other composers, key figures in German musical life before 1933, equally distant from the regime, are rarely mentioned in histories of music in the 1930s and still today are largely ignored. Walter Braunfels (1882-1954) had been one of Germany's most successful composers, but in 1933 he was labeled a “half-Jew” 12(his father was Jewish), and in 1934 – like Schoenberg and Schreker – he lost his membership in the Prussian Academy of Arts in spite of his German military service during the First World War.13In addition, in March 1934 Braunfels was dismissed as professor of composition and co-director of the State Academy of Music in Cologne. The fact that he had become a Catholic, or that his musical style was rather traditional, were to no avail. The atmosphere in Germany, mixed with a mood of terror and angst, was such that no musician or concert organizer dared to put a work by a Jew or even a so-called “half-Jew” like Braunfels on a concert program.14
Braunfels had for awhile considered leaving Germany; he later explained why he had remained: “First of all, I believed that through my existence I was a stone in the dam that had to be built against the evil spirit that threatened to destroy everything; but also, I had the feeling that by leaving my native country I would lose the most important root of my creativity.” A so-called “privileged mixed marriage” (his wife was “Aryan”) gave Braunfels some protection, at least until the autumn of 1944. He and his family moved from Cologne to a village on Lake Constance, near the Swiss border, where the composer lived a quiet, secluded life. For him, the years of internal exile were the most productive period of his life. In December 1944, after having written three operas and two string quartets, he began his String Quintet, Op. 63, which, in its expressive chromaticism, reflects the bitter feelings of the time.
Heinz Tiessen (1887-1971), a professor of composition at the Berlin State Academy of Music, was not Jewish, but he was a modernist composer who abhorred National Socialism. Since he had been closely linked with Leo Kestenberg and the Social Democratic party, from 1933 onwards his music was not performed; consequently, his income from performance rights went down to almost nothing – as early as 1933 his income was reduced to only one percent of what it had formerly been.15When, in 1935, the National Socialist Kulturgemeinde organization published a list of so-called ”cultural Bolshevists,” Tiessen figured in it.16On the other hand, like Paul Hindemith, Tiessen was able to remain a professor at the Berlin Hochschule. Looking back, in 1963, on his life during the Third Reich, the composer explained: “In order to stay alive, I had to simulate being dead.”17He was forced to be as unobtrusive as possible. Tiessen's poor financial situation forced him to raise a loan and even to pawn his piano,18 and his productivity during those years nearly ceased – unlike that of Braunfels.
Walter Braunfels and Heinz Tiessen are examples of composers, who – although they remained in Germany during the Third Reich – did not want to support a state that at first glance had seemed quite attractive to musicians. They evaded official engagements in order not be used in the propaganda machine installed by Joseph Goebbels. This attitude could be called Internal Exile. There is no clear-cut catalogue of criteria for internal exiles. If all civil servants (including professors at state-subsidized institutions like the Berlin Hochschule) are to be seen as supporters of the Third Reich, then Tiessen cannot figure in the Internal Exile group. More significant, perhaps, is the number of public performances they enjoyed. Unlike the unique case of Hartmann, who was able to boycott the Third Reich, Braunfels and Tiessen were boycotted by the regime.
Individual cases have to be checked carefully. For most musicians who, unlike Braunfels and Hartmann, were not financially independent, a compromise survival strategy had to be found. Sometimes there was only a thin line between such a compromise and collaboration, or else an artist led a double life, as was the case with Shostakovich in the Soviet Union. Beyond Braunfels and Tiessen, other cases need to be investigated – for instance, those of Max Butting, Eduard Erdmann, Wolfgang Jacobi, Robert Kahn, Heinrich Kaminski, Karl Klingler, Walter Kollo and Heinz Schubert. Some research has already been done on Philipp Jarnach,19 Ernst Pepping,20 Günter Raphael,21Peter Schacht 22 and Hanning Schröder.23Music history is not a black and white painting. There are different colors, transition areas and gray zones as well. Instead of generalizing, it would be advisable to take a closer look at individual fates.
After the war, composers like Braunfels, Erdmann, Jarnach and Tiessen suffered from the fact that they had remained in Germany during the Third Reich, and this has contributed to their continuing neglect. For a long time, internal exile artists either were not given their full due or were completely overlooked.24Now there are indications that a change is underway. In recent years, Braunfels's String Quintet has been performed in Toronto, London and Berlin; his Te Deum has been heard in Cologne and Berlin; and his operas Die Vögel and Szenen aus dem Leben der Heilige Johanna have received much attention – the former in Vienna, Los Angeles, Cagliari and at the Spoleto Festival, and the latter in Stockholm and Berlin. Likewise, Heinz Tiessen's “Amsel” (Blackbird) Septet received much acclaim when it was performed in Toronto (2006), London (2008) and Berlin (2009). Perhaps the very fact that this recognition is arriving decades after the composers' deaths means that their works are able to stand on their own merits, and not for political reasons or merely as curiosities.
Albrecht Dümling, a musicologist and music critic based in Berlin, is curator of the exhibition “Entartete Musik” and director of “musica reanimata,” a society for the rediscovery of Nazi-persecuted composers and their works. He is currently writing a book on German-speaking refugee-musicians in Australia.
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Posted November 1, 2009
by Harvey Sachs | Sep 30, 2009 | Articles & Essays
The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954) was one of Germany's most celebrated performing musicians, and his reputation has grown to almost mythical proportions in the five-and-a-half decades since his death. But the controversy surrounding his political behavior during the 1930s and '40s has never let up. There are those who declare that Furtwängler – who was principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and State Opera when Hitler's National Socialists came to power in 1933, and who continued to work in Germany until three months before the end of the Second World War – approved of the Nazis; according to others, he merely used them to further his career; and many claim that he actively opposed them.
Furtwängler came from an intellectually distinguished family and was educated by private tutors. He began to play the piano at the age of four and to compose at the age of seven. In 1922, after having served a long apprenticeship at major and minor German opera houses, he persuaded Louise Wolff, Germany's most powerful concert agent, to support his candidacy for the conductorship of the Berlin Philharmonic, which had just been orphaned by the death of its great conductor, Artur Nikisch. Other contenders for the job included such celebrities as Felix Weingartner, Richard Strauss, Willem Mengelberg and Bruno Walter – all significantly older than Furtwängler – and such gifted members of his own generation as Carl Schuricht, Otto Klemperer, Fritz Busch and Erich Kleiber. Frau Wolff, nicknamed Queen Louise, obtained for Furtwängler not only the Berlin job but also another much sought-after position that Nikisch's death had left vacant: the conductorship of the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig. At the age of thirty-six, Furtwängler had become Germany's most successful symphonic conductor. By the end of the 1920s, he had made much-praised debuts with the Vienna Philhar-monic, the orchestra of La Scala, the New York Philharmonic, and other major ensembles. In 1927, he accepted an invitation from the self-governing Vienna Philharmonic to be its principal conductor (he gave up his position in Leipzig the following year), but after three years he left Vienna and began to concentrate on further consolidating his position in Germany. He obtained an appointment as music director of the Bayreuth Festival, effective from the summer of 1931, but conflicts with the festival's other administrators caused him to resign after only one season. In January 1933, however, he won a major victory by becoming principal conductor of Berlin's main opera house, the Staatsoper. Combined with his Philharmonic position, the new job made him the most powerful figure in Germany's musical life.
Someone else won a major victory in Berlin in January 1933: shortly after Furtwängler signed his Staatsoper contract, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Furtwängler seems to have been exceptionally ignorant of politics (party politics, that is, as distinguished from musical politics), even by the appallingly low standards set by most of his fellow performing artists throughout history. He believed in music as a force for the spiritual redemption of humanity; although he must have understood that the survival of modern society – including musical institutions – depended upon the existence of some sort of political superstructure, he did not much care about the details. But Germany's new leaders, Furtwängler quickly discovered, were not garden-variety politicians. They planned to re-create their fellow citizens along the lines established in Mein Kampf, and they regarded Furtwängler as a valuable commodity. Thus, for the following twelve years he found himself contending not only with the Three Bs, but also with the Two Gs: Hermann Göring, who controlled the Prussian state theatres, including the Staatsoper, and Joseph Goebbels, who, as Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, would have liked to administer the Berlin Philharmonic by decree. Both ensembles depended on government subsidies for their economic survival.
Had Furtwängler been merely a national celebrity, and not an international one, his political case would not have remained controversial for so many decades. For more than sixty years, anyone who has cared to know has indeed known that Furtwängler was never a member of the Nazi party, or fond of the Nazis, or inclined to be anti-Semitic or authoritarian. But Furtwängler was an international celebrity, and this fact led and continues to lead people to ask why he did not make a stronger protest by exiling himself from Germany, as did his “Aryan” colleagues Busch and Kleiber, and other “Aryan” cultural celebrities like Thomas Mann and Lotte Lehmann.
The issue is not only the nature of Furtwängler's relationship with Hitler's regime, but also how what happened was perceived, outside as well as within Germany. From the outside, there appeared to be an ambiguous phase that lasted through the regime's first year, a heroic phase that began early in 1934, another ambiguous phase that began early in 1935 and a disastrously negative phase that lasted from March 1936 until Furtwängler's denazification trial in December 1946. A final phase – from 1947 to the present – defies summary characterization, for different observers have reached different conclusions about the pro- and anti-Furtwängler testimony that surfaced at the trial and afterward. Some have admired him, others have had ambivalent feelings on the matter, and still others have viewed his case with disgust and hostility. But within Germany, there were no such phases: the majority of persecuted Jews and other opponents of the Nazis who were aware of or directly affected by Furtwängler's relationship with the regime regarded his conduct as selfless and at times heroic, albeit camouflaged by ambiguous public deeds and statements; a minority viewed him as a waverer or even an opportunist.
There is plenty of evidence to support all points of view. Less than two months after the Nazis came to power, Thomas Mann, who was already in exile, wrote in his diary: “Indignant that [Richard] Strauss has taken over the concert from which Bruno Walter was barred. Furtwängler conducted the government's command performance of Die Meistersinger on this day of jubilation. Lackeys.” (The “command performance” in question was considered the inaugural event of the Third Reich.) But in another diary entry, written less than a month later, Mann noted: “Yesterday in the Frankfurter Zeitung Furtwängler's highly discreet but nevertheless admonitory letter to Goebbels on cultural policy, and the idiot's lengthy reply.” Parts of Furtwängler's admonition seem “discreet” to the point of ambiguity. The conductor was forthright in telling Goebbels that “the quality of music is not a matter of ideology,” a notion that went against the Nazi grain. But he seemed to support the theory, held by some lukewarm Nazis and even by many non-Nazis, that one had to distinguish between good Jews and bad Jews – in this case, between Jewish artists who were likely to make a “positive” contribution to art and those who were not. Furtwängler also distinguished, in his letter, between Jews and Germans, as if he accepted the Nazis' theory that German-born Jews could not be authentic Germans.
…If the fight against Jewry is focused upon those artists who are rootless and destructive, if it is waged against those who would profit through rubbish and empty virtuosity, the fight is justified. The struggle against such individuals and the spirit they personify — and the spirit has its German adherents too — cannot be waged vigorously and thoroughly enough. But if this attack is directed against real artists, too, it is not in the best interests of our culture […].
Plainly, it must be said that men like Walter, Klemperer, [theater director Max] Rein-hardt and others must be enabled in the future to practice their art in Germany […].
The last sentence I have quoted was futile but courageous, under the circumstances. But who was to determine what constituted “rubbish and empty virtuosity” and what constituted “the best interests of our culture”? Furtwängler himself? Goebbels? And what was to happen to the practitioners, Jewish or otherwise, of “empty virtuosity”? Obviously, Furtwängler was not suggesting that they be imprisoned, let alone sent to extermination camps, which, in 1933, were a mere gleam in the Führer's eye. But just how was Germany to be made virtuosenrein – cleansed of virtuosos? Would there be a government-enforced prohibition of the production and consumption of those types of art deemed insufficiently profound for the German people? And if “good” Jewish artists were to be kept in the country and allowed to work while “bad” ones were to be exiled or herded into ghettos and left to face unindemnified unemployment, was the same principle to be applied to “good” and “bad” Jewish merchants and shoemakers and street-sweepers?
The Nazis, we know, were not interested in making such fine distinctions. Nevertheless, the weakness in Furtwängler's logic grew out of his unshakeable beliefs in the superiority of artistic and intellectual pursuits to other areas of endeavor and in the superiority of Germanic musical culture to other musical cultures – beliefs held by some of the persecuted, too, including Arnold Schoenberg. Crude Nazi dogma was one thing; the fundamental rightness of German aspirations to cultural hegemony – benevolent, of course – was something else.
Even among Germanic musicians, however, there were people to whom it seemed, early in the Hitler era, that Furtwängler had been contaminated by Nazi doctrine. Alban Berg – as “pure Aryan” an Austrian as the Führer – wrote to his wife, on May 17, 1933, about a ceremony that had been held that day in Vienna to commemorate the centenary of Brahms's birth:
Furtwängler actually delivered the great address, which made me very depressed all day. It was a Nazi-inspired speech on German music, which, he implied, had found its last representative in Brahms. Without mentioning any names, he betrayed the whole of post-Brahmsian music, especially Mahler and the younger generation (like Hindemith). There was no reference at all to the Schoenberg circle as even existing.
It was horrible having to put up with all this and witness the frenzied enthusiasm of an idiotic audience. Idiotic not to realize how the Brahms a cappella choral songs which followed made nonsense of Furtwängler's tendentious twaddle.
Touché? The fact is that Berg, in characterizing Furtwängler's speech as “Nazi-inspired,” was off the mark. The conductor's aesthetics were merely nationalistic and conservative, thus they corresponded to some aspects of National Socialist cultural policy. Inevitably, however, outsiders – even those who, like Berg, were Furtwängler's ethnic next-of-kin and geographic neighbors – interpreted the similarity as evidence of collusion. Not many weeks after the incident reported by Berg, Furtwängler did stick his neck out, futilely, on behalf of Schoenberg, whose Variations for Orchestra he had premiered in 1928. “Arnold Schönberg is considered by the Jewish International as the most significant musician of the present,” he wrote to Bernhard Rust, the Minister of Culture, on July 4, 1933, when the composer was about to be relieved, officially, of the teaching position he had already been forced to abandon at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. “It must be recommended that he not be made a martyr. And if he is suspended now – I would not indeed consider this right – to [sic] treat the question of indemnity with generosity.” When Furtwängler was questioned, at his denazification trial, about his use of the term “Jewish International” (possibly a mistranslation; “International Jewry” may have been meant) in this letter, he replied that he had had to fight the Nazis using their weapons – their terminology, in this case – “otherwise I could not have achieved anything.” And indeed, Georg Gerullis, Undersecretary of Culture, had written, disgustedly, to another functionary: “Can you give me the name of a Jew who is not backed by Furt-wängler?”
In 1933, Furtwängler attempted to persuade government officials to continue to allow celebrated Jewish performing artists to appear in Germany and to persuade the artists not to boycott Germany; both attempts failed, but Furtwängler had openly demonstrated his opposition to the regime's policies. Later that year, however, Göring, without consulting him, conferred on him the title of state counselor, and Furtwängler was made vice-president of Goebbels' Reichsmusikkammer – a sort of national music council. Many observers wondered whether he was making his peace with the Nazis.
Early in 1934, Furtwängler decided to put Paul Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler, which was still unfinished, on the Staatsoper's 1934-35 production schedule. Hindemith was no anti-Nazi firebrand, but his wife and many of his associates were Jews, and the Nazis did not approve of his music. Göring struck Mathis from the Staat-soper's program; Furtwängler protested, and while awaiting an answer to his protest he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in the symphony that Hindemith had created from some of the opera's completed scenes. The performances were enthusiastically received by the public but condemned by the Nazi press. In the autumn, the Nazi Kulturgemeinde (Culture Corporation) announced a boycott of Hindemith's music. Furtwängler's letter of protest, published in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, won him even more public approval. Attacks against Hindemith and Furtwängler appeared in the Nazi press; in the end, the composer immigrated to the United States, and the conductor resigned from the Staatsoper and the Philharmonic and gave up all his official titles except that of state counselor. The episode received considerable international attention and made Furtwängler, for a time, a symbol of internal opposition to the regime. “News that Wilhelm Furtwängler has been relieved of all his posts – very significant, since it demonstrates that no person of any superiority can work with these people,” wrote Mann in his diary on December 5.
But then, in February 1935, Furtwängler signed a statement, prepared for him by Goebbels, in which he recognized Hitler and his ministers as “entirely and solely responsible for cultural policy” in Germany. In a postwar conversation with his biographer, Curt Riess, Furtwängler offered the remarkable explanation that he had simply been admitting a fait accompli, and that in so doing he had been absolving himself of any responsibility for what was happening to musical life in Germany! What had already happened by then included the blacklisting of Jewish and other “degenerate” composers and solo artists, the removal of Jewish and other unapproved singers and musicians from the rosters of opera companies and orchestras, the ex-propriation of Jewish-owned music publishing houses and concert agencies (including that of Louise Wolff, who had brought Furtwängler's career to its apex), and the use of intimidation, ghettoization, imprisonment, violence and compulsory exile against the racially “impure.” In exchange for his show of submission, Furtwängler was allowed to work as a free-lance, “non-political” musician in Germany.
The tale of this particular deal is hard to stomach. And the deal marked the beginning of another ambiguous, tug-of-war phase in Furtwängler's relations with the regime. Hitler attended a Berlin Philharmonic concert conducted by Furtwängler in the spring of 1935; Furtwängler refused to greet the Führer with the Nazi salute. Hitler attended another Philharmonic concert, in October 1935; this time he went up to the stage at the end of the performance and extended his hand to Furtwängler, who shook it. Furtwängler agreed to take the Philharmonic on tour to England, but cancelled when he learned that the tour was to be state-sponsored. The Nazis put pressure on him to drop his long-time secretary and personal manager, Berta Geissmar, who was Jewish, and he gave in. He tried to protect the few remaining Jewish and part-Jewish members in the Philharmonic, and he couldn't understand why most of them left Germany at the first opportunity. He wrote to Carl Flesch, a celebrated violinist, to complain that “all his best musicians were Jewish and they were abandoning him!” recalled Flesch's son. “The man was like a child who can only see his own way…. [The Jews'] departure was not only hurting his work but somehow a betrayal of art!… But while he was many things one might never like, he was never in any sense a Nazi.” A letter of rec-ommendation from Furtwängler prevented Flesch, Sr., and his wife from being sent to a concentration camp in 1940.
In February 1936, Arturo Toscanini retired from the conductorship of the New York Philharmonic and recommended that the orchestra's board of directors invite Furtwängler to succeed him. Furtwängler accepted the board's invitation, which included the condition that he would take on no concurrent permanent position in Germany. When news of the appointment was published, an infuriated Göring leaked false information that appeared on the front page of the New York Times: “The complete professional rehabilitation of Wilhelm Furtwängler […] was forecast today in an official announcement that he would shortly resume his activities as 'guest conductor of the Berlin State Operas.'” Göring's tactic worked. Musicians, critics, and members of the public in New York protested the hiring of a man who was compromising himself with the Nazis, and Furtwängler – who was vacationing in Egypt and did not yet know that Göring was responsible for the leak – assumed that the scandal had been orchestrated in America. He sent an angry cable to the Philharmonic: “I am not a politician, but an exponent of German music, which belongs to all mankind and is independent of politics. I suggest, in the interests of the Philharmonic Company, that I postpone my appearances in the U.S.A. until the public realizes that music and politics have nothing to do with each other.”
That summer, Furtwängler returned to Bayreuth for the first time in five years, to conduct at a fully nazified Wagner Festival. During the Festival, however, at a reception given by the Wagner family, Furtwängler was “cornered” by Goebbels, Göring, and Hitler, who attempted “to threaten him into again accepting an official position, to no avail,” recalled Friedelind Wagner, the composer's anti-Nazi granddaughter, who would flee Germany in 1939. The attempt ended with “Hitler's shrill threat that he would send him to a concentration camp – and Furtwängler's calm answer: 'Herr Reichskanzler, I will find myself there only in the very best company!' This so surprised Hitler that he couldn't answer, but vanished from the room.”
But internal protests of this sort were no longer audible outside Germany. In an open letter to German intellectuals – a letter printed in the Manchester Guardian on March 7, 1936 – the great violinist Bronisław Huberman, a Polish Jew, referred to Furtwängler as “one of the most representative leaders of spiritual Germany,” and went on:
It will be recalled that Dr. Furtwängler endeavoured to prevent me from publishing my refusal of his invitation [in 1933] to play with his orchestra in Germany. His astonishing argument was that such a publication would close Germany to me, for many years, and perhaps for ever….
Dr. Furtwängler was profoundly revolted not only at the Nuremberg incidents [violent physical attacks on Jews, and on non-Jews who associated with Jews], which he assured me he and all “real Germans” condemned as indignantly as I, but also against me because of my reference to the brutalisation of large sections of the German population. He felt himself compelled to regard this as a “monstrous generalization which had nothing to do with reality”.
In the meantime two and a half years have passed. Countless people have been thrown into gaols and concentration camps, exiled, killed, and driven to suicide. Catholic and Pro-testant ministers, Jews, Democrats, Socialists, Communists, army generals became the vic-tims of a like fate. I am not familiar with Dr. Furtwängler's attitude to these happenings, but he expressed clearly enough his own opinion of all “real Ger-mans” concerning the shamefulness of the so-called race-ravishing pillories; and I have not the slightest doubt of the genuineness of his consternation, and believe firmly that many, perhaps the majority of Germans, share his feelings.
Well then, what have you, the “real Germans”, done to rid conscience and Germany and humanity of this ignominy…?
Before the whole world I accuse you, German intellectuals, you non-Nazis, as those truly guilty of all these Nazi crimes….
At Salzburg in the summer of 1937, Toscanini, who had previously defended Furtwängler, broke with him over what he saw as Furtwängler's political wishy-washiness, and he told the Festival's administrators that he would no longer return to Sal-zburg if Furtwängler were invited back. But the crunch never came: in February 1938, Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg made his first compromises with Hitler, and Toscanini immediately announced his withdrawal from the Salzburg Festival. The following month, Austria voted to annex itself to Germany, and at the nazified 1938 Salzburg festival Furtwängler conducted what had been Toscanini's production of Die Meistersinger.
On the other hand, as long as Hitler's regime lasted Furtwängler fought a rearguard action against Nazi barbarity. There are approximately eighty traceable cases of Jews and others, musicians and non-musicians, whom Furtwängler tried – often successfully – to assist, in a variety of ways; there must have been many more such cases of which traces have been lost. At the same time, Furtwängler was trying to maintain his position as Germany's leading conductor, despite Göring's partially successful attempts to provide the public with an alternative in the person of young Herbert von Karajan. Der Wunder Karajan, as the press began to call the new idol, had joined the Nazi party early on, both in his native Austria and in Germany, and was busy creating a new dimension for the term “opportunism”. Furtwängler took advantage of Goebbels' rivalry with Göring in order to strike back at his own new rival. On December 14, 1940, while the war raged, Goebbels noted in his diary: “Furtwängler has objections about Karajan, who is getting too much coverage in the press. I put a stop to this. In other respects, Furtwängler is behaving very decently. And when all is said, he is our greatest conductor.” One of Furtwängler's “decent” acts was to play a pre-Christmas piano recital for Hitler at the Chancellery. (So much for the conductor's principle of separating art from politics!) Furtwängler was also decent enough to conduct a birthday concert for Hitler — only once, in 1942, according to some sources. But Sir Ernst Gombrich, the eminent art historian who was a refugee from Nazi Austria, maintained that the event was annual. “My war work [in England] was that of a Radio Monitor, and so I heard him conduct Beethoven's Ninth on every eve of Hitler's birthday, April 19th,” Gombrich wrote in 1987, in a letter to this writer. “The oration was first held by Goebbels, who regularly ended with the words 'Er soll uns bleiben, was er immer war, unser Hitler!' ['May he remain what he has always been, our Hitler!'] after which the strains of the Ninth began, most incongruously.” Gombrich, who had met Furtwängler before the war, described him as “a man of devouring ambition; I know he was not really a Nazi, but he certainly was a committed German nationalist and assured friends that he could not possibly leave his fatherland.”
The conflicting evidence seems endless. There is, for instance, the November 16, 1943, entry in Marie Vassiltchikov's Berlin Diaries — 1940-1945, which were published in 1987: “Dined tonight at Gottfried Bismarck's in Potsdam with Adam Trott, the Hassells and Furtwängler. The latter [sic], who is terrified of the possible arrival of the Russians, disappointed me. From a musical genius I had somehow expected more 'class.'” The interesting bit is not the passage that reveals the diarist's naïveté with regard to the behavior of geniuses, but the revelation about the company Furtwängler was keeping. Count Gottfried von Bismarck, Dr. Adam von Trott zu Solz, Ambassador Ulrich von Hassell, and young Princess Vassiltchikov herself were all profoundly involved in the secret anti-Nazi movement and in the ultimately unsuccessful plans to assassinate Hitler. Was Furtwängler merely odd man out at a dinner party, or was he aware of the others' doings? His widow maintained that he knew very well what sort of company he was keeping.
On the other hand, in reflecting on Stravinsky in one of his private notebooks, Furtwängler wrote: “The Russian revolutionary devotion to the machine finds a voice in him. Germany has got beyond this. Germany is struggling from the machine to life, and therefore it much prefers Bruckner's 'stupid' music to the 'clever' music of Stravinsky.” One may ignore the absurdity of Furtwängler's view of the politically ultra-conservative Stravinsky as a representative of the Bolshevik revolution, and one may ignore the conductor's incomprehension of Stravinsky's music; but one can hardly ignore the wrong-headedness and the nearly incredible level of self-delusion implicit in Furtwängler's belief that the Germans, as a nation, were spiritually superior to anyone or anything in 1944, when this comment was written.
In January 1945, Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister of Armaments, managed to let Furtwängler know that the Gestapo was going to try to do him in before the quickly approaching end of the war. The conductor's wife and family were already living in Switzerland, and he succeeded in joining them there. No sooner did he attempt to conduct, however, than he found himself the object of Swiss anti-Nazi protests. He was acquitted at his denazification trial in December 1946 – the testimony of Jewish colleagues and other witnesses was overwhelmingly in his favor – and he was soon conducting all over Europe, including Britain. But his nomination to the principal conductorship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for the 1949-50 season was vociferously opposed by Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz and other Jewish and/or anti-Fascist artists who had previously been forced to abandon Europe. “It is incomprehensible to me that Furtwängler should be tainted with an anti-Semitic attitude,” wrote the conductor and teacher Felix Lederer to the orchestra's board.
I am Jewish and was associated with Furtwängler in Mannheim (1915-1920) and in Berlin during the Nazi period. He always wholeheartedly supported Jewish artists with his whole being. He remained loyal to me in spite of being watched by the Gestapo, and always addressed me as “my very dear friend” in his letters even at a time when such familiarity [with a Jew] could have cost him his head. Only those artists who are falsely in-formed could refuse to play under his leadership. Anybody who endured the terrible Nazi period knows how bravely and selflessly Furtwängler intervened in behalf of Jewish artists.
It may have been unfortunate, for Chicago and for Furtwängler, that the anti-Furtwängler boycott worked; and yet, given the enormity of what had just happened in Europe, the protest was only to be expected. Rubinstein, Horowitz and all the others knew, after all, that they would have been murdered, not merely boycotted, if Germany had won the war.
Through recordings, Furtwängler's music-making continues to fascinate generations of listeners, and his behavior under the Nazis continues to divide those familiar with the story into camps of admirers and detractors. But the plain fact is that Furtwängler's political history is a disconcerting mixture of noble generosity, childish opportunism and nearly imbecilic short-sightedness, and there's no sense in trying to cast him as either a defender of virtue or the devil incarnate. His principle of keeping art separate from politics may be a good one under democratic regimes and in peacetime, but it cannot function in a reign of terror, brutality and war.
This is a condensed and updated version of an article, “Furtwängler and the Führer,” that was published in The Yale Review, Volume 81 No. 3, July 1993.
Music historian and cultural journalist Harvey Sachs is the editor of OREL's Articles & Essays column. He has published biographies of Arturo Toscanini and Arthur Rubinstein, a history (Music in Fascist Italy), and several other books, and his latest book, The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, will be published in the spring of 2010 by Random House (US) and Faber & Faber (UK). He currently resides in New York City and is on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Posted October 2009
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.
by Agnes Kory | Aug 1, 2009 | Articles & Essays
Unlike the so–called Terezín composers — Viktor Ullman, Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas and Hans Krása — whose names and works have become relatively well known in recent years, the Hungarian Jewish composers who were murdered during the Holocaust remain nearly unknown. All seven of those who have been rediscovered so far died young, before they had fulfilled their potential. Yet, in spite of adverse circumstances, all had produced work of value. The amount of work that appears to have survived varies; what they shared was an untimely, tragic end, followed by artistic oblivion. The following information about the seven Hungarian Jewish composers (presented here in alphabetical order) is the fruit of my attempts, so far, to rectify the situation.
Pál Budai
Budapest Music Academy yearbooks show that Pál Budai was a student of violin and composition there from 1922 to 1928. During the last two years, his composition teacher was Zoltán Kodály. In the 1930s Budai spent three and half years in Paris, where he led the orchestra faculty at the École Normale Supérieure. In 1940 the highly respected Hungarian musicologist Antal Molnár briefly analyzed Budai's early Rondino for piano (published in Paris) and forecast a great future for the composer. Fifteen years later, Molnár wrote that Budai had been particularly suited for the comic opera and ballet genres; he analyzed and praised the music for the ballet Babadoktor (Doll Doctor), the Two Pieces for violin, the Burlesque for piano and what was apparently Budai's most popular composition, the Elegy and Scherzo for string orchestra. According to Molnár, Budai's sense of comic opera style was effectively manifested in his Divertimento cycle for string orchestra. His desire to keep on studying, as well as his artistic integrity, would have ensured Budai's progress, which came to an end with his early death.
Although I met and interviewed Budai's widow over forty-five years ago, I have not yet found further information about him, and I have discovered only two short compositions by him: the early Rondino and a set of six short pieces for children – both published in Paris in the early 1930s – as well as excerpts from the piano version of the ballet Doll Doctor, published in Budapest in 1966. The music analyzed by Antal Molnár in 1955 has yet to be rediscovered.
Budai made use of Jewish melodies in the children's pieces (meant, most likely, to be listened to by children rather than played by them) and dedicated the set to Albert Neuburger, whose firm, Edition Senart, published it in 1933.
Jenő Deutsch
Deutsch was Bartók's gifted piano pupil, copyist and occasional music transcriber. He copied Bartók's 27 choruses for children's and female voices, the collection of Turkish folk music and most of the monumental Rumanian Folk Music; he also transcribed recorded folk music for Bartók's 1939 Pátria records. One week before the ultra-fascist Szálasi (of the Arrow Cross) seized control in Hungary, Kodály – who taught composition at the Music Academy – wrote in support of Jenő Deutsch who, however, was murdered.
Budapest, 8th October 1944
My ex-student Jenő Deutsch is one of the most outstanding and most versatile Hungarian musicians. His disappearance, should it prove to be final, would be the most painful loss to our musical life. Not only is he an excellent pianist and organist (in this respect I can speak on behalf of Béla Bartók, Deutsch's professor who is currently abroad but whose opinion I know well) but owing to his exceptional musical intelligence and to his skills in all branches of composition, Jenő Deutsch is an outstanding teacher, original thinker and author.
He also worked as an ethnomusicologist and has gained valuable experience in transcribing melodies from the phonograph. We badly miss the expertise of our colleague Jenő Deutsch.
Bearing in mind that his humanity, character, modesty and unconditional reliability surpass standards which are usually considered at such requests, I warmly recommend the favorable consideration of his application.
Zoltán Kodály
It is not clear whether this letter ever reached the forced labor camp, or even whether Deutsch was still alive.
Kodály had attempted to save Jenő Deutsch and László Weiner, another of his excellent students, in time. In 1939 he had tried in vain to secure positions for them at the Conservatorium in Melbourne, Australia.
Although, as the Budapest Music Academy's relevant year books (1928-34) demonstrate, Deutsch studied piano and organ with Bartók and Aladár Zalánfy, respectively, it is possible that he also studied composition, as Kodály's letter seems to indicate, and was good at it. Sadly, very little information about Deutsch is available. In spite of his important work for Bartók, he does not seem to appear in any biographical lexicons, nor have I yet found any composition by him.
There may now be only one person alive who knew Deutsch, although not very well. In November 2007, Peter Bartók, the 84-year-old son of Béla Bartók, sent me the following information:
Jenő was employed by my father for a long time, music copying with his fine calligraphy. I believe the Rumanian and Turkish folksong collections, as published, had the handwritten music notes by Deutsch. It is sad to know his fate. I have never met him face-to-face; my awareness of his presence in the house was when, while we were eating lunch, we heard outside on the staircase someone "roll down the stairs", like a machine gun; he had very fast moving legs and, when he was leaving, he never interrupted us. This was the stairway that the Hungarians removed from the house on Csalán út.
György Justus (Jusztus)
György Justus (or Jusztusz) (Budapest, April 24, 1898 – Budapest, January 1945) was a composer, musicologist and choir master. He was impoverished throughout his life and had to struggle exceptionally hard to survive. Justus studied violin and composition, the latter in Berlin during the 1920s; he returned home in 1927. He published almost thirty substantial papers on music, dance and theatre in Hungarian journals but was mostly interested in folksong research and comparative folklore and in establishing folksong choirs, which he conducted and for which he composed. His choirs also staged works like the Brecht/Weill Threepenny Opera, in which Justus often sang with great success. He played the violin, when one was needed, in the accompanying band. His orchestra regularly performed compositions by many contemporary Hungarian composers.
Justus was impoverished all his adult life. Although he worked all the time, he did not have a regular income. Indeed, he was very rarely paid for any of his work. For many years he had no home, slept wherever he could and wrote his essays and compositions on park benches and in coffee houses. He composed in his head, although the Korda brothers (music publishers, not to be confused with the film moguls) allowed him to use the piano in their storeroom, helped him as much as they could and published his early Jazz Suite for piano. Justus had a large group of friends, all of whom supported him as best they could, even if only with warm meals.
Although choral works account for most of Justus's compositional output, he also wrote songs, instrumental and orchestral works and musical plays. His Burlesque for violin and orchestra (1925) was played by two leading Hungarian violinists of the day, Ödön Pártos and György Garai, and in 1939 the prestigious Budapest Philharmonic performed some of his works. Justus and his wife, the writer Kató Ács, created a children's oratorio that was given favorable consideration by the Hungarian National Theater – but by then anti-Jewish discriminatory laws were in force, and the theater wanted to put an “Aryan” name on it instead of Justus's name. He and his “Aryan” wife refused the offer, and the oratorio was not performed.
Justus was taken to forced labor in the autumn of 1943. In 1944 he escaped from Transylvania and went into hiding in Budapest. In November the Hungarian Nazis (Arrow Cross) caught him, after which he disappeared. According to some sources he was killed in Budapest in January 1945.
Writing in 1955, Antal Molnár declared that in the slightly undisciplined yet interesting Jazz Suite (1928) Justus had not yet found his own voice. More individual is the song “Struggling with Sorrow” (1930; a setting of a poem by Csokonai), with which Justus won first prize at a national song competition. His mature style can be heard in several piano-accompanied songs for children and in the Villon Ballade (1935) for baritone or mezzo-soprano and orchestra. Molnár also mentions Justus's very effective choral work, 'No'.
I have inspected over forty of Justus's music manuscripts and have found many of his compositions to be more than worthy of performance. I also discovered old editions of two of Justus's works – the Jazz Suite and the lighthearted waltz-song, “Sometimes in the Evening.” Justus wrote the song's text as well as its music, dedicated the song to his mother and – as per the title page – arranged for its publication. But the address printed on the title page, given as that of the composer, was really the address of Sándor Vándor, another composer, because Justus was homeless. The song's words express Justus's longing for his mother and for Pest (the Pest section of Budapest). Three verses address the mother, and the refrain, heard three times, is about Pest. Although this song is apparently in a light vein, in retrospect there is nothing light about it. Justus escaped from forced labor in Transylvania because he was homesick for Budapest. Perhaps he would have survived the labor camp instead of being killed by Budapest's fascists.
Sándor Kuti
From Kuti's autobiography, written in 1944, shortly before he perished in a German concentration camp:
I was born in 1908, in a dilapidated block of flats in the Óbuda district of Budapest. My parents were poor, permanently struggling. From the age of three my favorite pastime was to invent various scenes and to add music to them. My first notated compositions date from my ninth year. But I started serious music studies only after my matriculation, at the age of eighteen. I studied at the Budapest Academy of Music. I obtained my highest degree, the artist diploma, under the supervision of Ernő Dohnányi. Since then I have taught private pupils and worked as a choral répétiteur. My artistic credo: to serve truth, freedom and human dignity. My piano compositions have been performed in Budapest, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Vienna, Paris and overseas; my chamber music and choral compositions have been performed in Budapest.
Although Kuti does not mention it, he was disadvantaged and poor throughout his whole life. At the end of this short autobiography Kuti provides a list of his compositions, including his two string quartets (1928, 1934), three string trios (1929, 1932, 1933), Rondo for symphony orchestra (1933), Sonata for two violins (1933), Piano Suite (1935), Sonatina for piano (1936), fifteen songs on poems by Lajos Hollós-Korvin, several choral works, pieces for children and songs on poems by Attila József. Although Kuti wrote this memoir shortly before he was murdered, he had yet to compose his last work, a solo sonata for violin.
Antal Molnár describes Kuti's music as “sincere in emotions and disciplined in form.” He calls the three-movement solo violin sonata one of Kuti's best works; it was “written on self-lined pages in a forced labor camp in the summer of 1944 and sent to his wife 'with lots of love and longing'”. The sonata is “heartbreakingly expressive,” Molnár says, “but it is also an example of cyclic relationships. The closing movement incorporates main ingredients from the previous movements.”
Kuti's compositions were well received by national and international critics as early as his Music Academy diploma concert, which he shared with his fellow student and close friend György (later Sir Georg) Solti. (Solti, towards the end of his life, described Kuti as having been “exceptionally gifted” and wrote: “I used to visit him at his family's desperately poor little catacomb of a home. I am convinced that had he lived, he would have become one of Hungary's greatest composers….”) Kuti's other close friends included the poet Hollós-Korvin, the pianist Andor Földes – who premiered Kuti's Piano Suite, with great success, in Amsterdam in 1935 – and the composer Endre Szervánszky. During the war, the non-Jewish Szervánszky tried to protect Jews; his courage was acknowledged by the Yad Vashem organization, which, in 1998 – twenty-one years after his death – described him as one of the “righteous among the nations.” One of Kuti's string quartets and one of his string trios were published posthumously in 1965 and 1966, respectively; a choral work was included in a collection of Jewish Folk Choruses in 1948, but other Kuti works remain in manuscript, and some may be lost.
Walter Lajthai-Lazarus
OMIKE (Országos Magyar Izraelita Közművelődési Egyesület) was the wartime Hungarian Jewish organization that provided work, as long as it could, to Jewish artists who were banned from employment elsewhere. Walter Lajthai-Lazarus was an OMIKE composer and also an OMIKE conductor. On May 11 and 13, 1942, his one-act “comic opera scene” Szerencse (Fortune) was premiered. I have not yet found any other information about him.
Sándor Vándor
Thanks to the choir named after him, Vándor is not entirely unknown. He even merited twelve lines in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. But his work as a composer and educator is largely forgotten. From 1920 on, Vándor (originally Venetianer; Miskolc, July 28, 1901– Sopronbánfalva, January 14, 1945) studied in Berlin and then as Paul Graener's composition student at the Leipzig Music Academy, from which he graduated. He worked as an opera répétiteur in Italy from 1924 until he returned to Hungary in 1932, after which he worked as an opera conductor and répétiteur and led several workers' choirs without payment. He conducted the choir that eventually took his name from 1936 until November 1944, when he was taken to Sopronbánfalva by the Hungarian Nazis and died under torture.
As a conductor, Vándor consistently promoted works by Bartók and Kodály, and he published articles about Bartók, Kodály, Mussorgsky and Shostakovich. In addition to Hungarian, he was fluent in German, Russian, English, French, Italian and Spanish. In 1940, during his three-month Ruthenian forced labor period, he learned Ruthenian and collected Ruthenian folksongs. Although as a composer Vándor was best known for his choral works, he was prolific in many genres and was well received by audiences and critics alike. Distinguished artists, such as the pianist György Sándor and the singer Vera Rózsa, performed at concerts of Vándor's compositions, which include instrumental, chamber, orchestral, vocal/choral and stage works. Only one of Vándor's compositions was published during his lifetime: The Machine, for piano solo, won the silver medal at an international competition for piano compositions in Eastern Europe in 1934. His second opera was left unfinished at the time of his death.
Many of Vándor's forty or more compositions were published posthumously, but they are not easy to come by. Many – perhaps all – of his manuscripts survive.
Molnár writes that some of Vándor's songs are among the treasures of Hungarian Lieder, and Fejes (1967) analyzes the String Quartet, the Sonatina for solo viola, First Sonata for violin and piano, other instrumental and chamber works, several songs, choral works and Vándor's only completed opera, which was written in the Brecht/Weill mode. Fejes emphasizes what he describes as Vándor's revolutionary choral chansons, the best of which – “Mondd, mit érlel” (“What will become of him”) – combines Hungarian folksong elements with 20th-century workers' songs à la Hanns Eisler. Vándor arranged folksongs of many nations; his most substantial Hungarian folksong arrangement was The Ballad of Anna Fehér for solo female voice, mixed choir and piano (1941).
László Weiner
With the possible exception of Lajthai-Lazarus, about whom I have yet to find data, Weiner (Szombathely, April 9, 1916– Lukov, July 25, 1944) was the youngest of the seven Hungarian Jewish composers who perished in the Holocaust. The Budapest Music Academy yearbooks show that Weiner was Kodály's composition pupil from 1934 until 1940 and that he also studied piano and conducting there.
As was mentioned in connection with Jenő Deutsch, Kodály tried to save Weiner as well as Deutsch as early as 1939, when he attempted to find positions for these two gifted Jewish musicians in Melbourne, Australia. In 1943, he again made an effort on Weiner's behalf:
To The Major General
12th July 1943, Budapest
Dear Sir,
Please allow me to draw your attention to my ex-student László Weiner. He is expected to become an outstanding composer and pianist. Two years ago a composition of his won the national competition. Weiner already spent 13 months in forced labor, partly with heavy manual work. I believe that the continuation of such work will put his future at risk: he will be unable to carry out the cultural work for which he studied and obtained qualifications.
I would appreciate it if, circumstances allowing, future work assignments would take into consideration Weiner's profession and individual abilities so that his future should not be jeopardized.
I am sure that, as far as possible, we can rely on your good will.
With much appreciation,
Yours very sincerely: Zoltán Kodály
Endre Gaál, music critic for the important daily newspaper Magyar Nemzet (Hungarian Nation), attended two of Weiner's premieres – both in 1942 – and reported favorably on them.
Weiner dedicated most of his compositions to his wife, the excellent singer Vera Rózsa. They had met as students at the Music Academy, married in 1942 and continued to make music together at OMIKE's concerts whenever they had the chance. OMIKE gave as many opportunities as possible to Jewish artists, but the fact that the young Weiner had to be accommodated alongside well-known mature artists limited his opportunities. He conducted, accompanied and taught – and had some of his works performed – there from 1941 until December 7, 1942. He was scheduled to conduct a Beethoven evening in February 1943, but by then he was in a forced labor camp. He was 25 or 26 when he composed his last works and 28 when he was murdered at the Lukov forced labor camp on July 25, 1944.
Vera Rózsa survived the Holocaust and became a well-known singing teacher in England. She taught at The Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and privately.
Molnár writes: “In spite of his youth, Weiner developed a musical style that would have been unimaginable without Kodály, but Weiner was no epigone. His ideas were melodic, well formed and rich in harmonies.”
On May 2, 1994, fifty years after he was murdered, a memorial concert was arranged for Weiner in the Goldmark Hall, which was the OMIKE concert venue. The concert included four of Weiner's compositions, and the performers – including cellist Janos Starker – had personal links to László Weiner. Thanks mostly to the violist Pál Lukács, Weiner's Violin and Viola duo, Viola Sonata and Triple Concerto were published by Editio Musica in 1958, 1961 and 1965, respectively; the Three Songs in 1994; the Overture in 1995; and the four-part chorus in 2001. Yet his works are still little known, and he is often confused with the much older Leó Weiner.
©2009 by Agnes Kory
Hungarian-born Agnes Kory is the founder-director of the Béla Bartók Centre for Musicianship (London), where children as young as two years old, as well as professional musicians, study. Once a professional cellist, she now focuses on research into such topics as Bartók, Kodály, Baroque instrumentation and Music of the Holocaust.
In Memoriam: Hungarian Composers Victims of the Holocaust [CD].
by Sophie Fetthauer | Jun 30, 2009 | Articles & Essays
edited since 2005 at the University of Hamburg by
Claudia Maurer Zenck and Peter Petersen
with contributions from Sophie Fetthauer
Lexikon verfolgter Musiker und Musikerinnen der NS-Zeit
ab 2005 an der Universität Hamburg herausgegeben von
Claudia Maurer Zenck und Peter Petersen
unter Mitarbeit von Sophie Fetthauer
In considering musical life during the Third Reich, and especially the consequences of Nazi policies regarding music, one inevitably comes across a variety of people: perpetrators, collaborators and followers – creators and representatives of the National Socialist German state – as well as victims and opponents of the regime. The approach to research may differ: banned professions and censorship may be the subjects, as may the development of professions, schools, musical institutions and branches of musical economy; musical life in the Jewish Cultural League, in the ghettos and concentration camps; aspects of assimilation and “brain gain” in the countries of exile; “brain drain” and the loss of traditions and knowledge in Europe; internal exile and remigration; and, finally, the history of composition, conditions of reception etc. Whatever perspective one chooses, every subject is connected with musicians whose lives were disrupted or even destroyed, or who at least were turned in another direction.
In publications about the history of twentieth-century music, persecution and exile during the Third Reich are still represented only to a small extent, and even if musicians who were persecuted are referred to, their fate as victims of persecution or as refugees is not necessarily recognizable. Thus it is still important to describe the lives of thousands of musicians who had to leave their countries or who were killed in the concentration camps and ghettos. Their lives and their work have to be rediscovered, and they still have to be inserted into general music history.
The interest in all these people, and the fact that it is through these musicians that the research fields mentioned above can be made accessible, are the motivation behind the Biographical Dictionary of Persecuted Musicians 1933-1945. For this reason, the aim of the project is twofold: In the first place, research lacunae will be eliminated through the presentation of information about the lives of individual persecuted musicians. In the second place, the biographical dictionary itself will be an instrument for further research work.
The Biographical Dictionary of Persecuted Musicians 1933-1945 is a music lexicon focused on a special subject. Four criteria have been specified to determine the project's objectives and limits: The people included were (and, in some cases, still are) professional musicians in a broad sense; they belonged to one of the groups that faced persecution during the “Third Reich;” they lived and/or worked in Germany or Austria or were at least known there as musicians; and, finally, they have to be identifiable by name and by date of birth or death.
The project's title and first criterion refer to “musicians,” part defined here as anyone involved in musical life. Starting with composers, instrumentalists, singers and conductors, the biographical dictionary goes on to include pedagogues, scholars, music critics, stage directors and music therapists as well as representatives of cultural policy, broadcasting and record companies, concert agencies and music publishing firms. In other words, not only composers and performers are included but also all those people who were involved with the mediation, distribution and cultural and economic organization of music.
Since all kinds of musical professions are included, it stands to reason that the project deals with all kinds of musical genres, from serious music at one extreme to light music at the other. For instance, one can find singers of all kinds in the biographical dictionary: opera, operetta, concert and choir singers, singers of chansons or folk songs, singing musical clowns as well as cantors in synagogues and churches.
As stated before, only professional musicians are included. This criterion doesn't imply any special achievement or reputation but is rather meant to ascertain that the people included regarded music as their principal occupation during at least some part of their life. It follows, then, that purely lay or amateur musicians are not included.
Professional reputation is often connected with public image, but, as the previous explanations indicate, degree of fame is not among the selection criteria. Musical life, for example in choirs or orchestras, relies mainly on the work of musicians whose names are not known to the public. Nazi terror did not make an exception of these people. They were banned from their professions and had to face other reprisals just like more prominent musicians.
Persecution by the National Socialist German state meant discrimination, defamation, censorship, deprivation, expulsion from the country, imprisonment, torture and/or murder. Most people were persecuted for “racial” reasons – for being Jews or just having Jewish ancestors – but apart from that there were also political, religious, ideological and cultural reasons. All these aspects are incorporated into the project's basic concept, as are their varying consequences: exile in foreign countries, deportation to ghettos and concentration camps and sometimes survival in hiding.
The biographical dictionary is confined to a specific region: the musicians have to have been born within the borders of Germany or Austria or must have lived there and/or been active somehow in musical life there. This requirement is a pragmatic one: although it would certainly be desirable and even more meaningful to include all musicians who were persecuted by the Nazis, especially after the German annexation and occupation of several European countries during World War Two, the project has so far had to be limited to Germany and Austria.
Inclusion is not, however, dependent on age. The biographical dictionary includes not only musicians who were active between 1933 and 1945, but also those who were already retired at the time, or who were still children and became professional musicians only later on.
The criteria mentioned above define the project's core areas. But of course some fringe areas must also be kept in mind. There are, for instance, cases of individual musicians who were persecuted only potentially, since their resistance was not discovered or they withdrew from the public before becoming targets for persecution. This applies to musicians in internal exile or musicians who left the country voluntarily, to express their opposition to the Nazi regime. In other cases, musicians anticipated the coming persecution and left the country before 1933 or found themselves accidentally on tour at the time and did not return to Germany after January 1933 or to Austria after March 1938. Still other musicians who would have faced persecution received special permits (“Sondergenehmigungen”) that allowed them to keep on working in Germany. Marriages with so-called “Aryans,” economic interests, credit abroad and patronage were among the reasons behind such temporary or ongoing special permits. Finally, the biographical dictionary includes those amateur musicians who, for at least some time, owed their living or even their survival to music, as, for example, all those amateur musicians who played in concentration camp orchestras. These special cases must not be ignored, because the biographical dictionary must call attention to the various ways in which people survived.
The starting point of the Biographical Dictionary of Persecuted Musicians 1933-1945 is a list of about 5.000 names that Peter Petersen collected over the last twenty years. The names of these persecuted musicians were recovered from literature about music in the Third Reich and in exile, from the press, archival sources and other documents, as, for example, the Nazi music encyclopedias Lexikon der Juden in der Musik and Judentum und Musik.
So far (February 2009) almost 350 complete articles have been published. Each of these individual entries provides a biography, describing the musician's professional and other activities, with particular reference to the history of persecution and exile. A list of works, documents and literature as well as photos complete these entries. These complete articles have been written by members of the project team as well as by external musicologists and other scholars.
Short articles have also been published, in which only names, professions and dates of birth and death are included. But these short entries, too, are based on documented proof that these musicians were persecuted. They will be augmented to the status of full articles in the future. The biographical dictionary currently contains about 1,200 short entries. The main source for most of these short entries are the Reich's Music Chamber files from the Berlin Document Center holdings in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. These files mainly document professional bans and the issuing of special permits. Other short entries rely on documents from the state archive in Vienna, the archive of the Department for Foreign Affairs in Berlin, memorial books and the Yad Vashem database of Holocaust victims.
The Biographical Dictionary of Persecuted Musicians 1933-1945 is a work in progress. New complete articles as well as short entries are published regularly. In addition, new information and corrections are added to the articles permanently.
The Biographical Dictionary of Persecuted Musicians 1933-1945 is an online resource (http://www.lexm.uni-hamburg.de). It comprises a biographical dictionary and a bibliography, both of which are accessible either through alphabetical registers or through extensive search tools. The search tools not only guarantee the possibility of finding individual musicians easily but are also aimed at supporting research on specific subjects. There are, for example, several keyword-based search functions (“gender,” “professions,” “reasons for persecution” and “persecution/exile”).
The Biographical Dictionary of Persecuted Musicians 1933-1945 was established in 2005 at the Musicological Institute of the University of Hamburg. It is funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), and, as a digital publication on the Internet, it has been accessible online to the general public since April 2006. It is edited by Claudia Maurer Zenck and Peter Petersen with the help of Sophie Fetthauer.
In addition to publishing the Biographical Dictionary of Persecuted Musicians 1933-1945, the project is conceived as an archive and an information office for researchers and other people interested in music in the Third Reich and in exile.
Posted July 2009
