by Gregorio Nardi | Jun 1, 2009 | Articles & Essays
“In Italy there is absolutely no differentiation between Jews and non–Jews, in all fields, from religion to politics to the military to the economy… Italian Jews have their new Zion here, in this adorable land of ours.” These words by Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, were published in 1920 in Il Popolo d'Italia, the newspaper of which he was editor–in–chief. And yet, one year earlier Mussolini had inveighed, in the same newspaper, against the occult powers of “International Judaism.” Thus, by following denigration with reassurance, he began the slow process of building up racist philosophy, which had seemed completely extraneous to the history and culture of Italy once the country's reunification was complete (1870).
At that time, Jewish communities were nearly perfectly integrated into Italian life, and open anti–Semitic hostility was limited to a few small Catholic groups. Although Jews accounted for only about 0.1 percent of the population, many of them had held prestigious positions: there had been dozens of Jewish senators, two prime ministers (Sidney Sonnino and Luigi Luzzatti), the most esteemed mayor of Rome (Ernesto Nathan) and, during the First World War, some fifty generals, including Emanuele Pugliese, the most decorated Italian general. Several Jewish musicians held important teaching positions: suffice it to mention such diverse personalities as the pedagogue Edgardo Del Valle de Paz (Alexandria, Egypt 1861 — Florence 1920); the composer Giacomo Orefice (Vicenza 1865 — Milan 1922), who founded the Friends of Music in Milan and was artistic director of the Teatro Costanzi in Rome; the great pianist Ernesto Consolo (London 1864 — Florence 1931), who was admired by Mahler and Toscanini. There were Jews among Mussolini's strongest adversaries but also among his most important financiers — businessmen who were hostile to communism.
When fascism came to power at the time of the March on Rome (October 1922), the violent attacks on political opponents were not racist in character. Some Jews held important positions as members of the Grand Council of Fascism, a vice–director of the police, a minister of finance, the vice–governor of Libya and even Mussolini's lover and first biographer, Margherita Sarfatti. The apparently peaceful cohabitation of the fascist government with Italy's Jewish communities lasted several years. In the Conversations with Mussolini that Emil Ludwig (originally Emil Cohn) published in 1932, the Duce described racism as “idiotic”, and following the advent of Nazism (January 1933) he saw to it that Jewish refugees from Germany were accepted without difficulty. And yet, from fascism's outset, and beginning with the educational reforms that included obligatory Catholic instruction, a series of directives and actions contrary to the principles of freedom put an end to equality between Jews with non–Jews. Nor was any Jew ever admitted to the Accademia d'Italia (founded in 1926), membership in which was decided by Mussolini.
For musicians, the first disquieting signal came at the end of 1933 in the form of a ban on radio broadcasts of pieces by Jewish composers. The decision came from on high, but it did not reflect public opinion, which was not at all opposed to Jewish culture. Indeed, no one was surprised by the enormous success of Lodovico Rocca's opera Il Dibuk (The Dybbuk), based on a text by Shalom Anski and produced at La Scala in Milan in March 1934. Given the peaceful atmosphere, older Jewish composers felt that they could gently bring their careers to a close. Alberto Franchetti (Turin, 1860 — Viareggio, 1942) had withdrawn into private life following the early success of such operas as Cristoforo Colombo and Germania. Leone Sinigaglia (Turin, 1868 — Turin, 1941) also enjoyed a degree of authority, and this led to his election, in 1936, to the Accademia di Santa Cecilia. Sinigaglia had been a friend of Brahms and a pupil of Dvořák; at the latter's suggestion, he had arranged a series of fascinating Piedmontese folksongs, on which his fame is based.
New prospects seemed to be opening up for younger Jewish composers. Renzo Massarani (Mantua, 1898 — Rio de Janeiro, 1975) was considered a representative of fascist officialdom: he had participated in the March on Rome, and his compositions were heard at all major artistic events — to such an extent that despite Nazi policies his Danza Atletica was entered in the international music competition at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Mario Castelnuovo–Tedesco (Florence, 1895 — Los Angeles, 1968) was considered, abroad, the most significant Italian composer of his generation and was performed by artists of the caliber of Gieseking, Heifetz, Piatigorsky and Segovia. He was simultaneously friendly with Carlo and Nello Rosselli, the regime's principal opponents (both Jews, and both assassinated in 1937), but also with Alessandro Pavolini, who later became a fanatical, cruel fascist leader. Castelnuovo was critical of the regime but knew how to take advantage of the opportunities that it offered him. Although he had openly protested against the radio ban, in 1935, at Mussolini's request, he wrote the incidental music for Rino Alessi's play Savonarola (a text that may have been too compromising for Catholics), which was performed at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Works by Jewish composers were officially commissioned as late as 1937, when, at the International Chamber Music Festival in Venice, Arnold Schoenberg's Suite, Op. 29, and pieces by Massarani, Castelnuovo–Tedesco and Vittorio Rieti were performed. Rieti (Alexandria, Egypt, 1898 — New York, 1994) lived mainly in Paris, where he worked with Les Six and Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, whereas in Rome he composed for the Cines Cinematographic Society.
It is clear that, unlike the Nazi regime, its fascist counterpart was not at all worried about artistic progressivism. At the Venice festival in the early 1930s, works by Achron, Bartók, Bloch, de Falla, Gershwin, Hindemith, Honegger, Ibert, Kodály, Krenek, Milhaud, Poulenc, Prokofiev, Roussel, Saminsky, Stravinsky, Szymanowski, Tansman, Turina and Walton were heard. In 1934, Hermann Scherchen conducted Berg's Der Wein in the composer's presence, and Berg's music was programmed in fascist Italy as late as October 8, 1942, when Wozzeck had its Italian premiere at Rome's Teatro Costanzi under the baton of Tullio Serafin, despite opposition from Germany, where the opera had been declared an example of “degenerate art” — although Berg was an “Aryan”. Clumsy attempts to imitate Hitler's policies were applied superficially, and the reactionary manifestoes that appeared from time to time — beginning with one signed by Pizzetti, Respighi and others in 1932 — were never formally sanctioned, although they called for vigorous fascist solutions to supposed musical decadence. Even jazz, which was gradually being forbidden for political and racial reasons, was secretly liked and listened to by Mussolini and many other party leaders.
In any case, the cultural situation was not relaxed. In 1926 Mussolini did not attend the world premiere of Puccini's Turandot, because Arturo Toscanini (Parma, 1867 — New York, 1957), who called the Duce “the great delinquent,” had refused to conduct the fascist anthem, Giovinezza, before the performance. Five years later, in Bologna on May 14, 1931, Toscanini was again asked to conduct the anthem; he refused, and when he arrived at the theater a group of fascists attacked and slapped him. He was advised to leave the city, and he refused to conduct again in Italy (which he later abandoned for the United States) until after the war. Another serious episode took place in 1934: despite the success that the opera La favola del figlio cambiato — by Gian Francesco Malipiero (Venice, 1882 — Treviso, 1973) on a libretto by Luigi Pirandello, who received the Nobel Prize that year — had had at Braunschweig two months earlier, Mussolini banned it after only one performance in Italy: he was probably put out by the polemics over the subject of political hegemony. Shortly thereafter, Massimo Mila (Turin, 1910 — Turin, 1988), who was later recognized as Italy's most important musicologist, and who had already been arrested in 1929 for antifascist activities, was put in prison, where he remained from 1935 to 1940.
It was in 1936 that specifically racist policies were set forth in circles close to the government. These were consolidated in 1938 with the promulgation of the so–called Racial Laws, which precipitated the situation. People “belonging to the Hebrew race” were expelled from all public positions. Jewish performers were banned from concert halls, as were works by Jewish composers. Luigi Dallapiccola (Pisino, 1904 — Florence, 1975), who had initially been a fascist, was one of the non–Jewish musicians who reacted resolutely against the shameful regulations. For those who already had contacts with foreign musical circles, the wisest choice was emigration. The pianist Gualtiero Volterra (Florence, 1901 — Florence, 1967) fled to Australia, following the example of his teacher and friend Ignaz Friedman, but two of his brothers did not follow his example and were later murdered at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Castelnuovo–Tedesco, too, together with his family, sadly left his beloved Florence in 1939, shortly before the war began: Toscanini, Heifetz and Albert Spalding guaranteed work for him in the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life and enjoyed much success in the film industry. Rieti did not return to Rome from Paris, and in 1940 he, too, immigrated to America. Massarani's departure was the most traumatic, given his political past: when his music was banned, he immigrated to Brazil where, as if out of spite, he did all he could to insure that his works would never be played, forbade their republication and performance and made it extremely difficult to find them.
Others removed themselves from social life and went into a sort of internal exile. Jewish musicologists were forced to interrupt their research. Alberto Gentili (Vittorio Veneto, 1873 — Milan, 1954), to whom we owe the fundamental rediscovery of Vivaldi's instrumental works, spent the terrible war years in hiding and only afterward could see to those works' publication; whereas the monumental study Fernando Liuzzi (Senigallia, 1884 — Florence, 1940) had undertaken on Italian musicians working in France could not be completed: it trailed off in Lully's era. Carlo Felice Boghen (Venice, 1869 — Florence, 1945), a friend and collaborator of Busoni's who had published many unknown masterpieces of the Italian Baroque, found himself having to give private piano lessons, in a painfully clandestine situation that was aggravated by declining health. Gino Mòdona (Florence, 1871 — Florence, 1952), who had been Castelnuovo–Tedesco's teacher and had composed refined piano pieces and didactic works, underwent a similar experience.
As early as June 1940, Jews were interned in Italian concentration camps, and many were unable to go into hiding. The aged Sinigaglia was among the victims: he had thought that his advanced age had made it unnecessary for him to abandon Turin, but, having been taken to the Mauriziano Hospital there, he died of cardiac–respiratory arrest when a fascist platoon prepared to arrest him.
Military disasters led to the fall of Mussolini in July 1943 and to the formation of a new government by Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio. At the end of that year, however, the Racial Laws had not yet been revoked, perhaps as a gesture to the Holy See, according to which the legislation “has measures that should be abrogated, yet contains others as well that are worth confirmation.” Although the situation in the south of Italy, which was already in the Americans' hands, was quickly regularized, in the north the German and Italian SS were fanatically committed to persecuting all remaining Jews. Guido Alberto Fano (Padua, 1875 — Tauriano di Spilimbergo, 1961), who had been a pupil of Orefice, a composer of significant chamber music and a director of the Naples and Palermo conservatories, but who had been removed from all of his official positions, was in hiding in Fossombrone and Assisi beginning in 1943. Then there was the dramatic story of Aldo Finzi (Milan, 1897 — Milan, 1945), who had composed splendid songs in the nineteen–teens and noteworthy symphonic works in the 1920s. He had been unable to take advantage of an invitation to Chicago from the soprano Rosa Raisa, because his exit permit arrived on the day that Italy declared war. In October 1944, knowing that the Italian SS militia was about to search the house where his son was staying, Finzi turned himself in, bribed the militiamen with everything he owned and managed to save himself. But four months later, his heart, overstrained by anguish, stopped beating.
One sad story has to do with popular music, and specifically with the most famous vocal group in twentieth–century Italy: the Trio Lescano, made up of three Dutch sisters (Lescano was an Italianization of the original Dutch surname, Leschan) who had arrived in Italy in 1935 and had quickly achieved extraordinary success. Their 78 r.p.m. record of the song “Tulip” sold 350,000 copies. Although they never joined the Fascist Party, they were chosen to launch the first experimental television broadcasts in 1939, and in 1941 they obtained Italian citizenship. But their Jewish origins meant that all of their programs were cancelled shortly thereafter. They were arrested in November 1943, accused of spying and imprisoned in Genoa. The ridiculous accusation was that their rhythmic songs — a witty combination of swing and jazz — contained hidden, coded messages for the enemy. While they were in prison, and because they spoke German, they were forced by the SS to be interpreters during the interrogations and torturing of captured partisans. When the war ended, they were unable to gain back the popularity they had previously known, and they quickly disappeared from the entertainment scene.
With the end of the war and the defeat of fascism, the persecution ceased. But the newfound security could not wipe out the bitter fact that most of the victims of this shameful episode were unable to enjoy the democracy that had finally been achieved, either because they had changed citizenship and decided not to return to Italy or because they had not survived to witness their country's liberation, which took place on April 25, 1945.
(Translated by Harvey Sachs)
Pianist Gregorio Nardi, who was a prize–winner at the Arthur Rubinstein competition in Tel Aviv and the Franz Liszt competition in Utrecht, is highly active as a concert pianist but also writes reviews and essays on the history of piano interpretation, the relationship between music and the visual arts, and the works of Jewish composers.
Posted June 2009
by Michael Haas | May 2, 2009 | Articles & Essays
It was in the mid–1980s when, as a producer for London Records, I first discussed a short series of works by Alexander Zemlinsky to be recorded with Berlin's Radio Symphony Orchestra and its new music director, Riccardo Chailly. The manager of the orchestra and source of this suggestion was the composer and conductor Peter Ruzicka.
Even as a very young producer, I was aware of Zemlinsky and owned a recording or two picked up during my student years in Vienna. What seems interesting in retrospect is the argument, offered by Chailly, that we should record Zemlinsky because he had taught Schoenberg and was Schoenberg's brother–in–law. At the time, Chailly was keen to present himself as a champion of twentieth–century music and had already been conducting copious quantities of Stravinsky in London. It was therefore not a surprise that he would wish to focus on the Second Viennese School, but it struck me as strange that he should approach it via another composer's relationship with Schoenberg rather than because of anything startling or persuasive about Zemlinsky's music itself.
Ruzicka was more forthcoming: he patiently explained the exotic paths and byways of fin–de–siècle Vienna, which had led to atonality and then to serialism. In his view, it was important to have an understanding of Zemlinsky if one wished to understand Schoenberg. Aha! I thought: If Schoenberg is the fulfillment of all of the twentieth century's musical aspirations, then Zemlinsky was the key to understanding much of his rather user–unfriendly music. I was up for the proposal, and we all agreed that making Zemlinsky recordings was a worthy undertaking. I still wasn't sure what his music was like, and the first couple of recordings — a youthful symphony in B–flat and a tone–poem called Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid) — sounded remarkably reminiscent of Dvořák. Any thoughts I may have had that this wasn't really what we expected twentieth–century music to sound like (indeed, even Schoenberg's early Pelleas und Melisande, which had shared a premiere with Seejungfrau, sounded more 'modern') were tut–tutted away with the affirmation that Zemlinsky was after all Schoenberg's only teacher and brother–in–law. I had only just turned thirty, and in the mid–1980s it was still possible to lose street–credit amongst musical colleagues if new repertoire did not challenge the listener. This may have been twentieth–century music, but only in the way that Klimt was a twentieth–century painter: It was not the alienating, “red in tooth and claw” avant–garde of a century ago.
Over the following two decades, Chailly became one of Zemlinsky's most persuasive apologists; Ruzicka went on to run the Salzburg festival and feature works by Franz Schreker, Zemlinsky, Erich Korngold and Egon Wellesz; and I produced a series of recordings with the sensationalistic sub–heading, “Entartete Musik” (“Degenerate Music”). Returning to the Zemlinsky recordings today, I'm surprised at how idiomatically Chailly approached the works. He made no attempt, as other specialist conductors were doing with similar repertoire, to view them through the prism of Webern or Darmstadt.
To our great delight and surprise, the recordings were well received, and I could relax and enjoy the music for what it was. Yet the experience triggered a number of questions — questions that still need addressing, as they represent the very problems of perception that constitute our greatest challenges today.
In keeping with my A&R profession, I divide these challenges into the categories of “artist issues” and “repertoire issues.” In some respects, the artist issues are more complex. Good performers are busy people, and no matter how intellectually inquisitive they may be, they rarely have time to inform their performances with historic background. By a lucky coincidence, Chailly had an innate response to Zemlinsky's music, even though it was distant from most of the repertoire that he was conducting at the time. He was recording Zemlinsky before he started to record Mahler; his ability to enter the sound–world of fin–de–siècle Vienna was instinctive.
With respect to music by the “suppressed” composers of the Nazi period, communicating historic information to artists in ways that mean something to them is one of the biggest challenges we face. The fact that this information is still not readily available comes as a shock. Most major European opera houses now mount operas by Zemlinsky, Korngold, occasionally Schreker and, even more occasionally, Walter Braunfels. Yet where once unfamiliar works gain a modicum of familiarity, the problems of perception change: lazy thinking takes over, and the works risk being dismissed for not outshining the glare of the familiar masterworks with which they are inevitably compared. One noted conductor told me, for instance, that the composers banned by the Third Reich “all sound like second–rate Richard Strauss.” The arrogance of such views is difficult to accept, and performers of this sort are rarely willing to hear explanations of why Korngold and Zemlinsky are not Strauss manqué, but fundamentally different.
The often willful inability to hear individuality in voices that sound familiar but aren't immediately recognizable will remain one of our biggest headaches. As a reaction to the Nazis' redefinition of new music in Europe, musicians in post–war Europe defied all that was perceived as safe and secure. Alienating the public was a punishment meted out to the Bildungsbürger, the culturally aspiring middle–classes, for having given space to the aesthetic doctrines set down by the Third Reich. Alienation in itself was perceived, de facto, as anti–fascist. When Andrei Zhdanov, the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee chairman under Stalin, decreed that Socialist Realism in the arts had to speak to and about the people, the non–Communist West responded with music that was even more abstract than before. The reaction to the manipulative musical values of the Nazis and the cultural legacy that grew out of the Cold War has resulted in a rupture that has left contemporary audiences reluctant to listen to unfamiliar music and unwilling to take the time to understand a work in its historic context. With composers banned by the Third Reich, such as Schreker, Zemlinsky, Korngold, Braunfels and Hans Gál — and even those regularly featured by the Nazis, such as Hans Pfitzner, Franz Schmidt, Emil von Rezniček and Josef Marx — one has an impressive list of twentieth–century composers in the Austro–German tradition who did not see music's progress as an inevitable, inexorable move away from traditional tonality. Yet the fall–out of history has left Richard Strauss as the soul survivor and today's audiences reluctant to explore any further.
It was this last point that frustrated me when I spotted the announcement of Esa–Pekka Salonen's “Vienna, City of Dreams: 1900–1935” series with the Philharmonia Orchestra during the 2008–09 London season. The series offered programs like those that Boulez had conducted in a nearly identical series forty years earlier, but with Zemlinsky now thrown in, probably because of his “Schoenberg connection.”
Schoenberg was a Jewish composer who would have been banned by the Nazis even if he had never written anything more complex than a four–part, tonal harmony exercise. Yet Schoenberg had asked crucial questions about music and art in the dying days of the Austro–Hungarian monarchy, which, for the Viennese of his generation, was the only known social and political order. Yet they saw their order moving inexorably towards war and away from any attempt at guaranteeing peace, security and stability. Their premonitions were not groundless, as the thirty–one years from 1914 to 1945 brought both bloodshed and instability, and during the following forty–four years peace was guaranteed only by keeping Europe divided, locked in the check–mate threat of mutual destruction. Ironically, some of Schoenberg's most devoted disciples were sympathetic to Hitler, and many members of the post–war generation who cited Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School as their musical progenitors were themselves children raised under fascism who, as adults, were seemingly drawn to absolutist views. Yet Schoenberg's contemporary followers and pupils did not always agree with or even understand what he was trying to achieve. Many of them felt that establishing serialism as twelve–tone dogma created a cul–de–sac from which the avant–garde needed to be rescued.
Today we encounter the same problem mentioned above, but from a different angle: musicians facing what they perceive as new repertoire that sounds almost familiar. Confronted with new yet familiar sounding music that is clearly moving away from tonality, artists instinctively refer to the “gold–standard” of Schoenberg and thus assume, for example, that Egon Wellesz and Hanns Eisler must have been less talented Bergs and Weberns, or that Ernst Krenek's twelve–tone opera Karl V was most likely a 'poor man's' Lulu. Few take the time to ponder what these composers did differently and why they felt compelled to modify Schoenberg's ideas. For the listener who demands challenging repertoire, there is still much that remains unexplored. All of these composers, along with several others, did indeed feel that music's progress would inevitably lead away from traditional tonality. Whether their music was the result of haphazard ideas or consisted of scrupulously mapped out serialism or diatonic–sounding serialism — reflecting Eisler's ambition to write “twelve–tone music for the common man” — it becomes apparent that the Second Viennese School offered more than just Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg. In other words, when we listen to the music of Hanns Eisler, Ernst Krenek or Egon Wellesz, the issue should not be how they are similar to Schoenberg but rather in what ways they differ from him.
Our main task, now, is to continue to pose these questions and to formulate and communicate coherent answers. I recently read a well–meaning article about Korngold's Die tote Stadt that breathlessly declared that Korngold “doesn't sound like Puccini meets Strauss, but like his teacher Zemlinsky.” Our challenge is to convey the message that Korngold sounds like Korngold. The public is receptive to such messages only when it stops being afraid of the unknown. Until then, we continue to do the composers banned by Hitler a further disservice by forcing them into musical alliances that they would not recognize.
by Lily E. Hirsch | Mar 31, 2009 | Articles & Essays
The Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture League), originally called the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden (Culture League of German Jews), was a performing arts ensemble by and for Jews, created in Berlin in collaboration with the National Socialist regime. The Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (Law for the Reconstitution of the Civil Service) of April 7, 1933, generally dismissed non–Aryans — defined at that time as any person descended from a Jewish parent or grandparent — from holding positions in the public sphere, especially at cultural institutions such as state–run music conservatories, opera houses, concert halls and theaters.1 From 1933 to 1941, the League was the most significant site in Nazi Germany that still allowed, and, paradoxically, even encouraged Jews to participate in music as well as theater.
In 1933, Kurt Baumann (1907–1983), who, as a Jew, had been dismissed from his duties as a director's assistant, developed the preliminary plan for the League, which was to include theatrical plays, opera, and orchestral concerts. 2 In his memoirs, he explained:
I based my idea of founding a Jewish cultural circle on very simple numbers. At the time, 175,000 Jews lived in Berlin alone, many other big cities had similar concentrations, percentage–wise.3
Baumann shared his plan for the League with Kurt Singer (1885–1944), whose assistant he had been at Berlin's Städtische Oper (Municipal Opera). 4 Singer, a musicologist, neurologist and conductor, known and respected in nationalist circles, had envisioned a similar organization. Together, they worked to recruit other Jewish luminaries, such as Berlin's chief rabbi, Leo Baeck, journalist Werner Levie and conductor Joseph Rosenstock. When Baumann approached theater critic Julius Bab with the project, Bab was justifiably skeptical: “Dürfen wir denn das?” (“Are we allowed to do it?”)5
Singer attempted to generate support for the organization within various Nazi government offices, and he was eventually invited to meet with Hans Hinkel, who had been appointed head of the Prussian Theater Commission by the new Prussian minister, Hermann Göring, immediately after Hitler's ascension to power. 6 In April 1933, Hinkel and Singer began to negotiate terms for the creation of the League – terms that included several stipulations: the League was to be staffed only by Jewish artists and financed by the all–Jewish audiences through a monthly fee; only the Jewish press was allowed to report on League events; League programs were to be submitted to Hinkel for approval before performance. This last requirement allowed the regime to exclude works of “Aryan” German origin and promote a repertoire considered appropriate for a Jewish organization – a repertoire that included “Jewish” art, according to Hinkel's definition of Jewish art.7
These stipulations explain the regime's otherwise apparently puzzling support of the Jewish organization. For the Nazi officials, the League was meant to function as propaganda: by pointing to their support of the League, the Nazis could claim that Jews were not oppressed but encouraged to find their own forum for cultural expression. 8 At the same time, however, through Hinkel's censorship of the repertoire the League offered a way for the regime's leaders to attempt to segregate Jews from Germany's cultural life and prevent Jewish appropriation of so–called German art.
By the beginning of September 1933, the League consisted of eight separate sections. Its lecture department included Anneliese Landau, Julius Bab, Arthur Eloesser, Max Osborn, Julius Guttmann and Ernst Landsberger. Bab also directed the drama department, which was associated with the dramaturgy department. Heinz Condell, Hans Sondheimer and Werner Levie supervised the décor and costume division, the technical department, and the management division, respectively. Levie, who had worked until 1933 as economic editor of the Vossische Zeitung (a liberal Berlin newspaper), also acted as League secretary. 9 Along with Singer, Joseph Rosenstock led the opera department, in which Baumann also worked. 10 The concert department, linked to the opera division, was also headed by Rosenstock and Singer as well as the concert director Michael Taube, who had been Bruno Walter's assistant at the Municipal Opera in Berlin. 11 When Taube left for Tokyo in 1936, Hans Wilhelm Steinberg (later known as William Steinberg) replaced him. When Steinberg left for Palestine later that year (to work with the newly conceived Palestine Orchestra), he was succeeded by Rudolf Schwarz.12
Berlin's municipal administration leased the Berliner Theater on Charlottenstrasse, in the northwest corner of Berlin, to the League's management, for use as a performance venue. But in 1935, after two years, the League was not allowed to renew the lease and lost the theater. League operations were then transferred to the Herrnfeld–Theater on the Kommandantenstrasse.
By October 1933, the League had about 12,500 members; this number increased to circa 20,000 – nearly twelve percent of Berlin's Jewish population – during the following winter. From 1934 to 1937, membership remained at about 18,500, with new members replacing those that emigrated. 13
The creation of the Jewish Culture League in Berlin was soon followed by the formation of active League chapters in Cologne and Frankfurt. Whereas the original Berlin League maintained a theater ensemble, opera company and philharmonic orchestra, the Cologne branch operated only an independent theater ensemble, and the Frankfurt League, which had no opera or theater ensemble, focused on orchestral music and maintained its own philharmonic orchestra under the direction of Steinberg, until he left for Berlin in 1936. 14 Smaller offshoots of the Berlin League were formed in Hamburg, Munich, Mannheim, Breslau, Kassel, Stuttgart and other locations. The most active League branches were in Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne and Hamburg, which maintained a third independent Jewish theater ensemble. 15 The Berlin chapter, supervised by Singer, was the largest. By 1935, the Jewish Culture League had forty–six local chapters in other towns and cities, which the Nazi regime put under the umbrella union, Reichsverband der jüdischen Kulturbünde (Reich Association of Jewish Culture Leagues), also based in Berlin.
Singer was primarily in charge of program approval, which was no easy task given Hinkel's requirements for League performances and the censorship of offending offerings. Still, despite pressure from the regime, League organizers did not generally gravitate toward “Jewish” works. To some, such a repertoire was, in fact, at odds with their sense of Germanness and threatened to turn their Jewish organization into a ghetto. On the other hand, from the very start the Jüdische Rundschau, a newspaper serving the Zionist movement, challenged this Teutonic mindset and demanded that the League confront the changing situation of Jews in Germany and the need for a repertoire specifically connected to Jewishness. 16 The existence of this conflict, which the heterogeneousness of the Jewish public only compounded, helps to explain why League leaders did not follow the example of other organizations dedicated to the question of “Jewish” art. The League lacked the support for any specific program, as well as the time needed to create one. Indeed, the organization was never envisioned as a long–term venture; at the time, most people did not expect the regime or its anti–Semitic policies to last long. 17 League organizers also differed as to the very definition of “Jewish” art. To address this controversy officially, Singer convened a Jewish Culture League Conference, designated Die Kulturtagung des Reichsverbandes der Jüdischen Kulturbünde in Deutschland, on September 5, 1936. In speeches given the following day, prominent theater and music scholars advised League representatives how best to satisfy all those involved through the performances of recommended Jewish works. 18
This conference probably represented the peak of official interest in the question of Jewish art within the League, but it yielded no definitive solutions. In the following years, as conditions worsened in Nazi Germany, other concerns overshadowed this debate. After Kristallnacht – November 9–10, 1938 – and in the absence of Singer, who was visiting the United States, Levie was put in charge of the League, and on December 31 the League in Berlin and its various branches were consolidated into the Jüdischen Kulturbund in Deutschland e.V. (Jewish Culture League in Germany, Inc.), which was still based in Berlin. 19
On September 4, 1939, Fritz Wisten, who had been involved in the League's theatrical productions, replaced Levie, who had left Germany at the end of August. 20 When the League had finally outlived its usefulness, the organization was officially dissolved on September 11, 1941. At this time, Germany was embroiled in war on two fronts — both with Britain and the Soviet Union. Hitler had also become committed to the elimination of European Jewry, and had approved the mass deportation of German Jews eastward. 21 Although the Final Solution was not discussed until the Wannsee meeting on January 20, 1942, Hitler's approval of deportation was a decisive turn toward murder. 22 The regime no longer needed the League for propaganda purposes and had found a more extreme means of segregation. Still, as an explanation for the liquidation of the League, the secret police cited Paragraph 1 of the Reich president's order of February 28, 1933 — for the protection of people and state. 23
Lily E. Hirsch is Assistant Professor of Music at Cleveland State University. She has published articles in Philomusica, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Musical Quarterly, and has a book, entitled A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press (2010).
1 Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 106. See also Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. I: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997), 28 and Erik Levi, “Music and National Socialism: The Politicization of Criticism,” in The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture & Film in the Third Reich, ed. Brandon Taylor and Wilfried von der Will (Hampshire: Winchester Press, 1990), 168.
2 Julius Bab, Leben und Tod des deutschen Judentums, (written in Summer 1939) ed. Klaus Siebenhaar (Berlin: Argon, 1988), 106. See also Germans No More: Accounts of Jewish Everyday Life, 1933–1938, eds. Margaret Limberg and Hubert Rübsaat, trans. Alan Nothnagle (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 183.
3 Ken (Kurt) Baumann, “Memoiren,” Leo Baeck Institute, New York, 27. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
4 Sylvia Rogge–Gau, Die doppelte Wurzel des Daseins: Julius Bab und der Jüdische Kulturbund Berlin (Berlin: Metropol, 1999), 60.
5 Baumann, “Memoiren,” 32.
6 Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany, 33–35.
7 See Letter from Hans Hinkel to Kurt Singer, 15 July 1933, Fritz–Wisten–Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and “Satzung des Kulturbundes Deutscher Juden,” Fritz–Wisten–Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. See also Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and their Music in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 101.
8 See Martin Goldsmith, The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000), 298; Kater, 98; Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 51; Michael Meyer, The Politics of Music in the Third Reich (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 75; Bernd Sponheuer, “Musik auf einer ‘kulturellen und physischen Insel’: Musik als überlebensmittel im Jüdischen Kulturbund 1933–1941” in Musik in der Emigration 1933–1945. Verfolgung, Vertreibung, Rückwirkung, ed. Horst Weber (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 1993), 111; and Herbert Freeden, Jüdisches Theater in Nazideutschland (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1964), 51.
9 Horst J.P. Bergmeier, Ejal Jakob Eisler, and Rainer E. Lotz, Vorbei . . . Beyond Recall: Dokumentation jüdischen Musiklebens in Berlin 1933–1938. . . A Record of Jewish musical life in Nazi Berlin 1933–1938 (Hambergen: Bear Family Records, 2001), 67.
10 Bergmeier, Eisler, and Lotz, 401.
11 Bergmeier, Eisler, and Lotz, 53.
12 Rogge–Gau, 62. See also Barbara von der Lühe, “Konzerte der Selbstbehauptung: Die Orchester des Jüdischen Kulturbundes 1933–1941,” Das Orchester 44 (1996): 7 and 10; and Bergmeier, Eisler, and Lotz, 365 and 385.
13 Bergmeier, Eisler, and Lotz, 71, 91–93, and 107–109.
14 Eva Hanau, “Die musikalischen Aktivitäten des Jüdischen Kulturbunds in Frankfurt am Main,” in Verfemte Musik: Komponisten in den Diktaturen unseres Jahrhunderts, Dokumentation des Kolloquiums vom 9–12 Januar 1993 in Dresden, ed. Joachim Braun (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993), 79–80.
15 Hanau, 80.
16 See for example, “Warum ‘Nathan der Weise’?” Jüdische Rundschau, 25 July 1933: 3.
17 See Henryk M. Broder and Eike Geisel, Premiere und Pogrom: der Jüdische Kulturbund 1933–1941 (Berlin: Wolf Jobst Siedler Verlag GmbH, 1992), 228 and 247.
18 See conference transcript in Geschlossene Vorstellung: Der Jüdische Kulturbund in Deutschland 1933–1941, ed.
Akademie der Künste (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1992),
266–297.
19 This reconfiguration was described by Werner Levie in “Aktennotiz,” 16 December 1938, Fritz–Wisten–Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
20 Fritz Wisten, “Bericht über die Arbeit des Jüdischen Kulturbundes in Deutschland e.V. in der Zeit von 1.9.1939–31.8.1940,” Fritz–Wisten–Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 4.
21 Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution: A Reconsideration (New York: Metropolitan Books ,2002), 57.
22 Roseman, 81–94.
22 Letter from secret police, 11 September 1941, Vereinsregister Berlin, Leo Baeck Institute, New York.
by Pamela Potter | Feb 28, 2009 | Articles & Essays
During the twelve years of the Third Reich's existence, there was no shortage of hyperbole in the representation of art's role and artists' obligations within the new state. Anyone who approaches the subject will be familiar with Leni Riefenstahl's brilliant piece of film propaganda, Triumph of the Will, with the sleek and imposing neoclassicism of the Olympic stadium and Reich Chancellery, with their muscle bound statuary and with Paul Ludwig Troost's House of German Art. Digging deeper, one discovers that Hitler laid the cornerstone for this art museum amidst a pompous procession of the history of “German” art that borrowed shamelessly from ancient Greece, and that the museum's grand opening in 1937 featured not only a hand-selected collection of works considered truly German but also an accompanying exhibit of illegally seized modernist art displayed, mockingly, as the “degenerate” work of charlatans, racial inferiors and the mentally deranged.
One year later it was music's turn with the creation of the Reich Music Days, which assembled music organizations from around the country and which Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels opened with a speech on the “ten commandments” for German music. A parallel exhibit on “degenerate music” vilified jazz, modernism and the alleged Bolshevik and Jewish domination of German musical taste under the Weimar Republic.
Yet, tempting though it may be to take the Degenerate Music exhibit at face value and to regard it as a global statement of Nazi Germany's repression of musical freedom, some important questions must be asked in order to arrive at an understanding of the event and its impact. Could an exhibit about music successfully convey a clear delineation between ideals of “good” and “bad” creative work as effectively as an exhibit of visual arts? Did this exhibit truly represent the state of German musical life at the time or merely the wishful thinking of rabid ideologues? The images and vitriolic language of this event are abhorrent to our twenty-first-century sensibilities, but how might such visual and verbal rhetoric have resonated in 1938?
Although the events of the Reich Music Days— which spanned more than a week and included performances by the Berlin Philharmonic and conducting appearances by Richard Strauss as well as concerts at local factories – aimed to highlight the superior features of German music, even the glib Goebbels was strikingly vague in his keynote speech. He circuitously suggested that “the nature of music lies in melody” rather than in theoretical constructs; “all music is not suited to everyone”; music is rooted in the folk, requires empathy rather than reason, deeply affects the spirit of man, and is the most glorious art of the German heritage; and musicians of the past must be respected. 1 Goebbels was not alone in his inability to put his finger on what made music German, for the elusiveness of music in general, and German music in particular, had plagued experts on both musical and political fronts for decades, if not centuries. 2
But what about the task of defining “un-German” or “anti-German” music? The Degenerate Music exhibit, a focal point of the Reich Music Days, should have been able to teach Germans how to recognize destructive musical influences and drive them out of the new state. Instead, it offered only a confusing mixture of all music that was construed as alienating, overly intellectual, sarcastic, erotic, socialistic, capitalistic or American. Furthermore, its heavy reliance on the imagery and devices of the art exhibit upon which it was modeled only highlighted the difficulties inherent in pinning labels on music, and the listening booths for sampling the “witches- sabbath” of cacophony may have been the most popular feature for those attendees who actually enjoyed listening to the music that was under fire. 3
Like Goebbels, Hans Severus Ziegler, the exhibit's curator, was not a musician, and he clearly felt uncomfortable delving into musical issues. In the catalogue, he stated outright that he did not intend to “write prescriptions or outline laws for the new formation of German musical life,” but rather to educate the country's youth. 4 Ziegler indulges in polemics against democracy, Bolshevism and Jews but pays more attention to Jewish literary figures than to musicians. One notable exception was Arnold Schoenberg, who was explicitly attacked as the inventor of atonality and the would-be underminer of the “German” triad.5
The fact that the organizers were heavily influenced by the success of the 1937 art exhibit is made even clearer thanks to the abundance of music-related images similar to those used as examples of degenerate art. The art exhibit had heightened its attack on modern artworks by arranging them in a crowded and chaotic fashion on walls strewn with graffiti-like commentary, and the music exhibit was set up in a similar manner. 6 Furthermore, the music exhibit's catalogue exploited the shock value of some modern art by linking it to music wherever possible. It featured a sketch of a stage design for a Schoenberg opera by Oskar Schlemmer, one of the defamed Bauhaus artists; reproduced caricatures of Jewish musicians that were drawn by Jewish artists;7 and showed two abstract paintings with musical subjects by the “degenerates” Paul Klee and Carl Hofer, with the inscription, “degenerate art and degenerate music hand in hand.”8
When they were not leaning on visual associations, the organizers tapped into popular tropes of racism and anti-Semitism as well as indulging in Janus-faced attacks on Bolshevism and capitalism without ever taking pains to sort out the inherent contradictions. The catalogue's cover, with its depiction of a black saxophonist with a Jewish star on his lapel, was meant to incite an immediate aversion to racial otherness: since the 1920s, the saxophone had symbolized concerns about the invasion of American culture, and the Jewish star supposedly revealed the manipulative power behind the alleged American conspiracy to debase German culture. An unflattering portrait of Schoenberg on page 13 of the catalogue is accompanied by an observation – by Siegmund Pisling, who was Jewish – that describes him as an explorer who tries to open up new horizons by turning sounds of anguish and hysteria into music.9 A portrait of his “Aryan” student Anton von Webern is captioned with the comment that the student exceeds the master “even in the length of his nose,”10 and another “Aryan” composer, Ernst Krenek, is targeted for “propagating race dishonor” with his hugely successful opera, Jonny spielt auf! (This work from the 1920s featured, as its central character, a black jazz musician with criminal leanings; it is defamed elsewhere in the catalogue as “Bolshevist” and was probably also the inspiration for the cover illustration.)11 The Jewish opera composer Franz Schreker, whose works had been quite successful throughout the 1920s and who had died in 1934, was linked with the sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld,12 and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's satire of capitalism was twisted to represent their purported encouragement of greed and corruption. 13
The “Degenerate Music” exhibit neither provided guidelines for musicians nor reflected current or developing music policy. The repeated attacks against Schoenberg, for one, would hardly have aroused much surprise in Germany in the 1930s, or even in the 1920s. Following the successes of Pelleas und Melisande (composed 1902-03), Pierrot Lunaire (1912), and Gurrelieder (1900-03, 1910-11), Schoenberg abandoned traditional harmony in his atonal and twelve-tone works and inspired several other composers to follow suit. By the late 1920s, however, many younger composers had set their minds on forging stronger relationships with the general public and had shunned Schoenberg's esoteric experiments, for which critical reception had been less than enthusiastic. Following the 1930 premiere of the composer's opera Von heute auf morgen, musicologist and critic Alfred Einstein reprimanded Schoenberg for his half-hearted attempt to compose a work for the masses by choosing a story with broad appeal but setting it to a twelve-tone score with “fanatical seriousness and an overwhelming lack of humor.” This resulted in a work of “pure self-gratification” that was “unsocial and inhumanly difficult,”14 wrote Einstein — who, like Schoenberg, was later forced to emigrate. Schoenberg had been named director of the prestigious composition master class at the Prussian Academy in 1925, and his public humiliation and resignation in 1933 attracted much attention as a first step toward fulfilling the Nazis' mission to remove all Jews from musical life. The fact that Schoenberg was a Jew whose work had recently declined in popularity provided a convenient coincidence for racist propagandists.
The denigration of Schoenberg did not, however, signal the death of his compositional methods in Germany: several atonal and twelve-tone works were created and performed during the Third Reich, and a few were commissioned by Nazi organizations and premiered in prominent venues. 15 On the occasion of Schoenberg's sixtieth birthday, in 1934, music critic Herbert Gerigk, an employee of the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, went so far as to suggest that in the right hands – i.e., in the hands of a composer who was pure of blood and pure in character – atonal composition could be an effective means of expression. 16
By 1938, when the Degenerate Music exhibit was mounted, Schoenberg and most of the other individuals attacked in it had either emigrated or died, which made them easy targets. Their absences also became retroactive “evidence” of the new order's successful eradication of destructive forces. Curiously, Ziegler names L'Histoire du soldat as a work that had “insulted German audiences,” but he fails to name its composer, Igor Stravinsky. 17 The Russian master was enjoying great success in Germany at the time of the exhibit 18 and was being cited as a possible mentor and inspiration for young composers in the Third Reich.19 His experiments with rhythm and meter unmistakably influenced Carl Orff's hugely successful Nazi'era composition, Carmina burana.20
The other prominent object of vilification in the exhibit was jazz, but the attacks did little to alter its fate in Nazi Germany. Jazz, like atonality, started out as an easy target: already during the 1920s it had symbolized foreign corruption in the minds of conservative music critics, leaders of the youth movement and — a little later, during the Depression – practicing musicians who feared competition from the influx of foreign jazz musicians.21 It is ironic that Germans acquired a much more sophisticated appreciation of jazz during the 1930s, and the genre's popularity would spike during the Second World War, as soldiers demanded it and the German public threatened to tune into foreign broadcasts if German radio refused to offer it on their airwaves.22 Jazz also managed to thrive in nightclubs, some of which were the frequent haunts of SS and SA officers who themselves were jazz enthusiasts.23
Finally, in assessing the success or failure of the exhibit, we must try to envision the Zeitgeist of 1938 in Germany and abroad – and here we encounter even more surprising contradictions. Musicologist Albrecht Dümling, who has long been engaged in reconstructing and understanding the 1938 event and its implications, recently made the stunning discovery that its shrill tone actually repelled some committed National Socialists, whereas the exhibit may have resonated with the adherents of concurrent strains of xenophobia in Britain and America. Peter Raabe, who was then president of the all-encompassing national musicians union (Reichsmusikkammer), founded in 1933, tendered his resignation in response to the exhibit; his predecessor, Richard Strauss, the “godfather” of German music, expressed his dismay more subtly, whereas other prominent musicians simply shunned the event – to such an extent that Goebbels shut the exhibit down prematurely. At the same time, however, an American reporter completely whitewashed the racist content of the exhibit, and a reporter for Britain's Musical Times uncritically noted how it “illustrate[d] the sorry plight of German music during the period of 'Jewish influence.'”24
Taken together, all of these contradictions within and surrounding the Degenerate Music exhibit do nothing to mitigate the fact that, at the very least, the event added to the ammunition that was being stockpiled by those who wished to destroy their enemies, Jews and non-Jews alike. Its barrage of anti-Semitic rhetoric was just one more factor that contributed to the German public's acceptance of the assault on the rights, property and physical safety of Jewish citizens, and the exhibit's attacks on so broad a spectrum of musical tastes only increased the possibilities for personal advancement and vindictiveness in an atmosphere rife with denunciation and betrayal.
Pamela Potter is Professor of Musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of "Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich" (1998) and co-editor, with Celia Applegate, of "Music and German National Identity" (2002). Her current projects include a history of musical life in twentieth-century Berlin and a book on Nazi aesthetics in the visual and performing arts.
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1Joseph Goebbels, “Zehn Grundsätze deutschen Musikschaffens,” Amtliche Mitteilungen der Reichsmusikkammer 5 (1938), facsimile in Albrecht Dümling and Peter Girth, eds. Entartete Musik: eine kommentierte Rekonstruktion (Düsseldorf, 1988), p. 123; portions translated in Donald Wesley Ellis, “Music in the Third Reich: National Socialist Aesthetic Theory as Governmental Policy” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kansas, 1970), p. 127.
2Bernd Sponheuer, “Reconstructing Ideal Types of the 'German' in Music,” in Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, eds., Music and German National Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 36-58; Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 200-234.
3Michael Meyer, “A Musical Facade for the Third Reich,” in Stephanie Barron, ed., “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum, 1991), p. 182.
4Hans Severus Ziegler, Entartete Musik: Eine Abrechnung, 2d ed. (Düsseldorf: Völkischer Verlag, 1939), p. 6.
5Ziegler, pp. 13, 22-24.
6Meyer, illustrations on pp. 170, 173, and 180; description of the exhibit on pp. 180-182.
7Ziegler, p. 19.
8Ziegler, p. 25.
9Ziegler, p. 13.
10Ziegler, p. 19.
11Ziegler, pp. 9, 19.
12Ziegler, p. 15.
13Ziegler, pp. 17, 21.
14Einstein, “Arnold Schönberg: Von heute auf morgen (World première in Frankfurt),” Berliner Tageblatt, 3 February 1930, trans. in Catherine Dower, ed., Alfred Einstein on Music: Selected Music Criticisms, Contributions to the Study of Music and Dance, 21 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 104-105.
15Fred K. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1982), pp. 126, 298-306.
16Herbert Gerigk, “Eine Lanze für Schönberg,” Die Musik 27 (1934).
17Ziegler, pp. 18-20.
18Joan Evans, “Stravinsky's Music in Hitler's Germany,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 56 (2003): 525-594.
19Michael Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 183.
20Michael H. Kater, Composer of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 122-128.
21Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 26-28.
22Kater, Different Drummers, chapters 1 and 2.
23Kater, Different Drummers, pp. 64, 101.
24Albrecht Dümling, “The Target of Racial Purity: The 'Degenerate Music' Exhibition in Düsseldorf, 1938,” in Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich, ed. Richard Etlin, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 62-63.
by Christopher Hailey | Nov 27, 2008 | Articles & Essays
Two generations of composers shaped the musical landscape during the first half of the twentieth century. The first transformed the inherited world of late Romanticism with vertiginous flights of fantasy. A second generation, which came of age in the 1920s, turned away from Romantic ecstasy and mixed high and low, serious and popular, bourgeois and proletarian. These generations shared a common heritage but pursued widely disparate cultural, aesthetic, and even political and philosophical preoccupations.
It is an astonishing legacy from an astonishing era, but it has been transmitted to us in fragments, its continuities disrupted, its densely woven fabric rent asunder. The picture that emerged after the Second World War— in music histories as well as in the living traces of that history, the concert repertoire— was over simplified, a largely Germano–centric narrative of big names and neat stylistic categories; facile cultural clichés and teleologies that propounded the necessary and inevitable demise of tonality and a fight to the death between progressive and conservative cultural forces. In the process, some of the era’s most distinctive voices were lost.
Those silenced voices from the interstices of a rich and variegated musical culture are what concern us here, voices like that of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, an unabashed Romantic whose precocity astonished his contemporaries; or of Franz Schreker, whose works, evenly divided between fin–de–siècle Vienna and the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, thematicized the fragile borderline between shimmering dream and sober awakening; or like that of yet another Viennese, Alexander Zemlinsky, who spent the most productive years of his life in Prague, the capital, after 1918, of a vibrant republic in which a younger generation that included Hans Krása, Pavel Haas and Viktor Ullmann contributed to a new flowering of Czech culture. And what of Erwin Schulhoff, whose peripatetic career was matched by a series of stylistic somersaults that took him from Dada, to jazz, neoclassicism and Neue Sachlichkeit?
These and other composers disappeared into the maw of National Socialism with its persecution of Jews and other “racial” and political undesirables and its various wars of aggression. Schreker was driven to an early grave in 1934, while Zemlinsky, Korngold, Hans Gál, Wilhelm Grosz and Erich Zeisl, along with countless others, were forced into exile. There, bitter and disoriented, many either lost their way or took detours that served to obscure the trajectory of their creative journey. Karl Amadeus Hartmann remained in Germany, but in inner exile, while Veniamin Fleishman was killed during the siege of Leningrad and Vítĕzslava Kaprálová died at twenty–five, in exile in France. Still more tragic was the fate of those composers, including Ullmann, Krása, Haas, Schulhoff and Gideon Klein, who lost their lives in Nazi concentration camps, their works scattered or destroyed, memories of their careers and activities effaced.
But the trauma of the war and the Holocaust was only the beginning. The devastation wrought by those catastrophes was compounded by the profound cultural disorientation that followed. In the early post–war years it was simply too difficult, too painful, to attempt to knit together a world shattered by so much death, destruction and moral abasement – the more so since an emerging Cold War was dividing Europe anew. The 1950s were a time for new beginnings, for brave new worlds in which even the fathers were dispatched without remorse (“Schoenberg est mort,” as Boulez famously declared). Thus, many composers who had been victims of Nazi terror were suppressed by a new set of aesthetic agendas. In the East, strictures against “formalism,” in the West, dogmas of musical progress led many well–intentioned composers, musicians and cultural managers to pursue narrow paths toward new horizons. The inevitable result was a willed cultural amnesia, a pragmatic decision to sweep away many vestiges of pre–war culture. Tonality, Romanticism, inherited forms, even those high–spirited jazz–inspired works of the 1920s and ’30s were relegated to slag heap of history, often with epitaphs adapted without apology from Nazi aesthetic jargon.
Such edicts were enough to warn away the incurious, absolve the complacent and insure that such revivals as took place were perfunctory and halfhearted. Publishers did their part by pulping most of their surviving inventories. It is likely that almost as many scores were destroyed in these post–war years as had ever been confiscated by the Nazis, just as some of the greatest losses to Europe’s architectural heritage took place not through bombing but in the name of post–war urban renewal. With most works out of print and little interest in publishing surviving manuscripts, it is no wonder that the forgotten victims of National Socialism were thrust ever deeper into the memory hole.
This started to change in the later 1970s, when narratives of the Holocaust began at last to penetrate popular consciousness. In Germany and Austria Zemlinsky, Schreker, Korngold, Walter Braunfels, Berthold Goldschmidt, Jaromir Weinberger and the Theresienstadt composers Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas and Hans Krása were accorded Wiedergutmachung, a kind of posthumous restitution in which the still open wound of repression was aestheticized as a cultural event. This led to a well–meaning but misguided attempt to appropriate the obscene Nazi epithet “Entartete Musik” (degenerate music) as a titillating slogan for marketing fascism’s victims to the public. In point of fact, central Europe’s fascists never succeeded in defining degenerate, much less in formulating their own musical ideals, and there can be no historical or aesthetic justification for lumping so many diverse artists into this single and singularly loathsome category. Moreover, such strategies only served to create further ghettos, tiny islets of commemoration, like those sanitized pedestrian zones in which once thriving historical districts are set apart for boutique commercialism. In the end these composers were not only divorced from the vibrant context of their times, but also cordoned off from our own contemporary musical culture.
“A lot of people think that this music is all about the Holocaust,” James Conlon has observed, “but only two percent of it was written in concentration camps. This is about the restoration of two generations of composers that were wiped off the map, a tremendous variety of composers.” In reality, most of this music was written before the rise of National Socialism, the Austrian Anschluss, or the occupation of Czechslovakia. The first challenge, therefore, is to restore it to its historical context, to explore its relationship to the culture and politics of the tumultuous early decades of the century. Only in this way can one truly gauge the contours of each composer’s creative response, whether conscious, as in the selection of genre or texts, or through those subtle stylistic transformations that reflect a more unconscious accommodation to shifts in the aesthetic climate.
All of these composers played an integral role in the musical culture of their times; their music sprang from commonly–held traditions and frequently shared aspirations. They vied for the same audiences and shared publishers, patrons, students and friends. Erwin Schulhoff’s giddy genre–hopping suggests ready parallels to Stravinsky, Křenek or Weill, just as the music of Braunfels and Korngold, Weigl and Zemlinsky, Krása and Kaprálová, Fleishman and Goldschmidt offers surprising points of comparison with Strauss, Mahler, Martinů, and Shostakovich. Hearing Franz Schreker next to Webern can heighten our appreciation of early twentieth–century notions of sonority and Klangfarbe, just as Viktor Ullmann’s harmonic language can evoke the ways in which Alban Berg flirts with lingering tonal references. But such juxtapositions are only a starting point for approaching unfamiliar works. With time, each composer’s idiosyncrasies emerge to help shape suitable performance styles and, in the end, to enhance our understanding of the era, so that even familiar classics can be heard afresh.
These composers also need to be heard in the company of today’s creative forces. It is no accident that a generation of music historians, baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, began researching these forgotten musicians at the same time that young composers of the same generation were challenging post–war compositional orthodoxies. Today’s musical culture is fluid, inventive, eclectic and open–minded in ways that recall the musical culture of the early twentieth century. Composers once neglected because they did not fit into a “school” have now acquired new relevance. Erwin Schulhoff’s aggressive assault on aesthetic barriers feels strikingly familiar, while Schreker’s obsession with timbre seems like an anticipation of today’s Spectralists.
In the end, any work of art frees itself from its creator and the circumstances of its creation to set its own terms and become subject to creative appropriation by other artists and an object of aesthetic appreciation by audiences blissfully ignorant of its historical significance. The times, the audiences to which these composers were responding, have passed; the rupture is complete. We cannot remove the shadow that haunts the memory of these composers, nor should we try. But the works themselves are oblivious to such impositions. If they are worth performing they must be given their right of way on the living thoroughfare of today’s musical culture, subject to the critical scrutiny of the reviewer’s pen and the risk of popular indifference. With sympathetic performances and repeated hearing, the strongest among them will shoulder their way into the repertoire, find their public and create a context for still other, more difficult works.
By restoring these composers to the repertoire we accord them the only justice still available – “the one thing,” James Conlon has observed, “that would have meant the most to them, which is to perform their music.” Celebrating creative individuality is the best response to the leveling force of aesthetic repression, a first step toward re–individualizing the dehumanized, faceless mass of National Socialism’s victims. To be sure, an author’s tragic fate is no guarantor of artistic significance, but each work of art, like the wounded eagle in Janáček’s From the House of the Dead, must first be restored to health before it can soar beyond the walls of its confinement. It is for us to replace the silence of apathy and neglect with the hushed anticipation of discovery.
