Hearing music silenced by the Nazis

Subject: Hearing music silenced by the Nazis
From: katlaughing
Date: 27 Mar 03 - 03:47 PM

A friend sent me this by email. I am posting the first few paragraphs. The remainder of the article is basically a review of performances of some of the music which has been found. You can read it here.

Thanks, kat


NYTimes- Hearing Music Silenced by the Nazis

March 26, 2003
By ALLAN KOZINN

Musicians have been slowly discovering a lost corner of the
20th-century musical world, not just the occasional
overlooked composer or lost work but a gallery of composers
who had established distinctive styles and significant
catalogs through the 1930's, before the Nazis swept through
Europe. Most were Jews from Czechoslovakia who were at the
center of a thriving cultural life in Prague. Most were
first sent to the Theresienstadt camp, at Terezin, in
Czechoslovakia, where they wrote their last works, and from
there to Auschwitz and other camps, where they were
murdered.


In many cases these composers' works survived because they
had entrusted stacks of manuscripts to friends, who hid
them in attics and forgot about them until the 1980's and
90's, when researchers who had heard about the composers
came looking for their works. Among this group were Viktor
Ullmann, Hans Krasa, Erwin Schulhoff, Gideon Klein and
Pavel Haas, each of whom is becoming better known through
recordings and concerts.

Subject: RE: Hearing music silenced by the Nazis
From: alanabit
Date: 28 Mar 03 - 02:39 AM

I hope I get time to check this out later today. You can frequently see East European gypsies busking the terraces of Cologne. Not many speak German, so it is hard to learn much about their culture. They are usually very fine musicians playing on really awful, cheap instruments. You have set me off thnking Kat. There is obviously something of a genuine folk tradition at play here. Thanks for posting.

Subject: RE: Hearing music silenced by the Nazis
From: Joe Offer
Date: 28 Mar 03 - 11:53 AM

Sounds interesting, Kat. People seem to get this cut-and-paste rule mixed up. the limitation applies only to non-music information. If it's about music and may be of interest to Mudcatters, please post the whole thing so it's easy to refer to in the future.
Thanks.
-Joe Offer-

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New York Times
March 26, 2003
Hearing Music Silenced by the Nazis
By ALLAN KOZINN


Musicians have been slowly discovering a lost corner of the 20th-century musical world, not just the occasional overlooked composer or lost work but a gallery of composers who had established distinctive styles and significant catalogs through the 1930's, before the Nazis swept through Europe. Most were Jews from Czechoslovakia who were at the center of a thriving cultural life in Prague. Most were first sent to the Theresienstadt camp, at Terezin, in Czechoslovakia, where they wrote their last works, and from there to Auschwitz and other camps, where they were murdered.

In many cases these composers' works survived because they had entrusted stacks of manuscripts to friends, who hid them in attics and forgot about them until the 1980's and 90's, when researchers who had heard about the composers came looking for their works. Among this group were Viktor Ullmann, Hans Krasa, Erwin Schulhoff, Gideon Klein and Pavel Haas, each of whom is becoming better known through recordings and concerts.

One musician who has recently taken up their cause is James Conlon, an American who has been the principal conductor of the Paris National Opera since 1995. Mr. Conlon is overseeing Recovering a Musical Heritage, a projected three-year series that opened with concerts at Central Synagogue in Manhattan on Sunday and St. Bartholomew's Church on Monday and also includes a concert by the Orchestra of St. Luke's tonight at Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Conlon came to this music by way of Alexander Zemlinsky, a composer whose life was also disrupted by the Nazis, but who, like Schoenberg, Weill, Korngold and Goldschmidt, was able to escape them. Mr. Conlon has undertaken the considerable task of recording all of Zemlinsky's music, and that seems to have led him to these composers. He joins an effort that has made great progress since Ullmann's courageously satirical opera, "Der Kaiser von Atlantis," had its belated premiere in 1975. A decade later Joza Karas published "Music in Terezin," a study of the musicians who lived in that overcrowded camp and the musical life they created to maintain a sense of civilization. The Terezin Chamber Music Foundation, which has supported research, performances and recordings since 1988, and the Decca Records' Entartete Musik series, which explored composers the Nazis deemed degenerate (a task lately taken up by other labels as well), helped revive this music.

Ullmann's "Kaiser" was the perfect opener for Mr. Conlon's series. Composed at Theresienstadt, it was about to go into rehearsal in October 1944, when Ullmann was shipped to Auschwitz. With a German libretto by Petr Kien, the opera describes the reign of Emperor Overall, who declares war against the rest of the world. He clearly represents Hitler, and his sidekick, the Drummer, can be seen as Eva Braun. Death regards the Emperor's war as so obscene that Death abandons his grim reaping, which creates chaos as the mortally wounded are denied the final release. Ullmann's finale is wishful thinking: the Emperor sees the error of his ways and agrees to become the first to die, if Death resumes his work.

Edward Berkeley's production, with sets by John Kasarda and costumes by Hilary Rosenfeld, was straightforward and had some pointed touches, for example making the Emperor a cross between Hitler and Dracula, and putting Death in a red tunic with a World War I-era spiked helmet. But generally it avoided heavy-handed symbolism.

The singers and chamber ensemble conducted by Mr. Conlon were from the Juilliard School, and they gave the work the polished, sharp-edged performance it requires. The most striking singers were Brian Mulligan, as the Emperor; Daniel Gross, who brought an appropriate gravity to Death; Alison Tupay, as the Drummer; Steven Paul Spears, as a philosophical Harlequin; and Alvin Crawford, as the singing Loudspeaker.

There was one needlessly jarring aspect to the performance, which was staged in the synagogue's sanctuary. As part of a context-setting preface to "Kaiser" that included an achingly beautiful performance of the string sextet from Strauss's "Capriccio" (which had its premiere soon after Ullmann arrived at Theresienstadt), excerpts from speeches by Hitler were played over the sound system.

The point was to capture the ominousness of the time, and that would have been fine in a concert hall, or even in the synagogue's social hall. But playing tapes of Hitler in the sanctuary showed a startling lack of regard for the nature of the space. For this listener it felt like an act of desecration; it was objectionable in a visceral way, and I was amazed that Central Synagogue's clergy allowed it.

At the chamber music concert at St. Bartholomew's on Monday, Mr. Conlon and Mark Ludwig, the violist of the Hawthorne String Quartet and the founder of the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation, spoke briefly about several of the works and their composers, and presided over a series of deeply moving performances. Mr. Conlon began with one of his specialties, Zemlinsky's affecting "Maiblumen Blühten Überall" (1903-4), offered here as a scene-setting work, from a time when musical language was essentially Romantic, but already in flux.

After the intermission Mr. Conlon conducted Ullmann's luxuriously lyrical Six Songs (Op. 17), composed in 1937. Amy Burton, the soprano, sang all the vocal works with an illuminating and powerful directness.

The heart of the program, though, was music for strings. The Hawthorne Quartet played Krasa's early String Quartet (1921), in which an Expressionist accent is tempered with touches of Weill-like cabaret, as well as Krasa's final work, a vigorous and at times transcendent Passacaglia and Fugue for string trio (1944). Ullmann's String Quartet No. 3 (1943) had the same kind of intensity and chromatic inventiveness as Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht." As an encore the group offered the Scherzo from Klein's Quartet (Op. 2), composed in 1940 when Klein was 20. He was killed five years later.

Concerts devoted entirely to composers caught up in the Holocaust have served the music well so far, but what the music needs now is to be absorbed into the mainstream: adopted by performers as repertory works and offered on programs alongside anything from Mozart to Copland. It can bear the scrutiny.

Subject: RE: Hearing music silenced by the Nazis
From: katlaughing
Date: 28 Mar 03 - 01:12 PM

Thanks, Alanabit! I look forward to hearing more of what you are looking into!

Joe, I do understand, but as it was mostly a critique of classical music I didn't think everyone would want to read it. Thanks, very much for posting the whole thing.

kat