Forbidden Music Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Michael Haas

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

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  Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

  Library of Congress Control Number 2013934408

  ISBN 978-0-300-15430-6

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  The book is dedicated to the two men in my life who made it possible:

  My father Benjamin Leopold Haas who provided me with the roots necessary to keep asking the right questions; and my partner Kevin Bell whose patience and support made it possible for me to take the necessary time away from the recording studio to write.

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  1 German and Jewish

  2 Wagner and German Jewish Composers in the Nineteenth Century

  3 An Age of Liberalism, Brahms and the Chronicler Hanslick

  4 Mahler and His Chronicler Korngold

  5 The Jugendstil School of Schoenberg, Schrecker, Zemlinsky and Weigl

  6 A Musical Migration

  7 Hey! We're Alive!

  8 A Question of Musical Potency: The Anti-Romantics

  9 The Resolute Romantics

  10 Between Hell and Purgatory

  11 Exile and Worse

  12 Restitution

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Preface

  ‘Should what's German and true be forgot, its memory be the Master's lot’ (Was deutsch und echt wüßt keiner mehr, lebt's nicht in deutscher Meister Ehr) is Hans Sachs's final admonition at the end of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and could have been understood as a veiled warning from the anti-Semitic Wagner to non-Jewish Germans on the cusp of Jewish emancipation. But Sachs's lines spoke just as strongly, perhaps even more resonantly, to Jews eager to contribute to what they had long perceived as a shared cultural heritage. In only 65 years, such intentions would be shattered and the loss would be felt by more than just the German nation.

  As the producer for the recording series entitled ‘Entartete Musik’ released by London/Decca, I found myself confronting works by composers who had inexplicably vanished from the repertoire since their banning in 1933. My first encounter with some of this material took place in the mid-1980s when I began producing recordings of early orchestral works by Alexander Zemlinsky with Riccardo Chailly and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (now the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin). That Zemlinsky was considered at all was thanks to the advocacy of the orchestra manager, Peter Ruzicka. When I was first shown the scores, I was slightly baffled. Chailly and Ruzicka were at the time both inquisitive musical progressives and the works they were considering reminded me more of Dvořák than their usual enthusiasms for more visionary twentieth-century composers. The fact that Zemlinsky was Schoenberg's teacher and brother-in-law offered an acceptable rationale and the recordings were surprisingly well received and were followed by Schoenberg's Gurrelieder. Then, as co-productions with DeutschlandRadio, (or RIAS, as it was then known), there came projects with Ute Lemper and John Mauceri, intended as the beginning of a series of the complete stage works of Kurt Weill. Disagreements with the Kurt Weill Foundation in New York led to the idea being dropped and rather than return the designated budget to London/Decca, I pleaded that we should use it explore other composers whose names I kept encountering while researching Weill. I had begun to suspect that Weill was only the tip of a potentially large iceberg. I put this proposal to the president of the label, Roland Kommerell, who was not only German, but also a nephew of the literary historian Max Kommerell, former secretary to the poet Stefan George and later a close associate of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. For whatever reasons, Roland Kommerell clearly appreciated that money put into this particular large-scale recovery would be well spent. I remain grateful to him for his trust and faith in both the idea and my work. Assisting me with advice and scholarly support was the ever helpful and indefatigable Albrecht Dümling, who remains one of the first and foremost German academics to have dealt fearlessly and objectively with this period of cultural history. The composer Berthold Goldschmidt, with whom I would subsequently work very closely, not only took me through his scores bar by bar, but was able to offer sobering accounts of life in Germany before 1935 and later as an émigré in England. The integrity of the recording series would have been unthinkable without him. Additional support came from Thomas Gayda and others, some of whom came from Peter Petersen's ‘Music Exile Project’ at Hamburg University while others came from within London/Decca itself.

  Though we were not the only label examining repertoire banned by the Third Reich, we were the first with international distribution and the financial wherewithal to record large-scale operatic and orchestral works. The series ran for nearly 10 years resulting in a total of 30 different projects and won many awards. The conductors Lothar Zagrosek, John Mauceri, Riccardo Chailly and Charles Dutoit along with the singers Ute Lemper, François le Roux and Matthias Goerne, and the instrumentalists Yo Yo Ma, Sabine Meyer and Chantal Juillet brought not only idiomatic authority but also a good deal of much-needed prestige. Sadly, all the recognition the series received could not save it from the turbulence of the recording industry during the final years of the last century. With the sale of Polygram to Universal Music, the series was cancelled and we went our separate ways.

  I was subsequently approached by the Director of the Jewish Museum of Vienna to advise on a large exhibition being curated by Leon Botstein on the subject of Vienna as a city of music and Jews entitled ‘Quasi una fantasia’. This was followed by my appointment as Music Curator, resulting in a number of exhibitions on various Viennese composers and allowing me the opportunity to do more than skim biographies and worklists in search of the most appropriate pieces to record. For the first time, I was able to explore the lives of individual composers, and the events that shaped them. This would not have been possible without an army of experts who assisted on each exhibition. These included the families of Hans Gál, Erich Korngold, Erich Zeisl and Egon Wellesz; Reinhold Kubik of the International Gustav Mahler Society in Vienna; Hannes Heher and Hartmut Krones of the Wellesz Foundation and the Austrian Hanns Eisler Society; Karin Wagner who co-curated the Erich Zeisl exhibition; Christopher Hailey, who is not only the leading authority on Franz Schreker but also an expert on the musical environment of prewar Vienna and Berlin; Brendan Carroll, whose Korngold biography finally gave us a scholarly reference that dealt with the composer as more than just a Hollywood phenomenon. Special thanks must go to the American relatives and friends who provided support and information: Gladys Krenek, Kathrin Korngold and her mother Helen; Barbara Zeisl-Schoenberg and the entire Schoenberg family, with particular gratitude to E. Randol Schoenberg the grandson of both Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Zeisl; the Los Angeles composer and critic Walter Arlen; and the grandson of Ernst Toch, Lawrence Weschler, as well as the grandson of Karl Weigl, Karl C. Weigl, along with Juliane Brand.

  The Jewish Museum in Vienna is a centre of excellence and its curators could hardly have been bettered. They have all achieved wide recognition in their various fields: Michaele Feurstein, Werner Hanak, Wiebke Krohn, Mar
cus Patka, along with the extraordinary senior curator Felicitas Heimann and the museum's director, Karl Albrecht-Weinberger, whose support gave the institution, and its exhibitions and the accompanying catalogues, intellectual authority. The designer Thomas Geisler and his team created large-scale, multi-media, presentations so that the exhibitions were interactive, didactic and even theatrical. Perhaps most importantly, the museum's finance director Georg Haber made sure it could all be paid for. This resulted in critical praise and extraordinary visitor numbers. With the departure of Dr Albrecht-Weinberger, Georg Haber and Dr Heimann, along with much of their team, I moved to new opportunities. I am grateful to Gerold Gruber at Vienna's Music University, where together we head Exilarte, an organisation devoted to the recovery of Austria's composers lost after 1938.

  Without the support of many organisations throughout Europe and America, the job of cultural restitution would hardly be possible. These include London's Jewish Music Institute and its indomitable director Geraldine Auerbach, who invited me to continue the work started at Decca as soon as she heard of the cancellation of the recording series. She helped assemble a committee that has remained a constant support and information resource. In addition, we all became close and mutually supportive friends. Together we make up the International Centre for Suppressed Music based at SOAS (London University): Martin Anderson, Betty Collick; Erik Levi and Lloyd Moore (who both provided invaluable editorial assistance for this volume, with Erik Levi helping to locate important documentation and Lloyd Moore reading and commenting on each chapter), Malcolm Miller, Gavin Plumley, Jutta Raab-Hansen and Peter Tregear. Additional thanks must also go to the historian Philipp Blom. In America, further support has come from the OREL Foundation, thanks to the conductor James Conlon and the Foundation's Director Robert Elias who also contributed invaluable editorial advice and guidance. Finally, Malcolm Gerratt from Yale University Press who provided the much needed impulse to put e-pen to e-paper and most of all, my editor Nigel Simeone, who helped sharpen the narrative and focus the arguments in each chapter. All of them, and many others too numerous to mention, have helped to made this book possible, and I am deeply grateful to every one of them.

  Translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

  Introduction

  This a magic cauldron be,

  Wherein we find bewitching forces;

  If you place your head inside

  You'll witness all your future courses

  A German future here to see

  Within this fetid sink;

  Yet don't be sickened by the scum,

  Or its penetrating stink

  With a smile, she bade me hither,

  I quickly hid my fear

  I hurried towards her, ever eager

  To see what held this sphere

  What I saw, I shall not say

  To silence I am vowed

  Indeed I hardly dare describe

  The stench-enfolding cloud

  With reluctance I recall

  That dreadful, cursed smell

  It seemed a mix of unwashed masses:

  Ovens from a tannery in hell

  Hideous the stench! Oh God help!

  That still continued to rise

  The fanning of dung it seemed to me

  Of three-dozen fields in size.

  Of Saint-Just's words, I know quite well

  Once uttered on charitable boards

  That sore afflictions, with rose-oil and musk

  Won't work to cure the hoards

  This rancid reek of a German future

  Overwhelmed the senses

  My nose had never inhaled the like

  It shattered my defences.

  Heinrich Heine, Germany: A Winter's Tale, from Caput 26, 1844

  As this excerpt shows, German Jews had a complex relationship with their sense of national identity. Heine's epic poem from 1844, Germany: A Winter's Tale, offers a chilling prediction of the disastrous direction in which the German nation would move. In an apparent contradiction, Heine states in his introduction that his sense of patriotism consisted of dreaming of a world that one day would be entirely German.1 Heine was simply personifying the conflict that resulted from his respect for German culture, above all its language, with his wariness about a national identity that saw itself as so exceptional as to be exclusive. As a Jew, he understood the notion of exclusion. At the same time, his response to German cultural exceptionalism was to reshape German culture through his own work: Heine was the poet for whom the Romantic German composers showed the greatest enthusiasm.

  This book is about the Jewish composers who were banned by the Third Reich. Most of those directly affected were born within a decade of Heine's centenary in 1897. The mixture of exuberance and apprehension expressed by Heine had ripened by then into a sense of national entitlement. Jews were able to counter threats of exclusion from German culture by reacting as Heine, and reshaping it through their own creativity. Thus, by banning Jewish composers, Hitler's Reich amputated an essential limb from the body of German cultural continuity. Jews born within Germany or Austria had only recently been allowed to count themselves as full participants in their nations. In Austria, Jewish emancipation came about in 1867 with the creation of the new state of Austria-Hungary, while in Germany it started with the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871. Once Jews became active participants in what they viewed as the most cultivated and liberal society in Europe, they embraced all things German with a creative enthusiasm that came close to mania. As with Heine, years of looking into German Culture from the outside resulted in works of untold inventiveness. It was a creative intoxication so intense that many did not notice the numerous non-Jews who dismissed out of hand any notion of Jewish cultural entitlement. The more vehemently Jewish claims of cultural or national equality were rejected by anti-Semites, the more Jews proved that they were bringing creative elements to bear that resulted in the country's artistic life becoming more, not less German.

  A fascinating example of this dynamic playing itself out in its many unappealing aspects was the slanging match between two Leipzig critics, Adolf Aber and Alfred Heuß, in the 1920s. It had been ignited by divided opinions surrounding Franz Schreker's opera Der Schatzgräber.2 Schreker was widely regarded as Jewish though he had been brought up as Roman Catholic by his mother, a member of Austria's impoverished aristocracy. Heuß greeted the premiere of Der Schatzgräber in Leipzig on 23 October 1921 with an incendiary article implying that Schreker's popularity was manufactured, supported by the press with its principal cheerleader being the influential Jewish journalist Paul Bekker, who in 1919 had proclaimed Schreker as ‘successor’ to Richard Wagner.

  Heuß's vile and paranoid article is not explicitly anti-Semitic, but its rant against ‘the press’ and Bekker (referred to as ‘Plague-breath’) would have been understood by anyone reading it. He denounces his fellow Leipzig critic Adolf Aber as a ‘Bekker-poodle’ and Schreker's operas as ‘sexually charged kitsch’.3 Such a toxic attack could not go unanswered and Aber wrote a short essay entitled The Heuß Case which he had privately published and sent to interested parties – one of whom happened to be Heuß.4 Heuß reacted by dismissing Aber as ‘Leipzig vermin,’ but what disturbed Heuß most was Aber's reaction to the implication that Schreker, Bekker and Aber were somehow not sufficiently ‘German’. Aber wondered how a Swiss such as Heuß could wrap himself in the flag of German nationalism while questioning Aber's own national allegiance. Aber reminds his Swiss colleague, that he – Aber – had not only fought in the recently ended war (in which Switzerland had remained neutral), but had been an officer in the Prussian Army. This was clearly a sore point for Heuß, and his retort tells us a good deal about the attitudes of the time: he wonders how Aber, as a Jew, can dare to question Heuß's German credentials. The assumption, which would have been understood by everyone following this row, was that a Prussian Jew (or even half-Jew, such as Bekker and Schreker), was far less ‘German’ than a Swiss-German.


  In an attempt to put disputes such as the Heuß–Aber row into context, this book sets the scene from before the emergence of the German nation into its two political states. It considers the historical and cultural significance of Jewish composers who have been ‘lost’, and examines the obstacle-strewn path towards musical assimilation that they were made to take. From the first half of the nineteenth century, Jewish composers who did not emigrate to France (as Meyerbeer and Offenbach had done) appear to have been almost stiflingly conventional in order to underpin their German cultural credentials. Wagner even dismissed the brilliance of Mendelssohn, declaring that he, too, was merely the product of Jewish over-compensation.

  Such views were a reflection of the hostile environment in which nineteenth-century Jewish composers found themselves rather than an objective assessment of their talent. This sheds light on the sobering fact that few of these composers – Mendelssohn excepted – have much to say to us today. Yet the cautious emergence of Jewish musicians evolved into a position of near dominance within German and Austrian musical life over the course of a mere half-century. Such was the situation that in 1938 the Nazis mounted an exhibition, ‘Entartete Musik’ (‘Degenerate Music’) in Düsseldorf to demonstrate the supposed ‘degenerate’ influence on German musical life by what they called ‘Jewish Cultural Bolshevism’.

  This is not a book about Nazis but about the composers who were lost, and the musical trends they established before being banned, murdered and exiled. It also examines the tragic postwar developments that kept them on the margins long after the fall of Hitler's Reich. As such, this book lays out how Jews saw themselves, and how they were seen by non-Jews. It tries to contextualise the discrepancy that often emerges from these different perceptions and to evaluate the music written by Jewish composers, much of which remains unjustly neglected.