Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis

by Michael Haas

  With many prominent professionals and intellectuals stranded in France in 1940, Roosevelt was able to introduce an Advisory Committee on Political Refugees (known as the ‘Refugee Committee’) so that visas could be quickly made available to selected individuals who could make their way to neutral Portugal, possibly via French Morocco. From this pool, over 3,000 special visas were offered to those who were deemed to be able to make a tangible contribution to American cultural, financial or academic life. It was under this system that Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler-Werfel were able to enter the United States after crossing the Pyrenees on foot and making their way from there to Lisbon. Erich Itor Kahn, once released from French internment, travelled to French Morocco and thence to the United States. Refugees waiting for visas in North Africa were immortalised in Casablanca (1942) starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, a film made all the more authentic by the participation of numerous Austro-German refugees working in Hollywood including Paul Henreid, Conrad Veidt, Peter Lorre, Curt Bois, Ilka Grüning and Ludwig Stössel. The music was by the Vienna-born, Hollywood-based Max Steiner.

  The composers Eisler and Toch, the director Erwin Piscator, the critic and musicologist Max Graf and other academics were able to enter the USA with offers to take up professorships at New York's New School of Social Research, a specialist college founded in 1919. Graf, Eisler and Toch were only a few of the well-known European intellectuals to be offered positions by one of the School's co-founders, Alvin Johnson. In 1933, Johnson, together with the Austrian economist Emil Lederer, set up a postgraduate division of the New School that he called the University in Exile, supported in part by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Jewish philanthropist Hiram J. Halle. Over the next few years, it would offer permanent positions to refugee-academics including the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, and the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer. The New School of Social Research, however, was only one of several elite institutions that saved lives by making offers of employment to refugee intellectuals and artists. The neo-Marxist Frankfurt School (of interdisciplinary social theory), formed under the sociologist Max Horkheimer, left Germany and relocated to Columbia University in New York in 1933 where it re-established itself as the Institute for Social Research. From the very beginning, it had attracted leftist scholars, intellectuals and academics such as Walter Benjamin and Paul Tillich.44 Theodor (Wiesengrund) Adorno was director of a social research project called the Radio Project, which would lead to collaboration with Hanns Eisler on the use of music and film, and was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, a source of income that must have left many Marxists culturally bemused. Eventually, it resulted in the publication of their co-authored book Composing for the Films (1947).45

  One of the most prestigious locations of all was Princeton, New Jersey, where the generously endowed Institute for Advanced Study established by Abraham Flexner became the temporary home for the writers Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch, the art historian Erwin Panofsky, and the archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld, with its most significant academic acquisition being the physicist Albert Einstein.46 America was proving itself enormously resourceful at taking in the brains which were being squeezed out of Hitler's Europe and marginalised in nationalist Britain, though it was a source of endless frustrations and humiliation for many of the émigrés themselves. Salaries for academics in America were not always what Europeans expected, nor did the system appeal to academics from Germany and Austria, where universities had been places for students to learn from professors. In America, students were able to choose the people under whom they wished to study, a change in focus that caused bewilderment. Along with these cultural upheavals came the genuine difficulties of not finding suitable employment at all. Paul Dessau worked on a chicken farm; the satirical writer Walter Mehring was a warehouse foreman; the poet, philosopher and second husband of Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Blücher, was a porter in a chemical factory; the Brechtian actress Ruth Berlau worked in a bar; and Lou Eisler worked as a cleaner.47

  Ernst Krenek wrote of the ‘echolessness’ of America's vast expanses’,48 which seems to refer to not only the geographical size of the country but also the inability of a composer to resonate. After countless false dawns and frustrations, some of Europe's finest composers and musicologists found themselves teaching in America's numerous provincial colleges and small universities. Krenek himself taught at Vassar, America's leading college for privileged young women, but left under a cloud, ostensibly for promoting twelve-note composition. He subsequently found a post at Hamlin University in St Paul, Minnesota, which provided him with the introduction to his third wife, the composer Gladys Nordenstrom. Other notable names would also find themselves teaching in colleges: Karol Rathaus at Queens College in New York, Alfred Einstein at Smith College (like Vassar, an outstanding liberal arts college for women), Paul Pisk at the Baptist University of Redlands in California, before he moved to the University of Texas in Austin, Erich Zeisl at Los Angeles City College, while the Austro-Hungarian pianist Lili Kraus took up the position of artist in residence at Texas Christian College in Fort Worth.

  There is no question that many were deeply grateful to the United States for the opportunities they were offered. At the time, the American West Coast became such a haven for refugee academics that the musicologist Christopher Hailey told the author that, as a youngster growing up in California, he and other young musicians didn't trust a teacher without a foreign accent. These were known locally as the ‘Bei-uns-niks’ for their constant prefacing of every conversation with the phrase ‘Bei uns …’, which in this context meant ‘Back where we're from …’. Hailey wrote in his essay ‘Émigrés in the Classroom’:

  It is possible that the influx of German-speaking émigrés of the 1930s and the ‘40s served as something of a brake on America's process of self-discovery. Through the introduction of systematic musicology, analytical procedures such as those of Heinrich Schenker, and compositional models such as those of Hindemith and Schoenberg, the émigrés helped establish a set of academic priorities that were heavily dependent upon the precedents of central European repertoire. The émigré presence also introduced or re-enforced certain long-held prejudices, including the notion that German music was superior to that of, say, France or Italy (substance over style), and the belief that instrumental music represented a higher, purer form of musical culture than vocal or theatrical forms, which were among America's strengths.

  Hailey concludes, however, that far from transferring the seed of European culture to the fertile soil of California, young American composers such as John Cage and Lou Harrison, both Schoenberg pupils, would react with their own strong musical statements, representing a definitive break with old-world aesthetic principles.49

  American ensembles and opera companies were just as suspicious of musicians without foreign accents, and probably nowhere were refugees taken up with greater enthusiasm than by American orchestras and the organisers of subscription concert series. Established conductors such as Bruno Walter, Georg (now George) Szell and others soon found first-rate orchestras with much better terms and conditions than the ones they had conducted in Europe. Otto Klemperer may have been frustrated with life in Los Angeles, and its obligatory income-producing Hollywood Bowl season, but there was no denying that he was able to establish a world-class ensemble from what was still a relatively young orchestra at a time of general financial hardship. In addition, he had the freedom to perform a good deal of modern repertoire to an inquisitive, if occasionally puzzled, audience. With so many immigrants arriving, many émigré conductors recognised players in their new ensembles from earlier days in Europe. A few had orchestras founded for them, such as the NBC Orchestra established in 1937 for Arturo Toscanini but also regularly conducted by Bruno Walter, George Szell, Ernest Ansermet and Charles Munch. The Jewish Hungarian Fritz Reiner had been working in the United States since 1922, long before the arrival of Hitler; but Erich Leinsdorf came to New York's Metropol
itan Opera in 1937 on the recommendation of the soprano Lotte Lehmann. By the 1950s, he had become a household name throughout America, while remaining largely unknown in his native Vienna. The Hungarian conductor and violinist Jenő Blau, later known as Eugene Ormandy, had, like Fritz Reiner, also come to America before the advent of National Socialism. Like Reiner, he was unable to return to Europe and was plagued by the inability to rescue family and friends after the outbreak of war. He went on to enjoy 44 years as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, from 1936 until 1980. Wilhelm, now William, Steinberg and Antal Doráti were other names that started to appear as regular conductors with provincial ensembles, while the Utah Symphony Orchestra in Salt Lake City was able to increase its national profile substantially from 1947 with the help of the Jewish Swiss conductor Maurice Abravanel, who fled Germany in 1933. These were just some of the conductors. There were, if anything, even more instrumentalists who arrived first as refugees in the United States, then stayed as immigrants such as the pianists Rudolf Serkin, Artur Schnabel, Lili Kraus, Eduard Steuermann; Jews from Russia such as Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein from Poland; the Viennese cellist Emanuel Feuermann and the violinists Fritz Kreisler, Rudolf Kolisch, along with the Russian violinists Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein, who as Jews were unwilling to return to Nazi-dominated Europe, having already fled Bolshevik Russia.

  American musical life took off as never before, with every school and provincial orchestra boasting its own celebrity émigrés who guaranteed that local standards of performance were as high as they were in Europe. More importantly, they inspired young Americans to meet the exacting standards demanded by their new teachers, conductors and even administrators. George Szell (who remained ‘Georg’ in correspondence with Austrian friends), wrote to Hans Gál in 1946 to explain his conducting post in Cleveland:

  The position in Cleveland, about which I have been unable to write until now, is truly ideal. The financial foundation of the society is the best that can be found amongst all American orchestras with the possible exception of Boston. The Hall, and indeed the entire building, is splendid and is in due course meant to become our permanent home. The orchestra, which was already one of the best in the country, will soon become one of the very best to be found anywhere as I have succeeded in increasing the personnel to 95 and have all of programmes for the coming season now scheduled. It goes to press in September and I'll have a copy sent to you.

  The interest and the participation of the public is enormous. Six weeks ago we had already sold $92,000 worth of subscription concert tickets. Last year at this time the figure stood at $42,000, but we need to remember that the strongest month for subscription sales is September, meaning it's still to come. Last year the final amount came to $77,000.50

  The musicologist Alfred Einstein, writing to Gál in early 1940 from Northampton, Mass., offers another picture of émigré life:

  Our larking about at Christmas in New York was repaid with double the normal work-load upon my return. In New York we heard almost only German – and what's more, German with a Viennese accent. Heini Schnitzler [son of Arthur Schnitzler], an evening spent with three conductors: Szell, Stiedry and Breisach, each at varying points put into a bad mood as they switched on the radio to hear a good Belgian conductor. […] We missed […] Karl Weigl, but the best of all, the one we most longed to see was of course you. Back in Northampton, one only hears English, but English that is coloured by every imaginable accent these days.51

  A selection of correspondence gives an impression of the pressures and problems of leaving Germany and Austria, and of obtaining an American visa. Temporary asylum in Switzerland is illustrated by letters of reasonably well-connected refugees trying to get to the United States. Erich Korngold's brother Hanns writing from Zurich on 26 March 1939 (where he had been stuck since the previous year) writes as follows:

  Four weeks ago, I received my deportation orders, against which I have already appealed. I've had numerous meetings at the special police office in charge of aliens. These meetings deal largely with the question of when I am planning to leave and what funds I have for supporting myself. Prospects are worse than ever with the American visa. The latest news from the local consulate is that it's pointless to expect a visa for at least another two years. This is hopeless. That was point one; my second point is that the officials here cannot be duped into thinking that I finance my existence simply by selling jewellery. The only means of deferring my planned deportation is not by showing them the cash I have in hand but by showing them bank statements that prove that I'm being supported from overseas. The longer such funding appears to be guaranteed, the better my position for trying to remain here.52

  He goes on to request a sum of between $60 and $70 a month – astronomical, he admits, and ‘adding unwanted pressure on Erich who already has so many obligations’. With this amount of money, he wrote that he would move out of Zurich and live in a small provincial bed-and-breakfast somewhere in the country until his visa came through.53

  Alfred Einstein, writing to Hans Gál in 1939 from Brooklyn, seems to corroborate this sorry state of affairs:

  Sorry to have missed you in London. […] We had to break our necks to get out of Switzerland and on to Naples in order to go through the usual purgatory at the American consulate (trying to organise matters from the Consulate in Zurich would have meant a delay of 2 to 3 years), without having the foggiest notion that we, that is to say, our daughter, was to be detained by Mussolini. In short, we did not return to Zurich where there was a British visa waiting for us. We were instead relieved that under these most dangerous circumstances, we managed to cross the border by boat from Ventimiglia into Cannes.54

  Hollywood

  As with the UK and France, one of the choice positions for a musician in America was with a film studio. For instrumentalists, it was a secure, well-paid job with one of the Hollywood orchestras or as a rehearsal pianist. For composers, it meant making arrangements, checking parts, orchestrating or, for an elite, actually composing film music. The nature and purpose of film scores was still not fully established. During the days of silent films, it was largely left to pianists to improvise as they saw fit. Larger cinemas in metropolitan centres had organs, and even bands and small ensembles. In due course, scores of arrangements were provided, but there was little if any original music included, and films ran to the accompaniment of well-known works such as Rossini's William Tell Overture or a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody, or generic works that could be slotted in for any given love scene or moment of suspense. If there was thought and planning behind the potential of music and film, it seemed to be coming in the main from Russia and Germany.

  Everything changed in 1933 when Max Steiner wrote the music for King Kong and transformed a gorilla puppet that had raised guffaws from American test-audiences into an object of genuine terror. In their book Composing for the Films, Adorno and Eisler lay out the means of achieving the maximum emotional effect by combining music with moving images: either musically to ‘replicate’ and amplify the visuals, or to set off images with a contrasting musical counterpoint – composing the obverse of what the visuals dictated; if the scene was swift-moving and tense, the music was slow and dreamy, and if the scene was dreamy, the music was tense and fast-paced. In this manner, a ‘dramatic dialectic’ or a synthesis of emotional responses could be created. The opposite extreme was to emphasise the visuals; for example, a ship on the high seas called for music that accentuated the vastness and majesty of the ocean. In other words, the composer simply replicated the visual image by expanding it musically.55 Not surprisingly, Hollywood usually opted for the latter solution and left arty intellectual ideas to Soviet and European filmmakers. For a Hollywood blockbuster like King Kong to come across as frightening, the music had to exaggerate the visual terror as much as possible. This recipe worked, and few studio composers, apart from Eisler, considered the alternatives.

  Steiner composed music for nearly a dozen films a year. The sheer nu
mber he worked on (no fewer than 62 from 1930 until King Kong in 1933) meant that he is remembered for the themes of such iconic pictures as Now Voyager, Gone with the Wind and Casablanca. Compare this with Erich Korngold, who during the decade he worked in Hollywood provided scores for roughly the same number of films as Steiner in a year. Korngold, who certainly drew on Steiner's methods (and vice versa), arrived in Hollywood as the first composer of film music already established as a successful composer of serious, ‘classical’ music. Up to this point, film composers had come from vaudeville or cabaret, or had worked as arrangers or bandmasters. Korngold was far classier than anyone Hollywood had encountered before, and everyone was in awe of him. His contract was unique, and he was spared the assembly line methods of other studio composers. He could choose which films he worked on, composed everything himself (with very few exceptions), and orchestrated as much as commitments would allow. His usual editorial and musical assistant was the young American cellist Hugo Friedhofer, who also came from a ‘classical background’ and had the advantage of speaking German. Korngold, who first went to Hollywood to arrange Mendelssohn's score for Max Reinhardt's Midsummer Night's Dream in 1935, left his mark on a series of swashbuckling films with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland along with classics such as The Prince and the Pauper (1937), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Anthony Adverse (1939), Juarez (1939), The Sea Wolf (1941) and Kings Row (1942, starring the young Ronald Reagan).

  The many Jewish composers arriving in Hollywood from Vienna could hardly have been more varied. On one hand, there were Steiner and Korngold, who, along with Franz Waxman from Berlin, dominated cinematic, wide-screen sound with extraordinary acoustical effects and romantic, sweeping melodies accompanied by lush harmonies that stirred the passions of the motion-picture-loving public. On the other, there was Dr Ernest Toch (as he insisted on being credited, though he grumbled at being billed as ‘Ernest’), who was a child of Germany's New Objectivity and a fearless enemy of the ersatz-Romanticism that Hollywood promoted (though on occasion he could provide generic movie tunes as required, such as, for example, his Oscar-nominated theme for Peter Ibbetson). As a modernist, he specialised in tense chromatic sequences, which were perfect for supplying the studios with yards of stock music that could be used for gangster car chases through Chicago, or the sleigh-chase through the Alps in Shirley Temple's Heidi. Though he received Oscar nominations for his music to Peter Ibbetson, he was normally assigned to comedy horror films (some of the best of which were with the young Bob Hope) and suspense movies.