Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis

by Michael Haas

  Gál was anxious about the fate of his works, as were nearly all of the composers of his generation who had signed agreements with German and Austrian publishers prior to 1933 and 1938. As early as 26 December 1946, Gál wrote to Universal Edition with a list of his works, asking what the state of the scores and material might be. He was primarily concerned about works that only existed in manuscript and for which he had no copies. It would have come as a great relief to Gál that UE had thought to take copies of almost everything it possessed which they then deposited in places of safety. The musicologist Thomas Gayda, while rummaging around in the UE Vienna archives in 1994, found scores by Berthold Goldschmidt that even the composer himself had thought to have been irretrievably lost. These included, among other things, his score of the Passacaglia for orchestra which won the Mendelssohn Prize in 1925, resulting in performances in 1926 by Erich Kleiber and the Berlin Staatskapelle. Gayda speculated that the location of the material, uncovered among various unrelated files, gave the distinct impression of someone actively hiding manuscripts of UE's non-Aryan composers.39

  New Homelands, Lost Identities

  How music was developing after the war was not only determined by what was still available from the ruins of publishing houses. Nor were developments being shaped only by an ‘unwitting’ younger generation manipulated by an unscrupulous CIA for propaganda purposes. There were at least two other crucial factors. One was the large number of former Nazis or those with strong Nazi sympathies still occupying senior cultural positions throughout Germany and Austria and deliberately hindering the remigration of former refugees. The other was the regular and frequent reluctance of host countries to accept immigrant-composers as their own.

  In the rare instances when previously established composers from Germany and Austria were successful in their newly acquired homelands, it was, as highlighted in the previous chapter, the result of a monumental effort of reinvention such as Kurt Weill's Broadway style with a Berlin edge, Korngold importing Viennese opulence to Hollywood, or Joseph Kosma incorporating echoes of Jewish Budapest into postwar French chanson. Composers who had not managed to establish themselves in Austria or Germany, often because they were too young at the time of their emigration, managed to integrate more easily. Many of these younger immigrants were successful: André Previn and Lukas Foss in the USA, or Joseph Horovitz, Franz Reizenstein, Alexander Goehr and Mátyás Seiber in England. By and large, however, established émigré composers were side-lined and ended up teaching, working for broadcasters and publishers or composing and conducting stock-scores for film, television and radio. Often, as was the case with Ernst Toch, an appearance of acceptance came thanks to performances by fellow émigré conductors and their American orchestras in Cleveland, Boston, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. Toch's Third Symphony even won the Pulitzer Prize, and its recording with William Steinberg and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra won a Grammy. However, with Toch's death in 1964, performances came to an end. With the death of his generation of performers, no American-born musicians championed him. It was for Toch and many others just as Krenek had written: a sobering confrontation with the utter ‘echolessness’ that their music generated in the wide, innocent spaces of America.

  But if Americans found most European music not to be worth the extra effort, the British closed their minds to German music altogether. Such had been the case since the First World War and no amount of interwar goodwill had changed this view. Adrian Boult's commission of Egon Wellesz's Third Symphony for BBC Symphony Orchestra never saw the light of day. Wellesz wrote to his daughter: ‘For the last year, I've had much aggravation surrounding my intended performance at the BBC. The manager of the orchestra who only likes French music has cancelled not only the performance of my Third Symphony, which Boult wished to conduct, but also (!!) that of Prospero.‘40 Boult was visibly annoyed, though his letters to BBC officials on the matter are spineless. In May 1952 he wrote first to the BBC's Third Programme scheduler Eric Warr, commenting that Egon Wellesz ‘tells me that there are now a number of eminent composers whose work is no longer submitted to the [vetting] Panel [of the BBC] … he is now a British subject.‘41 In October he wrote to Leonard Isaacs, head of music for the Third Programme, that Wellesz had informed him that his Third Symphony had been rejected by the BBC panel. He goes on to write: ‘I need hardly say I have offered again to do the Second Symphony if at any time you feel you could arrange this. Please do not bother to answer.‘42

  The Arts Council Opera Competition was another reality check for émigré composers. Lewis Foreman has described it as ‘a classic British funding cock-up’.43 The object was to promote the composition of a new opera in English which, despite a short notification period, would be performed during the Festival in Britain starting in May 1951. The Arts Council announced the competition in February 1949 and, as Foreman writes, under a Labour Government it would have been largely expected that such an event sponsored by the public purse would result in performances, especially given that the national jamboree celebrations of the Festival of Britain were in sight. This would have specifically been the expectation of the refugees from pre-Nazi Germany and Austria who wished to participate. In postwar Britain, they saw themselves as some of the most experienced composers in the country. The response to the competition was greater than expected, with 117 anonymous submissions. It's possible today to see that even at this early stage of the competition many of Britain's leading native-born composers had submitted outlines. These included such figures as Malcolm Arnold, Albert Coates, Cyril Scott and Bernard Stevens. Egon Wellesz was one of the many refugee composers who also entered with an opera based on Congreve called Incognito. Following these submissions, the judges shortlisted three operas. To their alarm, they discovered that they had chosen three composers who were not native born. These were the Australian Arthur Benjamin with A Tale of Two Cities, the German Berthold Goldschmidt with Beatrice Cenci, and the Austrian Karl Rankl, with Deirdre of the Sorrows. At that time, Rankl was music director at Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and in charge of rebuilding the orchestra and ensemble of the war-damaged company. Eric Walter White, who had dreamt up the idea of the competition, wrote to the Chairman of the Arts Council, Stewart Wilson: ‘In some ways I think it may be desirable for us to give publicity to the commissioned operas as soon as possible; but I realize that if there is to be a fourth commissioned opera and its composer happens to have an English name, it may be preferable to hold up press publicity until we can include him as well as the three composers mentioned above.‘44 As events unfolded, the operas were all behind schedule and were not completed in time for the Festival of Britain, dashing the original hopes of the organisers. The English operas scheduled for the Festival were hardly encouraging. Vaughan Williams's A Pilgrim's Progress was mounted at the Royal Opera House in April 1951 and was the only one to have shown any potential durability, thanks in part to the existing reputation of the composer. Even Britten's Billy Budd, now considered one of his greatest works, when presented in its original four-act incarnation, was not mounted until December 1951. With its all-male cast and glimmers of homo-eroticism (naïvely un-noticed by contemporary grandee assessors), it was not viewed as mainstream. By 1951 the Labour Government had been toppled and any expectations of publicly funded performances had collapsed with it. With the lack of home-grown talent in the final competition line-up, additional operas were included by Alan Bush with Wat Tyler and Lennox Berkeley with Nelson.

  As productions could not be mounted, the commissioning fee of £300 was paid and attempts were made to secure broadcasts of the winning entries. Rankl and Benjamin were opposed to this as they saw broadcasting as an inadequate means of introducing a new stage work. Bush and Goldschmidt agreed and their scores were passed to the panel headed by Leonard Isaacs at the BBC. The panel consisted of Benjamin Frankel, William Alwyn and Gordon Jacob, all of whom gave fairly negative assessments to Goldschmidt's Beatrice Cenci. In general, the panel members objected to the subject ma
tter though they had more positive things to say about the music. Frankel, himself the son of Polish Jewish emigrants, makes the rather bizarre point that ‘the implication of the incestuous episode in the prelude to Act II is too obvious and painstakingly German a device to be dramatically effective and remains merely repellent.’ Alwyn is, ‘dubious whether two hours of unrelieved gloom is suitable for broadcasting.’ Gordon Jacob ducks a decision and seconds Alwyn, but admits that there is much within the work that one can admire. Rudolf Bing, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, while not on the panel, was quite taken with Beatrice Cenci. Bing had been manager of Glyndebourne when the company's guest performance of Macbeth at the first year of the Edinburgh Festival had been thrown into doubt after George Szell's unexpected departure. Goldschmidt was called in to rescue the performances and was praised by public and press alike. Bing, who probably felt he owed Goldschmidt some support, wrote to John Denison of the Arts Council:

  The particular purpose of this letter is to implore you to rack your brains and see if there is anything you can do for Berthold Goldschmidt. I personally think that his Beatrice Cenci is really a very fine opera and I would love to do it here, but cannot for the simple reason that a new production of this sort would cost $60,000 and I could not, with the attitude of the New York public towards contemporary works, hope for more than three performances…. Even Peter Grimes, although by a composer well-known here, had not more than four or five performances with diminishing and shocking box office results.45

  Sadler's Wells also rejected the work for a similar reason to the BBC panel: its plot about incest and the murder of the sadistic Count Cenci carried out by his daughter Beatrice and her step-mother Lucrezia.

  That Beatrice Cenci should be a cause for moral concern seems astonishing. The libretto, adapted by the Viennese refugee Martin Esslin, was based on a historic event that Percy Bysshe Shelley had turned into a dramatic poem as long ago as 1819. That Shelley's The Cenci was a classic made it no more acceptable to British opera managers who – until 1968 – had to present new works to the Lord Chamberlain for approval before any public performance. It was eventually agreed that a sequence of excerpts could be broadcast as compensation. Whether such muddling was the result of anti-German prejudice, or just a funding ‘cock-up’ as Foreman believes, is difficult to say. Had time not been wasted expanding the remit to include a native candidate, things may have turned out differently. Following concert performances of the work during the 1994 Berlin Festival, Beatrice Cenci was eventually recorded by Sony, finally giving listeners a chance to assess the work. It shows how far Goldschmidt had travelled from his edgy style in prewar Berlin. It's full of counterpoint (a quibble highlighted by William Alwyn in his assessment), but also full of an abundant tunefulness that was clearly meant to appeal to British audiences. Rankl's opera Deirdre of the Sorrows was withdrawn, and scores and orchestral material were on the verge of being pulped by Oxford University Press's music department before Foreman rescued enough for a broadcast of excerpts in October 1995. The score and remaining performance material is preserved in the archive of the Music University in Graz.

  Some seventy composers landed in the UK and each had an individual story. The only consistent narrative that emerges from all the various host countries is that of the composer trying to recapture the resonance enjoyed prior to the arrival of the Nazis. Some tried as hard as they could to gain local acceptance before giving up composing altogether. In Goldschmidt's case, the silence lasted for a quarter of a century until he was persuaded to compose a Clarinet Quartet in 1983, at the age of 80. While Toch, following his departure from Hollywood's film studios and a heart attack in 1948, reacted by embarking on a composing binge.

  The Austro-German ‘Exile Symphony’

  Toch, Wellesz and Korngold all felt an inner drive to compose a symphony despite the fact that they had shown scant interest in the medium before. Wellesz was first off the mark and his Prosperos Beschwörungen, completed in 1936 and based on Shakespeare's Tempest, was an attempt to create a symphony using the Mahlerian means of sequencing tone-poems into a coherent symphonic narrative. The thematic ideas of his First Symphony came exactly ten years later while he was walking in England's Lake District, an area that reminded him of Austria's countryside. He went on to compose nine symphonies along with a monumental Symphonic Epilogue.

  Toch completed his First Symphony in 1949, first performed in 1950 by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under Herbert Häfner. His Second Symphony (there would be six altogether) followed the next year. Toch, like Korngold, had left the studios at the first possible opportunity once the war was over. He continued teaching until a heart attack in 1948 reminded him that he was not immortal. The compositional frenzy that he unleashed was unprecedented. Even in his heyday in Weimar Germany Toch had not turned out works at the rate of Krenek, Weill, Milhaud or Hindemith. After his heart attack, music poured out of him. By his own admission, it was more important to write down all that churned up inside, than to evaluate innate quality.46 As a result, the works from this period often seem both vivid and slapdash. There is a desperation about some of them suggesting an attempt to recapture an elusive prewar brilliance.

  Toch's prewar reputation – and the fact that he wasn't the son of the detested Julius Korngold and hadn't made such a conspicuous name for himself in Hollywood – led to support from the same refugee conductors who went to great lengths to distance themselves from Erich Korngold.

  Yet Korngold's Symphony in F Sharp Op. 40, completed in 1952, was by any measure a strong work. It was given its premiere by Harold Byrns and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in an under-rehearsed broadcast for Austrian Radio in 1954 that left Korngold so depressed that he requested that the tapes be wiped. The sloppiness of the performance was felt by Korngold to be overt belligerence aimed at himself and his musical values, and he was probably right. Though it does include quotations from some of his film scores, the Symphony also distances Korngold from his Hollywood years. Critics and public were baffled and ultimately left cold. This was not the nostalgic Korngold they knew before the war that since the early 1930s had remained preserved in a jar of Hollywood schmaltz. For the musical press on the other hand, it simply wasn't an appropriate reaction to the harder-edged, postwar world. Korngold's Hollywood past had tainted any objective appraisal of his work. Attempts to have it performed by colleagues who had worked with him before the Nazi years, were met with polite but chilly dismissals. The letters from the offices of Bruno Walter, Fritz Reiner, William Steinberg and others make depressing reading. This would be Korngold's only symphony and was his last work of note.47