Forbidden Music (49 page)

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:

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 number 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.

Hanns Eisler arrived in Hollywood with a decade of composing for European political cinema under his belt. Though he never worked at the same exalted heights as Korngold, Waxman, Steiner or Toch, he did set new standards for music in Hollywood with scores that achieved powerful effects by remaining in the background for much of the time, coming forward as part of the dramatic action, or by having no music at precisely the moment when it was expected. In short, his genius was in doing everything differently from the typical Hollywood film composer. Though studios allowed him less latitude for his dialectical dramatic effects than he enjoyed with his frequent collaborator, the Dutch director Joris Ivens, he still managed to achieve a great deal. His score for Fritz Lang's
Hangmen also Die
(1943, the story partially adapted by Bertolt Brecht) even managed an Oscar nomination. This was a remarkable achievement considering that the use of music in the film is sparse and nearly always operates as an active part of the drama rather than as mere illustration.

After the war, Zeisl, Toch and Korngold left studio work as quickly as they could, sensitive to the harm it would do their reputations and fearful of the damage inflicted on their talent by years of creativity on demand. After 1945, Waxman reduced his studio work to less than one film a year, but Eisler was keen to continue, and slowly but surely he started to demonstrate new directions in film music and to produce convincing cinematic effects with his counter-intuitive ideas and theories. It must remain a matter of speculation whether he could have changed the course of Hollywood film music had he not been forcibly removed from the United States by the House of Un-American activities in 1948.

No Escape

By 1939, just before the Nazi invasion of Poland, German, Austrian and Czech Jews were applying for visas for any country that would take them. Refugee
colonies were springing up as far afield as Lima and Shanghai. Britain had started to deport refugees and internment prisoners to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, though Canada notoriously refused to take in more than 5,000 Jewish immigrants, while making it clear that it was happy to take any other highly qualified refugee. The heavy loss of life resulting from the sinking of the SS
Arandora Star
(one of several ships carrying refugees or ‘enemy aliens’ sunk by German torpedoes during the war) en route to Canada in 1940 along with the case of the transport ship
Dunera
would eventually result in a temporary suspension of this policy.

The case of the
Dunera
would become one of the most notorious accounts of disregard for the rights and wellbeing of ‘enemy aliens’ held in British detention. On 10 July 1940, 2542 inmates from internment camps, some having already survived the sinking of the
Arandora Star
, were placed on the
Dunera
with the information that they would be deported to Canada. Instead, after they had been rifled, robbed and abused by their British guards, their luggage, including musical instruments, was wantonly thrown overboard. They were taken under unsanitary and inhuman conditions to Australia and arrived malnourished and ill some 60 days later, resulting in the court-marshalling of several senior officers and a severe reprimand to Lieutenant-Colonel William Scott. The refugees were then transported to the middle of the Australian outback to a camp in the town of Hay in New South Wales, where they further suffered from extreme heat while enclosed behind several barriers of barbed wire. Relatives were not informed of their location and eventually objections to their treatment were raised in the British Parliament.
⁵⁶

Another tragedy was the MS
St Louis
, which transported over 900 Jewish refugees from Hamburg to Cuba in May 1939, only to have entry refused by Cuban bureaucrats on a contrived technicality. Canadian and American immigration officials also refused entry to the increasingly desperate passengers, and though the nearby Dominican Republic agreed that it would accept 100,000 Jewish refugees at the 1938 Évian Conference, the captain of the
St Louis
decided to return to Europe, docking in Antwerp on 17 June, more than a month after leaving Hamburg. Negotiations resulted in passengers being offered asylum in France, Holland, Belgium and the United Kingdom before the
St Louis
returned to its home port in Germany. With the fall of all of these countries (apart from the United Kingdom), it has been estimated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that 254 of the original 937 passengers were subsequently murdered by the Nazis. The captain of the ship, Gustav Schröder, would not return to Germany until he was certain that every one of his charges had found a safe haven, an act of humanity
that postwar was widely recognised in his native Germany as well as in Israel.

There are many published accounts and several websites devoted to the music composed in Nazi concentration camps. For the present writer, it has always seemed a miracle that anyone could find the wherewithal to write anything in an environment that demanded so much in order to survive. Yet the essay by the composer Viktor Ullmann entitled ‘Goethe und Ghetto’ written in Theresienstadt (or Terezín), the so-called ‘model ghetto’ north-west of Prague and designed to show visiting dignitaries that Jews were being well looked after, raises important points and sheds light on how creativity could thrive under the most desperate circumstances:

This raises a crucial point about how environment can affect creativity. Whether adversity and a stressful environment are themselves the catalysts of creativity must remain a thorny, albeit rhetorical question. The circumstantial evidence offered by many exiled composers suggests that the transplantation of talent is rarely successful unless the artists have the resources to reinvent themselves in ways that are compatible with their new surroundings.

With Thomas Mann (but not his brother Heinrich), there was such a large international public that the change of geographical location made little difference to the nature of his output:
Doktor Faustus
, written in exile, became one of his most significant works. Lion Feuchtwanger was in a similar situation, with his international royalties allowing the purchase of an enormous villa in Pacific Palisades. Thomas Mann, while during this period not as popular as Feuchtwanger, also required his creature comforts, something his highly resourceful wife Katia Pringsheim (sister of the composer Klaus Pringsheim) was evidently able to provide.

Composers, however, are different from writers. Mann's quintessential novel-of-exile
Doktor Faustus
was read by individuals in the original language, or in translation, in the privacy of their homes all over the world. Mann certainly did not depend exclusively on an American public to guarantee readership. But music is an experience shared by an audience in a fixed place. At this time, music was usually only recorded if it had already established its popularity in the concert hall or the opera house. If the public did not respond, a composer's creativity either atrophied, as with Arthur Willner and Leopold Spinner, or went into overdrive in search of reinvention. This was the case with Toch, Rankl and arguably with Wellesz, all of whom embarked on a frenzy of symphonic composition.