Forbidden Music (53 page)
Authors: Michael Haas
Yet if former colleagues were carrying the torch for those composers they had known and respected from the interwar years, something else was happening with the younger generation and their supporters. A clear discrepancy seemed to be emerging between the positive response to a new work from the public and the vehemence of its subsequent dismissal by the press. Tonal works, especially by composers forced to flee Nazi Europe, were not welcomed by a new generation of critics and composers. As Pierre Boulez observed, ‘we wanted everything [during the first years after the war], that was the context. Imagine a young German like Stockhausen discovering new music after twelve years of Nazi time. Can you imagine the desire to get out of that?‘
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It was a generation of angry youngsters who had watched helplessly as their parents’ generation brutalised their cultural inheritance. For them, there was every incentive to distance their creative identities from their cultural roots. With the CIA taking Adorno's ‘emancipation of culture’ as meaning anything that would not be permitted under Communism, the scene was set for a shift away from the past, even if the past included composers
who had always seen themselves as progressive. In the words of Berthold Goldschmidt: ‘Suddenly, we were out of date!‘
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Publishers
A practical consideration for many exiled composers was re-establishing ties with former publishers, and, in rarer cases, publishers re-establishing ties with composers. On 24 October 1946 Hans Gál received a letter from the young German composer Günter Raphael. He reminds Gál of having met in 1932, ‘before the [Nazi] storm’ at the Tonkünstler Festival in Zurich. Revealingly, he defines himself as ‘half-Aryan’ rather than the preferred Nazi designation of ‘half-Jew’ and explains that this meant that he was unable to work in Germany.
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He mentions his connections with various publishers, something that piqued Gál's interest as a couple of weeks later, on 5 November, Raphael responded to inquiries regarding publishers in Leipzig. This is not only a fascinating source of information, but also a veritable time-capsule of feelings, thoughts and responses. Raphael begins with a run-down of publishers in Leipzig:
Breitkopf und Härtel was totally destroyed on 4 December 1943 – that is to say, the main building on Nürnberger Street was bombed right down to its foundations. The so-called fire-proof strong-boxes were strewn across the street and it took over a month and a half before they could be opened as sparks were still spitting out of the rubble. Once they could be opened, all of the valuable manuscripts were nothing but dust and ashes. However a number of their manuscripts along with their archive were evacuated and the publisher found a new location in the small Saxon town of Lausitz. Of the various editions, at least one copy was evacuated, but of course, only of those desirable, that is to say,
Aryan
composers. I wouldn't wish to guess if your violin concerto has by happenstance found its way into one of these piles of aryanised editions. I can only tell you that everything of mine is completely gone. (I had approximately forty-five works with Breitkopf und Härtel)…. I haven't dared venture into the Russian Zone yet, though my flat with two grand pianos, an upright and a Baroque organ is in Meiningen in Thüringen and therefore in the Soviet Sector. (The Russians seem keen to have me and have offered professorships in Leipzig, Halle and Weimar but as long as they maintain their Zone frontiers, I shan't take a single step towards the East. I wish to remain free to go from one place to another). Well, anyway, that was Breitkopf in Leipzig. Dr [Hellmuth] von Hase has gone to Wiesbaden and is trying to set up an alternative head office of the business…. Dr von Hase is
compromised as he was a former member of the Nazi party and his brother Martin is now supposed to run the company from Wiesbaden. New editions are to be produced thanks to photo-mechanical means of reproduction. I've seen what they intend to release in the first year, Classics, Romantics and more Classics. They wouldn't so much as consider releasing any works by contemporary composers. In any case, only Germans and Americans were represented:
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Pfitzner with his Op. 1 cello sonata, Hindemith with his Op. 8 cello works. Nobody gave Hans Gál, Paul Kletzki or me a single thought. Now to Leuckart. Sander Junior [Horst Sander: 1904–45] fell in the last days of the war in one of the battles around Leipzig.
De mortuis nihil nisi bene
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Sander was a big Nazi. The publisher apparently was burnt right to the ground. Who should now run it is unknown to me. Perhaps it will be merged with Kistner und Siegel which is presently run by Dr Walter Lott. Perhaps it will be taken over by Sander's other son [Erich] who is sitting with his family and mother in Upper Bavaria (in the American Zone) from where he's presently managing their business affairs. I haven't heard anything about Simrock yet. They have two of my chamber works. Peters Verlag is totally intact (including the Peters Library). Walter Hinrichsen came back as a young American lieutenant and reclaimed his father's property with his own hands. Just as the Russians arrived, he disappeared in the American Sector and put Dr [Johnannes] Petschull (who also has Universal Edition) in charge. It's all now run from Berlin. Peters doesn't deliver anything – actually, they haven't for years now. The Russians are now taking all of C. G. Röder's printing plates to Moscow … (along with all of the Peters printing plates and eight complete local paper factories!). Are you by chance acquainted with Max Hinrichsen?
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… As we're on the subject of publishers, Schott has been given a licence by the French – the Americans would never have issued one to them since they published [one of Hitler's favourite marches]
Baden-Weiler March
. It's now back in business despite the fact that the Mainz printing presses are still not working. The offices in Weihergarten were hardly damaged. There are no paper shortages in the French Sector (the best magazines are published there as well and enjoy huge print-runs). I'm working a good deal with Willy Müller, a publisher in Heidelberg (Süddeutscher Musik Verlag) who for years has been taking works by North German composers. Now to [Karl] Straube and [Günther] Ramin: Straube has been through a lot, but he's still alive. On the same infamous 4 December, he was bombed to smithereens. His marvellous library however was stored in the cellar of the Gewandhaus, which remained undamaged even if the actual building itself was reduced to rubble (along with half of the Conservatory). Kippenberg's wonderful collection of Goethe and Rilke etc. was also stored in the cellar.
Everything was saved. Straube who is now seventy-three years old admitted to our amazement that he had been a member of the Party since 1933! … Of course he has been relieved of all of his positions by the Russians (the Communists!).
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Slowly however, he's regaining influence, especially in the field of church music. He's been able to return to giving organ lessons though I feel very sorry for him. It is unfathomable what could have possibly driven him to take the step of joining the Nazi Party. There were of course many exceptionally intelligent and cultivated people such as Straube who did the same. They believed that, by being members, they could raise the level of things…. This war had probably to be fought to the bitter end, if only to stop the myth of ‘the greatest battle commander of all time being felled as a martyr for a just cause …’. Ramin runs Leipzig's musical life: he's the Thomascantor (both the Thomaskirche
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and the Nikolaikirche are still standing), he's conductor of the Bach Society and the Gewandhaus Chorus. Organist, harpsichordist etc. We also have, as of late, a new conductor of the Gewandhaus: Herbert Albert who used to be in Stuttgart. Abendroth left Leipzig in a dreadful sulk and has become an alderman for the Weimar ‘Thüringer’ local council and head of all music provision. His swastika would not have gone down well in the West! But perhaps he carried the red flag long before it had a swastika in the middle! This is also why I don't return to Middle-Germany [The Soviet Sector]: Everywhere you go, you meet the same old ‘good’ friends (even still in their same old uniforms) who look down on you.
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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.
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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
.‘
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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.‘
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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.‘
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The Arts Council Opera Competition was another reality check for émigré composers. Lewis Foreman has described it as ‘a classic British funding cock-up’.
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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.‘
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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
.
