Forbidden Music (56 page)

Erich Korngold's response is more intriguing. Few composers would have felt themselves to have been so defeated by postwar developments. Following his heart attack in 1947, Korngold escaped into the world of Viennese melancholy with an operetta somewhat appropriately called
Die Stumme Serenade
or
The Silent Serenade
, completed in 1950. Like his earlier opera
Das Wunder der Heliane
, it was wholesale retreat into the past, but Korngold didn't seem to care. If Toch's heart attack had generated an outpouring of compositional energy, in Korngold's case it resulted in an increasingly sullen isolation. Following Korngold's death in 1957, the letters of rejection sent to his wife are both moving and coldly dismissive. Hal Wallace, a producer at Warner Bros, offered 20 dollars to a Korngold Foundation, in a dictated letter typed on internal memo paper. RCA rejected a memorial recording; Rudolf Bing twisted himself into knots to explain why he could not mount
Die Kathrin
at the Metropolitan opera; and conductor after conductor rejected the Symphony in F sharp. Most of the letters are from the offices of former friends, now prominent musicians, and are often signed by secretaries sending dictated replies in English. Even letters from such formerly close colleagues as Paul Wittgenstein spoke only vaguely of their collaboration, and ‘how long ago it all was’ with more than a whiff of embarrassment.
⁷³

Yet one of the most surprising items among the Korngold papers at the Library of Congress is a letter dated 14 January 1942 from the Assembly for a Democratic Austria, which is incensed to find that Korngold had been donating money to a monarchist committee supported by Otto von Habsburg. As it happened, they could not have known that Korngold was also giving money to Socialists, Communists, Christian Democrats, organisations founded to help feed Austria's starving children, and another that had sent
him a self-important proclamation from Zurich in dense legal German (which he most certainly did not bother to read) regarding the obligations of artists and intellectuals in Austria's approaching post-Hitler era. Every organisation claiming to be anti-Nazi that asked Korngold for money was sent a cheque for 200 dollars. The terrible ambivalence of his love for Austria – the only place he truly felt at home – drove him to want the best for its people. Yet following the accounts of Nazi atrocities, many were initially unable to face any thought of returning. This was hardly an unsurprising position for Jewish exiles, yet resulted in much mutual suspicion between former refugees and Germans and Austrians who would have genuinely welcomed them back. In 1949, Korngold returned to Höselberg, the family estate in Austria's picturesque Salzkammergut, where he discovered that the house was in ruins, overrun by desperate refugees and operating as a centre for displaced people. The police arrested the former caretaker when it was discovered that some of Korngold's possessions had found their way into his lodge. Korngold sold the estate to the local mayor for nearly the price of a pepper-corn and told the police not to press charges against the caretaker, explaining that he had given everything away upon leaving Austria.

Such mutually felt paranoia, distrust and pain could only cause an emotional, indeed a very practical, paralysis that would make a reconcilable future together nearly impossible. Such debilitating mistrust was ultimately demonstrated by a telling anecdote related by Korngold's family upon their postwar return to their Villa in Vienna's up-market Cottageviertel. Upon their unexpectedly meeting the neighbour's wife outside their former home, she blurted out: ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Professor Korngold! I don't believe my eyes! You're in Vienna! – When are you going back home?’

Epilogue

In the introduction to this book, I write that it would chalk up a cultural victory to the Nazis to accept the belief that the pre-Hitler contributions made by Jewish composers to German music were delusional; however, I end the book paradoxically with Korngold's sobering encounter with this very same delusion upon his return to post-war Vienna. The 2003 Viennese and New York exhibition on Jews and German musical identity, ‘Quasi una fantasia’, maintained the default setting since the end of the Third Reich that Jewish contributions to German music were never recognised, acknowledged or valued by the societies so valued, acknowledged and recognised by Jewish composers and musicians. Their children and grandchildren inherited this sense of rejection and as generations passed on, estates were handed over to local universities and libraries in the belief that returning them to former homelands would be an act of treachery. To the offspring of musical refugees, themselves now completely assimilated within the societies that had provided safe havens to their parents, former homelands had no right to any claim of cultural ownership. The bitterness and resentment ran understandably deep. Yet it was only with the passage of time that our historic sightlines would become more focused. This meant that London/Decca's recording series ‘Entartete Musik’ would resonate in the early 1990s in a way that would have been unthinkable before. The angry protagonists on both sides had largely died out and the rest of us were left with a bewildered and bewildering legacy.

Did one value Ernst Toch as a central musical figure during the years of the Weimar Republic or ‘Ernest’ Toch, the Hollywood composer of comedy horror-films starring Bob Hope? His estate landed in UCLA on the basis that the latter was more relevant than the former. In very few instances could the post-exile contributions of anyone old enough to have already made a name in Germany and Austria amount to the same degree of importance during
their pre-exile years. The exceptions are rare yet often mentioned: Kurt Weill on Broadway and Erich Korngold in Hollywood. Yet for every Weill and Korngold there are dozens of Ernst Tochs. As music curator at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, I found unsettling the oft-made confession by even the most helpful archives in distant lands that they had no German speakers and therefore remained unable to identify pre-emigration documentation; especially as the documentation in question was often falling apart and just as frequently, incorrectly catalogued. Yet those children and grandchildren who have taken the leap of faith and offered to return musical estates to the cultural homelands of their parents and grandparents are confronted with the equally baffling situation of insufficient funding and personnel being available to provide what justice demands. As a result, many important musical estates remain stored in private lofts, under beds, in garden sheds or basements. Only within the last years have refugee-composers started to return to the historic consciousness of a younger, more inquisitive generation of Austrian and German musicians and scholars. It is these same young German and Austrian musicians who discover that scores and orchestral parts, even of those works rescued by publishers, are often in a state of editorial disarray, making contemporary performances reliant on guess work.

In our global society, culture is no longer the sole property of a single nation. It is the property of all with the interest and ambition to ask awkward questions and make new discoveries about themselves and the musical environment they inhabit. In a digital world, the need for digital preservation of musical émigré estates is self-evident. Just as important is the editorial input that addresses the issues that make contemporary performances challenging. If the purpose of this book was to demonstrate that the Jewish contribution to German music was not delusional, this epilogue attests to the urgency needed to preserve the widely strewn documentation, and restore the music itself, on which much of this book was based.

Notes

Introduction

1.
‘… ja, nicht bloß Elsaß und Lothringen, sondern ganz Frankreich wird uns alsdann zufallen, ganz Europa, die ganze Welt – die ganze Welt wird deutsch werden! Von dieser Sendung und Universalherrschaft Deutschlands träume ich oft, wenn ich unter Eichen wandle. Das ist mein Patriotismus'; Heine:
Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen
(digital edition, vol. 7).

2.
The Treasure Hunter
.

3.
Alfred Heuß: ‘Über Franz Schrekers Oper Der Schatzgräber, seine Geschäfts-praxis, die Schreker-Presse und Anderes’,
Zeitschrift für Musik
, 1921, 2. Novem-berheft, pp. 567–70.

4.
Hilmes 2003, p. 119.

Chapter 1. German and Jewish

1.
Schreker dropped the
č
in his name presumably because the now German-ized form ‘Schrecker’ meant ‘frightener’, which had potentially negative connotations for a budding composer.

2.
The Treasure Hunter
.

3.
The translation of
Juden auf Wander-schaft
is not really the invitingly obvious
Wandering Jews
but more accu-rately
Jews on a Journey
– or even conceivably,
Jews in Transit
.

4.
Roth 2006, p. 112.

5.
Ibid., p. 13.

6.
Ibid., p. 47.

7.
Pedro de Arbués (1441–85), an official of the Spanish Inquisition who tried to eradicate crypto-Judaism in Spain.

8.
Hanslick:
Aus meinem Leben
(Berlin: Directmedia), p. 22.

9.
‘Das Civil-Ehegesetz’,
Die Neue Freie Presse
, 4 May 1869.

10.
Dürhammer 2006, pp. 62–70.

11.
‘Oh Herr, lass dich herbei und macht die Deutschen frei, daß endlich das Geschrei danach zu Ende sei.’

12.
‘Der Weg der neuen Bildung geht, Von Humanität, Durch Nationalität, Zur Bestialität.’

13.
Bismarck:
Gedanken
(Berlin: Direct-media), pp. 280–2.

14.
Hobsbawm refers to ‘Ausgleich’ as meaning ‘compromise’. It obviously was a compromise for the Austrians to offer parity to the Hungarian half of the empire; however, it came about as the completion of negotiations that had begun before the expulsion of Austria from the German Federation.

15.
Krenek 1998, p. 25.

16.
Lohrmann 2000, p. 211.

17.
‘Das Civilehegesetz’,
Neue Freie Presse
, 4 May 1869.

18.
Known simply as ‘The December Con-stitution’ in Hungary, it was passed the next day on 22 December 1867.

19.
Pauley1992, pp. 22–3.

20.
Quoted in Scholz 2000, p. 76.

21.
Ibid., pp. 76–7.

22.
Ibid., p. 77.

23.
Neue Freie Presse
, 23 December 1867

24.
Krenek 1998, pp. 808–9.

25.
‘Ein großer Tag des Liberalismus’,
Neue Freie Presse
, 20 December 1928.

26.
Zweig 1970, p. 122.

27.
‘Ein großer Tag des Liberalismus’,
Neue Freie Presse
, 20 December 1928.

Chapter 2. Wagner and German Jewish Composers in the Nineteenth Century

1.
Barry Millington translates the title in English as
Jewishness in Music
– also appropriate and closer than ‘Jews in Music’ – a translation that would only cover a small part of Wagner's essay.

2.
The implication is that Hanslick was not circumcised.

3.
Wagner's ‘Judenthum in der Musik’,
Neue Freie Presse
, 9 March 1869.

4.
In the digital edition of the complete writings of Richard and Cosima Wagner, the name Mendelssohn is mentioned 459 times.

5.
Wagner:
Oper und Drama
: ‘Die Oper und das Wesen der Musik’ (Berlin: Directmedia), p. 249.

6.
Wagner:
Das Judenthum in der Musik (1850)
(Berlin: Directmedia), p. 81.

7.
Ibid., p. 79.

8.
By ‘expressive effect’ Wagner refers to the inner emotional turmoil, both erotic and febrile, that his own music was uniquely capable of eliciting; a shameless invasion of the listener's emotional privacy in the view of aesthetes such as Hanslick.

9.
Wagner:
Über das Dirigieren
(Berlin: Directmedia), p. 317.

10.
Wagner:
Das Judenthum
(Berlin: Directmedia), p. 80.

11.
Wagner:
Oper und Drama
, ‘Die Oper und das Wesen der Musik’, p. 230.

12.
Heine:
Lutetia
(Berlin: Directmedia), vol. 6, p. 424 .

13.
Scholz 2000, pp. 78–9.

14.
Reproduced in the 1959 Bayreuth
Parsifal
programme, quoted in Scholz 2000, pp. 78–9.

15.
Wagner: letter to Tausig, April 1869.

16.
Lucian O. Meysels:
In meinem Salon ist Österreich: Berta Zuckerkandl und ihre Zeit
(Vienna: Herold, 1984).

17.
Wagner:
Religion und Kunst
, ‘Erkenne dich selbst’

18.
Ibid.

19.
This is ironic when one considers Nietzsche's own chapter on ‘Redemption’ in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
. His comments on Wagner's view of redemption come from
Der Fall Wagner
(Berlin: Directmedia, vol. 2, pp. 908–9).

20.
Malte Fischer 2000, pp. 177–88.

21.
Leon Botstein: ‘Unter Wunderkindern’ (pp. 145–60) from
Lorenzo da Ponte, Aufbruch in die neue Welt
(Vienna: JMW, 2006).

22.
In the digital edition of Richard and Cosima Wagner's writings, Meyerbeer's name appears 615 times.

23.
Wagner:
Sämtliche Schriften und Dicht-ungen
(Berlin: Directmedia), vol. 1, p. 15.

24.
Botstein 2006, pp. 145–60.

25.
Wagner:
Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft
.

26.
Richter:
Aus Leipzigs musikalischer Glanzzeit
(Berlin: Digitalmedia), p. 96.

27.
Viereck 2007, pp. 90–126.

Chapter 3. An Age of Liberalism, Brahms and the Chronicler Hanslick

1.
The World of Yesterday
.

2.
Zweig 1970, p. 79.

3.
Ibid., p. 81.

4.
Botstein, Leon: ‘German Jews and Wagner’, in
Richard Wagner and his World
, ed. Thomas Pleasants (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 158.