Forbidden Music

by Michael Haas

  Heliane was understood by many as mere cannon fodder in Julius's war against progressive musical developments perpetrated by composers who were of similar age to Erich. Like many Austrian nationalists, Krenek had little time for Prussian Berlin and he retreated to Vienna following the unexpected success of Jonny. Krenek described visiting a performance of Heliane as ‘either the high-point, or the low-point of this particular period, depending on your point of view’.36 In writing more extensively about Korngold in his memoirs, he mentions the tragic elements in the relationship between father and son which made it easier to sympathise with Erich, and how his best music was written while he was still a teenager (and at the front line of the avant-garde). From Krenek's perspective, Julius had kept Erich from following his natural instincts and hindered the boy's talent. He recalled meeting Erich many years later in Los Angeles after the death of Julius and described him as being ‘a broken and disillusioned man who had nothing to show but a handful of long-forgotten film scores’.37

  Heliane failed to achieve the success of either Die tote Stadt or Jonny spielt auf. Krenek's opera had shown how far into the past Korngold had retreated. Yet on the other side of the world, an event took place on the day before the Hamburg premiere of Heliane that would have a far-reaching effect on Korngold's future and ultimately render the attacks on him irrelevant. Hollywood released The Jazz Singer, the first commercially successful motion picture with synchronized sound. Even before the arrival of Hitler, more and more Austrian and German talent had relocated to America, where Hollywood's appetite for all things European seemed to equal Europe's appetite for all things American.

  Korngold the Arranger

  The truth was that the cultural fights picked by Julius had put his son Erich in an impossible position. Moreover, until he was conscripted into the army at the age of nineteen, he had – according to Julius – not been allowed to leave the parental home unaccompanied.38 It was clear that Julius had also pushed him into situations where he was unable to have his works judged without prejudice. Taking a side step as an arranger of other people's music was the perfect antidote to Julius's attempts to influence every aspect of Erich's life and helped to neutralise Julius's use of Erich as a weapon in his public battles. While it is true that Erich's most progressive music was composed while still a teenager, he equally loved the nostalgia of Viennese operetta. In arranging the works of others, he saw a chance to get closer to music he adored and to earn enough money to achieve financial independence. This prepared Erich for his future as a film music composer by forcing him to supply music on demand and to work together with a team to a strict deadline. Viennese composers were never shy about arranging operetta: Schoenberg and Zemlinsky did so frequently and often gave similar assignments to their pupils.

  Erich Korngold first met his future wife Luise von Sonnenthal in 1917. She was the granddaughter of Adolf Ritter von Sonnenthal, one of the great actors of the Burgtheater and one of the first prominent Jews to be knighted following the ‘emancipation’ of 1867. Luzi, as Erich called her, was an actress who had starred in several films. In addition, she was an extremely accomplished pianist. Yet despite coming from one of Vienna's most prestigious families, Julius was against the relationship. He was hostile to any relationship that questioned his position as absolute mentor over every aspect of Erich's life. In his memoirs, he grudgingly acknowledges Luzi's abundant gifts, but hints darkly that she was responsible for bringing Erich into the world of cinema.39

  Johann Strauss's operetta Eine Nacht in Venedig from 1885 had been one of the composer's greatest disappointments. His widow, Adele, thought that if it were to be carefully reworked for more modern tastes, it could enjoy the success previously denied. The Korngolds knew Adele, and Erich loved Strauss's music. Korngold eagerly took the opportunity offered by the multi-talented writer, performer and entrepreneur Hubert Marischka to arrange and conduct performances of the work which would feature the popular tenor Richard Tauber. A long run at the Theater an der Wien followed a successful opening on 25 October 1923. It then travelled through Austria and Germany, returning to the State Opera with a cast including Maria Jeritza, Adele Kern, Alfred Jerger, Koloman von Pataky, and Hubert Marischka himself.

  Cagliostro in Wien was the next Strauss operetta that Korngold adapted and updated. This too was a success, opening at the Bürgertheater40 on 13 April 1927. Korngold went on to concoct a Johann Strauss pastiche entitled Das Lied der Liebe as a vehicle for Richard Tauber, as well as arranging two operettas by Leo Fall: Rosen aus Florida and Die geschiedene Frau – which opened at Berlin's Theater am Nollendorfplatz on 1 February 1933, two days after Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor.

  Korngold's association with the theatrical wizard Max Reinhardt was the single most important collaboration of his professional life. Ultimately, it would save him from the Nazis and, over time, Reinhardt became Erich's principal artistic advisor and an effective antidote to his father. In the short term, they were responsible for two of the biggest theatrical successes of the decade. Early in 1929, Reinhardt proposed that Korngold adapt Offenbach's La vie parisienne. However, Korngold thought the work weak and they settled on Die Fledermaus in a new arrangement that required three singers in the principal roles, with actors in the other parts. The opening at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin on 8 June1929 exceeded all previous public and critical successes. Die Fledermaus ran throughout Europe, including in Paris, where it was given under the French title of Chauve-souris at the Théâtre Pigalle conducted by Bruno Walter. It even made it to Broadway in 1942, where it enjoyed a run of 520 performances.

  The Great Waltz, or Walzer aus Wien as it was called in German, was to become Korngold's biggest operetta success. The book was written by Hubert's brother Ernst Marischka and Heinz Reichert, and the score was a compilation of numbers composed by Johann Strauss Father and Son. Korngold drafted in Julius Bittner to help. He was not only a family friend and the composer of the popular opera Das höllisch Gold, but he was also elderly, suffering from acute diabetes and near penury. In truth, Bittner was too ill to contribute much, but with the work's success and the ban on Jewish composers after 1933 (which of course included Korngold), Bittner became the only arranger to receive a credit. The Korngold Collection at the Library of Congress includes a deeply moving letter from Bittner's son, a returning prisoner of war, in which he expresses his most humble gratitude to Korngold for giving his parents the financial stability to survive the Nazi years. Bittner died in 1939, and the royalties kept him and his wife solvent.

  Walzer aus Wien was a hit from the moment it opened at Vienna's Stadttheater on 30 October 1930. It opened in London the following year as Waltzes from Vienna and ran for 600 performances, with a similar success in Paris as Valse de Vienne. In 1934, it reopened in London under the new title The Great Waltz, by which it became known to English-language audiences from various film versions. It opened as The Great Waltz on Broadway at the Center Theater directed by Hassard Short on 22 September 1934 and ran for a further 289 performances. All of the film versions, including the one directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1934, would mischievously keep to the original Korngold treatment while using arrangements by house composers, thus evading the considerable royalty payments due to Korngold and Bittner.

  Reinhardt had not given up on his wish to mount an Offenbach operetta, and at Christmas in 1930 he finally persuaded Korngold. Die schöne Helene (La belle Hélène), with a new libretto by Egon Friedell and Hanns Sassmann, became their second international success. It opened at Berlin's Theater am Kurfürstendamm on 14 June 1931. After a run of 144 performances, it moved to London's Adelphi Theatre, where it was entitled simply Helen. Léonide Massine was the choreographer and Korngold conducted the opening performance, attended by the likes of Noel Coward, J. B. Priestley, Ivor Novello, Vivien Leigh, Tallulah Bankhead, Laurence Olivier, Sybil Thorndyke and Gertrude Lawrence.41

  From 1933, Korngold's opportunities for work in Nazi Germany – including the many operetta arrangeme
nts – disappeared. The family retreated to its comfortable estate at Schloss Höselberg in Austria's Salzkammergut, where Erich began composing a new opera, Die Kathrin, even though there was no hope of it ever reaching a German stage under the new regime. Reinhardt, however, had managed to land a contract in Hollywood where he had accepted an offer from Warner Brothers to direct a film version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, for which he asked Korngold to provide the score. Korngold arranged Mendelssohn's incidental music along with extracts from the composer's other works, ingeniously joining them together by scrupulously composed Mendelssohnian links. The move from arranging operetta to film could not have been more natural; that it should be Mendelssohn who would provide the musical opportunity carries its own intriguing symbolism.

  Hollywood

  Hollywood's moguls were mostly Eastern European and Russian Jews themselves, and they must have felt a touch of Schadenfreude as they scooped up the cream of Western European talent following Hitler's rise to power. Most of the newcomers were assimilated, urban Jews who were intimidatingly glamorous and sophisticated. Certainly Jack Warner, head of Warner Brothers, felt their arrival provided the opportunity to move away from low-budget gangster films and to smarten up the studio's image. At the same time, cultural insecurity meant he made agreements with this abundant talent that did not tally with his normally canny business instincts. One of these untypical deals was Max Reinhardt's film of A Midsummer Night's Dream – which gave Warner Bros the prestige of filming Shakespeare before its rivals at MGM or Paramount. Reinhardt's theatrical reputation was legendary, and his staging of the play at the Hollywood Bowl the previous year had left everyone open-mouthed. It was assumed he would be a cinematic natural.

  What Warner had not taken into account was a European sophistication that took little notice of the company's central business precept – to produce mass-market movies with as little financial outlay as possible. Warner Brothers was famous for never going over budget. With Reinhardt's Midsummer Night's Dream, all the rules changed. Its expensive stars spoke lines in a weighty Shakespearian language that many movie-going Americans had difficulty following. The film may have been a succès d'estime, but it was a financial disaster. A combination of panic and cultural insecurity even saw Warner agreeing to another Reinhardt contract to make a film version of Georg Büchner's play Dantons Tod, while simultaneously taking measures to make sure such financial folly would never get beyond the planning stages. If it had, Korngold would have finally been able to supply Reinhardt with an original score, an ambition that was never to be realised.

  Korngold's arrival had a galvanising effect on the Warner Brothers music department. Though many studio composers from this time are now well known, such as Alfred Newman and Max Steiner, none arrived in Hollywood with a career as firmly established as Korngold's. They supplied music by the minute and used stopwatches to measure to the second what was required. A team of orchestrators and arrangers would then flesh out sketched ideas. Korngold's practical mastery was unheard of. He conducted with authority, played the piano like a virtuoso and orchestrated as he composed, leaving details to assistants like Hugo Friedhofer. Most astonishingly, he knew instinctively how much music was needed for, say, twelve inches of film, and never used a stopwatch. The film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream launched not only Korngold's Hollywood career, but also those of many in its cast: Olivia de Havilland and Mickey Rooney made their film debuts and the role of Bottom was improbably played by James Cagney.

  On completion of the film, Korngold returned to Austria in May 1935 to continue work on Die Kathrin. New contracts from Warner Brothers had already been offered to him for further projects with Reinhardt and Ernst Lubitsch. Paramount wanted him to compose the music for their newest signing: Jan Kiepura, the heart-throb star of Korngold's opera Das Wunder der Heliane, recently exiled from Hitler's Germany. The resolute Romantics of Vienna and Berlin had found their refuge from Europe's cultural and political dictatorships, and it was called Hollywood.

  CHAPTER 10

  Between Hell and Purgatory

  I, as a Jew, expect the redemption of the world to come to us through a renewal of a pure and genuine Christianity.

  Ich als Jude erwarte die Erlösung der Welt von der Wiedergeburt eines reinen und echten Christentums.

  Speech by Franz Werfel in Vienna, 4 March 1932

  We have eradicated International Jewry from cultural life; we have purged the theatres and cinemas and we have returned a respectable press to the German people. We have placed our entire intellectual and cultural life onto a new foundation.

  Wir haben das internationale Judentum aus dem Kulturleben ausgemerzt, wir haben die Theater und Kinopaläste gesäubert, wir haben dem deutschen Volk wieder eine anständige Presse gegeben und wir haben das ganze Geistes- und Kulturleben auf eine neue Basis gestellt.

  Speech by Josef Goebbels in Hamburg, 3 March 1933

  At the end of 1932, there was much to occupy the largely Jewish contingent of journalists at Vienna's Neue Freie Presse. The 300th birthday of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza was celebrated on 24 November,1 though despite the detail of the accompanying articles, it was far more subdued than the retrospective the paper had produced on the 250th anniversary of his death in 1927.2 It was a last gasp of rationalism: the Dutch Jewish philosopher had laid the intellectual basis for the Enlightenment that became the foundation for two pillars of German Humanism: Lessing and Goethe. In 1933 the readers of the Neue Freie Presse were offered a reminder of the conflicts between Wagner and Brahms, with a variety of articles and feuilletons: it was 50 years since Wagner's death and 100 years since Brahms's birth. The anti-Semitism of Wagner goes unmentioned,3 though the Austrian journalist deplores the brutalised co-opting of Wagner by ‘the new politics of today’ and paints his German nationalism in wilfully Kantian colours. Similarly, the philo-Semitism of Brahms passes without direct comment.4 Brahms's support for the Liberal Party, the basis of the paper's editorial philosophy, is considered more relevant – and tacitly it amounted to much the same thing. Mahler's beloved soprano Selma Kurz also died in 1933, making it a poignant year for Julius Korngold, who had been one of her most ardent supporters. More irksome for Julius was the continued success of his son's work as an arranger of operettas, most recently Offenbach's Helen, which opened to sensational reviews in London.

  And then there were the political changes taking place in Germany: Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933, the burning of the Parliament the following month and the imposition of the Reichstag Fire Decree on 27 February, suspending civil liberties and allowing the Nazis to embark on the systematic suppression of all opposition. This was followed on 23 March 1933 by the Enabling Act, sanctioned by the German Parliament, which gave Hitler absolute dictatorial powers, and given the totally inappropriate title ‘Law to Remedy the Distress of the [German] People and Reich’.5

  On New Year's Eve 1933, an anonymous editorial was printed in the Neue Freie Presse entitled ‘Between Hell and Purgatory’. It is an intriguing article, presenting the reader today with a combination of clairvoyance mixed with blindness, and wisdom tempered by fear and doubt. As with most leading articles in the paper, it is full of historic and literary allusions, starting with a quote from the fourth-century Greek sophist Alcidamas: ‘The Gods set all humanity free – nature has yet to make them into slaves.‘6 The article goes on to deal with contemporary macro-economic issues and the insanity of further defence spending. The writer is justifiably fretful regarding the delicate nature of relations between France and Germany, and is sceptical about Roosevelt's financial plans, which he views as reckless and unproven. But developments in Germany are the cause of greatest concern:

  It becomes more and more difficult to greet the developments of the age using words that offer mere credulity. It's as [Götterdämmerung] when during night's darkest moment, the rope of fate being woven by the Norns suddenly snaps, cut by a curse as forbidding as a peak within the distant moun
tain range. By this we mean that a normal evaluation [and interpretation of the end of the year and its implications for the year to come] is frankly not possible using simple reason, scientific objectivity, or even human instinct. The irrational and hallucinatory music of Götterdämmerung confuse the songs that ordinarily make up our end-of-year rounds and rob us of all confidence and assurance. The Alberich of today has more power at his disposal than the former Gods of light. […] In wishing to guess what may be in store, we can only grope blindly forward, trying to make out shapes in the dim light of a sun losing its warmth. We must free ourselves of everything we've ever believed – horror is the only emotion allowed. However, if we wish to divine the fate of humanity, we have no choice but to remain objective. Without objectivity, we're unable to place all that is hateful into its true alignment with our present condition. […] Yet this year's greatest outrage has been the dehumanising of humanity – the indifference to the fate of others, the greedy grasping of uncontrolled power and the idolisation of vulgar bigotry which is spreading like an intellectual epidemic more deadly than any variant of mediaeval mysticism. […] European culture itself as a spiritual entity has been destroyed. The intellectual traditions of generations have been wrecked. The dictators of recent times are uncannily adept at using the double edge of their swords: they position themselves at home as military absolutists on the one hand, while on the other, they make outward declarations of peace. […] Hitler has risen to the very top and has managed uncontested to rub out all political opposition like smudges on a chalkboard. […] He brought on elections that resulted in a monopoly in the Reichstag, which he has nevertheless succeeded in excluding from all political and economic decisions. He's turned theories of race into an anti-gospel that stands in stark contrast to the true gospels of mercy and charity towards one's neighbour. He has forced tens of thousands to flee, and many more have been ejected from their places of work. He ignores Frederick the Great's view that ‘misplaced zeal results in a tyranny that leaves the country barren – tolerance on the other hand is a gentle mother which nurtures and yields forth fruit’. The National Socialists have been able to carry out these brutalities by going out of their way to avoid conflict with the world's most important powers. They have spoken words of peace to all who chose to listen, expressed their desire to strike deals and negotiate the unresolvable. Nobody seems to recall their previous statements regarding Poland. [Hitler's government] has even been able to make a reasonable impression in Britain by acknowledging the mistakes made in previous disarmament conferences, counting on the desire of peace by the majority of the British people along with their sickness of war and their abject reluctance to start another arms-race. It is from precisely this point that we witness a new era in European politics: a shift away from the recent axiom of all western nations aligned against Germany. From now on, we witness concessions as the basis of all negotiations.7