by Michael Haas
Ralph Vaughan Williams, writing to the Austrian pianist Ferdinand Rauter, commented on the ‘trampling of the tender flower of English music‘30 by insensitive but marvellously trained Austro-German musicians. There was, in general, scant sympathy in Britain for music coming out of Germany and Austria during the interwar years. The critic Ernest Newman disparaged the music of Weill's Threepenny Opera as being a conglomeration of the worst traits of numerous styles and the best traits of none.31 To be fair, he was in good company: Schoenberg had also commented that Weill was the only composer in whom he could find no qualities whatsoever.32 As if Newman's review of The Threepenny Opera wasn't bad enough, the Times correspondent declared that ‘Weill writes a particularly nauseous kind of jazz’, following the short run of his operetta Kingdom for a Cow at the Savoy Theatre in 1935. The incomprehension of London's critics contributed to Weill's decision to quit Britain as soon as possible.33 The British press treated contemporary Austro-German developments with varying degrees of disdain, with only the likes of Edward Dent and Adrian Boult showing any kind of sympathy for recent continental trends.
By contrast, Berthold Goldschmidt saw England as especially welcoming, following the BBC broadcast of Berg's Wozzeck conducted by Adrian Boult in 1934. Goldschmidt had been Erich Kleiber's assistant and orchestral keyboard player for the Berlin premiere in 1925. Despite Goldschmidt's hopes placed in the sophistication of the British public, he found that in general they thought the music coming out of Germany clangorous and dissonant with heavy dollops of artless pseudo-jazz. The Threepenny Opera would not enjoy the same success in England that it had in Paris, despite the high profile anti-Semitic cat-calls of the French composer Florent Schmitt at the Salle Pleyel during a Kurt Weill concert in 1933: ‘We have enough bad composers in France and don't need to add to them by bringing in all of the German Jewish composers as well.‘34 Ultimately, Schmitt was denounced as an extremist by most of the French press. In Great Britain, the press was more inclined to view German composers as the ‘extremists’.
With a few exceptions, British music from the interwar years veered towards some form of pastoralism, or found itself aesthetically between the salon and the palm-court, with only rare ventures into the tamer realms of Modernism. Indeed, the British composer most regularly mentioned in the German new-music publications Anbruch and Melos is Cyril Scott. Progressive British composers from the generation of Weill, Eisler and Goldschmidt were not nearly as domestically established as their German and Austrian colleagues had been. By 1940 the BBC had compiled a list of composers it had decided could not be broadcast, including many refugees who had fled to Britain. The influence of the Austro-Germanic tradition would thus have to be applied vicariously via teaching: Egon Wellesz arrived at Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1939, and Hans Gál was appointed Lecturer at Edinburgh University immediately after the end of the war, though neither was engaged to teach composition. Hans Ferdinand Redlich lectured first at the Workers’ Education Association as well as extramural departments of the Universities of Cambridge and Birmingham before accepting a professorship in Manchester. Walter Goehr and the Hungarian composer Mátyás Seiber found positions at London's Morley College. The Webern pupil Leopold Spinner and Arthur Willner, a former composition teacher from Berlin's Stern'schen Conservatory, worked as copyeditors or arrangers for music publishers, while the Schoenberg pupil Erwin Stein became the musical midwife to the young Benjamin Britten. Britten had hoped to study with Berg in Vienna, but was persuaded against the idea by his teachers at the Royal College of Music, who were suspicious of musical developments in central Europe. Erwin Stein's influence served as an aesthetic link to the Second Viennese School, arguably aiding the projection of Britten's work beyond the insular world of British music.
The Academic Assistance Council of Great Britain (AAC) was set up in 1933 by William Beveridge, Director of the London School of Economics. It was meant to help place reputable academics, but the reality was quite different. Of the 2,200 academics leaving Nazi Germany and Austria by 1938, half went first to Britain, but the AAC dealt only with what it considered the ‘elite’, so that many ordinary teachers and researchers were never allowed to stay. By 1935, only 60 permanent university posts had been found for fleeing academics, including a small number of scientists. The AAC was under pressure from the Ministry of Labour to encourage academics to find employment in the USA, with only 31 refugee academics ultimately ending up in British universities.35
Internment
It was in 1940 that Churchill gave his infamous instruction to ‘collar the lot’, meaning that ‘enemy aliens’ were to be interned.36 These included male (and in some cases female) Germans and Austrians, but not the so-called 'Old Reich’ Austrians who held Czech, Polish or Hungarian citizenship. It also included Britons of German and Austrian origin, so that in a few instances Britons found themselves interned (or indeed deported) because their parents or even grandparents had settled in Britain. Until May 1940, ‘enemy aliens’ had been classified in one of the three categories listed as A, B and C. Those in category A were deemed an obvious threat and were already detained. Most able-bodied Jewish and political refugees fell into category B and were subject to employment and movement restrictions, while those in category C were exempt. Churchill's order resulted in 27,000 category B aliens, and many from category C being added to the category A aliens, already detained,
Hans Gál's internment memoirs Musik hinter Stacheldraht or Music behind Barbed Wire offers a vivid first-hand account of life in British internment camps, recalling his five months surrounded by despair, death and frequent suicides.37 His own family was ripped apart: in 1942, his youngest son, unable to cope with the new life forced upon him, committed suicide, and his oldest son was deported to unknown shores during the months in which Gál was detained on the Isle of Man.
Jewish asylum-seekers, businessmen with Nazi sympathies working in Britain when war broke out, first- and second-generation Austro-German Britons, along with political refugees, were all thrown into camps together (Italians were placed in separate camps). As Gál explained, the cynical view among refugees was that Britain was preparing to present Hitler with all of his escaped Jews on a silver platter, once the country fell to Germany.38 The music that Gál composed in camps at Huyton (outside Liverpool) and Douglas (Isle of Man) does not reflect his mood of desperation. On the contrary, he wrote pieces to take people's minds away from the situation. He composed for whatever instruments were available, and when performers were released, transferred to other camps or simply deported, he rescored his pieces for new arrivals, or transposed them as the situation demanded. He described the guards as obtuse and often sadistic. The frequently cited ‘camp universities’ with lectures held by Nobel Prize-winning scientists and concerts by some of the greatest performers of the day, all of whom were interned together, reflect only a partial truth that belongs mostly to postwar British mythology. The lectures and concerts, the art classes offered by the likes of Kurt Schwitters and plays mounted by refugee actors and directors were, according to Gál's memoirs, far less of a feature of daily life than the unremitting tedium. Wellesz's Oxford University diary is empty from the moment he is interned until the week of 8 July 1940, with two consecutive entries that read ‘Schöne Müllerin – Zusammenbruch’, referring to a performance of Schubert's Die Schöne Müllerin, and the total mental breakdown which led to his being released after the personal interventions of Myra Hess, Vaughan Williams and others.
The Austrian pianist Ferdinand Rauter campaigned tirelessly after his own release from internment for freeing musicians who clearly posed no threat to the British public and who were sometimes young enough to be in danger of suffering permanent psychological scarring. Among this group were several young Austrians including Norbert Brainin, Siegmund Nissel and Peter Schidlof, whom Rauter managed to have released and placed with the Viennese violinist Max Rostal for instruction. Rostal was impressed enough by the youngsters to teach them without charge, and in 1947
he introduced them to the English cellist Martin Lovett, with whom they formed the Amadeus Quartet. Gál was also lucky enough to be released early and returned to Edinburgh in late September 1940 after suffering from an inexplicable skin disease.
During his internment, Gál worked with a group of writers and performers to put on an internment-camp revue entitled What a Life! for which Gál wrote the music, and among the humorous writers was the Schubert scholar, Otto Erich Deutsch. The first performance was such a success with both prisoners and camp personnel that Gál was persuaded to delay his release by one day so that a second performance could take place. Songs were bilingual and a taste of a verse in English translated by Gál himself from an original text by someone he identified only as ‘Hutter’ certainly implies a baffled incomprehension at locking up ‘Hitler's best enemies’.39
The seagulls are in a curious mood
Maybe they are getting too much food.
One thing they all very much deplore,
Is the ugly barbed-wire that grows up the shore.
So in the seagulls’ parliament
There was a great debate on that end
And many of them did then enquire:
‘Why are human-beings behind barbed-wire?’
In truth, internment was standard in times of war and carried out by all sides, often with tragic consequences. Roosevelt's order for the internment of Japanese-Americans is copiously documented and the United States has been quicker than other countries in dealing with this dark chapter of its domestic history. Documentation concerning British internment that should have been released after 30 years remains embargoed to this day. But the Nazis also operated internment camps in addition to their many concentration camps. It was in such a camp, in the small Bavarian town of Wülzburg, that the Jewish, Prague-born composer Erwin Schulhoff died. He had been imprisoned, not as a Jew, but as a naturalised Soviet citizen, even though the camp in Wülzburg separated Jewish prisoners from other internees. His death from tuberculosis in 1942 was in the same year that the film star and opera tenor Joseph Schmidt died in a Swiss internment camp at the age of 38, proving that even the internationally famous matinee idol was not spared unsanitary and crowded conditions. There were also many deaths and suicides in French and British camps. Jewish inmates of French internment camps were regularly deported to the death camps in the East after the fall of France in 1940. The twelve-tone composer and protégé of Theodor Adorno, Erich Itor Kahn, and his wife, the Russian pianist Frida Rabinovitch, were relatively lucky. Having been shipped from one camp to another in France, they eventually managed, with help from the American Refugee Committee, to reach Casablanca and find safe passage to the United States in 1941. If his music remains largely unfamiliar today, his view of the dilemmas presented to a German Jewish composer at that time is revealing:
I believe that during such a time of profound world crises even art must be affected. In such periods as these, there is no stability of stylistic or expressive means and anything that is completed appears short-lived. The ultimate recognition of the limitations of recognised truth, treated also as a dialectical argument regarding material, is fundamentally shattering and seen as a point of departure. In the midst of such an age, the composer has only one means of guaranteeing his artistry: to yield to the rights and duties that have grown from an historic musical inheritance while at the same time yielding to the spiritual and intellectual vision demanded by its expression. The first and most determining question is this: How far can we go without betraying the past, and what do we need to keep without betraying the future?40
Less fortunate was the violinist Alma Rosé (niece of Gustav Mahler, and daughter of Arnold Rosé and Mahler's sister Justine), interned in Drancy before being deported to Auschwitz. The librettist Richard Fall, brother of the composer Leo Fall, was also arrested in France before his murder in Nazi gas chambers, sharing the same fate as the composers Szymon Laks and James Simon along with Fritz Löhner-Beda, the librettist for Lehár's Land of Smiles and Giuditta.
Escape: France
Fleeing from Nazi Germany in 1933 to neighbouring France, Czechoslovakia, Italy or Austria was only a short-term solution. But unlike Czechoslovakia and Austria, there was less apparent sympathy in France for Nazi anti-Semitism. Indeed, France had been helping Jews flee from central and Eastern European pogroms with its Comité central d'assistance aux réfugiés juifs since 1928. There was broad establishment support for aiding German Jewish refugees from 1933, and for Austrian composers such as Toch and Schoenberg, France was felt to be a more secure refuge than a return to Dollfuß's corporatist dictatorship in Austria. French was also the most common second language for German and Austrian refugees, and this fact regularly tipped the balance in favour of Paris over London.
But like Britain, France too was suffering from massive unemployment; its musicians were reeling from the loss of work that came with the arrival of sound films, and as a result, life was especially difficult for fleeing musicians. German music was not appreciated by the broader French public, though young French composers had greater sympathy for German modernist trends than their British counterparts.41 Refugee musicians did not form self-help leagues or societies such as those formed by German writers in French exile. Nor were they engaged to teach in institutions.42 If the British were fretful that, by hiring refugees as teachers, they were putting their native musical flower, ‘tender’ as it was, at risk from being trampled underfoot by better-qualified Huns, the French were sufficiently nationalistic to dismiss the idea of Austro-Germans teaching at their institutions altogether. With the exception of the teutophile, anti-Semitic Florent Schmitt and a small number of others, the French maintained the anti-German stance present since their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.
As in Britain, official attempts were made to preserve an outward appearance of friendly cultural relations between Germany and France, often leading to excessive concessions being made to avoid harming international relations. In 1936, Hanns Eisler submitted several movements of an oratorio that would eventually become his Deutsche Sinfonie, with texts by Bertolt Brecht and Ignazio Silone, to the committee of the ISCM in the hope of having it performed at the 1937 ISCM festival in Paris. The composer Jacques Ibert headed the jury along with the ISCM President Edward Dent. Neither was instinctively sympathetic to Eisler's politics, and both were wary of offending the remaining German delegates (Nazi Germany had officially withdrawn its cooperation and started a rival organisation). In an effort to appear as non-partisan as possible, the ISCM committee suggested to Eisler that the vocal passages be replaced by saxophones – a suggestion that Eisler, unsurprisingly, did not take up.
The film industry provided the easiest means for composers to enter French musical life. The Hungarian pupil of Hanns Eisler, József Kozma, later Joseph Kosma, arrived in Paris from Berlin in 1933. His first score, following the success of his 1936 hit-song ‘Au jour, le jour; à la nuit, la nuit’ from Jean Renoir's film Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, was La grande illusion (also directed by Renoir) in 1937, followed by La Règle du jeu in 1939. In due course, Kosma became the father of postwar chanson with such hits as Les feuilles mortes and Les enfants qui s'aiment set to texts by Jacques Prévert. But other composers would also find work in France's film industry, Eisler himself with Le grand jeu in 1934 and La vie est à nous in 1936. Paul Dessau, another frequent Brecht collaborator, composed scores for L'or dans la rue in 1935, Taras Bulba in 1936, and Cargaison Blanche in 1937, and even the future Hollywood great, Franz Wachsmann, later known as Franz Waxman, worked in Paris on the films La petite de Parnasse and Un peu d'amour (1932) and La crise est finie and Mauvaise graine (1934) prior to leaving for America. Of all of the composers seeking refuge in France, only a few, such as the Hungarians Joseph Kosma and Imre Weisshaus (later known as Paul Arma), and the Polish Webern pupil René Leibowitz, remained in France during the years of the Vichy regime, while the Austrian operetta composer Joseph Beer remained in hiding until the end of the war.
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Most German and Austrian composers either left France or were deported to the East. Beer remained too damaged through his experience to participate in postwar musical life and any of his prewar operettas that found postwar productions were mounted without his involvement. His family, along with his regular librettist, Fritz Löhner-Beda, had all been murdered. He remained a virtual recluse in the South of France until his death in 1987. During the Occupation, Jacques Prévert was able to feed film work through to Kosma, under house arrest in France's Alpes-Maritimes region, which was then published under the names of other, non-Jewish composers. Arma, also hiding in the South of France, compiled political songs held today at the Musée régionale de la Résistance de Thionville, and composed a song cycle entitled Les chants du silence setting poems by Vercors, Éluard and others. In the immediate postwar years, Leibowitz, who would become the teacher of Boulez and Henze (among many others), fostered an interest in Schoenberg among younger composers in both France and Germany.
Escape: The United States
Given the choice, nearly all Jewish refugees would have preferred emigration to the USA, but the quota system made this difficult for those without funds and contacts. Introduced in 1921, the quota system was a convoluted affair: within the total number of annual immigrants set at 350,000, ‘quotas’ were pegged at no more than 3 per cent of the absolute number of émigrés from any given country living in America since 1910. In 1924, the laws were made even more proscriptive with the capping of levels of existing populations being backdated from 1910 to 1890, and the total number of immigrants was reduced to 150,000. These regulations were brought in to stem the flow of immigrants after the First World War, and to reduce the numbers arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe in order to give an advantage to those from Northern Europe, which already represented the largest of the many ethnic groups.43