Forbidden Music

by Michael Haas

  Why did so many of these refugee composers even chose to write something as apparently outmoded as a symphony? The form was redolent of the ‘Old German’ school of Leipzig, and the composers who ended up as refugees though sympathetic with ‘Old German’ values, were not visibly drawn to its classical models. Mahler had changed the entire symphonic ideal, and Shostakovich was showing that the episodic model of symphonic writing was something that was exportable and not uniquely bound to the German tradition. Despite the symphonies of such important émigré composers as Korngold, Toch, Gál, Wellesz, Rathaus, Weigl, Karl Rankl48 and many others, Germany and Austria had essentially abdicated the symphony in favour of the Slavs, the Scandinavians and even the Americans and British. Franz Schmidt was the last of the traditional Austrian symphonists from the years before Austria's annexation by Germany. Émigré composers on the other hand appeared duty-bound to reassert their native entitlement to a form that had emerged from the same cultural environment as themselves. The Austro-German ‘exile symphony’ deserves a special place in twentieth-century musical history: its content cannot be disassociated from the circumstances under which it was composed.

  Nazi Resistance

  New musical developments in Europe were not simply the result of a reaction to Nazi atrocities, or covert indoctrination meted out to a group of intellectuals and artists too international to be susceptible to jingoistic anti-Communist propaganda. Equally potent – and equally frustrating for once prominent composers and academics living in exile – was the haphazard denazification process in the music business and academic institutions. The letter from Einstein to Gál (quoted at the head of this chapter) relating Robert Haas's desperate search for recommendations from former Jewish colleagues followed an earlier letter of 1 January 1946 in which he wrote the following:

  Have you heard that Robert Haas, the man of many smells [written in English] has either returned, or is still sitting with all the dignity and honour that befits his former position, and today is now one of the mightiest beasts in the jungle? The ‘three Kings from the East’ (or the West) made one of their biggest ever mistakes when they decided not leave ‘Ostmark’ as part of the Third Reich.49 The Austrians would certainly have earned such treatment!50

  That Haas was later removed from his position as Director of the Music Collection at the Austrian National Library and editor of the Bruckner Edition was some consolation, but it was hardly a significant step forward. Nowak, unlike Haas, had not been a vocal supporter of the Nazi Regime but was made to carry out Haas's bidding as necessary. This certainly did not look promising as a return to the central position Berlin and Vienna once held in musical scholarship. Wellesz had been removed from the University of Vienna after 1938, and though he was able to maintain a respectable profile with a lectureship at Lincoln College Oxford, he wanted to return to his former professorship in Vienna. With the death of Adler in 1941, he would certainly have been a leading candidate to take over Adler's Institute. Since Adler's death occurred while Austria was annexed, this meant that his Jewish pupils were unable to participate in the development of one of the most respected musicological institutions in the world. Instead, Erich Schenk, the Salzburg-born head of the musicological institute in Rostock, was brought to Vienna in 1940 by Robert Lach, another Adler pupil who had taken over Adler's professorship of comparative musicology in 1927. Schenk moved in quickly. He maintained that he protected the elderly Adler and his daughter from deportation by the Nazis until Adler Sr's death in 1941. He fooled no one: Wellesz sent an open letter in English to a number of important musicologists and members of the ISCM. It is undated but presumably sent sometime in 1946. The correspondence from Rudolf von Ficker to which it refers is dated 28 May 1945:

  More than a year ago a letter from an old friend of mind, and former colleague at the University of Vienna, Professor Rudolf von Ficker, brought me news of Miss Melanie (Mely) Adler, daughter of our former teacher, Hofrat Professor Dr. Guido Adler, Honorary President of the International Musicological Society. Professor Ficker occupied the Chair of Musicology in Munich from about 1930. He was known as a strong anti-Nazi. Miss Adler had also lived in Munich and was an intimate friend of Professor Ficker and his wife. [Professor Ficker's account follows] When Professor Adler, who was a Jew, was dying at the age of eighty-six in 1941 in Vienna the Gestapo wanted to turn him out of his house. His daughter, who nursed him, appealed to Professor Schenk, Ordinarius der Musikgeschichte, for help. Whether through his intervention or not, the Gestapo stopped their proceedings, and Adler died in his house. Miss Adler wrote a letter to Schenk thanking him for his help and asking him if he could help her to get to Italy to her relations…. The next evidence comes from letters which she wrote to Professor Ficker asking him to help her. As the price for his help Schenk demanded Adler's library. Miss Adler refused to part with it. At this point the Gestapo summoned her, threatening her with deportation, and members of the Musikhistorische Institute of the University of Vienna [Robert Haas and Leopold Nowak51] searched the library for autographs. Professor Ficker acted quickly and got the Public Library of Munich to offer Miss Adler a good price for the library and the guarantee of personal safety. The sale was prevented by Schenk, who said that such a valuable collection ought not to leave Austria.52 His intervention did not affect the library alone. It deprived Miss Adler of the opportunity of obtaining the guarantee of safety. The key of the library was taken away, and the threats of the Gestapo increased. Professor Ficker got no further letters from Miss Adler, and at last went to Vienna and saw Professor Schenk. He saw Adler's library, stored at the Institute.53

  The denazification hearing of Schenk – a result of von Ficker's efforts – was farcical. Schenk produced the letter from Melanie Adler thanking him for saving her father from the Nazis. Ficker, who was close to Adler's daughter wrote to Wellesz on 1 September 1947 explaining how she showed him the letter she had obtained from Schenk: ‘A copy of the statement given by Schenk was shown to me by Mely sometime during the early part of March 1941. How it began will stay with me forever, it started: “Though it disgusts me having to deal with a Jew …”.‘54 Ficker went on to explain to Wellesz that the guarantee of Adler's safety was given by Baldur von Schirach, Gauleiter of Vienna, at the request of his cultural advisor Dr Thomas who had been beset by pleas from former Adler pupils. All of this information was of no consequence. Schenk remained in his position until 1971, and Wellesz was not invited to return to his former post in Vienna. Schenk was supported by a network of former Nazi supporters and in a relatively small country such as Austria, this kind of protection was easily acquired and reciprocated. But Schenk's influence reduced Vienna's reputation for musicology to a trace of what it had once been. He had made a name for himself with a popular Mozart biography and furiously denied young musicologists any chance of researching the contributions of Jewish composers prior to the Nazi arrival in Austria in 1938. Accounts of his refusal to countenance doctorates on Mahler were legion, and even made it into the local papers with one relating the thwarted attempts by the Canadian Timothy Vernon. Schenk told him ‘to forget the idea. He was a Jew’.55 Schenk's comment to the young composer Gösta Neuwirth, when he expressed his intention to write a dissertation on Schreker, is now notorious: ‘There's no chance of anyone writing a dissertation about Jews under my supervision!‘56 Charges continued to be brought against him until 1967, all of which he saw off with the disdain – and the confidence, of someone who knew where skeletons were buried. All this was grossly disheartening to Austrian musicians and composers still living in exile.

  Einstein summed up the situation to Gál in another letter from 15 February 1947: ‘It's perfectly understandable to me that you should dismiss tempting invitations from Salzburg and Vienna – such siren songs have lost all appeal to those such as us. Even I wouldn't wish to find myself in the position of not offering my hand or greetings to colleagues who tell me that at the time they “never really believed any of that nonsense”.‘57 Einstein was as good a
s his word. In 1949 he refused an invitation by the Freie Universität in West Berlin and rejected the Golden Mozart Medal awarded by the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg.

  Einstein's remarks about not wanting to greet or shake the hands of former Nazis who later claimed not really to have ‘believed any of it’, finds an echo in an experience Gál had when he received a letter from Heinz Tietjen, dated 23 August 1951. Tietjen was the man who had mounted Die Heilige Ente in Berlin and Breslau in the 1920s. Under the Nazi dictatorship he became one of the most influential managers in theatre and opera, when Göring appointed him – along with Gustaf Gründgens (on whom Klaus Mann based his novel Mephisto) –as cultural advisor on the Prussian State Council in 1936, and general director of the Prussian State Theatre. This was followed by taking over effective management, with Winifred Wagner, of the Bayreuth Festival until 1944. Even as the most powerful theatre manager in pre-Nazi Germany, he approved of the closure of Berlin's bankrupt Kroll Opera in 1931, which the Nazis had branded a ‘cultural institution of Reds and Jews.’ Upon his appointment by Göring he promptly dismissed 27 non-Aryan employees and tore up contracts with Jewish performers. As with Gründgens, he was reprimanded after the war for ‘behaving opportunistically’ and yet was also allowed to take on the directorship of Berlin's Municipal Opera, the renamed Deutsche Oper. In 1951, he was made head of the Berlin Festival and from 1954, director of the Hamburg Opera. In his friendly letter to Gál, Tietjen reminds him that he's just been in London directing Parsifal and Meistersinger at Covent Garden, conducted by his ‘old friend from former Berlin days’, Sir Thomas Beecham.58 Beecham's position vis-à-vis the Nazis has long been contentious. He continued to conduct in Nazi Germany until virtually the declaration of war, whereupon he quit England and did not return until 1944.59 It must have been deeply disillusioning for someone like Gál, living in exile in Edinburgh seeing a slippery operator like Tietjen carrying on as if nothing had changed.

  Georg Szell wrote to Gál (in English) on 15 October 1942: ‘All the relatives of Lene including her old mother have been deported to Poland as far as we know, her two sons are living with their father in occupied France – of course we have had no news from them for years and can only hope they have not been deported. All the people we used to know in Prague have been deported, including women of eighty years – isn't it a beautiful world we live in? No matter what happens after the war, no punishment can be equal to these crimes.‘60 Then again on 30 May 1946 (this time in German), Szell wrote: 'My parents were deported from Nice in the autumn of 1943, first into the notorious camp at Drancy. From there, we lost track. I hope they didn't have to suffer too much.‘61 This is followed by another letter on 14 July 1946:

  We are in receipt of much news from Europe but every letter is so filled with gruesome things that both Lene and I start to shake the moment we spot a European postmark. In addition, I've been able to speak with friends who in recent weeks have been travelling in Europe and what they report is not too pretty [in English]. In addition to all of these things, I've received invitations to conduct in Salzburg in August and in September to conduct concerts in Vienna. Naturally I've refused without giving it so much as a second thought. Also … I have quite enough to do here. I've just had eight concerts in Chicago, and next week I have three further performances in Philadelphia…. I haven't the slightest sense of nostalgia for my former corner of the world.62

  If Germany dealt with its denazification more efficiently than Austria, Austria had specific problems of its own. The anti-Nazi, clerical, Austro-Fascist government from 1933 to 1938 was essentially a right-wing dictatorship. Despite the leading role the Catholic Church played within this government, it had many Jewish supporters. Today, we are inclined to see Hitler and Stalin as the embodiment of either a right-wing or left-wing dictatorship. But to many who lived through this period, their regimes seemed identical. The National Socialism of Hitler and the Communism of Stalin were both centralist-authoritarian and invested heavily in their respective domestic economies. They could only afford to carry out such policies by confiscating the personal wealth of easily isolated groups. To the Soviets, it was middle-class professionals and land-owning farmers; and to the Nazis, it was the Jews. Both were essentially anti-social forms of Socialism, and their political capital was guaranteed by the support of the disenfranchised class of the working poor, the unemployed and the unemployable, duped by endless streams of mendacious propaganda. To anyone who saw the individual as the building block of society, there was virtually no difference between the two ideologies.

  What this meant to Austrians after 1945 was a return of many right-wing political refugees who had gone into exile as supporters of the Austro-Fascist state. Competition for positions in institutions after 1945 was often between returning Jews and returning political exiles of either the extreme anti-Nazi right or the extreme left. As Germany did not have a period of anti-Nazi fascist government prior to Hitler, it did not experience the remigration of returning anti-Nazi fascist-supporters after 1945. Despite highly placed Communists and Social Democrats in the post-1945 Viennese municipal government, the Republic of Austria was less sympathetic to returning left-wing refugees than it was to those from the right. Its sympathy for returning Jews of any political persuasion was altogether more erratic. The new president of Austria, Karl Renner, had declared that claims by Jews against the state should be kicked as far as possible into the long grass.63

  Hanns Eisler would have preferred to find work in Vienna rather than relocating to East Germany; but he was further handicapped by his close Schoenbergian connections. Affiliations among returning refugee musicians were not easy to untangle. The Jewish composer Marcel Rubin was a pupil of Franz Schmidt and thus no supporter of Schoenberg. He escaped to France before finding refuge in Mexico. He returned to Austria in 1947. As an anti-Schoenberg Communist, he found himself more welcome in Vienna than two Jewish Schoenberg disciples from different ends of the political spectrum: Wellesz, who had supported the Austro-fascist regime, and Eisler, who was Communist.

  Schoenberg's near-fatal heart attack in 1946 was an additional reason for him not to return to Vienna. The new family he had started with his second wife Gertude Kolisch had settled in and gone native in California. Children born in America had no desire to leave friends and return to the ruins of the country that had thrown out their parents. It no doubt suited Vienna's musical establishment, led by Joseph Marx (who from 1938 to 1945 had enjoyed the status of being the Ostmark's most frequently performed living composer), not to give any encouragement to Schoenberg or his followers.64

  Egon Kornauth was a Schreker pupil, who, together with Marx, led the committee that awarded the postwar Austrian State Prize for Music. Kornauth wrote to Marx on 4 May 1957: ‘I completely agree with you and … wish to confirm that with full conviction, I would propose Dr Hans Gál so that we make sure that people who receive this prize write genuine music with imagination and skill which a normal listener with normal ears can appreciate – someone who can show a true lifetime's work – all of which is the case [with Dr Gál] (otherwise, we'll soon be swamped by masses of twelve-tone tinkerers).‘65 Marx's only conceivable objection to Gál receiving the prize had been expressed in a statement he had made regarding the prize in 1953, when he suggested that being in exile (or ‘living abroad’ as he put it) was grounds for being denied the prize, should it be deemed that a composer had ‘lost their sense of being Austrian while profiting from all of the advantages and opportunities that working in foreign countries provided’.66 Korngold was not proposed for this reason – ‘He's earned enough money in Hollywood already!’ as Kornauth wrote to Marx on 9 May1956.67 Gál, on the other hand, was praised by both Marx and Kornauth as being an Austrian composer ‘living abroad’ who did not give a false impression of musical life in Austria with 'all of that atonal and twelve-tone fiddling about’. Kornauth went on to hope that the following year they could award the prize to someone who actually lived in Austria.68 It would take Kornaut
h's death in 1959 before Krenek, Wellesz and other, more progressive voices would be recognised. Obviously, Schoenberg and anyone connected with his school were unwelcome.

  The political jostling between former Nazis who refused to budge from the positions bestowed upon them with the departure of Jewish colleagues made life both stressful and traumatic for returning composers, performers and academics. But duplicity and mendacity were not limited to the men and women encountered in the course of trying to return to a pre-Hitler existence. Korngold's publisher Schott had earned enormous sums from composers banned by the Third Reich and had every motivation to resist Nazi efforts and intervene in cultural policy. Instead, Schott went over to the other side – while writing cringing letters to its ‘non-Aryan’ composers such as Korngold, Toch and Gál. Both the Strecker brothers were sympathetic to National Socialism, and Ludwig was assumed to be a member of the party,69 while his brother Willy had written to Stravinsky in April 1933: ‘This movement has so much that is healthy and positive about it … a welcome cleaning-up has been undertaken … in an attempt to restore decency and order.‘70

  It was a perfect storm that now raged against Jewish composers, who, having been banned by Hitler and his odious Thousand-Year Reich, found themselves unwelcome in their former homes, and only reluctantly accepted in their new ones. The ravages of war left Germany needing every capable pair of hands available to rebuild its devastated infrastructure and to establish stability in the middle of a very unsettled Europe. Apart from efforts by the Americans, the removal of former Nazis from cultural positions was not a high priority for any of the occupying forces. The other three occupying powers had decided that music was so close to the German psyche that it was important to guarantee its seamless continuity, which they saw as extending from 1945 rather than 1933. It appeared a harmless trade-off against ridding the country of Nazis in more sensitive positions.