Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis

by Michael Haas

  Most of the Jewish composers Hanslick reviews, with the obvious exceptions of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, are condemned as conventional. But his affectionate obituary of Offenbach from 10 October 1880 finds him praising another innovative voice: ‘Offenbach was a true original. His music was recognisable as Offenbach within a matter of only a few bars.’ He mentions that in Offenbach's style, the language of Auber and Adam dominates, but Mozart and Weber are also apparent. After two full pages of praise, and documenting Offenbach's many successes and fewer failures in Vienna, Hanslick goes on with a certain benevolent cattiness to mention that ‘less brilliant than his melodic and rhythmic genius was his harmonic artistry; and his contrapuntal skills came to zero. But his power to amuse has no musical equal […] and as a final point […] he was a master of form and structure. Whatever one may criticise him for, he was a musician of great brilliance and a genius of the theatre.‘41

  Karl Goldmark, Hanslick and Brahms: a Musical Triumvirate

  Hanslick had praised Brahms as early as 1862 and he had been made aware of Goldmark's talent from as early as 1857, when Goldmark requested that Hanslick appraise a score in order to encourage support for his first concert. Hanslick's response was ‘talent, but not ready’.42 Later, when Hanslick headed a scholarship committee initiated by the Ministry of Education in 1863, he noted that his fellow committee member, the poet and playwright Franz Grillparzer, lamented that there were no more composers like Schubert: ‘In those days, we had the talent, but no means of aiding it. Today we have the means, but no talent!’ Hanslick then goes on to say that despite Grillparzer's misgivings, they in fact managed to promote a large number of promising youngsters, including Eusebius Mandyczewski, Richard Heuberger […] and above all, Antonín Dvořák and Karl Goldmark. In due course, Goldmark and Brahms would both join Hanslick as scholarship adjudicators.43

  Goldmark relates his first encounter with Brahms as taking place around 1860 or 1861 when he was the viola player in a Viennese quartet which met at the Café Čech, just off of the Graben (Vienna's most central square) near St Stephen's Cathedral. Brahms eventually offered the ensemble ‘a string quintet in an early version which was latterly much reworked’.44 Goldmark thought it was Brahms's self-belief that had initially so impressed Hanslick. In his memoirs, Goldmark notes that Brahms had admitted that Hanslick often turned to him for musical advice. He found Hanslick's deference to Brahms tiresome and even went so far as to say that Hanslick probably didn't understand Brahms at all. Elaborating on the one anti-Semitic remark Brahms made to him, Goldmark tells how Brahms discovered that Goldmark had set a text of Luther's that he had wanted to use himself, and informed Hanslick that it was not by Luther, but by someone else. When the work was performed, he was amused to read that Hanslick had simply repeated this bit of misinformation, planted by Brahms. It was during a later encounter, when Brahms spotted Goldmark in a restaurant, that he bellowed in front of other diners that he couldn't understand why a Jew would even wish to set a text by Luther.

  At his seventieth birthday celebration, hosted by the family of Viktor von Miller zu Aichholz, Hanslick remarked that nothing made him happier during all the years he had spent writing music criticism than ‘writing reviews that gave great joy to those who read of others being torn to shreds’. Brahms, according to Goldmark, was visibly unsettled by the comment, but went up to Hanslick afterwards and thanked him for his years of devoted support.45 Goldmark and Brahms were on close terms and met frequently, but Goldmark admitted that Brahms thought only Goldmark's Ländliche Hochzeit46 any good. Brahms had apparently told Brüll that he didn't really find much in Goldmark's music to appreciate, but that he valued both him and Brüll 'for their proficiency’. Further, he didn't really get on with the theatre, so wouldn't wish to comment on opera. Despite this, he did write to Hanslick of his enthusiasm for Goldmark's opera Merlin.

  Goldmark was often thought to be a Wagner epigone, thus resulting in some ambivalence when Hanslick came to review his works, particularly as the two men moved in the same circle. In writing a Laudatio in honour of Goldmark's seventieth birthday, Hanslick reviewed the extraordinary success of his operas – most especially Die Königin von Saba47 – and quoted extensively from a letter Goldmark had written, begging him to intercede with the powers at the Imperial Opera. Hanslick goes on to write, with some relief, that his intercession was unnecessary, as the work had already been accepted for performance. His reviews of Goldmark are carefully worded, but his views of Königin von Saba would today be construed as verging on the anti-Semitic, while giving us a strong indication of the sensibilities of the period – it was acceptable to be Jewish, but not to be too fulsome about it:

  Goldmark's score offers us an impressive work, which often highlights a strong and individual talent. The strength is shown most in the passion, explosion of feeling, not to say the pure sheen of the musical colours which offer the distinctive peculiarities of the Jewish Orient. […] Occasionally Goldmark drives the passion to its outer limits, with voice registers at the top of the range, the chromatic storm in the orchestra with its thundering timpani and trombones, and racing bolts of lightning in the violins. The most noticeable feature of Goldmark's individuality is the musical transliteration of Jewish Orientalism. [This] could be noted even in his earlier works such as his Sakuntala Overture, an interesting, rather strange yet artificial work. As the story of the Königin von Saba is so profoundly Jewish, he allows this particular attribute full reign. Perhaps it's my own blinkered view, but I can only tolerate this sort of music in small doses: as a stimulus, but not as regular nourishment. With brilliant determination, Goldmark has wrapped himself in a display of oriental exotica, with all of its plaintive melisma, its augmented 4ths and diminished 6ths, its shunting between major and minor, its heavy thudding basses above which one hears the flickering and darting of countless dissonant harmonies and slivers of tones. The abundant use, one could say abuse [my italics], of accidentals, syncopations and dissonance are recognisable features of the modern German school. But to be able to carry them through with such positive results is something that eludes most of Goldmark's colleagues. […] Where orientalist exoticism is called for, Goldmark gives everything he has. This works particularly well in the religious scenes and also in the ballet music and other dance scenes, which happen to be the highlights of the work. However, this tiresomely exotic manner grows wearisome after a while. It's even used when general human feelings are called for rather than anything specifically Jewish. How strange the ‘song without words’ sounds with which Astaroth tempts Assad to come to the queen. This is music that calls devout Jews to prayer, not lovers to a rendezvous! This is [Solomon] Sulzer written in the treble clef!48

  Hanslick's review of Merlin is equally revealing as he compares it with Königin von Saba. He is not impressed by Siegfried von Lipiner's text (credited to ‘Lipiner von Immermann’), and believes that it tends to undermine the opera:

  In Merlin we encounter, without any shadow of doubt, the composer of Die Königin von Saba but discover that his strengths have grown and become clearer. We are particularly delighted to notice the absence of the determining feature of Die Königin von Saba, which was its fussy Jewish wailing which frankly threatened to derail this otherwise beautiful work. Nevertheless, the story of Die Königin von Saba at least justified the Oriental colouring without making it any more agreeable to listen to. But could one conceivably claim that this original feature was perhaps more characteristically ‘goldmarkian’ than what we have with Merlin? It would be possible to presume so and not without reason: the colourful embers of the Orient, with its restless heaviness and exalted religiosity, were not so much a unique characteristic of Die Königin von Saba as they were of its composer who grew up exposed to double doses of Orientalism, namely the Jewish and Hungarian varieties! Our slight preference for Merlin, however, does not counter the fact that Die Königin von Saba in its second finale reaches a climax […] that offers no equivalent in effectiveness in Merlin. />
  For all of the musical independence that Goldmark has now acquired, it's apparent that in Merlin he still stands under the influence of Meyerbeer and even more obviously, Wagner. […] His musical expression is impregnated with Wagnerian essences, though Goldmark captures different perfumes from the ones that have been floating about for the last 30 years. Occasionally, though, he inhales too deeply. King Arthur reminds one with his spongy sentimentality of König Heinrich and the Landgraf Hermann. […] The love-duet is inconceivable without the templates of Lohengrin and Tristan. One is further reminded of Wagner with his unnatural emphasis on the dramatic, the restless chromatic breaks, and the flooding enharmonic modulations. … Yet the means by which the work is composed is quite different from Wagner. With Goldmark, the sung melody remains at the centre, despite the fact that it doesn't exactly flow in generous quantities, but at least it isn't allowed to dry into stammering declamation, which swings back and forth over a melody being spun out endlessly in the orchestra. Where there is need of a lyrical oasis, Goldmark places these within the architectural forms which became the jewels of opera in the days before Wagner: choruses with knights and elves and women; even strophic songs, marches, and a well-organised ballet are offered.49

  Mahler's admiration for Goldmark becomes understandable. Siegfried von Lipiner, librettist for Merlin, was a friend from pre-Alma days, and Goldmark's self-confidence as a Jew would have spoken deeply to Mahler's own creative spirit, as we shall see in the following chapter. He went on to conduct three of Goldmark's operas: Das Heimchen am Herd (1896), Die Kriegsgefangene (1899) and a new production of Königin von Saba. Indeed, Goldmark stayed as a regular feature of Vienna's opera season until Hitler's German henchmen persuaded compliant Austrians to have him removed two years before the Anschluss.

  Brahms's death is chronicled by Hanslick, not by an obituary, but by an hour-by-hour account of his last days. A typically Hanslickian touch is recalling Brahms's last visit to a Philharmonic concert in which they performed his Fourth Symphony: ‘The maestro, though ill, was brought from the back of his box at the end of each movement by stormy applause […] and this despite the fact that the E minor symphony is not his most popular – with its utter lack of charm, it never will be.’ It would be another two months before Hanslick could bring himself to write another article for the Neue Freie Presse. His reappearance as feuilletonist would consist of thirteen pages of memories and letters devoted to Brahms.50

  Ultimately, Brahms represented the artistic expression of Liberalism, a political environment that would soon produce Jewish composers who were no longer cautiously moving into the glare of daylight, as chronicled by Hanslick, but basking in dazzling brightness. What remained from the years of Liberalism and Brahms's support was the belief in the aesthetic purity of music as part of German cultural identity. The younger generation of Jewish composers from the early twentieth century no longer felt Hanslick's conflicts. Indeed, as Julius Korngold, Hanslick's successor at the Neue Freie Presse and a notorious antagonist of atonal music, makes clear at the Hanslick centenary celebrations at the International Society for Contemporary Music in Venice in 1925:

  The tonality traitors know well why they're against expression. They have to make a virtue out of necessity. Atonal cacophony negates sensual, melodic, emotional sensibility. We read in Alfred Einstein's Dictionary of Modern Music that ‘The atonal melody is fundamentally a purely mechanical product and presents us with a contradictio in adjecto – an absurdity, since the comprehending spirit is incapable of finding any coherent relationship between the individual notes. One cannot write music based purely on a negative principal.’ Hence the flight into linear contrapuntal writing that lucus a non lucendo – cannot be correctly voiced – causing a flight from all relationships into the tonality death-zone: the Twelve-Tone Row; this in turn results in objective, soulless attempts at messing about with material; the psychological effects of pitch and tone themselves being raised as the postulate of ‘new music’. And on whom do they so desperately call as their spiritual God-father? One hardly can credit it: Eduard Hanslick! This is because the composers of the younger generation, even the ones who still compose tonal music, have taken up Hanslick's arguments against Wagner and attempt to find in them their own aesthetic justification.51

  In his memoirs, Julius Korngold sees Hanslick's aesthetic battles in the more measured tones of his own youthful development: ‘It was not a question of Brahms or Wagner, but rather, Brahms and Wagner.‘52 They evolved an amalgam of values in which both the purity of art and the purity of German musical traditions merged. Few would wish to stray from these particular absolutes, which most, including Schoenberg, felt to be immutable.

  CHAPTER 4

  Mahler and His Chronicler Julius Korngold

  Mahler's Jewishness is not to be found within his use of the folkloristic, but rather expresses itself through all conduits as cerebral and restrained, while ultimately remaining tangible in its entirety.

  Was jüdisch ist an Mahler, partizipiert nicht unmittelbar an Volkstümlichem, sondern spricht durch alle Vermittlungen hindurch als ein Geistiges, Unsinnliches, gleichwohl an der Totalität Fühlbares sich aus.

  Theodor Adorno, Der lange Blick, 1963

  It is a historic coincidence that Mahler should arrive at the Imperial Opera in Vienna in the same year that Brahms died. The significance of this intersection of musical biographies is highlighted by a lecture and interview given by the Anglo-Austrian composer and musicologist Egon Wellesz. Recordings of the lecture and interview reveal that they were given at two different times and in two different languages: German and English. The English interview is from a 1962 BBC broadcast with Deryck Cooke and comes from Wellesz's period as lecturer (retired) at Lincoln College, Oxford, a position he took up after fleeing Austria in 1938. The German lecture comes from the 100th anniversary of Mahler's birth given at the Vienna Staatsoper in 1960. Both deal with musical life in fin de siècle Vienna. In the English interview, Wellesz mentions the crucial figure that conditioned musical life as Johannes Brahms, whereas in the German lecture, it's Gustav Mahler.1

  Mahler was the musical personality who would provide hundreds of twentieth-century Jewish composers – whether religious or not – with the means to do more than just assimilate into Austro-German musical life. He broke down the barriers that subsequently allowed younger Jewish composers to surge forward with their own ideas and agendas. They no longer had to accept the conditions tacitly demanded by the unwelcoming environment of the nineteenth century. By the time of his death in 1911, Mahler had demonstrated that he, as a Jewish composer, had not only broken with previous conventions, but had, with his highly individual approach to the Austro-Germanic symphonic tradition, placed himself in the pantheon of German Masters, uniting the disparate ‘old’ and ‘new’ German schools. The significance of this is summarised by the Jewish critic and writer Adolf Weissmann: ‘Mahler lived from the very beginning in a state of high-voltage creativity, though it was racially coloured: he was born a Jew, but as one of the most noble of his race he was elevated to sainthood.‘2

  In Arnold Schoenberg's lecture on Mahler from 1912 (which Dika Newlin translated into English in the early 1940s), he writes: ‘I believe firmly and steadfastly that Gustav Mahler was one of the great men and artists. For there are only two possibilities of convincing someone of an artist's greatness: the first and better way is to perform his work; the second, which I am forced to use, is to transmit my belief in this work to others.‘3

  Schoenberg then proceeds to counter much of the anti-Semitic criticism of Mahler without once referring to the fact that Mahler was Jewish. Schoenberg's translation would have come from a period when he was more than ever aware of his own Jewishness, but this is not allowed to intrude on his original lecture from 1912, in which he takes issue with the usually unspoken but implied anti-Semitic charges of Mahler's banality, emptiness and sentimentality, or his ‘lack of inventiveness’.4 In 1912, Schoenberg did not need to use the word
‘Jewish’ to make his position clear.

  Jewish Vienna at the Time of Mahler

  By 1897, Mahler's call to the Imperial Opera in Vienna may have required him to convert to Catholicism, but by this time, anti-Semitism was less the domain of the aristocrats making the appointment than of the aspiring non-Jewish middle classes. Indeed, Karl Goldmark was already an established grandee by this time and is likely to have been involved in discussions with Chancellery Director Eduard Wlassack, who was responsible for Mahler's appointment.

  By the turn of the century, the scene was firmly set. Assimilation had guaranteed a wealthy, culturally hungry Jewish bourgeoisie that enriched Viennese life not only by supporting local musical life, but also by commissioning paintings from Klimt's Secessionists and filling their homes with objects designed by Joseph Hoffmann's handicraft counterpart, the Wiener Werkstätte. Their cultural forum became the quintessentially Jewish phenomenon of the ‘Salon’, with its origins in the early nineteenth century when wealthy Jews reacted to their exclusion from aristocratic houses by holding alternative ‘courts’, reserved for the intellectual aristocracy of artists, writers and anyone who was stimulating and open to intelligent debate and conversation.

  Berta Zuckerkandl was the most prominent of Vienna's many salonnières, and it was her close relationship to Klimt and his relationship to the artist Carl Moll – step-father of Alma Schindler – which eventually resulted in Gustav Mahler meeting his future wife at one of Zuckerkandl's weekly ‘at homes’. The visual arts were one of the few cultural fields that allowed social interaction between Jews and non-Jews. Almost all of the important Viennese artists from the end of the nineteenth century were not Jewish, whereas most of their patrons and supporters were. Berta Zuckerkandl, in addition to being one of Vienna's best-known hostesses, was also a prominent art critic and journalist. It was in her salon that the Secessionist movement was founded, as indeed, she would later be midwife to Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt's idea of a performing arts festival in Salzburg. Alma Schindler's immediate family was notoriously fraught with contradictions regarding the Jews and non-Jews within the Zuckerkandl circle. Alma was an unreformed anti-Semite who seemed to display a near fetish-like preference for Jewish men, while her step-father Carl Moll, whose gallery and patrons were nearly all Jewish, would become a passionate follower of National Socialism and committed suicide in 1945 when it became apparent that Hitler would not triumph.