Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis

by Michael Haas

  ‘Hey! We're Alive!’ The phrase which lends this revue its name is heard five times emanating from various quarters of the stage: from the broadcasting console of the radio studio, from the private dining room where a government minister is taking a bribe, from the office of a journalist, from a brothel where a young girl is being taken by an elderly count, and from the dingy dive of a group of workers having a meal. The stage is assembled in such a way that all of these venues are instantly visible and the actions are all concurrent. Various other dramatic devices are employed throughout, such as actors mixing with the audience, newspaper-sellers shouting from the top balcony ‘Extra! Extra!’ before tossing sheets of newsprint on top of the audience seated below.22

  ‘It's a revue, but without the girls’, explains Salten, who adds that Piscator and Toller haven't created a piece of theatre so much as wedged their weltanschauung onto the stage. Revolutionary use is made of montage, film, music, transparencies and agitprop. ‘Toller's work is as current as the editorial commentary that's read in the daily paper: full of harangue in the manner of someone addressing a mass-meeting, there is the aggression and gesticulation of the cockiest of political posters.‘23

  Composing for films

  The music for Hoppla, Wir leben! was written by the Viennese-born composer Edmund Meisel, and in his review Salten mentions that one of the cinematic sequences used in the work reminded him of Battleship Potemkin. This should not have come as a surprise since Meisel had composed its music. The director of the film, Sergei Eisenstein, had more or less come to the conclusion that he did not want a single score as musical underlay, but preferred each country, region, territory, indeed even each generation, in which the film was shown, to have its own musical soundtrack. Meisel therefore arrived in Moscow to view a screening in preparation for the film's German distribution. Eisenstein mentions in his autobiography that the screening was shown with an accompanying cacophony as work was being carried out on the central heating system in the cinema. Eisenstein suspected that Meisel had later incorporated these sounds into his score.24 He was very taken with Meisel's music and later mentioned that the perfect combination of sound and vision that he achieved in Alexander Nevsky in 1938 (with music by Prokofiev) would never have been possible without Meisel's pioneering work on Potemkin.25 Unfortunately, a year before Meisel's untimely death in 1930 at the age of 36, Eisenstein and Meisel fell out: Meisel had instructed the projectionist at the London premiere of the film to show it at a slightly slower speed in order to accommodate certain rhythmic elements of the music, a request that did not go down well with the director.

  Film composition was a fairly new art form in 1927. The large number of Viennese Jewish composers drawn to the medium is well documented, but it is an extraordinary coincidence that Edmund Meisel should be yet another, given that he was born in Vienna but raised in Berlin, and writing the music for one of that city's most iconic cinematic representations, Walter Ruttmann's 1927 film, Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin, the Symphony of a Metropolis).

  Eisenstein's thoughts on the marriage of film and music were developed later by Hanns Eisler, who started working in Soviet cinema in 1932 with the Dutch director Joris Ivens. The techniques Eisler acquired during this period informed his 1947 book Composing for Films, co-authored with Adorno.

  Meisel and Eisler had similar backgrounds. Meisel was born in Vienna, but moved as a small child to Germany; Eisler was born in Germany and moved to Vienna. Both came from secular Jewish backgrounds and were political activists. Meisel composed songs for Ernst Toller's Hoppla, Wir leben! and Eisler joined him at Piscator's Theatre in 1927 with a production of the play Heimweh (Homesickness), by Franz Jung. Meisel scored Ruttmann's Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt in 1927, predating Eisler as a film composer, but Eisler soon caught up, providing music in 1932 for Kuhle Wampe, oder wem gehört die Welt? (Kuhle Wampe, or To whom does this World Belong?), starring Ernst Busch with a screenplay by Brecht and directed by Slatan Dudow. Although both young composers were curious about the juxtaposition of image and sound, Meisel's score for Berlin: die Sinfonie der Großstadt employs acoustical effects and often rushes forward with a musical sweep that anticipates Hollywood. Kurt Weill found these characteristics in conflict with the aesthetics of the age and clearly did not approve:

  The purely illustrative music of [Meisel's] Berlin film score lies well outside the development of film music, such as I would imagine it and which I believe to be the only possibility. Without wishing to make qualitative judgements on the score, I believe that resorting to expressive devices from the past to solve the issues of film music is wrong. Objectively speaking, this music is offering purely melodramatic means in a Veristic style which completely contradicts the epic character of modern cinema […] for example, at the beginning of the film, we see a train approaching Berlin and hear the rattling of wheels on the tracks. Meisel illustrates this literally to the point that after a few seconds we start to wonder, what's going to happen now? At any point something has to happen: an accident, a robbery, a crash with another train; but in fact and against all expectations, nothing of the sort occurs. And such moments are repeated throughout, with one frustrated build-up closely followed by another. What is utterly overlooked, however, is that though the outward expressive devices are continuously built up, the work itself does not offer the same intensity. We need an objective, concertante score, a creation that runs under the images of the film and not a literal illustration of these images.26

  Eisler's film music takes these ideas even further by presenting a counter-illustrative score that often draws stark contrasts between the visual and the aural. During his work with Ivens, Eisler's scores moved beyond the purely illustrative to create a parallel emotional dialectic that draws out greater depth from the film by contrasting images against unexpected musical effects. By 1941, when he set his Fourteen Ways of Describing the Rain to Ivens's short experimental silent film Rain from 1929, we are confronted with any number of dislocating moments between viewer and listener. With the 1955 Auschwitz documentary Nuit et brouillard, directed by Alain Resnais, Eisler employs the starkest of music-to-visual counterpoint, anticipating Hannah Arendt's concept of ‘the banality of evil’: he underscores the gas-chambers with music of unapologetic banality, leaving the viewer with a deeply unsettled impression.

  Music for the Masses or Mass Appeal

  The age of Aestheticism, vigorously defended by Hanslick during the mid-nineteenth century and which had continued to enjoy wide currency, was now seen as elitist. Even the age of post-Wagnerian Romanticism that superseded it (as represented by Zemlinsky, Schreker and latterly, Korngold) was resoundingly discredited by Weill in his 1926 essay on ‘The New Opera’. What was required, he argued, was a shedding of pretentiousness and the need to find the most immediate contact with a broad public. Radio thus facilitated Weill's ‘immediate contact’ aspirations, though the technical limitations of its early days made satisfactory broadcasts of complex and finely differentiated music nearly impossibly and seemed thereby to confirm the fundamental redundancies of post-Romanticism. Music now had to be brief, instantaneous and memorable. It had to escape from the bourgeois prisons of the concert hall and opera house, and feed the culture-hungry masses. Jazz, dance music and light entertainment were not only genuinely appreciated by a wider population, but also provided Jewish composers and writers with an entrée that earlier generations could not have dreamed of. Why battle to be counted among the elite, when so much more could be achieved by sticking with the masses? Ralph Benatzky, the popular (non-Jewish) composer of Im Weißen Rößl (The White Horse Inn),27 may have been over-generous in his diary entry for 1 January 1928, but it contains more than an element of truth:

  There is only one truly good and ideal public: the Jewish one! If there are a number of Jews in a room, there'll be both laughter and tears; there is warmth and gratitude as well as comprehension and recognition; and if there are a lot of Jews in a city, one can always count on a re
ady public. The intellectual agility of this race, the ability to comprehend everything in a moment, their cultivation, their talent for punning and wordplay are ideal for the creative artist, and it is no coincidence that a huge number of this nation are recruited to make up the largest contingent of performers, writers and composers. Of the Viennese composers, meaning for example Lehar, Strauß [sic!], Kálman, Fall, Granichstädten, Eysler, Stolz, Engel-Berger, Erwin, Krauss, Werau, R. Fall, Katscher, Ch. Weinberger, etc., only Lehar and myself are Christians. Of Vienna's publishing houses: Weinberger, Herzmansky, Hein, Callé, Marischka, only Herzmansky is Christian, and of the librettists, I simply can't think of a single one who isn't Jewish. And the same is true of actors and actresses, singers, dancers etc., non-Jewish performers are rather few and far between, and one shouldn't even mention the situation regarding theatre managements. Perhaps it's a bit different in the world of so-called ‘serious’ music, and perhaps this hypothesis should be tested, but I'm quite sure the results wouldn't be that different.28

  Benatzky's enthusiasm leads him to make numerous factual errors, but he throws a positive light on what would be turned just a few years later into Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and confirms the popular perception of Jewish prominence in light music.

  Operetta by Jewish composers and librettists suffered a particularly iniquitous post-Hitler legacy. The Third Reich's guardians of public morality removed popular works and replaced them with alternatives from which all social satire and sauciness had been removed. With post-1945 revivals of previously banned works, the puritanical policies of the Nazis continued with the fastidious removal of sexual innuendo and the employment of actors and actresses who represented a harmless winsomeness far removed from their predecessors, leaving operetta with a saccharine reputation that it absolutely did not deserve.29

  New Objectivity was the determining aesthetic of the serious artistic movements in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, representing not just a rejection of Romanticism, but a resolute Counter-Romanticism. Accelerated by the hot-house atmosphere of various new music festivals such as those in Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden, along with further events organised by the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (ADMV) and the International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM), bright young composers began a process that turned music into a commodity, or at the very least, put it to ‘practical’ use. With music's application for stage and screen, it became a function or indeed, a utility. Brecht said to Eisler that music captured his verse like ‘a fly in amber’, implying that music was the means rather than the end.30 Rejecting music's implied ability to communicate on an abstract ‘spiritual’ level meant that it was neither more nor less intrinsically valuable than graphics or carpentry. Indeed, Eisler's agitprop songs were considered by Piscator's avant-garde circle as the musical equivalent of John Heartfield's striking political posters. New Objectivity was aimed at the masses for them to use as they felt best. The spirit of the Weimar Republic meant that music had lost its position as an aristocratic accompaniment to balls and banquets or even as a bourgeois pretension to cultivation.

  Eisler, however, did not feel that this should compel composers to pitch their work down market. As early as 1935, he was stating clearly that the avant-garde had a responsibility not to isolate itself from the masses.31 But in 1950, he elaborated these earlier thoughts in another essay that strikes us, in retrospect, as a clear-sighted prophecy of where the emerging avant-garde in postwar Europe was heading: ‘If modern – that is serious – art distances itself continuously from the broader masses, then it becomes continuously more cynical, decadent, nihilistic and formalistically isolated; monopoly-capitalism's cultural industry has always understood the masses: for them, “true” art is merely merchandised art.‘32 Just as Ernst Toch would ultimately distance himself from the steely-eyed gaze of New Objectivity in American exile, Eisler, living in the Communist East, would clarify his earlier stance: appealing to the masses did not mean composing music with mass appeal.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Question of Musical Potency

  The Anti-Romantics

  What is it that we call modern? We aren't so foolish as to fall for the belief that all advancement is progress. We know that a new way of painting, a new palette of colours, a new sense of harmony, a new instrument doesn't represent progressive attainment in an absolute sense. These are only the outer symptoms of inner permutations brought about by the tide that continuously sweeps everything away. And we believe in this tide and the change it brings and call it life. And this is what we call modern: what ebbs and flows within us, changes, yields fruit and carries us along.

  Was ist es denn, was wir ‘modern’ nennen? Wir sind nicht töricht genug, an eine “Entwicklung” der Kunst im Sinne des Fortschritt-Philisters zu glauben. […] Wir wissen, daß eine neue Mal Technik, eine neue Farbenskala, eine neue Harmonieverbindung, ein neues Instrument, keinen Fortschritt, keine Errungenschaft im absoluten Sinne bedeutet, daß dies alles nur äußere Symptome innerer Umstellungen sind, bedingt durch den ewigen Fluß und Wechsel der Dinge. An diesen Fluß und Wechsel aber glauben wir, denn er ist das, was wir Leben nennen. Und dieses nennen wir modern: was innerlich fließt, wechselt, zeugt und trägt.

  Paul Bekker, Musikblätter des Anbruch, 1920

  To musical conservatives, Hans Pfitzner's pamphlet Die neue Aesthetik der musikalischen Impotenz. Ein Verwesungssymtom? (The New Aesthetic of Musical Impotence: A Sign of Decay?), written in 1919 and published the following year, must have seemed like a godsend. It was a response to the critic Paul Bekker, the author of a popular and well-received biography of Beethoven in which he suggested that the music of the early twentieth century was the fruit of Beethoven's legacy. As reactionaries and progressives both claimed Beethoven as their own, Pfitzner's attack on Bekker was intended to dispute the legitimacy of the modernists’ claim. However, Beethoven was only the casus belli of Pfitzner's tract on ‘musical impotence’. It irked him that a year earlier Bekker had suggested in a pamphlet that the only contemporary composer who could be considered a legitimate successor to Richard Wagner was Franz Schreker.1 Bekker had arrived at this conclusion after careful consideration of the potential claims by a number of other composers, including Pfitzner.2

  It is worth focusing on one central point in Pfitzner's essay as this would ultimately harness many intellectuals into the anti-Semitic thinking of National Socialism. Clearly, there was more at stake than the question of which strand of musical development had a legitimate claim to Beethoven's inheritance, and accordingly Pfitzner moved the debate to something even more profound by making a claim on behalf of musical conservatives of the German soul itself. Composers of all musical tendencies believed that music was somehow a privilege uniquely bequeathed either by fate or by God to the German people. Pfitzner, in common with Wagner (whose Das Judenthum in der Musik he described in his own tract as ‘serious, brave and loving‘3) saw Jews as non-German foreigners. He goes on to accuse the Jewish Bekker of leading an international assault, and uses the words ‘international’ and ‘Jewish’ in tandem so often that they soon become interchangeable. ‘International’ thus becomes the opposite of ‘German’. The Communist Party was at this time called the ‘International’, which was described as ‘Bolshevik’: thus, ‘international’ = ‘Jew’ = ‘Bolshevik’ = ‘non-German’. In due course, other euphemisms for Jews would stand in for ‘international’, 'cosmopolitan’ emerging as a favourite used by both National Socialist and Communist anti-Semites alike. Ultimately, all these euphemisms meant outsiders, usurpers, parvenus, Möchtegerns and confidence tricksters. To Pfitzner and others, such as his journalist ally Alfred Heuß, editor of the nationalist, conservative Zeitschrift für Musik, these were merely synonyms for ‘non-German’.

  Paul Bekker was born in Berlin and was briefly a violinist in the Berlin Philharmonic before leaving to work as a conductor in Aschaffenburg and Görlitz. He started writing music criticism in 1906 and from 1911 to 1923 he was chief music critic of the Frank
furter Zeitung, Germany's liberal answer to Austria's Neue Freie Presse. This placed him in a similar position to Julius Korngold, and their rivalry was legendary. In an open letter to Korngold from 1924, Bekker wrote the following attack on him:

  My dear Dr Korngold!

  One taunts those whom one loves – this truism occurred to me as I recently read in the Neue Freie Presse your anguished cry regarding atonal insanity and the demise of human feeling and passion. I continued to be reminded of this truism as I noticed that despite these human catastrophes, you still managed, somehow, to intone your predictable grandiose song in praise of the natural order. It was at this point that I suddenly realised that it was my own good self you meant when naming the un-credited spokesman for the ‘journalistic pulp’ that calls itself the ‘Vienna Newspaper for Atonal Music’ [Anbruch]. So, I thought to myself, you really love me, don't you Julius? Why deny it? Only a deep love can bring forth such great pain, such grievance and such anger. […] For this reason, I shall attempt to explain why I, Julius, cannot love you, at least as far as such things can be accounted. […] You see, Julius, I happen to view Beethoven as being different from Wagner, just as Krenek is different from Schoenberg. I see two operas by Schreker from different perspectives and am proud of the inconsequence that it does not result in me being against Schreker, though he doesn't happen belong to the [atonal] ‘movement’. […] When I walk through the garden, I cherish the apple tree, the pear tree, the peach tree, the roses and the thistles. I do not value a single one of these to the exclusion of others. Rather, I am conscious of the fact that apples, pears and peaches are fundamentally different in both taste and appearance. I still enjoy eating all of them, according to the individual tree's fruit and whims of the season. I'm delighted by the rose. As far as the thistle goes – please don't blush, Julius – I must admit it pleases me the least of all. But I think to myself, God also created the thistle and he surely must know why. For that reason, it should continue to stay where it is, growing and bringing whatever fruits it may bear – even if only asses enjoy eating it.4