By Michael Beckerman
Music with a fraught past is frequently performed, but how should it be presented? Is it correct to say that all fraught pasts are equal - e.g., Beethoven's or Mahler's personal experiences as opposed to Klein's experience in a concentration camp? Reflecting upon recitals of works that depend on the audience's knowledge of historical contexts, we may legitimately wonder whether such recitals offer something more like a history lesson than a musical experience. Jumping back and forth between history and aesthetics is a common practice, but are the two worlds mutually exclusive, or can they coexist to create powerful experiences? And if they can, in what way? Must programs that in some way engage the fraught past be entirely devoted to a particular time, place and condition, or are there more subtle ways to program?
Read full article »
By Lily E. Hirsch
As a music lecturer and promoter, Anneliese Landau participated in an extraordinary number of significant developments: early German radio broadcasts, the Jewish Culture League in pre-war Berlin, and the activities of émigré composers in Los Angeles. She knew and worked with many important historical figures — musicologist Alfred Einstein, composer Ernst Toch, and Rabbi Max Nussbaum, among others. In doing so, she navigated traditional roles that defined women in her day and common assumptions regarding Jewish identity, within and outside the world of music.
Read full article »
By Malcolm S. Cole
Against all odds, in 2014 three multi-generational, Holocaust-related projects came to fruition almost simultaneously: Night Will Fall, an HBO Documentary film; Glenn Kurtz's book, Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux); and the opera Zeisls Hiob [Zeisl's Job], which is the focus of this essay. Commissioned by the Bavarian State Opera for its summer festival, Zeisls Hiob premiered in Munich's venerable Reithalle on July 19, 2014, with repeat performances on the 21st and 23rd. Imaginatively conceived, well performed, and extensively reviewed, Zeisls Hiob is a music drama sui generis. Presented in a markedly different form than its originators could ever have imagined, this miracle in Munich merits an account of its meandering evolutionary course, an assessment of the finished work in theory and practice, and speculation concerning its future.
Read full article »
By Dr. Kevin Clarke
How did this happen? Or more importantly: how could it happen? How did the up-to-date, cheeky, cosmopolitan art form known as ”operetta“ become transformed from a popular, commercial genre into the old-fashioned, state subsidized, sexually repressed waltz-and-schmaltz entertainment that it is usually seen as today? There are several answers to these questions. Although there is a somewhat different explanation for the shift in the United States, in the German speaking world the line that divides operetta history into a ”before“ and ”after“ is the year 1933.
Read full article »
By Michael Haas
With Hitler's election on January 30, 1933, most of the political opposition optimistically assumed that things would proceed through established constitutional and democratic processes. An unpopular government would last only until it was voted out again. Checks and balances meant that there was no immediate danger to most Communists, Social Democrats or even Jews, although anyone who had read Hitler's Mein Kampf suspected that he might be ruthless enough to rid himself of the constitution and rule by decree. Such suspicions were confirmed in less than a month, with the burning of the Reichstag and the beginning of numerous draconian measures. One of these was the dismissal of all Jews from publicly funded bodies.
Read full article »
By Carla Shapreau
After the March 13, 1938 Anschluss, Jewish members of Austria’s society of authors, composers, and music publishers (Staatlich genehmigte Gesellschaft der Autoren, Komponisten und Musikverleger), known as the “AKM,” were blacklisted. The nature, scope, and ramifications of the AKM’s 1938-1945 history are the subject of new research in Austria, with the publication of a study expected soon. 1 This study follows on the heels of the first public exhibition of a recently discovered AKM blacklist in the Vienna City Library in 2012. 2 Name by name, this diminutive yet chilling red-lined Nazi-era artifact was a prelude to evolving persecution in Austria for those in the musical world.
Read full article »
By Juliane Brand
A Review of the Conference at Arizona State University, 2013
In November 2013, a select group of international scholars met in Tempe, Arizona, to discuss the richness and diversity of music created and performed in Poland during the first half of the twentieth century. The event, hosted by the Center for Jewish Studies at Arizona State University (ASU) and co-organized with The OREL Foundation, took place over two days, both of them packed with presentations, and it concluded with a stellar concert by the ARC (Artists of the Royal Conservatory) Ensemble.
Read full article »
By Jory Debenham
On June 22, 1944, baritone Karel Berman and pianist Rafael Schächter premiered Pavel Haas's Song Cycle Four Songs on Chinese Poetry for an audience of inmates in Terezín. Although many features of the work brought it acclaim, one of the most striking aspects of the cycle is its use of an ostinato pattern that becomes the basis of the first and third songs; this results in a form that is at least reminiscent of the Baroque passacaglia and may even be a direct usage of it. In his review of the work, Viktor Ullmann noted the significance of the pattern, granting it the status of an idée fixe. Only six weeks later, on August 7, Hans Krása completed his work Passacaille et Fugue, and in the subsequent two weeks Viktor Ullmann completed his last piano sonata, which concludes with a set of variations and fugue on a Hebrew folk tune. Almost exactly one…
Read full article »
By Juliane Brand
On March 4 and 5 of 2012, the OREL Foundation and the Center for Jewish Studies at Arizona State University (ASU) collaborated in sponsoring an international interdisciplinary conference in Tempe, Arizona, on the subject “Reimagining Erwin Schulhoff, Viktor Ullmann and the German-Jewish-Czech World.”
Schulhoff and Ullmann are no longer obscure names encountered only in ancillary relationships to the canonic figures of music history, as was the case a mere decade or two ago. Interest in them may have begun within the context of what, for brevity's sake, is often called Holocaust studies (both composers were incarcerated and died in Nazi camps), but closer acquaintance with their oeuvres over the past couple of decades has revealed each to have been a strong, highly individual voice in his time. Performances of their works are no longer rare, and a growing corpus of recordings attests to the acceptance of this music into the twentieth-century repertoire. As the conference organizers Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Michael Beckerman and Robert Elias stated in their synopsis, the decision to place the music of these two men at the center of a two-day conference was based on the recognition that, among the composers who died or were otherwise suppressed by the Nazi regime, Schulhoff and Ullmann “stand out for their productivity, the quality of their musical imaginations and the unusual and fraught contexts in which they worked.”
Read full article »
By Emile Wennekes
A Dutch case study in the re-migration of European musicians after World War II1
Early in February 1945, violinist Samuel Swaap received a liberating note that contained the following message: "You are placed in the February 5 transport to Switzerland. In order to get things settled, you are requested to go to the meeting point at Langestrasse 3 with your baggage, today: Sunday February 4, 1945, from 7:00 pm until 11:00 pm. Only hand luggage and one suitcase is allowed, because the journey will take place in an express train and no hand luggage carrier is made available." This little note for Swaap, former concertmaster of the the Hague Philharmonic (Het Residentie Orkest, meant the end of protracted hardships in the supposedly "beautified" concentration camp of Theresienstadt (Terezín)...
Read full article »
Page 1 of 5 pages 1 2 3 > Last ›
