By Barbara Milewski
Józef Kropiński's Compositions in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp
In a 1945 publication titled "The Nazi Kultur in Poland," written in Warsaw under the German Occupation and published in London for the Polish Ministry of Information, the following summary assessment is given of the state of music in Poland at the height of the war:
Despite such difficult conditions of life, despite imposed limitations, persecutions, arrests, man-hunts and deportations to concentration camps […] music in Poland is not dead. Apart from […] public performances, which are much limited by official vetoes and regulations, many concerts devoted exclusively to Polish music are organized in private houses […]. In spite of the danger involved, they are well attended and steadily increase in number […]. [A]rtists give…
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By Simon Wynberg
Music and Virtue
Music's purpose during the Hitler years and its relationship to officialdom and to the public is as complex as it is fascinating. Beyond the Nazis' incorporation of music into its racial policies and their exploitation of it as both rallying-cry and battle-cry, musical themes include the achievements of the Terezin composers; the use of music in concentration camps (and, latterly, as vehicles for Holocaust memorial projects); Hitler's appropriation of Wagner; the Reich's relationship with jazz, and music as an expression of internal political rivalry, between Goebbels and Goering for example. What accounts for our fascination? The visual art and literature of the Nazi period receive nothing like equivalent attention, although in the years just after the Holocaust, there were indeed significant responses across all the arts.
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By Paul Chihara
Most critics and historians of film music consider Max Steiner's soundtrack for King Kong to have been the first great Hollywood film score. The movie was released in 1933, the same year in which Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Thanks to one of the many ironies of history, politics and art, the “Golden Age” of film music was almost exactly coextensive with the sordid human tragedy known as the Third Reich (1933-1945). During those years, the fledgling movie industry in Hollywood attracted the genius of Old-World musicians from Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Budapest and elsewhere – composers at the height of their creative powers, versed in the classical and romantic musical tradition – to participate in this new form of mass entertainment. They were neither students nor pioneers, but rather established, active European composers, among the best of their generation. And they created what many consider to be the finest scores ever written for the film industry.
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By Bob Elias
This month, we offer something a bit different as our featured piece. It is not an article, but a ten-minute multimedia work by Artist Rita Blitt, created in response to the music of Pavel Haas. Ms. Blitt is an American painter, sculptor and multimedia artist with studios in California, Colorado and Kansas. The work, “Collaborating with the Past,” as well as more information about the artist, may be found via the following link:
http://www.ritablitt.com/films/collaborating-with-the-past.cfm
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By Anna Hájková
Why didn't Eliška Kleinová play in Terezín? Let me open my essay with this seemingly superfluous question. It opens a door to illuminate how the category of gender can help us understand musical life in Terezín. To start, let us recount her biography, perhaps reading against the grain:
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By Michael Haas
Work Recommendations
Seldom have I been asked to list works that I think might win over audiences on a single hearing. For one thing, much if not most great music demands at least a second hearing, and often many more, before its full message gets through. But we can't always assume that a second hearing will be available to repertoire that is more often regarded with suspicion than with curiosity. I've been asked to schedule and plan programs and festivals, but rarely has anyone asked me what works I believe will silence the doubters after a single performance. Until now, I have tried to strike a balance between the familiar and unfamiliar, and I have been able to rely on the good will of listeners whose curiosity was known to outweigh their suspicions.
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By Michael Haas
“I find the subject fascinating, but I just don't know where to start” is a sentence every one of us has heard countless times. Of course there is no single answer and each person making this point will have his or her own preconceptions and requirements. If one is speaking to a string quartet, it hardly makes sense to rattle off lists of Lieder, and operas by suppressed composers probably won't be of much use to a pianist planning a recital program. Yet there must be some means of peering into this dense forest of opportunities and seeing more than just the trees while being wary of the gullies and crevices lurking in the underbrush.
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By Michael Haas
Like a time capsule, unopened for nearly three quarters of a century, the music of Walter Arlen lay hidden until 2008. Full of emotional issues from a period most of us know only from history, it inevitably leads us to ask: What is the ‘cut-off' point, at which one can confidently say that Hitler's direct influence has dissipated from our emotional, cultural and musical lives? How many generations are necessary to bridge the dual states of “refugee” to “all-American” with no emotional ties to a distant country with a language no longer spoken at home? Refugees arriving with young families were astonished to see how quickly their children assimilated. Lawrence Weschler, grandson of the composer Ernst Toch, and the son of Viennese parents, has written of his incomprehension of a grandfather who was neither interested in, nor enthusiastic about baseball. Indeed, for many refugees, it was often their Americanized children and grandchildren who kept them from returning to their former homelands.
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By James Conlon
The first half of the twentieth century was to see an explosion of creativity in all the arts, not least in classical music and opera. It was also an era of profound political and social upheaval, tumultuous transition, revolution and warfare. The art and music of the time reflect this and, like a cardiogram, tracked its movements. Out of the growing pains came new, formidable, innovative impulses. In the first third of the century, a vibrant, dynamic and liberal artistic culture nourished this even before the First World War.
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By Silvia Glocer
More than a hundred Jewish musicians who were forced to flee Europe during the Nazi years found refuge in Argentina. Most of them came to the country with excellent musical education and having achieved significant, successful professional lives in Europe. Composers, performers, critics, musicologists, educators and stage directors (many of whom were were born in Germany or Austria) had to leave their homes and jobs on the European continent and chose to come to Buenos Aires as a place of exile.
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