By Marc D. Moskovitz
In 1927, Alexander Zemlinsky, the fifty-seven year old conductor of Prague's New German Theater, headed for Berlin, hoping for a fresh musical start. During the previous seventeen years he had given the Czech capital everything he had and had kept the city abreast of contemporary musical currents, but he had been longing all the while to be free of Prague's provincialism. Zemlinsky's preference was always to return to Vienna, the city of his birth, but Vienna seemed indifferent to what he had to offer, and offered him nothing in return. When Otto Klemperer invited the veteran conductor to join his staff at Berlin's newly formed Kroll Oper, Zemlinsky jumped at the chance. He would spend the next five years in the Prussian capital. Yet rather than providing true musical fulfillment and the recognition that was Zemlinsky's due, Berlin proved to be his undoing. His work as a conductor would be cut short when Klemperer's experimental theater was closed down after four years, and shortly thereafter Zemlinsky and his seventh opera, Der Kreidekreis, became early victims of Goebbels' yet-to-be defined—or refined—musical policies.
Read full article »
By Bret Werb
In the spring and summer of 1943, a theater piece with a stellar cast and an urgent message scooped the daily press to bring news of the genocide of European Jews to a scarcely believing American public. Subtitled “A memorial dedicated to the 2,000,000 Jewish dead of Europe,” We Will Never Die was the brainchild of the popular screenwriter Ben Hecht (1894–1964). Those unfamiliar with Hecht's name will probably recognize the titles of some of the more than 150 films to which he contributed: Scarface, Twentieth Century, Gone With the Wind, Notorious, A Star Is Born. An ex-newsman who had lived the fabulous-gaudy life that a Chicago newsman of the roaring teens and '20s was supposed to have lived, Hecht had an insider's grasp of the popular media and the confidence and enterprise to challenge its priorities openly.
Read full article »
By Juliane Brand
Equal in fascination to the concept of creation is that of resurrection. The possibility that death might be reversed or transformed can serve as an irresistible trigger to imagination. Certainly the idea has generated some of the most powerful moments in religion and the arts, from the myth of the phoenix and belief in Jesus's resurrection to the story of Dickens's Dr. Manette, recalled to life during the French Revolution. The same fascination with recalling to life no doubt explains the satisfaction of excavation—recovering artifacts and voices that previous generations had consigned to oblivion.
Read full article »
By Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek
The situation of composers who became former Polish citizens in September 1939 was defined by general policies and new jurisdictions introduced by the Nazi and Soviet authorities. Poland disappeared from the maps in 1939, divided into three parts: the General Government under German civil administration and military occupation, the Third Reich–incorporated territories and the USSR–annexed territories. The approaches to the inhabitants of these regions varied, yet their common feature was terror, directed first of all towards the intelligentsia. In the part of Poland that came under Soviet rule, arrests by the NKVD and deportations to Siberia were means of grasping control of the Polish population, but until June 1941, when these territories were seized by the Third Reich and incorporated into the General Government District of Galicia, musical institutions and schools still operated, even though their functioning was adapted to Soviet models and the most important positions were given to those who were willing to collaborate with the new regime.
Read full article »
By Nick Strimple
There is a small town about an hour's drive northwest of Prague, close to the convergence of the Labe (in German, Elbe) and Ohře (Eger) rivers; it was originally called Theresienstadt. Built by the Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II in 1780 and named for his mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, it was designed to protect Prague from a potential attack by Frederick the Great of Prussia. The complex consisted of a small fortress on one bank of the Ohře and a garrison town on the other. The town itself, called the Big Fortress, contained three large military barracks (Sudeten, Brandenburg and Magdeburg) and was partially walled; altogether it could easily accommodate about 6,000 people. By the beginning of the twentieth century Theresienstadt was obsolete as a military bastion, the Little Fortress serving only as a maximum security prison (Gavrilo Prinzip, whose assassination of the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand provided the catalyst for World War I, was imprisoned there). When Czechoslovakia became a republic after World War I, the town's name was officially changed to the Czech equivalent, Terezín.
Read full article »
By Michael Beckerman
1. From the Rectangle to the Mona Lisa
It is a kind of truism that the past comes to us through some combination of testimony (oral or written), images, written documents, and artifacts. Of course, the previous things are just words, and exactly what an artifact is, and what an image is, or whether on some level we could consider all such things as “documents” of the past is not precisely clear. However, it is in this broad sense that I wish to ask: what kind of historical document is a musical score, and how might one go about extracting information from it - and what kind of information might that be?
We are familiar with documents that say such things as: “The King of So and So paid three bottles of fine wine and three geese to the composer Monsieur X.” Once we go through the tiresome, but necessary, process of verifying the document's provenance, we may conclude that someone wrote this statement on such and such a day, and unless we can think of a compelling reason why the document might contain mistaken information or be deliberately misleading or forged, we imagine that indeed, it is as it appears. Then we can check it against any other information that can be similarly verified and see whether any kind of coherent picture emerges, albeit of limited practices within a certain time and place. In the end, though, there is a great deal of guesswork involved in connecting these historical “points in space”, and in this cosmic game of follow-the-dots some will see rectangles as they connect four points in historical space, while others will insist that they have produced the Mona Lisa.
Read full article »
By Eleonore Pameijer and Carine Alders
Dutch painting is world famous. Every year, thousands of tourists flock to the Netherlands to admire paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, Van Gogh and Mondriaan.
How different is the fame of Dutch music! Holland was always susceptible to the powerful cultural influences of its larger neighbors, France and Germany. This was certainly true in the 19th century when Holland was under the sway of German musical traditions, but the situation began to change toward the beginning of the 20th century, when French music became more influential. Although this was partly a result of the strength of a new school of French composers, the political and cultural climate in the Netherlands was also changing. Directly prior to the Second World War, affinity with French music even became a political statement, a declaration of opposition to the rising Nazi regime. During the war, that regime dictated new rules for the arts and for cultural life. Affiliation with French music was not sufficient cause for suppression of music by Dutch composers. There was no ‘Entartete Kunst’ as such. Music was forbidden simply because a composer either had a Jewish background or refused to comply with Nazi rules. Such composers had to give up their social positions, and their music was banned from all public performances. Most Jewish composers were deported, their personal belongings plundered. Many of them lost their lives. Their personal archives as well as their musical heritage were eradicated.
Read full article »
By Harald Kisiedu
At Terezín, in what is now in the Czech Republic, opportunities for the performance of jazz and other forms of popular music - operettas, revues and cabaret music, for instance - emerged in the wake of the SS's decision to turn the concentration camp into a “model ghetto.” Throughout its existence, Terezín served a dual function within National Socialist policies - and specifically, those of Heinrich Himmler. Although it was originally conceived as a transit camp for Bohemian and Moravian Jews on their way to extermination camps in the General Government area, Terezín also fulfilled the propagandistic function of keeping up the appearance of Jewish autonomy and the “normality” of ghetto life. But this make-believe autonomy of the Jewish administration, presided over by the Jewish Council of Elders, was entirely subservient to the SS's dictatorship over Terezín and its prisoners.
Read full article »
By Melina Gehring
Even though musicology was a relatively young and fairly small academic discipline when Hitler seized power, Germany lost more than one hundred of its music researchers to exile; they included Jews and opponents of the regime. 1 The implementation of the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (Law for the Reconstitution of the Civil Service) of April 7, 1933, dismissing non-Aryans from any position in the public sector, also put an end to many university careers. It may come as a surprise that, compared with the number of those who had to leave the country, few musicologists lost proper university positions. The reason for this is that the years preceding the ‘Third Reich’ were already severely marked by anti-Semitic discrimination. In the Weimar Republic, German-Jewish scholars had had great difficulty obtaining professorships. 2 Since academia at the time was predominantly conservative and anti-republican, often in conjunction with anti-Semitic ideology, Jews were rejected for their alleged liberal attitudes. Thus, the professional discrimination against Jewish scholars in the Weimar Republic should be considered more political than ethnic or religious.
Read full article »
By Philippe Olivier
When the Second World War began, on September 1, 1939, French musicians who were practicing or non-practicing Jews – conductors, instrumentalists, singers and composers – felt even more anxiety than did their compatriots who belonged to other religions. Since 1933 they had been aware of the persecutions being carried out in Germany, and later in Austria, against members of the faith of Abraham and Moses. These French Jewish artists belonged to several generations; they were active in education, opera, chamber music, orchestras and liturgical music – since some of them were cantors in synagogues. Many of them worked in the area of light music – cabarets, restaurants, bars in the principal hotels, revues at the Folies-Bergère and popular song – or in the movies. Furthermore, all of them had to face the emigration of their fellow Jews who had fled to France from Germany or Austria after Hitler's accession to power and the Anschluss; these people were the successors of Jewish musicians who had arrived in France during the 1920s from Hungary, Poland and Romania. All of them understood, however, that the universe that Stefan Zweig had described in Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday) – one of his most lucid works – was about to disappear forever.
Read full article »
Page 3 of 5 pages < 1 2 3 4 5 >
