How did exile from their country of origin affect the music of Jewish composers forced to establish roots elsewhere? Michael Haas, co-founder of the Exilarte Foundation in Vienna, and leading authority on the subject, has addressed this in his important book Music of Exile. On Sunday Haas will deliver the keynote talk at Wigmore Hall on a day featuring music by some of the composers who suffered this fate.
In Music of Exile, Haas quotes the German composer Walter Braunfels: “I felt that if I were to leave my homeland, I would be ripping out the most important roots feeding my talent...The uncreative individual can extract himself, but an artist has his creativity deeply rooted in his people, and is helpless if he’s unable to be their voice.”
Braunfels' antisemitic compatriot Richard Wagner, many of whose operas were musical settings of German mythology, claimed in his essay Das Judenthum in der Musik that Jews like Braunfels had no such roots. Wagner believed that authentic art must be rooted in the organic life and folk spirit of a community from which Jews, perpetual outsiders, were excluded, able only to imitate rather than create original artistic content. In fact, many Jewish composers, Braunfels included, had little or no connection to their Jewishness, were frequently converts to Christianity and fully identified with the German, Czech, or Polish cultures in which they had been raised. Wagner's reasoning anticipated that of the Nazis who stripped Jews of their Germanness and forced them to subscribe to a Jewishness with which many felt no connection.
At Wigmore Hall, the work of a number of such composers will be performed by the outstanding ARC Ensemble, who have long been dedicated to rediscovering, performing and recording the music of exile. Ernest Kanitz, whose wonderful string quartet in D major was released by the ARC ensemble on Chandos Records last October, was a devout Christian who suffered a number of personal tragedies unrelated to the Holocaust. Simon Wynberg, the ARC's artistic director, detects in this quartet 'a nostalgia (perhaps a eulogy) for old Vienna', while Jerzy Fitelberg's eerie and mysterious Nachtmusik, another highlight of the concert, reflects the influence of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School.
Some composers did find inspiration in non-European cultures, Jewish and otherwise. Czech composer Walter Kaufmann, whose work comprises the first concert of the day, found it in the music of India, fleeing to Mumbai in 1934 where he composed the very un-European-sounding All India Radio theme. Kaufmann also composed film music for what later became known as Bollywood. ‘The hallmark of this remarkable music’, explains Wynberg, ‘is its striking originality. There are flashes of Debussy, Bartók, and Stravinsky, and hints of Bohemian and klezmer music, but the end result is a world of inventiveness and surprises. It is an extraordinary blend of Eastern and Western traditions, both adventurous and accessible.'
Alberto Hemsi, a Sephardi Jew born near Smyrna, moved with his family to Milan in 1913. There his teacher, Giusto Zampieri, told him that Jewish melodies had long ago been lost. Hemsi set out to prove him wrong, amassing a collection of 200 Ladino songs that became the basis for his Coplas Sefardies. At Wigmore Hall, we will hear Hemsi's Tre Arie Antiche, a chamber music setting of three of them. Hemsi, like the Czech composers Leoš Janáček, Béla Bartók and the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, was inspired by European neo-folklorism - a fashion for establishing musical identity through traditional culture, forging a new musical language in the process.
Paul Ben-Haim, who began life in Munich as Paul Frankenburger, was profoundly inspired by the famous Jewish-Yemenite folk-singer Bracha Zefira for whom he arranged many songs from Yemenite, Bokarian, Persian, Arabic and Ladino traditions. Ben-Haim developed a modal element in his own music, fusing Western music with Jewish folk music, much as Vaughan Williams had done with the English equivalent. Vaughan Williams had been a friend and supporter of the Hamburg-born composer Robert Müller-Hartmann after both men settled in Dorking. When Müller-Hartmann was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man in 1940, Vaughan Williams worked to have him released, despite having written that “wonderfully trained Central European musicians were in danger of trampling the tender flower of English music”.
Polish-born Szimon Laks, whose music concludes the day, became conductor of the Auschwitz Orchestra and survived the war to become a French citizen. Laks, more famed now for his memoir Music of Another World than for his compositions, firmly believed that no good music could be written in the camps. In Auschwitz, he wrote, “music was a tool in the hands of the oppressor and not the victims... In an atmosphere made oppressive by the unbearable stench of the dying, the musicians performed Christmas carols, while the women cried and screamed to be allowed to die in peace.” Laks’ son, André, claimed, “My father was a composer before and after Auschwitz; not during it.” Laks' nostalgic Quintet for Piano and Strings on popular Polish melodies was written in 1967.
Music of Exile is published by Yale University Press.
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