Have you heard of Bronislaw Huberman, the Jewish Polish violinist? I certainly hadn’t until my last visit to a concert at the Israel Philharmonic. Seeing his name, as the founder of the orchestra, I looked him up and found there was a film on YouTube about his life called Orchestra of Exiles. Now, because here is nothing I like more than a proper obsession, I am plugging his story.
Huberman was an infant prodigy who, by the time he was 12, had played Brahms on his violin… er... to Brahms.
“I wish they hadn’t applauded after the cadenza,” he told Brahms, who replied, “Well, you shouldn’t have played it so well, should you?”
His ambitious father schlepped him around the world in Mozartian fashion, from the age of seven, without any conventional schooling. After his father died, Huberman enrolled at the Warsaw Conservatory and the Sorbonne to complete – or perhaps, start – his education, before continuing to play in Europe and the US. But he was always aware of the escalating situation for Jews in Nazi Germany and began to think more and more about how he could lure Jewish musicians out of Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania, where they were already being thrown out of orchestras, to ensure their security by forming a Jewish orchestra in Palestine.
To this end he raised money from Jewish philanthropists all over the world and personally auditioned hundreds and hundreds of players, determined to offer places to only the very best. An orchestra of number one players. Of course, many were unwilling to leave home for an unknown, and maybe backward terrain. The last tranche of funds was raised at a prestigious dinner in New York when he enticed Albert Einstein to be the guest of honour. Everyone hoping to be anyone wanted to be there. The money flew in. The final accomplishment, the gooseberry on the gateaux, was when Huberman persuaded the anti-fascist Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini to take the baton for the first-ever concert in Israel of the Palestine Orchestra.
The repertoire was Rossini, Mendelssohn – by then banned in Germany – and Brahms. Toscanini walked into the rehearsal, tapped his baton, said “Brahms one”, and the orchestra played. There was silence. Then he said, “Brahms two.” Once again, they played and again to silence. At the third Movement the Maestro started shouting and screaming. The orchestra relaxed. Their leader would now treat them like professionals.
In an act of famous altruism, Huberman declined to play in the first concert, saying he wanted the orchestra to be the star that night, not him. The orchestra, renamed the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, rose to fame and fortune, under the batons of Leonard Bernstein, Zubin Mehta and Daniel Barenboim. I wrote last week of the Bernstein, Gershwin and Copeland concert I watched last week in Tel Aviv. Oh how we punch above the weight of history.
In the words of my colleague Simon Callow, ‘’You have to work quite hard when you listen to Huberman – he demands it. He was, of course, a virtuoso, but, doesn’t play like a virtuoso. Virtuosity is there at his disposal.” Nowadays, he is mostly remembered not for his expressive, flexible and individualistic playing, but for his Stradivarius, which was twice stolen from him – the second time from his dressing room at Carnegie Hall, by a man called Altman, who confessed on his deathbed to the theft. It is now owned and played by the great Jewish American violinist Joshua Bell.
In June 1947, having achieved everything he set out to do, Huberman fell ill and died in Switzerland, probably of physical exhaustion, at the age of 59. He had personally saved the lives of 1,000 Jewish musicians and their families.
In the words of Rumi, “when words fail, music speaks’’ and there may be no greater exponent of that phrase than the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who this week… (spoiler alert) will be crowned one of the prestigious Oldies of the Year, at a lunch at the Liberal Club in Whitehall. As I was asked to write her accolade for Gyles Brandreth, I learnt more about this formidable artist’s story. Here is a preview of some of it: If I asked Anita Lasker-Wallfisch what she would like to be remembered for, she would simply say: “I am a cellist.”
She is, indeed, a remarkable cellist, a musician who has given her life to her music, her family and to finally telling the world the story of her survival as a prisoner in the death camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Her parents were murdered in 1942, her sister left Germany on the Kindertransport and she and her other sister Renata were arrested by the Gestapo, after trying to escape into France, on forged passports, a crime for which she was imprisoned for 18 months;
“Prison is not a pleasant place to be,” she said, “but at least no one was murdered in prison.”
She was sent to Auschwitz, aged 19 and in her interview by the SS at the camp, she was asked what she had done before the war, and her reply, “I played the cello”, saved her life. She was recruited to the infamous Auschwitz women’s orchestra under Alma Rose, who made the orchestra so afraid of playing the wrong note that they forgot their fear of torture or death.
They played military marches as the prisoners were paraded out of the camp to work, when they returned at night, and also, in concerts, for the SS to enjoy as the bodies burned. They were liberated by the Allies in 1945.
When witnesses like Anita are no longer with us, we must read and remember her words for fear of history repeating itself: “We must talk to each other before we kill each other.’’
My final soothing of the savage breast is a recommendation to catch the documentary Take That on Netflix. May I declare my interest. One of my sams (Son After Marriage) Gabe Turner, executive produced it. What I knew before watching this doc about the boy band, could have been written on a Hobnob, but it didn’t matter. This story of lads to riches and back is universal. How to handle the traitor, fame, is the burning issue and with brilliant editing and direction, terrifying fan mania and the sad sweetness of the five – well, Robbie Williams is not really in the show but he permeates it – musicians. It makes for three riveting episodes. They really did “Rule the World,” and seem to have finally found shalom.
In the words of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady; “There are gates in heaven that cannot be opened except by melody and song.”
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