Authors: Michael Haas
Of course, America, Britain and France were only three destinations. The Hindemith pupil Hans Joachim Koellreuter went to Brazil where he taught Antonio Carlos Jobim, the prime creator of the bossa nova. Manfred Gurlitt and Klaus Pringsheim ended up in Japan and were in no small measure responsible for fostering the talents of the postwar generation of Japanese performers. The Webern pupil Philipp Herschkowitz ended up in the Soviet
Union and became the influential mentor to the ‘Underground’ composers of the post-Shostakovich generation that included Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke.
24
Herbert Zipper eventually landed in the Philippines and, of course, there were many musicians who went to Palestine, such as Paul Ben-Haim, formerly known as Paul Frankenburg, who went on to establish a national school of the Eastern Mediterranean, a sound world that was an inspiring mix of Jewish ghetto and sacred music with a touch of Impressionism and Bauhaus Functionalism. However, the influences to come out of these far-flung destinations were ultimately marginal on postwar Western European and American music. The story of Palestine's evolution into Israel and the role music played in this process is too broad a topic to be covered in this context.
Escape: Great Britain
On 25 March 1938 Georg Szell wrote to his old friend Hans Gál from Marseille in France:
I can't tell you how happy I am to know that you are safely in London. I shall drop Tovey a quick note, he's a charming but somewhat cranky and unreliable individual who never answers correspondence. I advise you to contact (by mentioning my name) Dr Adolf Aber; he was formerly of [the music publisher] Hofmeister and critic in Leipzig; he's now a representative of many German publishing houses and is partial owner of Novello's. He may have something to offer to you in dealing with music publishing – at least he can offer advice. In England you must have, above all else, lots of patience!
25
Szell then itemises his schedule for the next six months – divided between orchestras in The Hague and Glasgow – and provides his temporary addresses in the Netherlands and Sydney. Szell's future in America looked barely possible at this time. As the letter is dated less than two weeks after Austria's annexation, plotting elaborate career moves was less of a priority than getting friends and family out of Hitler's way. Writing to Gál from California a few months later, on 15 June 1938, Ernst Toch adds his advice:
I can only offer at most an introduction to [Alexander] Korda, but I can't promise much. It certainly didn't help [Nikolai] Lopatnikoff – but take it anyway. You have to put up with everything we've already been through and continue to go through. During my time in London, I wrote to every studio in town and begged for appointments. 98% were
DIS
-appointments and 2% resulted in stumbling a few steps forward by way of a couple of contacts. It's
astonishing that somehow things work as long as you stay patient. Only when I left London was I told that it would have been better had I had an agent. So for good measure, I'll pass this bit of advice on to you. Nevertheless, here I have five agents and not one has ever managed to do anything for me. Ultimately, you have to do everything yourself. From where I am at the moment, I can't do anything for you. I would love to have helped Lopatnikoff, but here I'm simply a kernel of dust being stirred around in a witch's cauldron of intrigues and plotting. […] Louis Greenberg [1883–1964], one of America's most respected composers who had his opera [
The Emperor Jones
] performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York as well as in Chicago, has been sitting around here for the last two years without work, despite having an agent, while others seem to strike lucky. There seems to be no recipe of how things turn out. […] Emigration has taught me that you need to do everything tirelessly by yourself without losing patience; at some point, you find a small safe hole to slip into and from there, it all continues up-hill. What you need to appreciate is the fact that you're out of there. What would we give – my wife and I – if we could get our relatives and friends out of Vienna. Please don't be too disappointed and don't curse me too much for this idiotic letter. Believe me, it would make me the happiest man alive if I could help everyone who asked me – even if I could help those who
don't
ask me, but who I know need help.
26
The music historian Jutta Raab Hansen in her seminal work on musical exile in Great Britain explains in detail the restrictions to which musicians who made it to the United Kingdom were subjected by the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM), headed by Sir George Dyson.
27
Essentially, it was designed to protect the interests of British musicians who had been steadily losing employment since the demise of silent films in the late 1920s. Dyson's ISM successfully lobbied for regulations to guard against further threats by the influx of potentially better qualified musicians from the continent. These were controversial measures that were flagrantly broken by the likes of the tenor Richard Tauber, who toured the country without the slightest trace of official hindrance giving popular concerts and recitals. The wartime National Gallery Concerts organised by the pianist Myra Hess were slightly more provocative, since she involved many unknown refugees (such as the aforementioned Lopatnikoff), while numerous refugees took up employment at Glyndebourne, the country house opera company run by Sir John Christie before it closed for the duration of the war in 1939, or at the invitation of Michael Tippett, at London's Morley College. These infringements were more than balanced by the determined harassment of foreign teachers and orchestral players, a
practice that relaxed slightly in the early 1940s as refugee organisations such as the German Kulturbund, the Austrian Centre and the Anglo-Austrian Music Society began admitting the public to its concerts. Hitherto, admission had been restricted to fellow refugees, who couldn't in any case pay for tickets.
One area where refugee composers were able to work with some degree of impunity was the film industry. By 1933, motion pictures using recorded sound had been around for some six years, but experiments as to how to position music within films was still quite hit-and-miss. Most film composing simply meant writing a hit song or two that cropped up at an apposite moment during the movie. Though Baden-Baden's new music festival had already focused on the potential uses of music with cinema as early as 1928, the first dedicated original score for a Hollywood film was not until 1933, with
King Kong
, and music by Max Steiner, a Viennese Jew who as a student had been dismissively regarded by Mahler as being ‘without talent’.
28
Already recounted in Chapter 7, silent films, such as
Berlin, die Symphonie der Großstadt
(1927) and
Battleship Potemkin
(1925), both with scores by Edmund Meisel, had shown what the combination of music and image could achieve. By 1933, the field of film composition was still so specialised that composers such as Mischa Spoliansky, who arrived in London from Berlin almost as soon as Hitler took power, could start work without raising the suspicions, let alone the hackles, of the ISM. Other composers arriving in Britain for film work included Hanns Eisler with his 1936 adaptation of
Pagliacci
starring Richard Tauber, and his ‘anti-Hitler’ film
Abdul the Damned
(1935). Ernst Toch wrote scores for two films directed by Alexander Korda,
Catherine the Great
and
The Private Lives of Don Juan
, and a third,
Little Friend
, directed by the Austrian Berthold Viertel; to these composers can be added the Schreker pupils Karol Rathaus and Wilhelm Grosz.
As they were accepting commissions to produce music for films, they were not officially resident in Britain, but only in transit. They therefore did not need to apply for refugee status (though evidence has come to light that the British Secret Service was tailing Hanns Eisler and making it difficult for him to be paid for his work).
29
This gave composers the same advantage as the pianist Artur Schnabel, who decided early on that the only way to continue performing in Great Britain was to be based elsewhere.
One notable exception to this rule was the former Schoenberg pupil Allan Gray who, as Josef Zmigrod (as he was originally known), had written the music for such classics as
Berlin Alexanderplatz
and
Emil and the Detectives
, both from 1931. Though he also arrived in London in 1933, it would be ten years before he wrote another film score with
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
in 1943 and, in 1951, John Huston's
The African Queen
. Others who
escaped the bans of the ISM by composing for the British film industry were Hans May, whose 1933 film with heartthrob tenor Joseph Schmidt,
Ein Lied geht um die Welt
(and its 1934 English-language remake,
My Song goes Round the World
), would assure him steady employment with a number of British ‘B’ movies such as
No Monkey Business
(1935) and a further film with Joseph Schmidt,
A Star Fell from Heaven
, in 1936.
Mischa Spoliansky had made a name for himself in Berlin cabaret with the husband and wife team of Marcellus Schiffer and Margo Lion, and the then still unknown Marlene Dietrich, who would be discovered by Josef von Sternberg performing in Spoliansky's
Zwei Kravatten
(
Two Neckties
); von Sternberg was seeking a leading lady for his film
The Blue Angel
. Spoliansky remained Dietrich's regular confidant until his death in 1985, and his daughter, Irmgard or ‘Spoli’ Mills, recalled first memories of London with Dietrich preparing breakfast for them, a family of freshly arrived, excited, yet insecure, refugees. Spoliansky moved seamlessly into composing for British cinema and provided scores for such films as
The Man Who Could Work Miracles
(1936),
King Solomon's Mines
(1937),
Over the Moon
(1939), continuing through the war and up to retirement. His career ended, appropriately, with the score for
Hitler: The Last Ten Days
(1973), starring Alec Guinness.
Since the beginning of the First World War, Great Britain had lost its enchantment with all things German. The British royal family's name-change from ‘Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’ to ‘Windsor’ was symbolic of their specific shift from their Hanoverian roots, and Britain's broader rejection of German cultural influence in general. British music began looking towards Paris rather than Leipzig, Vienna or Berlin. Composers who had once embarked on pilgrimages to absorb the mastery of Mendelssohn and Schumann now immersed themselves in the musical spirit of France, creating a fusion from which grew England's appetite for all things pastoral as a distinctly British take on French Impressionism. Paradoxically, this occurred as Germany was locking itself into its mood of unemotional sobriety, and the French themselves had started to shed Impressionist tendencies in favour of a leaner neo-Classicism.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, writing to the Austrian pianist Ferdinand Rauter, commented on the ‘trampling of the tender flower of English music‘
30
by insensitive but marvellously trained Austro-German musicians. There was, in general, scant sympathy in Britain for music coming out of Germany and Austria during the interwar years. The critic Ernest Newman disparaged the music of Weill's
Threepenny Opera
as being a conglomeration of the worst traits of numerous styles and the best traits of none.
31
To be fair, he was in good company: Schoenberg had also commented that Weill was the only
composer in whom he could find no qualities whatsoever.
32
As if Newman's review of
The Threepenny Opera
wasn't bad enough, the
Times
correspondent declared that ‘Weill writes a particularly nauseous kind of jazz’, following the short run of his operetta
Kingdom for a Cow
at the Savoy Theatre in 1935. The incomprehension of London's critics contributed to Weill's decision to quit Britain as soon as possible.
33
The British press treated contemporary Austro-German developments with varying degrees of disdain, with only the likes of Edward Dent and Adrian Boult showing any kind of sympathy for recent continental trends.
By contrast, Berthold Goldschmidt saw England as especially welcoming, following the BBC broadcast of Berg's
Wozzeck
conducted by Adrian Boult in 1934. Goldschmidt had been Erich Kleiber's assistant and orchestral keyboard player for the Berlin premiere in 1925. Despite Goldschmidt's hopes placed in the sophistication of the British public, he found that in general they thought the music coming out of Germany clangorous and dissonant with heavy dollops of artless pseudo-jazz.
The Threepenny Opera
would not enjoy the same success in England that it had in Paris, despite the high profile anti-Semitic cat-calls of the French composer Florent Schmitt at the Salle Pleyel during a Kurt Weill concert in 1933: ‘We have enough bad composers in France and don't need to add to them by bringing in all of the German Jewish composers as well.‘
34
Ultimately, Schmitt was denounced as an extremist by most of the French press. In Great Britain, the press was more inclined to view German composers as the ‘extremists’.
With a few exceptions, British music from the interwar years veered towards some form of pastoralism, or found itself aesthetically between the salon and the palm-court, with only rare ventures into the tamer realms of Modernism. Indeed, the British composer most regularly mentioned in the German new-music publications
Anbruch
and
Melos
is Cyril Scott. Progressive British composers from the generation of Weill, Eisler and Goldschmidt were not nearly as domestically established as their German and Austrian colleagues had been. By 1940 the BBC had compiled a list of composers it had decided could not be broadcast, including many refugees who had fled to Britain. The influence of the Austro-Germanic tradition would thus have to be applied vicariously via teaching: Egon Wellesz arrived at Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1939, and Hans Gál was appointed Lecturer at Edinburgh University immediately after the end of the war, though neither was engaged to teach composition. Hans Ferdinand Redlich lectured first at the Workers’ Education Association as well as extramural departments of the Universities of Cambridge and Birmingham before accepting a professorship in Manchester. Walter Goehr and the Hungarian composer Mátyás Seiber found positions at
London's Morley College. The Webern pupil Leopold Spinner and Arthur Willner, a former composition teacher from Berlin's Stern'schen Conservatory, worked as copyeditors or arrangers for music publishers, while the Schoenberg pupil Erwin Stein became the musical midwife to the young Benjamin Britten. Britten had hoped to study with Berg in Vienna, but was persuaded against the idea by his teachers at the Royal College of Music, who were suspicious of musical developments in central Europe. Erwin Stein's influence served as an aesthetic link to the Second Viennese School, arguably aiding the projection of Britten's work beyond the insular world of British music.