Authors: Michael Haas
As productions could not be mounted, the commissioning fee of £300 was paid and attempts were made to secure broadcasts of the winning entries. Rankl and Benjamin were opposed to this as they saw broadcasting as an inadequate means of introducing a new stage work. Bush and Goldschmidt agreed and their scores were passed to the panel headed by Leonard Isaacs at the BBC. The panel consisted of Benjamin Frankel, William Alwyn and Gordon Jacob, all of whom gave fairly negative assessments to Goldschmidt's
Beatrice Cenci
. In general, the panel members objected to the subject matter though they had more positive things to say about the music. Frankel, himself the son of Polish Jewish emigrants, makes the rather bizarre point that ‘the implication of the incestuous episode in the prelude to Act II is too obvious and painstakingly German a device to be dramatically effective and remains merely repellent.’ Alwyn is, ‘dubious whether two hours of unrelieved gloom is suitable for broadcasting.’ Gordon Jacob ducks a decision and seconds Alwyn, but admits that there is much within the work that one can admire. Rudolf Bing, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, while not on the panel, was quite taken with
Beatrice Cenci
. Bing had been manager of Glyndebourne when the company's guest performance of
Macbeth
at the first year of the Edinburgh Festival had been thrown into doubt after George Szell's unexpected departure. Goldschmidt was called in to rescue the performances and was praised by public and press alike. Bing, who probably felt he owed Goldschmidt some support, wrote to John Denison of the Arts Council:
The particular purpose of this letter is to implore you to rack your brains and see if there is anything you can do for Berthold Goldschmidt. I personally think that his
Beatrice Cenci
is really a very fine opera and I would love to do it here, but cannot for the simple reason that a new production of this sort would cost $60,000 and I could not, with the attitude of the New York public towards contemporary works, hope for more than three performances…. Even
Peter Grimes
, although by a composer well-known here, had not more than four or five performances with diminishing and shocking box office results.
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Sadler's Wells also rejected the work for a similar reason to the BBC panel: its plot about incest and the murder of the sadistic Count Cenci carried out by his daughter Beatrice and her step-mother Lucrezia.
That
Beatrice Cenci
should be a cause for moral concern seems astonishing. The libretto, adapted by the Viennese refugee Martin Esslin, was based on a historic event that Percy Bysshe Shelley had turned into a dramatic poem as long ago as 1819. That Shelley's
The Cenci
was a classic made it no more acceptable to British opera managers who – until 1968 – had to present new works to the Lord Chamberlain for approval before any public performance. It was eventually agreed that a sequence of excerpts could be broadcast as compensation. Whether such muddling was the result of anti-German prejudice, or just a funding ‘cock-up’ as Foreman believes, is difficult to say. Had time not been wasted expanding the remit to include a native candidate, things may have turned out differently. Following concert performances of the work during the 1994 Berlin Festival,
Beatrice Cenci
was eventually recorded by Sony, finally giving listeners a chance to assess the work. It shows how far Goldschmidt had travelled from his edgy style in prewar Berlin. It's full of counterpoint (a quibble highlighted by William Alwyn in his assessment), but also full of an abundant tunefulness that was clearly meant to appeal to British audiences. Rankl's opera
Deirdre of the Sorrows
was withdrawn, and scores and orchestral material were on the verge of being pulped by Oxford University Press's music department before Foreman rescued enough for a broadcast of excerpts in October 1995. The score and remaining performance material is preserved in the archive of the Music University in Graz.
Some seventy composers landed in the UK and each had an individual story. The only consistent narrative that emerges from all the various host countries is that of the composer trying to recapture the resonance enjoyed prior to the arrival of the Nazis. Some tried as hard as they could to gain local acceptance before giving up composing altogether. In Goldschmidt's case, the silence lasted for a quarter of a century until he was persuaded to compose a
Clarinet Quartet in 1983, at the age of 80. While Toch, following his departure from Hollywood's film studios and a heart attack in 1948, reacted by embarking on a composing binge.
The Austro-German ‘Exile Symphony’
Toch, Wellesz and Korngold all felt an inner drive to compose a symphony despite the fact that they had shown scant interest in the medium before. Wellesz was first off the mark and his
Prosperos Beschwörungen
, completed in 1936 and based on Shakespeare's
Tempest
, was an attempt to create a symphony using the Mahlerian means of sequencing tone-poems into a coherent symphonic narrative. The thematic ideas of his First Symphony came exactly ten years later while he was walking in England's Lake District, an area that reminded him of Austria's countryside. He went on to compose nine symphonies along with a monumental
Symphonic Epilogue
.
Toch completed his First Symphony in 1949, first performed in 1950 by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under Herbert Häfner. His Second Symphony (there would be six altogether) followed the next year. Toch, like Korngold, had left the studios at the first possible opportunity once the war was over. He continued teaching until a heart attack in 1948 reminded him that he was not immortal. The compositional frenzy that he unleashed was unprecedented. Even in his heyday in Weimar Germany Toch had not turned out works at the rate of Krenek, Weill, Milhaud or Hindemith. After his heart attack, music poured out of him. By his own admission, it was more important to write down all that churned up inside, than to evaluate innate quality.
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As a result, the works from this period often seem both vivid and slapdash. There is a desperation about some of them suggesting an attempt to recapture an elusive prewar brilliance.
Toch's prewar reputation – and the fact that he wasn't the son of the detested Julius Korngold and hadn't made such a conspicuous name for himself in Hollywood – led to support from the same refugee conductors who went to great lengths to distance themselves from Erich Korngold.
Yet Korngold's Symphony in F Sharp Op. 40, completed in 1952, was by any measure a strong work. It was given its premiere by Harold Byrns and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in an under-rehearsed broadcast for Austrian Radio in 1954 that left Korngold so depressed that he requested that the tapes be wiped. The sloppiness of the performance was felt by Korngold to be overt belligerence aimed at himself and his musical values, and he was probably right. Though it does include quotations from some of his film scores, the Symphony also distances Korngold from his Hollywood years. Critics and
public were baffled and ultimately left cold. This was not the nostalgic Korngold they knew before the war that since the early 1930s had remained preserved in a jar of Hollywood schmaltz. For the musical press on the other hand, it simply wasn't an appropriate reaction to the harder-edged, postwar world. Korngold's Hollywood past had tainted any objective appraisal of his work. Attempts to have it performed by colleagues who had worked with him before the Nazi years, were met with polite but chilly dismissals. The letters from the offices of Bruno Walter, Fritz Reiner, William Steinberg and others make depressing reading. This would be Korngold's only symphony and was his last work of note.
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Why did so many of these refugee composers even chose to write something as apparently outmoded as a symphony? The form was redolent of the ‘Old German’ school of Leipzig, and the composers who ended up as refugees though sympathetic with ‘Old German’ values, were not visibly drawn to its classical models. Mahler had changed the entire symphonic ideal, and Shostakovich was showing that the episodic model of symphonic writing was something that was exportable and not uniquely bound to the German tradition. Despite the symphonies of such important émigré composers as Korngold, Toch, Gál, Wellesz, Rathaus, Weigl, Karl Rankl
48
and many others, Germany and Austria had essentially abdicated the symphony in favour of the Slavs, the Scandinavians and even the Americans and British. Franz Schmidt was the last of the traditional Austrian symphonists from the years before Austria's annexation by Germany. Émigré composers on the other hand appeared duty-bound to reassert their native entitlement to a form that had emerged from the same cultural environment as themselves. The Austro-German ‘exile symphony’ deserves a special place in twentieth-century musical history: its content cannot be disassociated from the circumstances under which it was composed.
Nazi Resistance
New musical developments in Europe were not simply the result of a reaction to Nazi atrocities, or covert indoctrination meted out to a group of intellectuals and artists too international to be susceptible to jingoistic anti-Communist propaganda. Equally potent – and equally frustrating for once prominent composers and academics living in exile – was the haphazard denazification process in the music business and academic institutions. The letter from Einstein to Gál (quoted at the head of this chapter) relating Robert Haas's desperate search for recommendations from former Jewish colleagues followed an earlier letter of 1 January 1946 in which he wrote the following:
Have you heard that Robert Haas,
the man of many smells
[written in English] has either returned, or is still sitting with all the dignity and honour that befits his former position, and today is now one of the mightiest beasts in the jungle? The ‘three Kings from the East’ (or the West) made one of their biggest ever mistakes when they decided not leave ‘Ostmark’ as part of the Third Reich.
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The Austrians would certainly have earned such treatment!
50
That Haas was later removed from his position as Director of the Music Collection at the Austrian National Library and editor of the Bruckner Edition was some consolation, but it was hardly a significant step forward. Nowak, unlike Haas, had not been a vocal supporter of the Nazi Regime but was made to carry out Haas's bidding as necessary. This certainly did not look promising as a return to the central position Berlin and Vienna once held in musical scholarship. Wellesz had been removed from the University of Vienna after 1938, and though he was able to maintain a respectable profile with a lectureship at Lincoln College Oxford, he wanted to return to his former professorship in Vienna. With the death of Adler in 1941, he would certainly have been a leading candidate to take over Adler's Institute. Since Adler's death occurred while Austria was annexed, this meant that his Jewish pupils were unable to participate in the development of one of the most respected musicological institutions in the world. Instead, Erich Schenk, the Salzburg-born head of the musicological institute in Rostock, was brought to Vienna in 1940 by Robert Lach, another Adler pupil who had taken over Adler's professorship of comparative musicology in 1927. Schenk moved in quickly. He maintained that he protected the elderly Adler and his daughter from deportation by the Nazis until Adler Sr's death in 1941. He fooled no one: Wellesz sent an open letter in English to a number of important musicologists and members of the ISCM. It is undated but presumably sent sometime in 1946. The correspondence from Rudolf von Ficker to which it refers is dated 28 May 1945:
More than a year ago a letter from an old friend of mind, and former colleague at the University of Vienna, Professor Rudolf von Ficker, brought me news of Miss Melanie (Mely) Adler, daughter of our former teacher, Hofrat Professor Dr. Guido Adler, Honorary President of the International Musicological Society. Professor Ficker occupied the Chair of Musicology in Munich from about 1930. He was known as a strong anti-Nazi. Miss Adler had also lived in Munich and was an intimate friend of Professor Ficker and his wife. [Professor Ficker's account follows] When Professor Adler, who was
a Jew, was dying at the age of eighty-six in 1941 in Vienna the Gestapo wanted to turn him out of his house. His daughter, who nursed him, appealed to Professor Schenk,
Ordinarius der Musikgeschichte
, for help. Whether through his intervention or not, the Gestapo stopped their proceedings, and Adler died in his house. Miss Adler wrote a letter to Schenk thanking him for his help and asking him if he could help her to get to Italy to her relations…. The next evidence comes from letters which she wrote to Professor Ficker asking him to help her. As the price for his help Schenk demanded Adler's library. Miss Adler refused to part with it. At this point the Gestapo summoned her, threatening her with deportation, and members of the Musikhistorische Institute of the University of Vienna [Robert Haas and Leopold Nowak
51
] searched the library for autographs. Professor Ficker acted quickly and got the Public Library of Munich to offer Miss Adler a good price for the library and the guarantee of personal safety. The sale was prevented by Schenk, who said that such a valuable collection ought not to leave Austria.
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His intervention did not affect the library alone. It deprived Miss Adler of the opportunity of obtaining the guarantee of safety. The key of the library was taken away, and the threats of the Gestapo increased. Professor Ficker got no further letters from Miss Adler, and at last went to Vienna and saw Professor Schenk. He saw Adler's library, stored at the Institute.
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The denazification hearing of Schenk – a result of von Ficker's efforts – was farcical. Schenk produced the letter from Melanie Adler thanking him for saving her father from the Nazis. Ficker, who was close to Adler's daughter wrote to Wellesz on 1 September 1947 explaining how she showed him the letter she had obtained from Schenk: ‘A copy of the statement given by Schenk was shown to me by Mely sometime during the early part of March 1941. How it began will stay with me forever, it started: “Though it disgusts me having to deal with a Jew …”.‘
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Ficker went on to explain to Wellesz that the guarantee of Adler's safety was given by Baldur von Schirach, Gauleiter of Vienna, at the request of his cultural advisor Dr Thomas who had been beset by pleas from former Adler pupils. All of this information was of no consequence. Schenk remained in his position until 1971, and Wellesz was not invited to return to his former post in Vienna. Schenk was supported by a network of former Nazi supporters and in a relatively small country such as Austria, this kind of protection was easily acquired and reciprocated. But Schenk's influence reduced Vienna's reputation for musicology to a trace of what it had once been. He had made a name for himself with a popular Mozart biography and furiously denied young musicologists any chance of researching the
contributions of Jewish composers prior to the Nazi arrival in Austria in 1938. Accounts of his refusal to countenance doctorates on Mahler were legion, and even made it into the local papers with one relating the thwarted attempts by the Canadian Timothy Vernon. Schenk told him ‘to forget the idea. He was a Jew’.
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Schenk's comment to the young composer Gösta Neuwirth, when he expressed his intention to write a dissertation on Schreker, is now notorious: ‘There's no chance of anyone writing a dissertation about Jews under my supervision!‘
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Charges continued to be brought against him until 1967, all of which he saw off with the disdain – and the confidence, of someone who knew where skeletons were buried. All this was grossly disheartening to Austrian musicians and composers still living in exile.