Forbidden Music (55 page)

Einstein summed up the situation to Gál in another letter from 15 February 1947: ‘It's perfectly understandable to me that you should dismiss tempting invitations from Salzburg and Vienna – such siren songs have lost all appeal to those such as us. Even I wouldn't wish to find myself in the position of not offering my hand or greetings to colleagues who tell me that at the time they “never really believed any of that nonsense”.‘
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Einstein was as good as his word. In 1949 he refused an invitation by the Freie Universität in West Berlin and rejected the Golden Mozart Medal awarded by the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg.

Einstein's remarks about not wanting to greet or shake the hands of former Nazis who later claimed not really to have ‘believed any of it’, finds an echo in an experience Gál had when he received a letter from Heinz Tietjen, dated 23 August 1951. Tietjen was the man who had mounted
Die Heilige Ente
in Berlin and Breslau in the 1920s. Under the Nazi dictatorship he became one of the most influential managers in theatre and opera, when Göring appointed him – along with Gustaf Gründgens (on whom Klaus Mann based his novel
Mephisto
) –as cultural advisor on the Prussian State Council in 1936, and general director of the Prussian State Theatre. This was followed by taking over effective management, with Winifred Wagner, of the Bayreuth Festival until 1944. Even as the most powerful theatre manager in pre-Nazi Germany, he approved of the closure of Berlin's bankrupt Kroll Opera in 1931, which the Nazis had branded a ‘cultural institution of Reds and Jews.’ Upon his appointment by Göring he promptly dismissed 27 non-Aryan employees and tore up contracts with Jewish performers. As with Gründgens, he was reprimanded after the war for ‘behaving opportunistically’ and yet was also allowed to take on the directorship of Berlin's Municipal Opera, the renamed Deutsche Oper. In 1951, he was made head of the Berlin Festival and from 1954, director of the Hamburg Opera. In his friendly letter to Gál, Tietjen reminds him that he's just been in London directing
Parsifal
and
Meistersinger
at Covent Garden,
conducted by his ‘old friend from former Berlin days’, Sir Thomas Beecham.
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Beecham's position vis-à-vis the Nazis has long been contentious. He continued to conduct in Nazi Germany until virtually the declaration of war, whereupon he quit England and did not return until 1944.
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It must have been deeply disillusioning for someone like Gál, living in exile in Edinburgh seeing a slippery operator like Tietjen carrying on as if nothing had changed.

Georg Szell wrote to Gál (in English) on 15 October 1942: ‘All the relatives of Lene including her old mother have been deported to Poland as far as we know, her two sons are living with their father in occupied France – of course we have had no news from them for years and can only hope they have not been deported. All the people we used to know in Prague have been deported, including women of eighty years – isn't it a beautiful world we live in? No matter what happens after the war, no punishment can be equal to these crimes.‘
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Then again on 30 May 1946 (this time in German), Szell wrote: 'My parents were deported from Nice in the autumn of 1943, first into the notorious camp at Drancy. From there, we lost track. I hope they didn't have to suffer too much.‘
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This is followed by another letter on 14 July 1946:

If Germany dealt with its denazification more efficiently than Austria, Austria had specific problems of its own. The anti-Nazi, clerical, Austro-Fascist government from 1933 to 1938 was essentially a right-wing dictatorship. Despite the leading role the Catholic Church played within this government, it had many Jewish supporters. Today, we are inclined to see Hitler and Stalin as the embodiment of either a right-wing or left-wing dictatorship. But to many who lived through this period, their regimes seemed identical. The National Socialism of Hitler and the Communism of Stalin were both centralist-authoritarian and invested heavily in their respective domestic economies. They could only afford to carry out such policies by confiscating the personal wealth of easily isolated groups. To the Soviets, it was
middle-class professionals and land-owning farmers; and to the Nazis, it was the Jews. Both were essentially anti-social forms of Socialism, and their political capital was guaranteed by the support of the disenfranchised class of the working poor, the unemployed and the unemployable, duped by endless streams of mendacious propaganda. To anyone who saw the individual as the building block of society, there was virtually no difference between the two ideologies.

What this meant to Austrians after 1945 was a return of many right-wing political refugees who had gone into exile as supporters of the Austro-Fascist state. Competition for positions in institutions after 1945 was often between returning Jews and returning political exiles of either the extreme anti-Nazi right or the extreme left. As Germany did not have a period of anti-Nazi fascist government prior to Hitler, it did not experience the remigration of returning anti-Nazi fascist-supporters after 1945. Despite highly placed Communists and Social Democrats in the post-1945 Viennese municipal government, the Republic of Austria was less sympathetic to returning left-wing refugees than it was to those from the right. Its sympathy for returning Jews of any political persuasion was altogether more erratic. The new president of Austria, Karl Renner, had declared that claims by Jews against the state should be kicked as far as possible into the long grass.
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Hanns Eisler would have preferred to find work in Vienna rather than relocating to East Germany; but he was further handicapped by his close Schoenbergian connections. Affiliations among returning refugee musicians were not easy to untangle. The Jewish composer Marcel Rubin was a pupil of Franz Schmidt and thus no supporter of Schoenberg. He escaped to France before finding refuge in Mexico. He returned to Austria in 1947. As an anti-Schoenberg Communist, he found himself more welcome in Vienna than two Jewish Schoenberg disciples from different ends of the political spectrum: Wellesz, who had supported the Austro-fascist regime, and Eisler, who was Communist.

Schoenberg's near-fatal heart attack in 1946 was an additional reason for him not to return to Vienna. The new family he had started with his second wife Gertude Kolisch had settled in and gone native in California. Children born in America had no desire to leave friends and return to the ruins of the country that had thrown out their parents. It no doubt suited Vienna's musical establishment, led by Joseph Marx (who from 1938 to 1945 had enjoyed the status of being the Ostmark's most frequently performed living composer), not to give any encouragement to Schoenberg or his followers.
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Egon Kornauth was a Schreker pupil, who, together with Marx, led the committee that awarded the postwar Austrian State Prize for Music. Kornauth
wrote to Marx on 4 May 1957: ‘I completely agree with you and … wish to confirm that with full conviction, I would propose Dr Hans Gál so that we make sure that people who receive this prize write genuine music with imagination and skill which a normal listener with normal ears can appreciate – someone who can show a true lifetime's work – all of which is the case [with Dr Gál] (otherwise, we'll soon be swamped by masses of twelve-tone tinkerers).‘
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Marx's only conceivable objection to Gál receiving the prize had been expressed in a statement he had made regarding the prize in 1953, when he suggested that being in exile (or ‘living abroad’ as he put it) was grounds for being denied the prize, should it be deemed that a composer had ‘lost their sense of being Austrian while profiting from all of the advantages and opportunities that working in foreign countries provided’.
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Korngold was not proposed for this reason – ‘He's earned enough money in Hollywood already!’ as Kornauth wrote to Marx on 9 May1956.
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Gál, on the other hand, was praised by both Marx and Kornauth as being an Austrian composer ‘living abroad’ who did not give a false impression of musical life in Austria with 'all of that atonal and twelve-tone fiddling about’. Kornauth went on to hope that the following year they could award the prize to someone who actually lived in Austria.
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It would take Kornauth's death in 1959 before Krenek, Wellesz and other, more progressive voices would be recognised. Obviously, Schoenberg and anyone connected with his school were unwelcome.

The political jostling between former Nazis who refused to budge from the positions bestowed upon them with the departure of Jewish colleagues made life both stressful and traumatic for returning composers, performers and academics. But duplicity and mendacity were not limited to the men and women encountered in the course of trying to return to a pre-Hitler existence. Korngold's publisher Schott had earned enormous sums from composers banned by the Third Reich and had every motivation to resist Nazi efforts and intervene in cultural policy. Instead, Schott went over to the other side – while writing cringing letters to its ‘non-Aryan’ composers such as Korngold, Toch and Gál. Both the Strecker brothers were sympathetic to National Socialism, and Ludwig was assumed to be a member of the party,
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while his brother Willy had written to Stravinsky in April 1933: ‘This movement has so much that is healthy and positive about it … a welcome cleaning-up has been undertaken … in an attempt to restore decency and order.‘
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It was a perfect storm that now raged against Jewish composers, who, having been banned by Hitler and his odious Thousand-Year Reich, found themselves unwelcome in their former homes, and only reluctantly accepted in their new ones. The ravages of war left Germany needing every capable pair of hands available to rebuild its devastated infrastructure and to establish
stability in the middle of a very unsettled Europe. Apart from efforts by the Americans, the removal of former Nazis from cultural positions was not a high priority for any of the occupying forces. The other three occupying powers had decided that music was so close to the German psyche that it was important to guarantee its seamless continuity, which they saw as extending from 1945 rather than 1933. It appeared a harmless trade-off against ridding the country of Nazis in more sensitive positions.

The Cold War polarised matters even further. The continuity of tradition and craftsmanship that had been so important to Jewish composers in their journey to becoming German composers had been cut off, and this isolated them even further. As the decades rolled past, it became ever more apparent that the gratitude felt by refugee musicians and composers was not reciprocated by their host countries. Britain was no more inclined to view Goldschmidt and Wellesz as British composers than America was to treat Hindemith and Toch as Americans. With many managers, directors, conductors, and performers sharing the refugee experience with émigré composers, their works continued to enjoy performances for as long as this generation remained active. But as these individuals began to die out, performances became rarer. They were no longer seen as former refugees but as dinosaurs from Germany's age of Utilitarianism, composing reams of
Gebrauchsmusik
, as all German and Austrian interwar music was disingenuously classified. They were considered as having nothing of interest to say compared with the daring experiments of younger composers. New music in the West was intellectually challenging and was meant to discomfort listeners. Not to embrace it was to be aligned with the reactionary forces of the past. As Adorno wrote: ‘It doesn't even occur to anyone to compose music like [Dietrich von] Bausznern and [Siegmund von] Hausegger, or like Georg Schumann and Max Trapp – even less does it occur to anyone to play these monstrosities in concert. The conviction of such musical rhetoric doesn't merit opposition and even their natural habitats have not remained unaffected.‘
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For a generation of angry young European composers, it was too easy to see any and every composer from the previous generation as tainted.

The final dilemma facing émigré musicians was whether to return to their former homes in Austria and Germany. It was far from certain that they would be allowed to make a worthwhile contribution. In Austria, at least, little or no effort was made to restore returning musicians to their previous posts. Over the intervening twelve years, lives had moved on, and there was a legitimate suspicion that even if they returned, they would not be wanted – and even the chilling realisation that they had perhaps never been wanted. This pain was not just the result of injustices and deep personal losses, but grew out
of the recognition that generations of German and Austrian Jewish musicians and composers had imagined themselves to be equal celebrants in the greater Germanic cultural pageant. The composer Erich Zeisl writing to his old friend, the author Hilde Spiel, expressed this frustrated anger succinctly in a letter dated 17 May 1946: