Nov 17, 2022
The center of Western Classical Music, ever since the time of
Bach, has been modern-day Germany and Austria. You can trace
a line from Bach, to Haydn to Mozart to Beethoven to Schubert to
Schumann, Brahms, and Wagner, and finally to Mahler. But why does
that line stop in 1911, the year of Mahler’s death? Part of the
answer is the increasing influence of composers from outside the
Austro-German canon, something that has enriched Western Classical
music to this day. There was also World War I getting in the
way. But after the war, one could have expected that this
line would continue again. The 1920’s in Germany and the rest
of Europe were a time of radical experimentation, a flowering of
ideas, a sort of wild ecstasy of innovation across all the arts. So
why don’t we hear of these Austro-German experimenters and
innovators anymore? Because of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels,
and their Entartete, or Degenerate music. Hitler’s worst
crime was by no means his suppression of dozens of German,
Austrian, and Eastern European composers, but it is a fact all the
same that from the end of World War I until 1933, classical music
in Germany and Eastern Europe(especially Czechoslovakia), was
flourishing, with composers such as Zemlinsky, Krenek, Korngold,
Schreker, Schulhoff, Haas, Krasa, and Ullmann taking up the mantle
of the giants of the past and hoisting it upon themselves to carry
it forward.
The Nazis silenced, exiled, or killed off many of these
musicians during the twelve years of 1933-1945, and those voices
are forever lost, but the music they wrote before, during the War
and the Holocaust, and after it, some of it masterpieces quite on
the level of their predecessors, has been preserved. So why
then are these composers not better known? I’ve chosen 12
composers, all of whom were writing music at the highest level.
Some of them may be familiar to you, but many probably won’t
be. And through all of their trials and tribulations, one of
the things I want to emphasize throughout these stories, even the
bleakest ones, is that so many of them found the will to be able to
compose this heart-rending, beautiful, and often optimistic music
all as they witnessed unimaginable horrors. It may seem empty when
the end for many of these artists was so horrific, but these
compositions and the men and women who were behind them are a true
testament to the resilience of the human spirit. These
artists created a life for their friends, neighbors, and fellow
inmates in concentration camps. They wrote music they knew
would almost certainly not be heard in their lifetimes, from an
urge that could not be destroyed, even by gas chambers. Join us to
learn about them this week.