Forbidden Music (50 page)

The important composers working in Theresienstadt – Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása and Viktor Ullmann – have become fairly well known, and their works are becoming a regular feature of the concert repertoire. All, with the exception of the younger Klein, were en route to becoming established composers before internment. Klein's genius was one of the many tragic miracles of Theresienstadt, his brilliance not becoming evident until he was imprisoned and long after his death.

In any case, the inhumanity of man and the undeniable creativity that it can generate is demonstrated in one highly symbolic work that came out of the Theresienstadt Ghetto. It can stand without explanation and be counted, regardless of its provenance, as a masterpiece:
Der Kaiser von Atlantis
by Viktor Ullmann and his youthful librettist, the painter and poet, Peter (or Petr) Kien. It is also a work of ethical genius. Its alternative title is
The Abdication of Death
and the plot is simple but powerful: Death has been overworked by the megalomaniac Emperor Overall and decides to go on strike. It was an obvious and dangerous parody of Hitler's ambitions. Yet what places it beyond the expectations of listeners today is its apparent lack of anger; soldiers who can't kill each other wonder why they're fighting, and a soldier-girl and soldier-boy fall in love after fruitless attempts to annihilate each other. A harlequin figure moves the action along while the Emperor Overall and Death argue. A drummer makes further pronouncements, ordering people to kill until nobody is left standing, while singing parodies of the German national anthem. The main protagonists are portrayed as buffoons while the music veers from the Bergian to cinematic hit-song and cabaret.

Ullmann's message, though, is that the only thing that needs to be feared is an
absence
of death. Its ethical message goes even further with Emperor Overall agreeing to be the first to die in order for Death to end his strike and thereby redeeming the apparently irredeemable. This was an extraordinary idea to present in a situation where death was ever-present – parts of the
libretto were written on the backs of deportation lists to Auschwitz. Unsurprisingly, it did not make it to performance, though according to the memoirs of the bass Karel Berman, also interned in Theresienstadt, it did go into rehearsal. It has several alternative endings, and though Ullmann gives the official completion date as 13 January 1944, it is clear that during rehearsals there were disagreements about the ultimate version of the text. Kien was in general more cynical, angry even, while Ullmann comes across as verging on the serene with a view of death closer to that of Felix Salten's
Bambi
or Janáček's
Cunning Little Vixen
. The many variants of the final aria result in very different conclusions, changing the entire character of the work. It must surely be one of the bravest pieces of music-theatre ever written – and a powerful ethical testimony.

Music in Terezín
, by the Polish-American music historian Joža Karas, remains the definitive work on music in Theresienstadt. Since its publication in 1984, the composers have become far better known and some, especially Ullmann, have been recognised as major figures. Hans Krása and Pavel Haas were two very distinctive composers who maintained a Czech musical identity that would be carried forward after the war by Martinů. Krása studied with Zemlinsky and Haas with Janáček, and both composers maintained a pronounced aesthetic distance to the New Objectivity, or twelve-tone trends dominant in Germany at the time. So, too, did their teachers, both of whom had already developed distinctive musical styles without conforming to current developments. Though the cultivated Krása employed neo-Classical Stravinskian devices, his music remains essentially Czech, with fewer rugged edges than Pavel Haas. It would be unfair to call their styles eclectic, as they seemed to have come up with something that was individual, though a fusion offering traces of Stravinsky, Janáček and even French Impressionism can be heard in the works of both.

The world inhabited by Czech composers grew from the same surreal environment that produced Franz Kafka: an emotionally defuse world somewhere between dream and awakening. In Krása's Dostoevsky-based opera
Verlobung im Traum
,
⁵⁸
given its premiere in Prague under Szell in 1933, there's a strong sense of the disparity between reality and the imagined. This blurring of reality and magic is also present in Pavel Haas's folk-opera
Šarlatán
⁵⁹
of 1936, and in Erwin Schulhoff's weirdly surreal treatment of the Don Juan story in his only opera,
Flammen
(1929). It is a musical world that survived in Martinů's
Julietta
, given its premiere three days after the annexation of Austria, on 16 March 1938 in Prague, conducted by Václav Talich, the teacher of Karel Ančerl, who conducted much of the music composed in Terezín. Czech music was a product of what Max Brod – journalist, composer,
Janáček translator and Kafka biographer – called 100 per cent Czech, 100 per cent German, and 100 per cent Jewish. It was a description he gave to the Czech capital, Prague, but it also works as a description of Czech composers as well.

There were other composers in Theresienstadt such as the Hindemith and Hába pupil Zikmund (Siegmund) Schul, whose few surviving works, such as the
Two Chassidic Dances
, various Hebrew Choruses and a
Cantata Judaica
, employ explicitly Jewish subjects. There was the bass Karel Berman, who as well as being a singer, also composed songs and piano works; and there was the Austrian-Polish composer Carlo Taube, who composed a
Terezín Symphony
. The score is lost, but a report of a secret performance held in a prayer room in one of the barracks has come down to us from one of the prisoners, an engineer named Arnošt Weiss:

There were other less important figures composing in Theresienstadt. The 22-year-old Robert Dauber wrote a delightful yet disturbing
Serenade
for violin and piano, in the Palm Court style of his father Adolf ‘Dol’ Dauber. It remains the only work of this gifted young man who died of typhoid in Dachau at the age of 23. Dauber was the only member of his family to end up in Theresienstadt and even sent occasional post-cards telling his family that he was well. The
Serenade
is best seen as another of Dauber's post-cards: short, sweet and positive. As with the works by Gál composed in Huyton, it has nothing didactic, symbolic or redolent of his experience as a prisoner. On the contrary, it is a work that was no doubt written to help people forget their situation. Perhaps another of these lesser figures who still resonates today is the poet Ilse Weber whose poem
I wander through Theresienstadt / My heart a lump of lead
… has become a regular feature at the many concerts in which the music of Theresienstadt is remembered. All of these composers, apart
from Berman, were either murdered or died in camps. More recently and astonishingly late in the day, Hungarian composers murdered in the camp
s
are starting to receive scholarly attention. In addition to Ferenc Weisz, murdered in 1944, we are finally able to hear works by Pál Budai, Jenő Deutsch; György Justus; Sándor Kuti; Walter Lajthai-Lazarus; Sándor Vándor; and László Weiner.
⁶¹

It is a bitter irony that the Austro-German music tradition held in such high esteem by the third generation of emancipated, assimilated Jews was last heard wafting across the tundra and barbed wire of Eastern Europe's death camps, played by desperate inmates, most of whom would not survive. Heinrich Heine was surely thinking of the Germany of
Dichter und Denker
, ‘poets and philosophers’, when he wrote in his forward for
Germany, a Winter's Tale
: ‘If we could rescue God from indignities which inhabit mankind here on earth, we would thus become the redeemers of God himself – if we could restore dignity to a people deprived of joy […] then […] the whole of Europe, indeed the whole world, will fall to us! It is this message of universal domination by Germany of which I so often dream when I wander amongst the oaks. This is my patriotism.’

The poems of the Jewish poet Heine, which inspired countless settings by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt and Loewe among many others, were banned. Jewish musicians performing Beethoven and Wagner, the strands of which whispered across the moorlands and plains in Central Europe (the very regions being claimed for German
Lebensraum
), had previously, as with Heine, considered themselves ardent defenders of Germany's most humanist values. Yet here they were, their national and cultural identity taken away by neighbours who had convinced themselves that their own entitlement to all that was ‘German’ could only come at the expense of those whom they could unilaterally declare ‘un-German’. Wagner was arguably more accurate in his view that Jews would eventually undermine the essential moral fabric of German culture than he could have known. Nazi anti-Semitism, much of which was inspired by Wagner himself, had driven non-Jewish Germans to perform acts of cultural barbarity that would bankrupt for generations any ethical legacy bestowed by its greatest writers, artists and philosophers.

The letters quoted above provide a snapshot of life after Hitler. The first refers to cringing attempts by former Nazi-supporting academics to hold onto their livelihoods during the denazification processes. The plea for positive endorsements from the colleagues they forced into exile (or worse) is made in the context of revelations of extreme ruthlessness carried out by many non-Jewish academics between 1933 and 1945, profiting from the anti-Semitic
tabula rasa
in their institutions. Robert Haas, to whom Einstein refers, was the Nazi-supporting head of the Austrian National Library's Music Collection
and principal editor of the Bruckner critical edition. He was removed from his position after the war and replaced by Leopold Nowak. Haas was a cantankerous anti-Semite who maintained that Bruckner had been corrupted by exposure to the ‘cosmopolitan influences of Jews’. With denazification underway, he was now trying to persuade various ‘Jewish corrupting influences’ to come his way as well.

Erich Schenk, also referred to by Einstein, was the controversial rector of Vienna University who from 1957 had,
faute de mieux
, ended up as effective head of the Institute of Musicology founded by Guido Adler. Though Adler had retired in 1927, he was still Editor of
Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich
, the series he had initiated before the Nazis removed him at the age of eighty-one. The former Adler student, Rudolf von Ficker recalled that after Adler's death in 1941, he found his former professor's library stacked in Schenk's study. When von Ficker challenged Schenk about this, Schenk explained that Adler's daughter Melanie had tried to stop his requisitioning the library and had behaved ‘like a stupid sow’. Schenk went on to explain that though she had fled (after appealing to him for protection), he was confident that she would soon be found by the Gestapo and then, ‘she's off to Poland!’ She was murdered in the extermination camp Maly Trostinec near Minsk on 26 May 1942 after her deportation on 20 May.
¹

Haas and Schenk were just two of the musicologists of the same generation as Gál and Einstein who had happily supported the Nazi regime. None of them would have anticipated the posthumous controversy surrounding the noted Schütz and Bach scholar, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, who was implicated as a member of the SS Einsatzgruppe D, which, under SS Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, murdered some 5,000 people in the Crimea between 9 and 13 December 1941.
²
In twelve years, Hitler had converted Germans from their centuries-old reputation of ‘Dichter und Denker’ (Poets and Philosophers) into ‘Mörder und Henker’ (Murderers and Executioners).

Einstein's second letter reveals the cynical view that self-preservation was being attempted by the postwar German music establishment through feigning revulsion at twelve years of Nazi brain-washing. The consequence was an escape into the arms of whatever appeared to be the diametric opposite of Hitler's national Romanticism. This reaction to the excesses of the past was strangely reminiscent of the early 1920s when writers, painters and composers turned to ‘New Objectivity’. Works such as Franz Schreker's
Irrelohe
, first performed in 1924, and Berg's
Wozzeck
, given in Berlin a year later, certainly owed much to Wagnerian Romanticism, turned Expressionist, and were written at the height of artistic detachment that followed the First World War. But if Germans in 1919 were trying to sober up their vision after the
intoxicating delusions growing out of Bismarck's short-lived German Empire, the implications post-1939 of criminal behaviour accorded to every German man and woman by Hitler's yet more delusional Third Reich caused an even stronger artistic reaction.