Violins of Hope (6 page)

On December 4, the orchestra moved into the new hall and finally played together for the first time. United in exile, the musicians started to sense the strong collaborative relationship that results in a cohesive sound. But there were concerns about the acoustics in the hall. Huberman was concerned that the first violins—which by all rights should have been the strongest section in a Jewish orchestra—were not projecting properly. They tried raising the chairs, but this did not help. The problem persisted until Toscanini arrived one week prior to the inaugural concert. He seemed to fix the problem by lowering the chairs, but it was difficult for the musicians to tell whether the sound improved because of the new seating arrangement or because of Toscanini's inspirational conducting. Regardless, Toscanini wasted little time in developing a beautiful orchestral sound, accomplishing in one week what usually takes many years.

Up until Toscanini's arrival, the orchestra had been conducted by Steinberg, who at Huberman's insistence had been drilling the orchestra over the course of more than sixty rehearsals in less than two months. Despite such a great amount of preparation, everyone was still nervous about Toscanini's arrival. The conductor was legendary for temperamental outbursts. The musicians were worried about how he would react to their imperfections. Many skeptical musicians and community members were convinced that Toscanini would leave after the first rehearsal, if he came at all. But Toscanini was patient with the eager performers as they learned how to play together. According to one musician, Toscanini found the Palestine Orchestra to be more responsive to his instructions than the established ensembles he usually conducted.

At first, Toscanini simply listened as he conducted Brahms's Second Symphony, which was the first piece he had chosen to rehearse. As the first movement unfolded, he started to interact with the musicians in his native language of Italian, occasionally mixed with German. “Oboe: singing!” “Trumpet: a little louder” “A little softer . . . shh . . . shh . . . piano, piano, pianissimo.” By the second movement, the orchestra already sounded completely different. In the third movement, Toscanini started to demand perfection. He spent several minutes with the oboist on the grace note that precedes the third note in the very first measure. Again and again he called out, “Music is not played, it is sung, it is sung!” To make his point, he sang along with the orchestra, placing his hand on his chest when the orchestra did not meet his high standards. In the fourth movement, he chastised the ensemble for not playing fast enough, rapping his baton on his music stand and crying out, “Follow, follow!” As the rehearsal continued, Toscanini became increasingly animated, stomping his feet to spur the violinists into playing “with fire” and yelling “macaroni pie” when they got lost.
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The antics worked. The entire orchestra sounded better than ever.

The success of Toscanini's first rehearsal generated a great deal of excitement in the Jewish community of Palestine. Skeptics who had previously been reluctant to purchase tickets now stormed the box office, snatching up all of the subscription tickets and available seats. The demand was so great that the police were brought in to protect the orchestra staff from the mob of ticket seekers. “What has been happening around the Toscanini concerts these past few days was to a large extent not enthusiasm, but a psychosis,” wrote one member of the orchestra staff. “At times I have gotten the impression that the individuals involved have lost track of what they are asking for as they scream, beg, and threaten.”
²⁰
The plans for the seating in the new hall were continually revised to squeeze in more audience members.

The public's overwhelming interest and the orchestra's proficiency in the earliest rehearsals convinced Toscanini to open up the final two rehearsals to agricultural workers, as well as to musicians, teachers, actors, and writers. The colonists were moved to tears by what they heard. They had never dreamed that their adopted homeland would be able to assemble an orchestra of such renowned musicians. They could have never imagined that Toscanini would conduct the opening concerts.

The first official performance of the Palestine Orchestra took place in the evening of December 26, 1936. The hall was packed with 2,500 audience members, including British and Jewish luminaries from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and elsewhere throughout Palestine. Several hundred music lovers stood in the drizzling rain outside of the auditorium, pressing themselves against the wall and even climbing onto the roof to hear the concert. They had come to witness the birth of their orchestra under the baton of the celebrated conductor Arturo Toscanini. They were not disappointed.

When Toscanini took the stage, he was welcomed with a thunderous standing ovation. Then the concert began.

The first piece on the program was Rossini's Overture to
The Silken Ladder
, a work with fiendishly difficult violin parts that showed Toscanini's faith in his first violins. The entire orchestra rose to the challenge. Next were the two German masterpieces: Brahms's Second Symphony and Schubert's
Unfinished
Symphony, in which the musicians played at their very best. As a calculated protest of Nazi Germany's prohibition against Jewish composers, Toscanini followed Brahms and Schubert with the Nocturne and Scherzo from Mendelssohn's
A Midsummer Night's Dream
.

The audience listened in silent admiration and then responded to each piece with prolonged applause and shouts of “bravissimo!” When the concert concluded with Weber's
Oberon
Overture, the orchestra received yet another standing ovation. The only sour moment came when Toscanini was angered by a photographer's flashes and refused to return to the stage for the curtain calls the audience enthusiastically demanded.

It was perhaps the musicians who were most thrilled with the performance. After being dismissed from the orchestral positions they had earned through years of practice, after being unemployed and humiliated, and after moving their entire families to a strange country, they were not just making music again. They were doing so under the baton of a true master. “Under his conducting problem spots simply disappear. The music rises and falls, sings and laughs, thrills our hearts and brings us to tears,” wrote cellist Thelma Yellin. “We play as never before. It sounds as if we—the Palestine Orchestra—have been playing together for years, not weeks. The eyes of those of us who hold music dearest of all are wet with tears. We have finally arrived at our destination: we have become an instrument in the hands of the greatest artist of our time.”
²¹

Ever since its first concert, the orchestra has continued to be the crown jewel of Israeli culture. By giving exceptional performances for subscription holders and workers alike in Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, as well as in various settlements throughout the country, the orchestra quickly became the pride and joy of the Jewish community in Palestine. When the State of Israel declared its independence in 1948, the orchestra was there to perform “Hatikvah” (The Hope), the nineteenth-century Zionist hymn that had become Israel's national anthem. Today the orchestra that is now known as the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is widely recognized as one of the very best orchestras in the world—just as Huberman intended it to be.

But the ensemble's greatest legacy can be found in the lives it saved during the Holocaust. By helping the musicians as well as their family members immigrate to Palestine, Huberman saved an estimated one thousand lives between 1935 and 1939.

Many orchestra members brought top-quality, German-made instruments with them to Palestine. After the war, when they learned of the atrocities that the Germans had committed during the Holocaust, they refused to play on their instruments any longer. They simply did not want to have anything to do with Germany ever again. This included continuing the unofficial ban that had been in place since Kristallnacht on playing the music of Richard Wagner, whose anti-Semitic writings and nationalist compositions had become powerful symbols of the Nazi regime.

Several violinists destroyed their German instruments. Others sold theirs for pittances to Moshe Weinstein, who could not bear to think of any instruments being damaged—even German ones. The first violin Moshe purchased was made by the eighteenth-century German violinmaker Benedict Wagner. “Not only was it made in Germany, but the maker's name is Wagner,” its owner complained, even though the two Wagners were not related. “If you don't buy it from me I'm going to throw it away.”

Unsellable in Israel, the violins remained in Moshe's workshop until they were passed to Amnon. By the time Amnon took over the business in 1986, 52 of the 110 violins in the shop's inventory were German, as were 16 of the 19 violas and 12 of the 19 cellos. In the 1990s, Amnon became curious about the Wagner Violin and the other German instruments his father had purchased decades earlier but had never sold. He realized that, contrary to modern opinion, the German instruments were just as good as those made in Italy and France at the same time. Moreover, the German virtuosos who had founded the Palestine Orchestra had actually preferred violins made in Germany over the ones made elsewhere, even though there was no difference in price—at least before the Holocaust.

So why did Italian and French violins eclipse German instruments in prestige and cost in the second half of the twentieth century? The answer is simple. The market for musical instruments is driven by demand, and that demand is based on the types of instruments played by the leading virtuosos. Since the greatest violinists tended to be Jews who would only play on instruments made in Italy or France, the rest of the music world followed suit, creating a run on those instruments and ignoring their German counterparts. Today, German instruments are sold at fractions of the prices demanded by comparable instruments that just happened to be made in Italy or France.

In 1999, at the invitation of a German bowmaker who had seen the German violins in the Weinstein collection, Amnon gave a lecture on his German instruments at a conference in Dresden for the Association of German Violinmakers and Bowmakers. The success of the presentation and Amnon's insatiable curiosity inspired him to begin searching for other violins with connections to the Holocaust.

This was the start of the Violins of Hope project.

 

 

B
utcher and amateur violinist Erich Weininger was twenty-five years old and living in Vienna on March 11, 1938, when Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg delivered an earth-shattering address over the radio. In a trembling voice, Schuschnigg announced that he would be resigning and handing over power to the Nazis. Schuschnigg's efforts to suppress the rise of Austrian Nazism had failed, as had his attempts to establish peace with Hitler. With no foreign powers willing to come to Austria's aid, Schuschnigg had no choice but to peacefully surrender to the Nazis in the hopes of avoiding a bloody German invasion. Schuschnigg bade farewell to his country with the words “God save Austria!”
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The radio followed Schuschnigg's address with the theme from the slow movement of Haydn's String Quartet in C Major, op. 76, no. 3. The melody is one that Haydn wrote in 1797 in honor of Holy Roman Emperor Francis II. In 1938, the tune served as the national anthems of both Austria and Germany. Austrians who were hoping to avoid being annexed by Nazi Germany would have instantly noted the irony of broadcasting a song they knew to begin with the words “Blessed be, without end, wonderful homeland.” Pro-German Nazis no doubt appreciated the manifestation of the song they knew as “Germany, Germany, above all.”

The German army marched into Austria later that night, but by that time the Nazi takeover was already complete. Immediately after the closing bars of Haydn's anthem, Austrian Nazis took to the streets, shouting and waiving swastika flags. “One people, one Reich, one Führer,” they chanted. “Die, Jews!”
²³

The Nazi marauders commandeered Jewish-owned vehicles and businesses. They vandalized Jewish homes and shops. They grabbed Jews off the streets, pushed them onto their hands and knees on the sidewalks, and forced them to scrub away the slogans for Austrian independence that had been painted there just days earlier. “At last, the Jews are working,” the mob taunted. “We thank our Führer, who has created work for the Jews!”
²⁴

The anti-Semitic regulations that the Nazis had systematically implemented in Germany over the previous five years were extended into Austria virtually overnight. Jews could neither attend schools and universities nor practice any professions. They were forced to relinquish their businesses and property for compensation that was nominal at best. They were forbidden from eating at public restaurants, visiting public baths, entering public parks, and going to public theaters, and were regularly subjected to ridicule and intimidation. Over the next three months, seventy thousand Austrian Jews were arrested, principally in Vienna. Most were harassed and tortured for a few hours or days before being released.