Some program ideas emerge in a single moment of inspiration. Fugitives had such a birth: it sprang into being one night in June of 2007, when I was onstage with Kate Lindsey at Wolf Trap. We were doing a concert of German songs from the Weimar years called Berlin Night Life. As Kate sang Kurt Weill’s “Nanna’s Lied,” I had a sudden vision of the two of us performing Alexander Zemlinsky’s “Meeraugen.” This image became something of an idée fixe. I was determined to get Kate, Zemlinsky, and me onto a concert stage—but I didn’t have any idea what the other courses of that musical banquet should be.

I began to meditate on Zemlinsky, a writer of great refinement and surprising power. He was one of many musicians who fled Nazi Germany when the Third Reich made all Jews into outlaws. Their creative output was labeled “entartete”—degenerate. The term was codified in a 1938 exhibition in Düsseldorf entitled Entartete Musik, a follow-up to the famous 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibit in Munich. The Düsseldorf show was designed specifically to vilify the music that Hitler considered non-Aryan: jazz, atonal music, and anything written by Jewish composers, ranging from nineteenth-century icon Felix Mendelssohn to modernist pioneer Arnold Schoenberg.  When the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók heard of the exhibition, he demanded to be included. For him, entartete was a badge of honor, not a smear on his reputation.

As the Nazi threat choked off their freedom and their livelihoods, many Jewish musicians fled for asylum in England and America. Others met tragic fates in the death camps. After an astounding burst of artistic creativity in the 1920s, Germany’s illustrious musical tradition ground to a halt. The Third Reich permitted only certain composers to be heard—from its own generation, the list included musicians like Werner Egk, Carl Orff, and Richard Strauss; from the past, Richard Wagner held pride of place. Over a period that lasted twelve years, two generations of German and Austrian composers—Jews and dissidents—were silenced, and their music seemed as if it might be lost forever.

Hitler’s wholesale suppression of what he labeled “Entartete Musik” is a wrong that is gradually being righted. Decca Records began a series of recordings in the 1990s that brought back a wide range of lost works—operas and operettas, cabaret music, instrumental pieces, and art songs. Conductor James Conlon devoted himself to the recovery of Entartete Musik with performances of works ranging from Viktor Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis and Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg, to orchestral pieces by Franz Schreker, Ernst Křenek, and Erwin Schulhoff. And Elysium Between Two Continents, an international festival with bases in both New York City and Europe, has worked tirelessly to present the works of musicians suppressed by Germany’s Fascist regime.

The song that inspired Fugitives, Zemlinsky’s “Meeraugen,” is about a person staring into the roiling abyss of the ocean, so fascinated by its depths that he wants to join their embrace. That song replicated my own fears of—and attractions to—plunging into tonight’s program. The subject is so emotionally charged and far-ranging that it initially overwhelmed me. But as the original Fugitives team—Ben Sosland, Kate Lindsey, Joseph Kaiser, and I—kept researching and listening, we began to find songs that could tell the story of this turbulent era. In the first half, we’ll hear Lieder, cabaret pieces, theater songs, and agitprop composed in Europe by the composers who would soon be forced to flee their homeland. In the second half, we begin with music by three composers who were lost to us: two who died in concentration camps, and one whose works disappeared in the thickets of the post-war musical jungle. And finally, we hear the songs exiled composers wrote from their new outposts in America, some in New York, others in Los Angeles. There was no way to include music by all the refugees, nor all the musical philosophies of the era. That’s the work of a two-semester course, not a two-hour recital. Instead, we’ve gravitated to the music that touched us and illuminated those fearsome decades of the twentieth century.

James Conlon has commented that the Entartete composers were “an integral part of German music. These are not people from outer space. They have the same roots and came out of the same environment as everyone else in their time.” This had been precisely my conclusion as I read through the Lieder of Zemlinsky, Korngold, Schreker, and the pre-twelve-tone Schoenberg. They were experts in melodic nuance and pianistic color, and created a body of work that can stand next to that of Wolf and Strauss.

These composers have become increasingly familiar to musicians and avid concertgoers in the last couple of decades, but many of them still remain unknown to those outside classical music’s inner sanctum. Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942) was a seminal figure, with artistic roots reaching far back into Germany’s musical history. He was a protégé of Brahms, whose influence rings out clearly in the noble anthem that opens our concert, “Altdeutsches Minnelied.” Zemlinsky was also a noted teacher; his students included Webern and Schoenberg—as well as practically every other musician on tonight’s concert. (Schoenberg eventually married Zemlinsky’s sister, becoming the brother-in-law of his mentor.) The two dense pages of “Meeraugen,” built on a short, obsessively repeated theme, give a beautiful demonstration of Zemlinsky’s musical intensity, his chromatic harmony, and his ability to plumb emotional depths swiftly.

Franz Schreker (1878-1934) was best known for his operas, which took the musical world by storm in the early years of the twentieth century. Der ferne Klang and Der Schatzgräber were his biggest successes, imbued with the hedonistic eroticism of Freud’s Vienna. A master of orchestral color and harmonic daring, Schreker reveled in the sensual possibilities of sound. The very Russian-sounding “Unendliche Liebe,” set to a text by Tolstoy, is a good example of Schreker’s satisfying linear flow and his imaginative, wide-spaced sonority which spans almost the entire keyboard of the piano.

Erich Korngold (1897-1957), a child prodigy, was another of Zemlinsky’s star pupils. Korngold premiered his first opera, Violanta, when he was seventeen, and reached his peak of fame as a classical composer six years later with Die tote Stadt, which took New York by storm when the old New York City Opera revived it in 1975. Korngold was among the first composers to immigrate to America: in 1934, Max Reinhardt invited him to Hollywood to create the score for his movie version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After the Anschluss there was no way Korngold could return to Europe. He remained in Hollywood for the rest of his life, turning out a series of soundtracks composed as “operas without singing”; the characters in films like Anthony Adverse and The Sea Hawk are each given their own Leitmotif in scores that function as sweeping, intricate tone poems. Korngold’s music embodies late-Romanticism at its ripest—generous, richly harmonized, and eager to please, narrowly avoiding self-indulgence. His best works can disarm the listener with a kind of piercing sweetness and sincerity.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is certainly the best known of tonight’s Lieder composers, but we’re hearing him in an unfamiliar guise. He is most famous as the J. Robert Oppenheimer of classical music, the man who exploded tonality and propounded twelve-tone music as the wave of the future. “Erwartung” is the work of the pre-dodecaphonic Schoenberg. Written when the composer was 28 years old, the song evokes a decadent sensuality and a mysterious sense of forbidden pleasures not usually associated with this cerebral, mathematically-minded musician.

I daresay that Germany’s brilliant cadre of political satirists was considered the most “degenerate” of all the Entartete musicians—and the most dangerous to the Third Reich. In Germany’s theaters, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht took Europe by storm in 1928 with Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera). And Berlin also had a thriving cabaret scene where gifted performers (among them Marlene Dietrich) performed topical songs written on a weekly basis by brilliant songwriters (among them Friedrich Hollaender). Left-wing politics merged with the cadences of American jazz to produce a dazzling repertoire of razor-sharp entertainment. But when the Weimar Republic fell, the revels ended, and an entire entertainment industry was forced to run for cover. Some survived—and some did not. Tonight, we’ll sample the wares of Weill, Hollaender, Kurt Tucholsky, and Hanns Eisler—the stars of Germany’s Golden Age of popular/populist song.

For a few years in the 1920s and early 1930s, Weill (1900-1950) and Brecht (1896-1956) overcame their ideological and personal differences to create a series of groundbreaking theatrical works: besides Threepenny, their collaborations included the cabaret suite Mahagonny-Songspiel (which morphed into the full-scale opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), Happy End, The Berlin Requiem, and The Seven Deadly Sins. Ultimately Brecht’s extreme political views and exploitative work habits made it impossible for Weill to continue writing as his writing partner. The composer turned to his old friend and mentor Georg Kaiser to write the book and lyrics for what was to be his last German work, Der Silbersee (1933), from which we are hearing the agitprop ballad “Caesar’s Death.” The action of Silbersee proceeds with the dream-like logic of a fairy tale, culminating in a final scene where the leading characters finally escape from tyranny by walking on a lake which magically remains frozen under their feet, even as all around them spring bursts into bloom. It was a myth many people wanted to believe during one of the grimmest times in modern history. The Nazis shut down Silbersee after sixteen performances. Soon after, the Reichstag was set aflame and civil liberties were suspended. Weill fled to Paris. He was never to return to Germany.

As Weill became estranged from Brecht, the playwright formed a partnership with Hanns Eisler (1898-1962). Politically, they were far more like-minded—both committed Marxists—and their collaboration lasted to the end of Brecht’s life. Eisler was a student of Schoenberg, and wrote twelve-tone music at various points in his career. But his true aim was to write music to energize and unite the working class. He called these songs Kampflieder—songs of struggle—and they brought him an enormous following in the late 1920s. He was associated with the German Workers-Singers Union, a group that had 400,000 members, and his music incited a visceral response from them. Eisler’s hardline, unyielding politics often took the form of hardline, unyielding music. He’s probably the most serious composer in the history of popular song. But in the pacifist anthem “Der Graben,” written to a poem by Kurt Tucholsky, he seems to write from his heart; this writer’s words seem to have a softening effect on this often-uncompromising composer.

Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935) is an artist very dear to my heart. A prolific essayist, journalist, poet, and lyricist, he was committed to the cause of pacifism. It was his mission to “stem the irresistible tide of war with his typewriter,” in the words of a contemporary writer. Tucholsky clung to a kind of idealism and always had faith in the reconciliation of the many warring German parties and classes. In his prose and his poetry, he demonstrated a razor-sharp wit akin to Dorothy Parker’s, along with a decidedly un-Brechtian passion and empathy. In recent years, Tucholsky has re-emerged as a hero to today’s younger Germans, who are avid readers of his poetry. Like Weill, he wrote to address the issues of his day, but his words continue to sound universal, fresh, and truthful—particularly his portrayals of women and the battle of the sexes.

Friedrich Hollaender (1896-1976) lacked Kurt Weill’s lacerating musical originality, but he was a very fine popular songwriter and a keen observer of Berlin society. He wed sharply crafted lyrics to the kinds of tunes that lodge irresistibly in the listener’s brain. His name might not be familiar, but some of his songs certainly are. One of them was “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß,” known more familiarly as “Falling in Love Again”—introduced by Marlene Dietrich in the movie The Blue Angel in an indelible performance.             

Korngold, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, Weill, Brecht, and Hollaender escaped Nazi Germany to begin new lives in America. But Tucholsky’s life ended tragically before the war. Left-wing cabaret, agitprop, pacifist journalism, and Communist demonstrations all proved useless against the rise of Hitler. Tucholsky fled Germany and immigrated to Sweden, but he was ultimately denied Swedish citizenship. Overwhelmed by the early ravages of the Nazi era, he decided he’d seen enough. He took an overdose of sleeping pills that ended his life—or so it has seemed. People have long assumed that Tucholsky’s death was a suicide, but his biographer Michael Hepp postulates that it may have been an accident. Tucholsky’s tombstone refuses to settle the question, quoting from Goethe: “All that passes is but a riddle.”

Schreker’s life also ended before the war broke out. The Nazis terminated his employment at the two conservatories where he had professorships. The loss devastated him emotionally and physically, and he died two days before his 56th birthday after suffering a stroke.

Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944) and Hans Krása (1899-1944) were among the composers deported to Theresienstadt, which was intended as a symbol to the world of a “model Jewish settlement,” a place where a number of prominent Jewish composers were interned and where the arts were supposedly encouraged. The grim reality of Theresienstadt was far removed from the public image, promulgated by the Nazis, of a happily buzzing arts colony. Music thrived for a time, but the 50,000 Jews crammed into a space previously inhabited by 7,000 people soon faced the same devastations suffered at all the camps. Ullmann and Krása were eventually deported to Auschwitz, where they died in the gas chambers.

Ullmann and Krása were both mentored by Zemlinksy and Schoenberg. The generosity, opulence, and intensity of Ullmann’s music seem to emerge from Zemlinsky’s aesthetic, while the spare atonality of Krása is an inheritance from Schoenberg. The publication of Ullmann’s complete Lieder is a cause for rejoicing, and the 2006 production of Krása’s opera Brundibar in a translation by Tony Kushner finally put the spotlight back on this composer whose life was cruelly cut short.

The concentration camps were the most violent way to silence Jewish musicians. But many fine Jewish composers who managed to survive the Second World War were nevertheless lost to future generations. They never seemed able to recover from the ravages of the war or their displacement. One such artist is Georg Jokl (1898-1954), a student of Schreker’s in Vienna. He was a successful pianist and composer in his Austrian homeland and in Germany until he was forced to flee to New York in 1939. Of his fifteen years in America, I have been able to learn nothing. But I heard a few of his songs at a beautiful concert given by Elysium Between Two Continents in 2003, and never forgot them. They appear never to have been published—the music is in manuscript. For me, Jokl’s music is a poignant symbol of an entire tier of composers who simply lacked the advocacy or the creative energy to relaunch their careers in the United States.

Eisler, Weill, Hollaender (now respelled as “Hollander”), Zemlinsky, and Korngold did manage to re-establish themselves in America, with varying degrees of success. Weill, Hollander, and Korngold emerged victorious. Weill enjoyed a brilliant career on Broadway working with America’s greatest writers: Ira Gershwin (Lady in the Dark), Ogden Nash (One Touch of Venus), Maxwell Anderson (Knickerbocker Holiday), and Langston Hughes (Street Scene). Korngold scored twenty films, was nominated for four Academy Awards and won two, and eventually returned to writing art songs as well. It is true that his career dwindled as styles changed. His heavy breathing, late-Romantic spirit failed to resonate in the 1950s as it had two decades earlier. But his stock has risen in recent years, and now Korngold’s music gets programmed with some frequency by recitalists and opera companies. Hollander’s American career was even more illustrious than his German one—he’s credited on over 80 film scores (including The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., with a script by none other than Dr. Seuss) and made several hundred more uncredited contributions to other movies. He was as accomplished a lyricist in English as he was in German; his astounding command of wordplay is on full display in “Black Market,” written for Marlene Dietrich in A Foreign Affair. (Next time you see the movie, check out the onscreen pianist: it’s Hollander himself.)

Hanns Eisler’s dour personality and extreme left-wing politics were always a mismatch for Tinseltown, where he moved after spending a short period in New York on the faculty of the New School. While on the east coast he joined the University in Exile, conceived in 1933 by New School President Alvin Johnson to provide a haven for European intellectuals and artists endangered by Hitler and Mussolini. But Eisler soon moved out west to be part of the emigré enclave in Hollywood, where he managed to land a couple of jobs writing movie scores. He too received a pair of nominations for Academy Awards. But as Brecht famously commented, “Paradise and Hell can be the same city.” Eventually Eisler was targeted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and deported to Germany in 1948. About his experience in America, he wrote: “I leave this country not without bitterness and infuriation. I could well understand it when in 1933 the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the evil of the period; I was proud at being driven out. But I feel heart-broken over being driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way.”

Alexander Zemlinsky’s fate is perhaps the most poignant of all. He had been a celebrity in Europe, and mentor to so many of tonight’s composers. But when he moved to New York in 1938, he was unable to establish himself in the American musical scene. While Schoenberg’s career flourished, Zemlinsky’s foundered. The conductor Artur Bodanzky had promised to get Zemlinsky’s opera Der König Kandaules produced at the Met, but the administration thought the libretto faulty and the production never materialized. In 1939, he suffered a stroke. After the richness and stimulation of his earlier years, his sudden obscurity and neglect filled his final years with sadness—the desolate sense of loss that permeates his setting of Langston Hughes’ poem “Misery.”

The story of this era is permeated with terror, displacement, cruelty, and injustice. But it is also filled with stories of courage, adaptation, and rebirth. Our music tonight runs the gamut—political satire, passionate late-Romantic outpourings, spare modernist miniatures, warm Broadway ballads and tough German anthems. The Third Reich was a death machine, but in the end the forbidden music would not be silenced. As we pay tribute to Germany’s embattled artists, I am overwhelmed by music’s enduring power to help us survive, give clarity to our lives, and instill us with faith.

 

I had a great deal of assistance with Fugitives when NYFOS first presented it 17 years ago. Thanks are due to Joe Kaiser, Kate Lindsey, Ben Sosland, Elliott Hurwitt, and James Russell. John Hargraves guided me through the German poetry with great intelligence and generosity; Donald Stubblebine, Peter Clark, Jeannie Im, and Richard Traubner graciously supplied some of the rare material, much of it now available online with a click, but extremely elusive in 2009. To all of them, my gratitude.–SB