Cultural Displacement in Music: The Exilarte Narrative

Over the last months, the Exilarte Center has been working all hours to keep up. As our contribution to the celebrations of Arnold Schoenberg’s 150^th birthday, we mounted an exhibition on Schoenberg, his teacher Alexander Zemlinsky, and Schoenberg’s last assistant in Los Angeles, the Viennese composer Richard Hoffmann, who went on to teach at Oberlin College in Ohio. It represents a triangle of teacher-student relationships that also examines the issues of cultural displacement and cultural transfer.  The more one digs the more one finds connections between different composers. For example, the conductor and composer Georg Tinter was the music teacher of Richard Hoffmann in Vienna before 1938 and Hoffmann’s family in turn facilitated Tintner’s immigration to New Zealand. Both Hoffmann and Tintner musical estates are held at the Exilarte Center allowing such connections to link up. And countless inter-connections link up once the estates are held together: Hans Winterberg was often mentioned in the interwar Czech press together with Walter Susskind. Again, both of these estates are now housed with us in Vienna.

When I left Vienna’s Jewish Museum in 2010, I began a consultancy with Vienna’s Municipal Library and its remarkable Music Collection.   It not only possesses the musical estates of nearly every significant operetta composer, including the entire Strauss family, but it also has a good deal of Franz Schubert’s estate along with a fair amount of the publishing house Universal Edition’s archive. Other important holdings include the composer Max Brand, the person who financed and collaborated with Robert Moog in the creation of the synthesiser, though they fell out and Brand has largely been written out of the synthesiser story. Nevertheless, the original prototype is in the Brand Museum in Lower Austria. But Vienna’s Music Collection is extensive and with their large collection of Jewish operetta composers, they asked if I could expand their holding to include other “exiled” composers.  By “exiled” they meant composers and musicians who were victims of Hitler’s annexation of Austria.  Inevitably, at a certain point, the Library threw up its hands and said “enough!” They had neither the personnel nor the funds to take on further material.

In Vienna by 2010, it was becoming increasingly clear that the city’s musical life had been cataclysmically affected by its years of Nazi rule.  Since the 1990s, various organisations were founded to research Austria’s persecuted literary, artistic and musical legacies. The focus was difficult to determine since the country that became the Republic of Austria in 1918 after the First World War, was not the country in which most of the musicians, artists and writers were born. People who considered themselves subjects of the Habsburg “House of Austria” and living in either Cisleithien or Transleithien (the Western “Austrian” and Eastern “Hungarian” halves of the Dual Monarchy) were by today’s reckoning Ukrainian, Romanian, Czech, Italian, Slovenian, Slovakian, Croatian, Bosnian or Polish.  Though they may have thought of themselves as “Austrian” was it appropriate that we also count them as such? Were Hungarians to be included? Hungary as the other half of the Dual Monarchy in its Transleithanien manifestation pre-1918 and was a good deal larger than Hungary is today.

Breaking point with the Municipal Library’s Music Collection came with the musical estates of both Walter Bricht and Hans Gál and it was these two composers, along with Julius Bürger who would form the basis of the Exilarte Center. The story of its founding has been told elsewhere on this blog, so it won’t be repeated and in the meantime, we have acquired another thirty or so musical estates. An additional point worth making was the only way for us to square the complicated circle of who counted as Austrian and who didn’t, was to agree that the Exilarte Center would take the legacies of all persecuted musicians and composers regardless of where they came from or their actual nationality. In truth, we now have a number of German musical estates, such as Walter Wurzburger, Richard Fuchs, Gustav Lewi and in continuous negotiation for Eugene Engel, whose opera Grete Minde, is being published as part of our Exilarte series with Schirmer Music. We also have an estate from France (Edouard van Cleeff) as well as many estates from what used to be Austria-Hungary.

We even have the fascinating estate of Jan Urban, born as an Austrian in 1875 in today’s Czech Republic. He moved to Serbia where he married and became a naturalised citizen before moving to what today is Croatia, then part of the Kingdom of Serbia. He wasn’t a Jew, but with the outbreak of the Second World War, and Serbia’s support of the Soviet Union, he was persecuted by the Fascist Croatian Ustaša. Following his death in 1952 as a much-decorated and highly regarded composer, his musical estate was split between Osijek in Croatia and Belgrade in Serbia. This left his legacy exposed to persecution from all sides with the outbreak of the Yugoslavian Civil War in 1991. His son died in the middle of the Civil War and his granddaughter, a concert pianist living in Paris at the time flew into Osijek to rescue what she could.  Urban’s estate in many ways stands as testimony to the fact that despite most of the composers and musicians persecuted by Hitler being Jewish, this was not always the case. The Urban musical estate also shows us that the Second World War did not end in September 1945. Poles who had been instrumental in victory against Hitler in the Free Polish Army were handed over to Stalin afterwards as were the Czechs who had managed to remain the last democracy standing in 1938 until they were sold out by the British in the Munich Accord. From 1948, Germany was split into two parts and has yet successfully to grow together and Yugoslavia was a time bomb waiting to explode. The 1990s offered the aftershock that followed the earthquake of two world wars.

Hans Winterberg was another composer whose persecution continued long after the end of the Second World War: following his death in 1991, his manuscripts and musical estate were locked away under a contract signed by the Sudeten German Music Institute, a German cultural institution in 2002, intending to keep his music out of circulation until the first day of 2031: forty years after his death. Then, assuming his music would even have been revivable after such a lengthy absence, it was only to be performed as works by a “Sudeten German” composer with any mention of Winterberg being Jewish treated as a breach of contract. Fortunately, the intercessions of his grandson put a halt to the deliberate and needless damage to the legacy of such an important composer. Winterberg is now one of Boosey & Hawkes’ composers and interest in his music continues to grow.  

Each acquisition tells a different story: one recent acquisition is of a composer who wrote hit-songs for films, but became a dentist in British exile. Another is the Viennese-born composer Marcel Tyberg, arrested in Croatia and murdered in Auschwitz. He was one-sixteenth Jewish, in other words, he had one great-grandparent who was Jewish. As mentioned above, the Ustaša was not just allied with the Nazis, they were much more ruthless. If and when Manès Sperber’s amazing unfinished novel wie eine Träne im Ozean – Like a Tear in the Ocean, is translated, one can read about the back story concerning Serbian terror after the break-up of Yugoslavia. Learning what happened to Serbians and their communities in Croatia and Bosnia does not allow us to condone the revenge they carried out in the early 1990s.

Equally interesting is the phenomenon of archives and libraries in distant lands that hold musical estates that are subsequently passed on to Exilarte – a relief for their own collections that need more space for more recent generations of musicians, artists and ‘machers’.  The truth is, a musical estate handed over in good faith sixty or seventy years ago by a family grateful for the refuge they received, is often less relevant to host countries than their original homelands. We are supremely fortunate in being able to take on the Eric(h) Zeisl estate, formerly housed in the UCLA Performing Arts Library.

Zeisl is fascinating, especially when we compare him with Walter Bricht. Both composers were born within a year of each other and both were highly productive and successful. Bricht, however either hid, or was unaware of his Jewish ancestry. Grandparents had converted and as so often the case in Vienna in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, converted Jews remained outside the family units of profoundly antisemitic bourgeois society, resulting in marriages to other converted Jews. At the time, converted Jews marrying other converted Jews was seen as a joint step towards assimilation. If non-Jewish families were reluctant to marry into the families of converted Jews, it was assumed that such prejudices would disappear over subsequent generations.  Zeisl, who grew up in Vienna’s Second District, the so-called ‘Matzos Island’ (in common with Arnold Schoenberg and Ernst Toch), was never unaware of his Jewish identity. His position as a talented musician elevated him into creative, largely Jewish circles of writers and artists while Bricht remained in musician circles based around his teacher Franz Schmidt. It is where he met his pianist wife, a fellow pupil of Schmidt. Zeisl, on the other hand, met his wife, a lawyer through his various circles of young secular Jewish intellectuals and artists.

For young Austrian composers after the loss of Empire, the only important break-out event that counted was public and press recognition in Germany. Performances in Prague or Zurich were undoubtedly welcome. However, they would not result in the same degree of recognition. In this respect, ignorance of Bricht’s Jewish ancestry allowed him to build a substantial and successful career in Germany after 1933, mostly through the efforts of the fanatically antisemitic conductor Leopold Reichwein, a musician so devoted to the Third Reich that he committed suicide following its defeat. His abhorrence of Mendelssohn pre-dated the arrival of the Nazis. If Bricht was aware of his Jewish ancestry, he must have felt he was walking on eggshells in collaborating with Reichwein. Regardless, the partnership resulted in Bricht having a more international career than Zeisl, which in turn resulted in greater recognition in Austria. Bricht was preparing for performances conducted by Clemens Krauss and the Vienna Philharmonic when he was publicly “rumbled” by Austria Radio for having three Jewish grandparents. A hasty attempt to declare Bricht an “honorary Aryan” was turned down by Bricht who had connections at the American Embassy. Affidavits and immigration were quick and relatively unproblematic. 

I have written in the past, and I think too little has been made of this point, but it was the well-off and well-connected who managed to flee Hitler. Austria’s classical musicians were in a good position. They had seen what had happened in Germany and many had contacts, even funding abroad.  Zeisl was not in this lucky position but his wife and mother-in-law were clever and persistent and went through American phonebooks looking for people named Zeisl or Zeisel. After a few futile attempts, one of them finally came through. The situation for Jews was still unclear. The so-called Kristallnacht pogroms had not taken place and the “final solution” was still four years away, and the idea of murdering Europe’s Jewish population seemed unimaginable. Jews probably believed the Nazis were aiming for a return to the ghettoization of pre-emancipating days. In Germany, Jewish emancipation had only lasted sixty-two years. Someone in their 80s would have remembered days when Jews weren’t allowed to live wherever they liked, or go to university or marry whomever they wanted.  The “Holocaust” was a nightmare that was so far from comprehension that remaining in Germany or Austria was still seen as a viable, if deeply undesirable option.  One just needed to keep one’s head down. It is the reason popular musicians were more often the victims of Nazi gas chambers than classical ones. But even Zeisl, without the profile of Bricht, would have been aware that there was no future remaining in Hitler’s Vienna.

Where things get fascinating is assessing their lives in their new homelands: both having immigrated to New York. Bricht managed a commission from his friend the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein but soon discovered a country that was unaware and uninterested in who he was. There was no resonance. As Ernst Krenek wrote about arriving in America, “it was a land without an echo”.  Zeisl’s experience on the other hand was the very opposite. Again, having to take the initiative paid off. Taking the initiative was probably something that Bricht, the far more established composer had never needed to do.  People came to him as Franz Schmidt’s most brilliant pupil. Zeisl managed performances and even good press notices in New York. Bricht would not return to composition until the very end of his life. Zeisl would suffer six years of having to slog through Hollywood hackwork before again taking the initiative and striking out with his own synthesis of tradition and modernity coloured by Eastern modal harmonies with their ambiguities between major and minor. Zeisl was realistic enough to accept that he could no longer make his way as an Austro-German composer in America. The only means of surviving and “cutting through” meant creating something that was new and personal. His “Jewish” synthesis offers at most the “echo” of the Temple or the Shtetl but never anything more ethnocentric. His writing remains tonal with a halo of Eastern modes. Zeisl took an option that was clearly unavailable to Bricht who discovered his inability to compose in any other fashion than the Austro-German traditions he had grown up with and much applauded in Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden.

Such stories of exile and creativity arrive monthly at the Exilarte Center and tell us that there is still much to learn on the inter-relationships between displacement and creativity.