Music Exile in “Old” and “New Worlds”

To begin, I have to apologise for my apparent neglect of this blog. I have had to go through a devastating personal tragedy that has kept me away from work at Vienna’s Music and Performing Arts University and our Exilarte Center (which continues to grow in importance and profile) as well as from writing. I hope that normality will slowly begin to impose itself on my, at present, highly disruptive life.

Recently, I was asked to review Árni Heimir Ingólfsson’s excellent Music at World’s End, a book that deals with the contributions made to musical life in Iceland by three refugees who arrived in the 1930s: Viktor Urbancic, Heinz Edelstein and Robert Abraham. Sadly, as excellent as the book is, it’s priced for university libraries and not for the average music lover, who might just wonder how a tiny country could move from only having a tradition of male-voice choirs to producing a disproportionate number of world-class musicians covering every imaginable genre. It simply would not have happened had three, not spectacularly exceptional, but highly competent, well-educated musicians not managed to build an orchestra, a music school and introduce music education for children. Iceland now has a population of around 440,000. In the 1930s when the two Germans and one Austrian arrived, it had a population of less than 200,000. Ingólfsson is a wonderful storyteller and his narration holds the attention as he breaks each biography into comparative segments. The evolution from Central European scholars and performers to catalysts that arguably allowed Iceland to excel musically is fascinating and the mysteries of this intriguing corner of the world are wonderfully unfolded in Ingólfosson’s telling. It’s a book that would be just as intriguing to those interested in Iceland as those interested in music’s paths during the twentieth century.

Perhaps one of the most challenging aspect of life in Iceland was avoiding their policy of returning refugees to the Nazis once their visas had expired – something they appeared to do without a second thought. The Icelanders weren’t particularly welcoming and aware of their vulnerability. Eventually, the island would be occupied by the British. It took considerable fortitude, linguistic ability, luck and competence as a refugee to duck and dive the barriers, prejudices and the suspicions of the locals. In the end, Iceland, once a country without a single grand piano, today produces composers, pianists, pop artists, and performers that are vastly out of proportion to its population. Ingólfsson convincingly argues this development can be traced back to the influence, knowledge, patience, and adaptability of Orbancic, Abraham and Edelstein.

But the book raised a point that I only mention in passing in my own book Music of Exile.  It highlights the dichotomies of exile in what we call the “Old World” and the “New World”. In looking more closely at these issues, it’s important to understand the different perceptions held by arriving Austro-German refugees, and the citizens of those “Old” and “New” World countries who provided refuge. And equally, it’s important to understand what is meant by the “New World”, which fundamentally means the parts of the world Europeans invaded, absorbed and colonised over five centuries. In the course of this process, they marginalised the indigenous peoples as well as the people they brought in as slaves. And of course, to the indigenous peoples, what the Europeans called the “New World” was to them, their world and it was thousands of years old. Only much later, did a group of former refugees acknowledge this and undertake studies in the music of the indigenous people of the “New World”.

The European populations of the “Old World” saw the people of European heritage who, over the centuries, had immigrated to the New World as the progeny of religious fanaticism, at best escaping poverty and inequality, and at worst, avoiding, or carrying out criminal prosecution, or evading enforced marriage. At the same time, the people in the New World saw themselves as motivated, adaptable, free to develop their own cultural parameters, unchained to an Old World still spiritually enslaved to its institutions of church and aristocracy.

The regions of the “Old World” that found themselves absorbing fellow “Old World” refugees covered a vast area. It is rarely written about. It included not only Iceland, but also other Scandinavian countries, Great Britain, Russia (then known as the USSR), India, China, Japan, South East Asia etc.  Some of these countries welcomed Austro-German cultural influences and some didn’t. Some, such as Great Britain, the Soviet Union and Iceland, believed they had a musical culture that was unique to their identity and did not need to welcome outside influence.

The New World, however, had also changed over the centuries. Its European interlopers had become citizens and had taken on hyphenated identities, labelling themselves as Irish-American, Norwegian-American, German-American, Italian-American etc. On the one hand, they were happy in their new country where they could fashion life and culture to their own needs without the interference of established institutions. They could establish their own institutions that reflected their needs and beliefs. It has to be remembered that these “New World” countries, having been a magnet since the seventeenth century, really came into their own at the time of the industrial revolution. It was a time when European aristocracy lost its monopoly of wealth and Old World aristocracy was forced to acknowledge the reality of the “Dollar aristocracy” from across the Atlantic. And it wasn’t just the United States, in the early twentieth century, Argentina was wealthier than most European countries.

However, one of the things these transplanted Europeans still maintained, even after generations of transplantation, was an adherence to certain European cultural identifiers, one of which was music. The dilemmas were noticeable. It was acknowledged the great composers, artists, and writers were European and the New World was only starting to catch up. In the question of music, apart from its hybrid of European popular music and the music of its ambient, oppressed and often indigenous people, (in America, this was “Jazz” but it found its equivalents throughout Latin and South America), the “New World” found itself in a bind. If it produced purely European music, it was merely aping the language of the oppressors from whom they had all fled, but if they created their own music, it was apt to come across as shallow and provincial, lacking the timelessness of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

Prior to the end of the First World War, the Old World was not prepared to accept the New World as its cultural equal, while having to accept it as its financial superior. This strange contradiction created tensions. On the one hand, the middle classes in the New World were wealthier and healthier than their equivalents in the Old World, but they also harboured something of an unspoken inferiority complex, which the Old World was happy to exploit.  This is when we find “Dollar- Princesses” marrying Ruritanian aristocracy – and quite often, British, German, French and Austrian aristocracy as well. All of these contradictions and complexes can be found in Emmerich Kálmán’s marvellous operetta The Duchess of Chicago.

I’m not an anthropologist, but I’m sure we can say that the colonisation process was different in each corner of the globe. How North America was colonised was different from Central and South America. Australia and New Zealand have very different histories as do South Africa, Kenya, Namibia and Zimbabwe, not to mention France’s many African colonies. In some countries, indigenous populations were totally sidelined, while in others they were allowed a degree of participation. In any case, nearly all refugees fleeing Hitler headed towards the New World and the issues and challenges they encountered were different from those encountered by refugees who ended up in the Old World.

So what were the challenges encountered in the Old World? First off, resentment that arrogant German speakers believed they had been uniquely blessed by God with the gift of music. In truth, Germans and Austrians took music far more seriously than most other countries. The British considered the German fixation on music as something bordering on the pathological. Music was entertainment and in church, it was meant to inspire. As Egon Wellesz wrote to his daughter, (and this is an approximation of the quote I read in his letter) “in Oxford, they see no need for aesthetics, musicology or music history. The sole purpose of music studies at Oxford is to provide organists for the nation’s great cathedrals.” There was also an uncomfortable realisation that at the time of their arrival in Britain, orchestral musicians, soloists and even teachers were better grounded and more solidly trained than their local equivalents. There was a greater tradition of music in the home among German speaking families. In Britain, being too interested in music was seen as something that might be perceived as slightly deviant with the description of someone as “musical” being a code word in polite society for homosexual.

Of course, there were serious musicians in Britain – even very great composers, but they were marginalised to a degree that would have been unthinkable had they been in Germany or Austria. Quite apart from anything, British composers were largely excluded from developing a meaningful avant-garde.  This was why the young and inquisitive Benjamin Britten was desperate to study with Alban Berg. 

Vaughn Williams, Holst, Delius and Elgar were considered local masters who, with the exception of Holst’s The Planets and Delius’s opera A Village Romeo and Juliet – originally composed in German as Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, were rarely exported.They made a mark in Britain as British composers, while aspiring to a uniquely British sensibility and sense of identity. Expressing national identity in music was something that was taking place everywhere. It was only in the defeated nations of Germany and Austria where developments were pulling in the opposite direction. Music became an integral element in the “New Objectivity” developments that attempted to remove the strings that tied music to nation and cheap emotional manipulation. Schoenberg’s ideas moved in a similar direction, though he believed new avenues of expression could be achieved rather than removed. After the defeat in 1918, artists, writers and musicians believed a cultural expression of national identity could only lead to delusion and ultimately perdition. The countries on the winning side of the First World War saw little reason to question the emotional power of music or to tinker with tonality, let alone leave it altogether. Tonality was the common language that allowed every nation, with the exceptions being Germany and Austria, to express themselves. There was no impetus to move music into new directions. In the run-up to the Great War, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and even Richard Strauss exploited dissonance and Schoenberg departed from tonality. But these were seen as momentary apocalyptic premonitions. In most countries, with the exception of Austria and Germany, tonality and music as an instrument of national identity returned.

Such self-assurance in one’s own national musical identity was definitely a challenge for refugees who had been participants in Central Europe’s new music experiments. It wasn’t just the reaction of losing a war and their respective empires, it was a Central European belief that music was a serious art form in danger of stagnation. This idea alone was unwelcomed in most Old World countries. The idea that music might be the basis of something scientific was laughable to Old World cultural gatekeepers. And yet, despite such obdurate nationalism, German and Austrian refugees eventually managed to make lasting contributions. They died thinking they had done too little. But, they planted seeds that flourished in later generations. An example of this took place in Iceland with Abraham, Urbancic and Edelstein. Once they convinced their hosts that they could make positive contributions that ultimately enriched their musical life, new organisations, schools and ensembles followed. With the success of these institutions, native Icelanders decided they were better equipped to take these projects to the next stage, side-lining the immigrants altogether. Today it may come across as shocking, but Britain offered a similar experience for the refugee composers and musicians fleeing Hitler. After all, both Britain and Iceland were islands in the North Atlantic and proud of their national identity and cultural isolation.

To put these issues into context, it needs to be pointed out, the Shoah – or Holocaust as it has more commonly come to be called, was not a concept until many years after the war.  The Eichmann trial was a moment of revelation that few wanted revisited. Survivors were aware of survival coming at the costs of others.  Nobody could imagine coming out of Auschwitz alive would, in a future, post-Spielberg world, be seen as a badge of honour. During the first decade after the war, the genocide of European Jewry was somehow lost in the context of every family in Europe losing loved ones. The audacity of Hitler’s attempt to wipe out European Jews only sank in with the American television series Holocaust. It suddenly became clear that the murder of Europe’s Jews was not something that happened to other people, but was something that happened to neighbours, family doctors, and teachers.  For these reasons, German and Austrian musicians who found refuge in “Old World” countries attempted to assimilate while not betraying their core values.  Their contributions were slow to take root.

The New World offered an entirely different set of challenges. On the one hand, refugees brought a European link to the hyphenated populations of the North Americas, Australia and New Zealand. This was welcomed, because ultimately, the white European colonisers had never completely lost their European identity. It could be seen in the many organisations that sprung up for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or for Irish Catholics, or Italians, Greeks and Poles.  They all still considered themselves to be “European”, even the Jews who had fled the pogroms of the Russian Czar. And this continued, despite birth in the New World and a near total inability to speak their original mother tongues. For these reasons, European refugees were made more welcome and the contributions they made were acknowledged. It would be much later before both New Worlders and former refugees could view each other objectively.

European refugees in the New World initially saw the locals as cultural inferiors and lacking in depth and decorum. In Los Angeles they were referred to as the “Beiunsniks” because they began each observation on life in their new country with the linguistic tick of “Bei uns” –  meaning “Where we come from”, before continuing in English on how young people didn’t put hands in pockets, or chew gum or whistle on the street. When news eventually filtered through of murdered family members, their sense of cultural superiority diminished. At the same time, the confidence they had instilled in their most talented students would result in an oedipal impulse to dismiss their contributions as “important” and “crucial” but “fundamentally irrelevant”. Few of Schoenberg’s American pupils would become twelve-tone composers. Indeed, Schoenberg was selective in teaching twelve tone and stuck largely with the fundamentals of Tonsatz, harmony, counterpoint, form, variation etc. It would be the 1960s, when American academia would join with the CIA instigated European avant-garde, and declare complexity to be an aesthetic element that surpassed anything resembling superficial appeal.

The “oedipal” reaction also took place in Iceland. Once new institutions and ideas had been delivered, it was generally decided that it was best for the locals to take charge, while thanking the immigrants for their contributions. To offer a typically trivialising example of what happened to music, one need only look at what happened to pizza. Having been introduced by Italian immigrants, native-born Americans fell in love with the idea and created a dish that was completely different, but more “relevant” to Americans. What happened with food, happened with music, and it happened wherever immigrants arrived and brought new ideas or new recipes. It would not last more than a decade or so after the war for New World instrumentalists, conductors and singers to dominate the international concert and opera circuit. Arnold Schoenberg recognised this development when he told George Gershwin that he had nothing to teach him.

What this article is attempting to outline is the different challenges encountered by Austro-German musicians depending on whether they ended up in the Old World where existent music traditions and institutions were suspicious of Austro-German interlopers, or in the New World, where they were initially welcomed but subsequently superseded as irrelevant. Young composers, musicians and scholars in the New World wanted to go their own way and while welcoming the wisdom and depth of experience brought by immigrants, they felt it ultimately had little relevance to their own developments.

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/die-lebensgeschichte-von-robert-abraham-ottosson-von-berlin-100.html

Scroll about a minute into the above link in German to hear a moving arrangement of an Icelandic folksong by Robert Abraham, or Róbert Abraham Ottósson, as he became known in Iceland. (Best to open in a new tab in order to continue reading.)

Music at World’s End, Ingólfsson’s wonderful book about music refugees in Iceland and their contributions only demonstrates the challenges and ultimately, the subsequent disappointments these highly competent, generous and grateful former refugees experienced. They succeeded, as the most skilful of refugees in Britain would succeed, by acknowledging rather than belittling local music traditions and building on what they found. The example of Robert Abraham becoming the leading scholar of early Icelandic liturgical music is a case in point. It compares with developments in the study of early music and performance practice in the UK being traced back to Egon Wellesz, who like Viktor Urbancic was a former pupil of Guido Adler at Vienna’s University. The successful music émigré realised that imposing a presumed cultural superiority would never be accepted. They needed to find a way of appending the knowledge, experience and skills they brought onto the existing apparatus.  And when their contributions had taken root with the next generation, they would be kindly asked to step aside so that a local, native-born conductor, administrator, rector or professor could take over.