The Exilarte Center at Vienna’s University for Music and Performing Arts Celebrates its Tenth Anniversary

Exilarte has just celebrated its tenth anniversary as an Archive and Research Center. This article is illustrated with just a few of the estates held, and they’ve been inserted randomly.

It was more than twenty years ago, when Vienna’s Orpheus Trust abruptly ceased operations and handed its modest collection of musical estates to Berlin’s Akadmie der Künste (Academy of Arts). It then turned its attention to compiling a directory of every Austrian musician who was a victim of the Third Reich. One of Austria’s most highly regarded diplomats, Dr Emil Brix, mentioned by way of suggestion to the professor of Music Theory Gerold Gruber, based at Vienna’s University for Music and Performing Arts (known as the mdw), that though it was disappointing the Orpheus Trust had pulled its operations, there was still a need for a forum, at the very minimum, that could mount concerts, offer specialist advice and share information. The exil.arte Society was thus founded in 2006 and housed in Professor Gruber’s office. The following year, while I was still working as music curator at Vienna’s Jewish Museum, Prof. Gruber approached me to join him at the exil.arte Society, or “Verein” as it was known in German.

It would be fair to say that there was considerable scepticism and even bad-will coming from various German academic colleagues as well as the former head of the Orpheus Trust who felt none of us was competent for such an undertaking. The Orpheus Trust publicly stated the City of Vienna had backtracked on its commitment to support its work. As result, it made good its threats to give its collection of musical estates to a Berlin institution. The Orpheus Trust had legitimately won the confidence of a large number of serious and respected musicologists and historians who felt Austria had deliberately suppressed its complicity during the Nazi years and was still unwilling to admit to its culpability. All of this took place twenty years ago though it really does feel like a lifetime has passed since then. Many Germans and the head of the Orpheus Trust specifically decided Vienna was still filled with unrepentant Nazis. It was a comfortable story to put about when the Orpheus Trust found itself unable to answer awkward questions regarding its accounts.

After I left the Jewish Museum, I accepted an informal contract to liaise the families of former exiled Austrian Musicians with Vienna’s Municipal Library and its highly prestigious Music Collection. Initially, this worked out, until things came to an abrupt halt. The Music Collection admitted that regretfully, it had neither the space nor the personnel to deal with the numbers being presented. The sheer scale of Vienna’s musical diaspora was unimaginable to the well-meaning city functionaries who ran its libraries, archives, collections and museums. Even the director of the Jewish Museum couldn’t believe the numbers when, at his request, I compiled a list of every Viennese musician and composer, across all genres, who had been made to flee or had suffered persecution through threats, internment or execution. His reaction was to admit that given the numbers, and names, all of which he recognised, music was the most significant cultural contribution made by Vienna’s Jews during the inter-war decades. Its numbers eclipsed writers, scientists, academics, doctors, painters and patrons. And it’s a sobering fact that in terms of serious music (leaving film and popular music to one side) Austria’s Jewish composers counted such significant individuals as Goldmark, Mahler, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Korngold, Toch and Hanns Eisler with even less familiar names such as Hans Gál, Karol Rathaus or Egon Wellesz as important composers during the inter-war years. In all of Germany, Jewish composers of serious music were less visible. There was Walter Braunfels, a Catholic convert and Kurt Weill who moved seamlessly between high-and-middle brow output. Of course, in Germany there were many Jewish performers and composers of light music, which was also the case in Austria-Hungary. Many of them were former students of the Music Academy, today’s University of Music and Performing Arts, shortened to its German abbreviation of mdw.  Many others were self-taught emerging during an age when broadcast and recording were still relatively primitive and music was performed in the home by talented amateurs.

A Dutch transmision of Grosz’s amusing contemporary operetta (I prefer to call it a cabaret operetta) Achtung! Aufnahme! (Standby! Recording!)

It was around 2015 when Vienna’s municipal institutions were no longer able to take the estates of former, refugee musicians, Gerold Gruber and I put together a plan to convert the exil.arte Society into something more ambitious. While discussing our plans, it became clear that we had a major opportunity to expand exil.arte’s remit and purpose. Until then, the focus had been on Austria, but what was Austria? Most of the composers and musicians who were born “Austrian” were actually born in today’s Czech Republic, Slovakia, Italy, Croatia, Ukraine or Poland. Of course, there were also many who were born in what is today’s Austria, which prior to 1918 was referred to as “German-Austria” in order to differentiate it from the rest of the Austria (not counting Hungary), that was Slavic-Austria. (Not counting its Italian speaking regions) The composers born in places that were formerly Austrian were left in limbo. Post-war, they were neither recognised as Austrian or as Polish, Czech, Croatian or whatever. For the Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs etc. they were believed to be too Austrian and for the Austrians post-1918, they were believed to be too Polish, Ukrainian, Czech.

The limitations of focusing on Austrians were clear. The solution was to drop the restriction to “Austria” and open up the archive to any musician who had been made to flee regardless of where they were born. We decided to expand the remit to include any part of Europe that was occupied by the Nazis. And indeed, why just limit our new undertaking to practicing musicians? People in the music business were as dynamic as any musician when it came to deciding who and what was placed in front of the public. There were few archives that offered homes to exiled scholars, journalists, agents, publishers, personal secretaries, assistants or institutional managers. And incredibly, it was in these areas, that suffered the most destructive antisemitic purges. As a result, there is regrettably very little that is still preserved or available. Still, we decided we would take anything that came our way. Our final change of course was to lift any and all restrictions on genre while removing our personal views on such subjective ideas such as “importance”,  “quality” and “value”. What was considered rubbish, or a cultural embarrassment at one point, (remember the views on Korngold only a decade or so ago, or the views of Rachmaninov from a generation earlier?) could be accepted as valid musical expressions in the future. The self-appointed arbiters of taste have arguably done as much damage to music as any Nazi Gauleiter.

One of the desk-drawer marches composed in his rented room in London. Written only for his inner-ear and a private means of returning to the Austria he knew before Hitler. This is called Heimat Erde, or Homeland Earth

Our concept was put to the president of the University, Ulrike Sych, who said something that has remained with me: “No country lost more of its musical legacy during the Hitler years than Austria, so if there is to be an archive and research centre, it has to be in Austria, and if it’s in Austria, it has to be in Vienna, and if it’s in Vienna, it has to be in our institution, which with its 200 year history, was the place where so many of those who were expelled or murdered studied and taught.” The historic building of the former Music Academy was modified with vast sums poured in to create a floor that consisted of a state-of-the-art vault for storing paper, manuscripts, photos and other fragile documents. Professional archivists were hired, an events’ manager, classes proposed for student credits, an exhibition floor opened, and office space made available along with a sound archive, research facilities and a rehearsal room, which houses the rebuilt, Bösendorfer piano of composer Egon Wellesz.

Soon, Exilarte had its own concert series, was being invited across the globe and struck publishing deals with Schirmer Music and Boosey & Hawkes in New York, Berlin and London. It had had become a dynamic archive that created the conduits for its works to be heard, played and disseminated.

It’s amazing to think that all of this activity took place twenty years ago when Gerold Gruber founded the exil.arte Society and ten years ago when the Society was incorporated into the University with its own building and facilities. What it has achieved is unique. If granulated, we can analysis the synthesis music underwent as émigrés landed in the Anglo-American New World, the Spanish-Portuguese New World, the European Old World and the non-European Old World.

Further differences become apparent when looking at the ages of musicians and composers with those born in the 1870s and 1880s already established names. Those born between 1890 and 1910 just entering their most productive years. Those born in 1910 and afterwards were barely out of music college and more or less managed to establish careers in new homelands while carrying the identity of their former homelands with them like an albatross. Most inwardly conflicted in many ways were those born in 1920 and afterwards. This was a group who arrived in new homelands as children or teenagers. It was a stage of life when social forces demand conformity with peers. They too were aware of their original identities, but attempted to learn new languages to replace the ones they spoke at home. Many went to great lengths to deny their refugee pasts, or indeed, acknowledge any reason for their flight from former homelands. If the generation born between 1910 and 1920 carried the albatross around their necks where it was visible, those born in the 1920s carried it inside where it couldn’t be seen, but weighed just as heavily inwardly. The music written by these transplanted composers covered vast ranges of genre and expression. Much was written for publication, or for teaching purposes, while a good deal was composed for friends and colleagues, but most interesting was the music written for self-therapy, confined to desk drawers and kept locked away like a secret diary.

And then, there are the estates of those murdered that reflect a degree of artistic stasis. Here we encounter more organic developments suddenly cut off – there is no exile to speak of, no synthesis of old and new homelands, just an abrupt rupture that tells us at the very least where the musical centre of gravity lay at the point it was eliminated.

But the question that remains unaddressed is how did the world end up in such a situation? What were the negative forces that created this cultural diaspora and were responsible for not just the expulsion of a creative elite, but imprisonment and genocide? We search for answers while at the same time wondering if it’s too facile to compare today with the 1930s? Of course, history doesn’t repeat itself one-to-one. If that were the case, all the podcasters and journalists who rant against today’s governments would have been shot or imprisoned. At the same time, we’re witnessing the emergence of politicians who absolutely would silence criticism as soon as they found the means of doing so. By being a repository of music, Exilarte has also become a reflection of politics and this reflection reminds us of developments in the past that can easily return. History may not repeat itself or, pace Mark Twain, even rhyme. The results we see today, however, inevitably are the progeny of similar actions to those taken in the past. The de-humanisation of fellow citizens. What was true then is true today.

The world is now very different. In the 1930s, it was mostly Europeans fleeing to New World countries colonised by former Europeans. Some refugees managed to flee to safer European countries. Only a few fled and remained to make contributions in non-European countries such as Japan, China or India. Today, we are witnessing a reversal. Large numbers of non-Europeans are fleeing to Europe and the New World. Rather than fight Camus’s notorious “Great Replacement Theory”, it’s best to treat it in the same way we have integrated arts, literature and even television. Synthesis is formed – black and brown don’t replace white but bring their own talents and create cultures that we already see in much of the United States and Europe. Mixtures of skin colours, mixtures of cuisines and inevitably, mixtures of music, both serious and popular. The so-called “Replacement theory” was turned on its head when a white farm boy named Elvis Presley took the music of Black Americans and made himself incredibly rich just as a pop group made up of attractive blond young men called The Police took music from Black Caribbeans. If there is replacement going on here, it appears to be heading in the opposite direction. I doubt any black singer could have had the success of Elvis Presley or any Jamaican band could have had the success of The Police.  But, in the end, everyone’s musical borders were shifted beyond traditional expectations, accepting things they hadn’t considered before. Even Jazz and Swing was black music that whites managed largely to expropriate. It’s not just jazz, reggae or calypso, it’s also the Bossa Nova the rhumba and other Latin American genres. It’s an injustice that this was the case, but on the other hand, it presented black culture, both from the United States and the Caribbean, to music lovers who would never have been exposed to it otherwise. So, my point is synthesis is good, not bad. The demonisation of people with different skin colours and different religious traditions and customs is like King Canute trying to hold back the waves. These different cultures meld with indigenous cultures and create something entirely new. The present fences, walls and barriers being built along with the demagoguery being spewed can only lead to violence, and is there anything more harmful for people and culture? 

The above music examples are just a few of the many estates now held by the Exilarte Center.