The most articulate dismantling of Wagner’s arguments in his 1869 tract ‘Jewishness in Music’ is provided by Eduard Hanslick in the ‘Neue Freie Presse’. I quote it at length in ‘Forbidden Music’. Hot… Continue reading
Political environments shape the arts. For this reason, it’s important to understand the debates and issues that surrounded and often engulfed both the Jewish and non-Jewish ‘Hitler-generation’ of composers. One of the most… Continue reading
Ernst Toch and Paul Hindemith were initially ‘Terrible Twins’, though Hindemith was the younger, bolder and more mischievous. His sense of music’s possible ‘usefulness’ was more idealistic and he saw in this idea… Continue reading
For those who read German and would appreciate both the aid of graphics and explanations of who is who, this – as yet unfinished – start to ‘The Last Days of Mankind’ (Die… Continue reading
If there is a single person who put flesh onto the skeletal idea of hunting down music lost during the Nazi years, it was Berthold Goldschmidt, the self-effacing, quiet German émigré approaching his… Continue reading
One of my German colleagues wondered why ‘Forbidden Music’ seemed to have such a strong Austrian bias. I explained that the sub-title of the book was ‘The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis’… Continue reading
If you go to the Dartmouth Jewish Sound Archive and register, you should, once your log-in is confirmed, be able to put Chochem into the search engine and listen to a number of… Continue reading
Here the final two covers from Ernst Toch’s private LP collection, maintained at the Library of Performing Arts at UCLA. For those who missed Misha Horenstein’s comments on the previous posts and are… Continue reading
Another striking plate from Hans Mermann’s 1928 book on ‘Modern Music’ was the 1924 portrait of Arnold Schoenberg painted by Oskar Kokoschka. The internet offers no information on where this portrait is held,… Continue reading
Anne Midgette writes about ‘Forbidden Music’ – and is largely generous in her appraisal. Sadly, there are a number of minor-slips in my book that some people are picking up. My slip, at… Continue reading
