April 30



NEW YORK:

Music Silenced by the Nazis Finds Its Voice


The destruction wrought by World War II extended deep into the musical
landscape of the last century. Composers perished or were sent into exile,
their works were banned and eventually forgotten. Entire chapters of music
history were never written.

Recent years, however, have witnessed an amazing surge of interest in "Art
From Ashes," as one CD is titled. Often on recordings but also in live
performance, composers are getting a second hearing, a chance for their
music to speak to a public once more.

Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Hans Krasa and Gideon Klein are among those
whose music has been brought to life in recent years. To this list, one
must also add Erwin Schulhoff, a German-speaking Czech Jew who had an
audacious and original musical voice and a fascinating career before dying
in a Bavarian concentration camp in 1942. His music is the focus of a
three-concert series this weekend at the 92nd Street Y and Lincoln Center.

Reclamation projects of this nature began cropping up over a decade ago,
and amid the choruses of approval, occasional questioning can now be
heard. Is the music to be regarded as art capable of speaking on its own
terms, or as an artifact that illustrates a particularly tragic moment of
history? Can we commemorate these composers as victims of Nazism while
still listening to their music through critical ears? For the conductor
James Conlon, who leads the Schulhoff events this weekend as the second
installment of his project "Recovering a Musical Heritage," the primary
goal is simply to put into circulation the music that was prematurely
removed. "Many of these composers did not live to maturity and the
dialogue that should have occurred among them did not take place," he
explained on a recent visit to New York. "I'm not saying that this will
replace Mozart," he added. "Over the course of decades, it will be decided
which are the pieces that really matter. But we owe it to ourselves and we
owe it to the memory of those composers whose music was banned, to give it
a profound hearing."

A sensible proposal it would seem, and all the more so with Schulhoff,
whose music requires little propping up in order to intrigue. He was a
composer and gifted pianist who thrived in Europe's burbling laboratory of
artistic experimentation between the wars. He wrote serious chamber music
and symphonies but also naughty musical pranks, a piano concerto with a
steamboat whistle, and an oratorio about a naval ship whose crew mutinies
after the admiral bans the playing of jazz.

More generally, Schulhoff had a positively Zeligesque gift for
assimilating the different styles of modern music in the air around him,
moving swiftly through Dadaism, Expressionism and neo-Classicism. To
survey his oeuvre, as audiences will have a chance to do this weekend, is
to peer into the dizzying musical kaleidoscope of his times.

Born in Prague in 1894, Schulhoff was a precocious pianist. At 7 his
mother took him to see Dvorak, who was apparently skeptical about
prodigies but affirmed Schulhoff's talent and sent him on his way with two
chocolate bars and a recommendation for a private teacher.

He had a traditional German musical education, but his early years as a
composer were cut short by World War I. He served in the Austrian Army for
almost the full duration of the war, returning massively disillusioned
like so many artists of his generation. Schulhoff's cynicism extended to
his outlook on musical tradition, and he abandoned his former
late-Romantic style as a relic of prewar artistic ideals that had lost
their currency in a world irrevocably changed.

After the war Schulhoff moved to Dresden, Germany, immersing himself in
provocative Dadaist circles and making his own memorable contributions.
His "Symphonia Germanica" of 1919 features a male singer absurdly
bellowing out "Deutschland ber Alles," the patriotic hymn that had been
sung by the kaiser's soldiers during the Great War and would become the
German national anthem. His "Sonata Erotica" of the same year calls for a
solo female actress to recreate the throes of passion, a sort of German
Dadaist version of Meg Ryan's famous diner scene in "When Harry Met
Sally."

Neither work is on the program for this weekend (they are available on the
Channel Classics record label), but Schulhoff's "Bass Nightingale" for
solo contrabassoon should convey a sense of the composer's rebellious
streak. It will be performed by Arlen Fast on Sunday afternoon at the 92nd
Street Y, and will include a monologue Schulhoff wrote attacking all those
less Dadaistically inclined: "You petty marionettes, fops, bespectacled
pseudo-intellectuals, you pathological hothouse plants and decayed
Expressionists."

Schulhoff's Dada phase was temporary, but the more enduring influence from
that period was American jazz, which the composer first heard on
recordings owned by the painter George Grosz. He quickly integrated jazz
into many of his own compositions, including his Suite for Chamber
Orchestra of 1921, which Mr. Conlon has just recorded on the Capriccio
label, and which the Juilliard Orchestra will perform tonight under his
baton in Alice Tully Hall. Also on the program will be Schulhoff's
jazz-inflected piano concerto of 1923, with the Juilliard pianist David
Greilsammer as the soloist.

While Schulhoff took a leading role in integrating jazz with classical
music, he also became a formidable jazz pianist himself. In 1924, the same
year that George Gershwin performed the premiere of his "Rhapsody in
Blue," Olin Downes of The New York Times described a Salzburg performance
of Schulhoff's chamber music after which the composer "betook himself to a
certain inn and played American ragtime on the piano till the walls
tottered."

But Schulhoff's probing for the sound of musical modernity did not end
with either jazz or Dadaism. In works from the same period, he delved into
the 12-tone territory of Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School.
Schulhoff's remarkable String Sextet, which will be performed tomorrow
evening at the 92nd Street Y, shows that he was capable of writing
rigorous atonal music with his own distinctive stamp, though evidently not
with much enthusiasm. The composer put aside the piece after writing just
one movement. Mr. Conlon puts it simply: "He was not in harmony with that
kind of music."

By the time he picked up the Sextet again, he had returned to Prague, his
quest for innovation having brought him to a folk-influenced
neo-Classicism. The remaining movements of the Sextet are written in that
vein, with haunting string effects and at times a rugged Bartokian style.

Where Schulhoff would have ultimately settled aesthetically is anyone's
guess. In the early 1930's his outlook went through one last
transformation, the most radical of all, when the composer placed his
faith in the Soviet Union, judging it to be the best bulwark against
fascism and the gathering threat of war. Remarkably, after more than a
decade of advocating progressive modern music, Schulhoff voluntarily
embraced the ideals of Socialist Realism and renounced all his previous
experiments. He launched a new phase of Marxist-inspired music, going as
far as writing a cantata based on the "Communist Manifesto."

Also dating from this period is Schulhoff's strident Fifth Symphony, which
Mr. Conlon will perform tonight with the Juilliard Orchestra. The
conductor is fascinated by the genuine idealism behind the symphony, or
what he calls "Marxism as muse." With its blustery tunes and bombastic
march rhythms, the work certainly makes for a striking contrast with
everything that came before, though it is hard to avoid lamenting the
self-censoring of such a creative musical mind.

Moreover, Schulhoff's newfound political faith was tragically tenacious.
He was convinced that his Soviet allegiance would protect him in
Nazi-occupied Prague while he made plans to emigrate to the Soviet Union.
But before he could leave, Hitler broke the German-Soviet Nonaggression
Pact, and Schulhoff was rounded up with his son and taken to the Wlzburg
concentration camp in Bavaria, where he died of tuberculosis within a
year. A survivor remembered the sound of him playing piano in the guard
room. One imagines it was probably jazz.

The major events of the war are clear in hindsight, but Schulhoff's story
is a poignant reminder of the inscrutability of history as experienced by
those who lived it in the present. Indeed, examining Schulhoff and other
composers like him can be worthwhile not only as an exercise in honoring
the memory of victims, or as a means of discovering unduly neglected
music, but also as a way of correcting the stories we tell to explain the
20th century.

In particular, Schulhoff's life challenges the idea that the 1920's were
one long and steady march toward a catastrophe whose true nature should
have been foreseen by all. His music invites us to consider the cultural
richness of a period whose political tumult coexisted with a sense of
radical artistic possibility as composers grappled like never before with
the struggle to find music's modern voice.

Among the competing paths being forged, Schoenberg's version won out after
the war, and serial music became synonymous with modernism. As Mr. Conlon
and others have argued, the dominance of serialism allowed it to define
the story of its own victory, making its triumph seem like a preordained
conclusion. This meant that the modernist alternatives that once existed
were brushed aside; composers who had not renounced tonality came to be
viewed as reactionary. This may well have contributed to Schulhoff's
lingering obscurity.

In the broadest sense, then, considering the music of Schulhoff and others
of his period may be a crucial way of restoring a sense of the breadth,
vitality and diversity of the original modernist experiment, and by
extension, the true legacy it has bequeathed to us today. Surely not all
of the recovered music will stay in circulation, but in the process of
sorting through it, one illuminates a once-bright artistic period between
the wars, a chapter of cultural history that has too often been obscured
by the implacably dark shadow of its own future.

(source: New York Times)