Forbidden Music Read Free

exhibition, ‘Entartete Musik’ (‘Degenerate Music’) in Düsseldorf to demonstrate the supposed ‘degenerate’ influence on German musical life by what they called ‘Jewish Cultural Bolshevism’.
    This is not a book about Nazis but about the composers who were lost, and the musical trends they established before being banned, murdered and exiled. It also examines the tragic postwar developments that kept them on the margins long after the fall of Hitler's Reich. As such, this book lays out how Jews saw themselves, and how they were seen by non-Jews. It tries to contextualise the discrepancy that often emerges from these different perceptions and to evaluate the music written by Jewish composers, much of which remains unjustly neglected.
    In dealing with how Jews saw themselves and the world around them, I have used two main sources: Vienna's newspaper the Neue Freie Presse , which, since its earliest days, was seen as one of the great European papers and a voice of social and economic Liberalism. Its daily essays, called ‘feuilletons’, offered an exceptional forum for intellectual discourse. The paper was written and produced largely by secular Jewish journalists for a largely Liberal readership, many of whom were also secular and Jewish. The Viennese Jewish polemicist Karl Kraus in his own publication, Die Fackel , defines the journalism of the day by relentlessly attacking it. He saves his most lethal darts for all writers of feuilletons, especially those writing for the Neue Freie Presse . To Kraus, feuilletons were an unhealthy and unwelcome mix of fact and personal creativity. Kraus's ethical and intellectual standards have, I suspect, made many historians reluctant to use feuilletons as a source for understanding the thinking of the time. His views on creative journalism turned out to be fully justified. Still, to ignore feuilletons that appeared in the Viennese press is to ignore the manner in which some of the age's brightest and most articulate writers viewed and responded to the world around them. I take theview that feuilletons ( pace Karl Kraus) are not journalism in the pure sense of reporting events, but a literary genre that grew out of people's reaction to the world in which they lived. With photography and moving pictures still in their infancy, they offer some of the most captivating images of the past. Nobody would dare to challenge the ethical might of Karl Kraus, but I believe the world has moved on, and his rants against opinion-based journalism can – for our purposes – be respected, but passed over.
    My other key source comes from the journal Musikblätter des Anbruch , later called simply Anbruch . It was launched in 1919 by Universal Edition (UE), the Viennese publisher of many of the composers who would find themselves banned in Germany after 1933. Anbruch was run by secular Jews and aimed at a progressive readership. With the highly regarded Eduard Hanslick serving since 1864 as principal critic for the Neue Freie Presse , and his successor Julius Korngold, along with Guido Adler who was the ‘éminence grise’ of Anbruch , we gain a very clear idea of how Jews participated in musical life until 1933 in Germany, and 1938 in Austria. Both publications represented authoritative forums for cultural, musical and intellectual discourse: they were progressive, secular and resoundingly aware of their own Germanic culture in the international context of musical trends and developments.
    The 2003 exhibition at Vienna's Jewish Museum took the title ‘Quasi una fantasia’ to express the cultural delusion that grew out of Jewish political and social emancipation . The implication was that assimilation was a mirage that had beguiled Jewish composers into writing works that affirmed their entitlement to German culture, only then to be ejected from their natural home by Hitler. This implied delusion meant that even when they enjoyed great popularity among non-Jewish audiences, these composers