Forbidden Music Read Free Page A

remained very far from obtaining true equality and acceptance.
    Yet it wasn't only a delusion. To leave it at that would be to chalk up a victory to the anti-Semitism that culminated in the Third Reich. By banning Jewish artists, musicians and writers the Nazis had not removed delusional fantasists but, instead, broken fundamental links in the chain that made up German musical continuity.
    In an eerie fulfilment of Hugo Bettauer's satirical novel from 1922 The City without Jews or Die Stadt ohne Juden , Germany and Austria, rendered virtually Judenfrei after 1945, have struggled in the decades following, to regain their prominence as leaders of musical development. After centuries of determining how music interacted within society, these two German nations found themselves overtaken by the very countries that had given refuge to their émigrés. Yet even these host countries largely mishandled their opportunities. Few composers could establish themselves in their new homelandswithout either appealing to new and unknown audiences or relying on the support of fellow émigrés who ran many of the musical institutions in America and elsewhere for quarter of a century after the war.
    There may be no qualitative difference in the music composed by Weill on Broadway, or Korngold in Hollywood or even Joseph Kosma in Paris with his now iconic French chansons, but one thing is beyond dispute: their development as composers, despite new-found success, was disrupted. With many others, it was stopped altogether. It was perhaps only the most talented, opportunistic or resourceful who could continue to remain creative in their new environments.
    This is an epic story that starts with the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and ends with the new definitions of music and society in the 1960s. Such an expanse of history squeezed into a single volume means that significant people and events are sometimes merely signposted, in the hope that interested readers will investigate further for themselves. This book also tries to avoid the inevitable ‘what if’ questions, offering instead an account of what happened and exploring what shaped the decisions that an important lost generation of composers was forced to make.

CHAPTER 1
German and Jewish
    And as I reached the country's border,
    I felt an inner tremble growing
    It moved within my deepest breast
    And wet with tears my eyes were glowing

    Yet when I heard the German tongue
    A strange mood overtook my soul
    It seemed as if my very heart
    Though bleeding, filled with joy, was whole

    Heinrich Heine, A Winter's Tale , Caput 1
    Isak Schrečker, the Jewish father of the composer Franz Schreker, had been court photographer in Budapest to Franz Joseph, King of Hungary and Emperor of Austria, as well as to his son and heir Crown Prince Rudolf, since obtaining the royal seal of approval in 1871. In 1874, he divorced his Jewish wife, converted to Protestantism and changed his name to Ignácz Ferenz Schrecker before placing an advertisement in the paper in search of a new, presumably non-Jewish, wife. The success of this venture must have startled even him: with his marriage to the penniless god-daughter of Princess Eleonore Maria Windisch-Graetz, his new wife, Eleonore von Clossmann, was related to the families Thurn und Taxis, Fürstenberg, Lobkowitz and Waldstein, Austria's most blue-blooded aristocrats. Only a decade earlier, such a union would have been unthinkable, and seen in the context of the time, the marriage demonstrated the speed and degree of acceptance of Jewish assimilation.
    Isak had been born in 1834 in Bohemia, which at the time was Austrian. Typical of Jews during these early days of Liberalism, he had become an earlyadopter of new technologies and by the late 1860s had based himself in Budapest where, in addition to royalty, he accumulated an impressive list of celebrity clients.
    Equally characteristic of this new age of social emancipation was the fact that in 1912 Wilhelm Pickl von