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Oct. 11, 2013
Art comes back to life
TPE performs music banned by the Third Reich.
BASYA LAYE
Turning Point Ensemble is used to performing bold works for Vancouver audiences. The upcoming season is no exception. TPE opens 2013-2014 with works by composers whose music was considered “degenerate” and banned by the Third Reich.
The Forbidden Music includes works by two German composers who fled Europe and settled in North America, Little Threepenny Music by Kurt Weill and Kammermusik No. 1 by Paul Hindemith, as well as works by two Czech composers who died in concentration camps, Wind Quintet op. 10 by Pavel Haas and the Concerto for String Quartet and Wind Ensemble by Erwin Schulhoff.
According to conductor Owen Underhill, the inspiration for this concert emerged from TPE’s mandate, which “includes the performance of extraordinary large ensemble music of the first half of the 20th century, including the rediscovery of music that is rarely heard.”
“The systematic and terrible persecution of the Third Reich effectively pushed underground and/or extinguished amazing musical directions prevalent in Germany and eastern Europe during the twenties and into the early thirties,” Underhill told the Jewish Independent. “It was our goal in mounting this concert to present the high point of this expression prior to its composers fleeing the onslaught of the Third Reich (in the case of Weill and Hindemith) or being imprisoned and killed (in the case of Schulhoff and Haas). The music performed covers the period 1922-1930.
“We have performed in the past the music of Kurt Weill and Erwin Schulhoff, and this concert provided the opportunity to perform for the first time Weill’s iconic Little Threepenny Music suite and Schulhoff’s superb Concerto for String Quartet and Wind Ensemble. In the case of Haas, his music has only become more prominent in the last decade, and I was delighted to discover, in addition to his string quartets, a very special wind quintet from 1929. The Hindemith piece is a brilliant and virtuosic work for large ensemble composed in 1922 when he was only 27 years old.”
Music and the arts flourished during the Weimar years, an exceptionally fertile creative and intellectual period between the First and Second World Wars, and there was a considerable shift away from the romanticism of previous decades. Weimar composers explored the social utility of music and incorporated elements of other genres and performance, as artists and intellectuals kept at least one eye on the rise of fascism and Nazism across Europe, including the composers represented in TPE’s The Forbidden Music.
“Music in Germany in the 1920s was innovative and daring, and certainly post-romantic. Influences included jazz, cabaret, politically inspired music and artistic movements of the period, including dada,” Underhill explained. “Both Weill and Schulhoff were active in politics of the left, including the communist movement, and their music on the program also exhibits influences of jazz and cabaret. Haas, like his Czech composer mentor Leos Janacek, was influenced by folk music. In the case of Hindemith, his Kammermusik No. 1 from 1922 shows a vibrant and eclectic form of expressionism.”
As anti-Jewish and anti-communist propaganda flooded Germany and began to leak through to the rest of Europe, the Third Reich kept a stranglehold on art they deemed to be decadent and un-German, banning works by hundreds of composers, painters, authors, sculptors, architects, filmmakers and anyone else they deemed radical.
“The Third Reich banned all music by Jewish composers, as well as any trends in music that they defined as ‘degenerate’ or ‘entarte,’” Underhill said. “This included all leading modernist directions, including 12-tone music (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern), atonal music (they included Hindemith in this), Igor Stravinsky, jazz and what they termed cultural Bolshevism (which certainly included Weill and Schulhoff).
“Following the lead of the notorious 1937 Degenerate Art visual arts exhibition, the Third Reich mounted in 1938 a week-long Third Reich Music Days in Dusselfdorf, which presented ethnically ‘pure’ music and denigrated through posters and other means ‘degenerate’ music, which was described as ‘subhuman.’ There were seven components to the degenerate music exhibition which identified many of the composers banned since 1933 who had in fact already escaped, including Hindemith, Weill and many others (Schoenberg, Krenek, Stravinsky).”
Weill is best known for his music for The Threepenny Opera, a musical by dramatist Berthold Brecht, which was banned by the German government. Weill’s Little Threepenny Music, a concert suite, was commissioned just following the Opera’s première by conductor Otto Klemperer.
“The instrumental Little Threepenny suite includes many of the famous songs that are in the opera,” Underhill explained, “including ‘Mack the Knife,’ ‘Ballad of the Easy Life’ and ‘Tango Ballad.’ The suite is authentic, having been assembled by Weill himself in 1929, and has the jazz-influenced orchestration, including two saxophones, accordion, wind instruments, including trombone and tuba, and banjo and guitar. It is really the iconic cabaret-influenced and also Brechtian-inspired sound of Weill in the late twenties, totally original at the time, and perhaps never really repeated in his music written in North America.”
The fact that many artists and musicians, including Haas and Schulhoff, did not survive Nazi Germany’s extermination machine, makes the survival of their music even more extraordinary.
“Firstly and unfortunately, I think it is fair to say that their music barely survived the war,” Underhill said. “It has only been through the efforts of a number of historic projects of the past 20 years that much of the music by composers who died in Nazi concentration camps is now being heard and performed.
“Pavel Haas deserves much greater recognition,” he continued. “He was a student of Janacek and perhaps the composer that most developed from this tradition, especially with his use of Moravian folk music. He was also influenced by Jewish chant, European music and jazz, and developed into a highly skilled and original composer well versed in international trends.
“Erwin Schulhoff was a one-of-a-kind. He was an extraordinary pianist who was proficient in jazz. He was influenced by and assimilated many leading trends of the times from his years in Germany in the early thirties. His unique Concerto for String Quartet and Wind Ensemble that we will perform was composed in 1930 for the early recording studio. His later compositions in the thirties were directly political and communist-inspired.”
Hindemith’s relationship with Nazi Germany was also precarious.
“From the first years that the Nazis came into power, Hindemith was identified as problematic,” said Underhill. “This was because of his use of atonality and also his wife was half-Jewish. Given his important role as a conductor, educator at the Berlin Hochschule and as a composer, he attempted at first to stay in Germany through the intercession of the conductor [Wilhelm] Furtwängler. This proved unsuccessful and he was attacked directly by Goebbels, who called him a ‘dud’ and an ‘atonal noise maker.’ After this time, Hindemith secretly prepared to emigrate, first going to Turkey, where he helped a number of Jewish musicians to escape, and, eventually, to Switzerland and the United States. The Nazis continued to attack Hindemith after he left and he was denounced as a ‘standard-bearer of musical decay’ at the Dusseldorf exhibition.”
Conductor and co-artistic director of TPE (with Jeremy Berkman, who is also the ensemble’s trombone player), Underhill is also a composer and faculty member in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. He has a “special commitment to Canadian music and innovative interdisciplinary collaboration,” and was recently honored “as one of 50 special ambassadors for Canadian music.”
Underhill said he is mindful of the uniqueness of the works presented in the Forbidden Music program and the responsibility inherent in performing the work of composers who were (or nearly were) erased by history.
“All of the pieces on the program are brilliant and exuberant, and very much alive with the spirit of the times,” he said. “My hope is to bring to our performances an authenticity and integrity that is present in a different way in each of the works.”
He added, “I hope that we will be able to continue to develop this project, as there is more music that is still rather unknown by many composers who died or were forced to emigrate by the Third Reich. The uniqueness of the Turning Point Ensemble is that we are one of the few groups that is a large chamber ensemble and, therefore, can perform and bring to the public those works that fit into our repertoire. We, therefore, potentially have a significant role moving forward in identifying important works that we can perform that otherwise may not be brought to light.”
The Forbidden Music, presented in partnership with SFU Woodward’s cultural programs, launches TPE’s 2013-14 season with two performances on Oct. 27, at 2:30 and 8 p.m., at the Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at Simon Fraser University’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 West Hastings St. Tickets, $35/$33 (seniors)/$10 (students), can be purchased at turningpointensemble.ca.
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