Music, Conscience, Accountability and the Third Reich

Music's purpose during the Hitler years and its relationship to officialdom and to the public is as complex as it is fascinating. Beyond the Nazis' incorporation of music into its racial policies and their exploitation of it as both rallying-cry and battle-cry, musical themes include the achievements of the Terezin composers; the use of music in concentration camps (and, latterly, as vehicles for Holocaust memorial projects); Hitler's appropriation of Wagner; the Reich's relationship with jazz, and music as an expression of internal political rivalry, between Goebbels and Goering for example. What accounts for our fascination? The visual art and literature of the Nazi period receive nothing like equivalent attention, although in the years just after the Holocaust, there were indeed significant responses across all the arts.

We know that a musical work, or a specific section of a musical work, can arouse feelings of transcendence — of involvement, connection and satisfaction that are rarely offered by other artistic forms. But music in its purest form, without text or programmatic substance, refers only to itself. Its power lies in its ability to subvert and satisfy expectation simultaneously. And, one assumes, the more experienced and sensitive the listener, the keener, the more discriminating and intense the response. The state of grace that music encourages is sui generis, unrelated to any external morality or ideals of purity, decency or generosity. Of course music can express a variety of emotions and conjure up all manner of associations, which are generated not only by the music itself but also by the circumstances of its performance. But whatever these qualities may be, they are disconnected from concepts of innate good or evil...

(This is an excerpt of ARC Ensemble Artistic Director Simon Wynberg's essay for The OREL Foundation. Read the full article here.)

ARC in Israel & Amsterdam: A Photographic Essay

The ARC Ensemble's recent trip to Israel and Amsterdam undeniably scored a high note for the "Music in Exile" series, and for the ARC musicians as well. Besides the hectic concert schedule, there were also numerous rehearsals, dinners to attend, and even a bit of sightseeing. What follows is a brief photographic essay of ARC's travels this past March, all candid shots by the musicians themselves.

ARC violinist Erika Raum in a field outside of Jerusalem. Says Erika: "We were in a van on a group tour, on our way back from the Mount of Olives. This chair was just sitting all alone in an empty field. On closer inspection, neither field nor chair was quite as fresh and fragrant as it might look here. Naturally, I checked for rats before I sat down."

ARC on tour, touring the Israel Museum

Erika Raum, Ben and Lizzy Bowman, and Joaquin Valdepeñas floating in the Dead Sea.

The ARC Ensemble rehearses in Jerusalem

ARC violinist, Ben Bowman, at the Wailing Wall

Peter Simon, Dianne Werner Simon, Bryan Epperson, Ben Bowman, and Marie Berard.

ARC pianist, David Louie, at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam

Ben Bowman, Bryan Epperson, and Steve Dann enjoy a spring day in Amsterdam.

Back to business. ARC rehearses at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

The ARC Ensemble tours Israel & Amsterdam

Mishkenot Sha'ananim faces the western ramparts of Jerusalem's old city. Built by Moses Montefiore in the 19^th century, it is now an international conference centre and an important venue for artistic and political dialogue. Over the years it has hosted a who's who of creative giants: Primo Levi, Amos Oz, Saul Bellow, Laurie Anderson, William Kentridge... the list is long. Mishkenot provided the base for the ARC Ensemble's tour of Israel, the central part of its “Music in Exile” project, which, in addition to ARC's five concerts, included a film series on exiled composers, an international conference, and the "Banned by the Nazis – Entartete Musik" exhibition which was installed at Tel Aviv University's Central Library. Ensemble members also presented master-classes at the University's Buchmann-Mehta School, formerly the Ruben Academy.

ARC's concerts at the Buchmann-Mehta School included two extraordinary works by Mieczyslaw Weinberg: the Clarinet Sonata and the Piano Quintet, both composed in the mid-1940s, by which time he had fled Nazi-occupied Poland and found refuge in Moscow. Less than 10 years later, Weinberg's survival was again in the balance when he was arrested by the NKVD (Stalin's secret police). There were very real fears that both Weinberg and his wife Olga might be killed and Shostakovich's wife, Nina Vasilyevna was given power-of-attorney for the Weinberg's young daughter Vitosha (Victoria), should the worst come to pass. But Weinberg was released shortly after Stalin's timely death in March 1953 and the two families toasted a ceremonial burning of the power-of-attorney. Victoria, who has lived in Tel Aviv with her mother since the early 1970s, attended the Thursday performance at Tel Aviv University. It was a rare opportunity for her to hear her father's chamber music in Israel, and a moving and thrilling opportunity for the ARC players to meet her.

ARC's touring programmes also included a Clarinet Quintet composed by the father of Israeli music, Paul Ben-Haim—originally Paul Frankenburger—who fled Germany for British-mandated Palestine in the 1930s. It is a substantial and atmospheric work that melds the academic and architectural rigor of Central Europe with the twirls and turns of Middle Eastern melody and melisma—a language that Ben-Haim was still absorbing. ARC's string players and its clarinetist Joaquin Valdepeñas effortlessly succeeded in combining these two forces without compromising either. Jehoash Hirshberg, Ben-Haim's biographer and emeritus professor at the Hebrew University, hailed the performance as the best he had ever heard.

The Ensemble's final concert in Israel was broadcast live from the Jerusalem Theatre, which has hosted this series for more than 25 years, despite ongoing threats to Israel's music programming. ARC then moved on to Amsterdam where it presented two concerts at the Concertgebouw's Small Hall, an elliptically-shaped room that is as elegant as it is acoustically blessed.

Built in the late 19^th century, the Concertgebouw's three venues now present some 800 concerts a year. Unusually for the Netherlands, the institution receives almost no government support and is funded solely by ticket revenue and commercial sponsorship, notably from Deutsche Bank. Both of the concerts had been sold out for weeks and enthusiastic audiences responded to an evening programme of Prokofiev, Brahms, and Weinberg, and a broadcast matinée of Mendelssohn, Röntgen, and Elgar with bravos and standing ovations. It made for a satisfying close to the tour.

ARC Ensemble receives $25,000 Bravo! Fact Grant

Adolf BUsch 1891-1952

Bravo! Fact (Foundation to assist Canadian talent) has awarded the ARC Ensemble a $25,000 grant to create a short film. "One Good German" describes how Adolf Busch, the country's most eminent violinist, refused to co-operate with the Nazi regims and instead chose a self-imposed exile. The story is told as a filmed graphic novel, the score drawn from the ARC Ensemble's recently released recording of Busch's String Sextet (included on its Two Roads to Exile - RCA Red Seal). The artwork is being prepared by Max Douglas (or Salgood Sam, to use his nom de plume) and directed by James Murdoch. The project should be completed by the end of October, 2010.

Adolf Busch – The Life of an Honest Musician

Toccata Press has just issued Tully Potter's long-awaited biography of one of the 20th century's greatest violinists, and one of its least-appreciated composers: Adolf Busch - The life of an Honest Musician. Mr Potter generously forwarded a couple of chapters to me a few months ago when I was researching Busch's self-imposed German exile. The clarity of his narrative, and the depth and reach of his research heightened my impatience to read the complete account.

This is a massive work in two hefty volumes; the first covering Busch's life in Europe from 1891-1939, the second, his years in America and his role in the creation of the Marlboro Music School: 1939-1952. Vol. II also contains 12 appendices that feature a selection of tributes to, and discussions and observations about Busch's playing and teaching. Of inestimable value is a complete list of Busch's works (with commentary) and an exhaustive discography. Included with the biography are two fascinating CDs: one devoted to Busch the violinist, the other to a selection of his compositions. The books are copiously illustrated with scores of period photographs; one of my favorites: Rudolf Serkin playing the alto saxophone, an instrument not immediately associated with the legendary pianist who was Busch's son-in-law and longtime recital partner.

Tully Potter is an authority on the history of string playing and classical recording. He has been assembling material for this biography for some thirty years and much of the information is drawn from interviews with family-members and personalities who knew Busch intimately: Rudolf Serkin, Busch's widow Hedwig and his daughter Irene-Serkin Busch. And then there are the composers and musicians, Busch's friends, colleagues and students; Berthold Goldschmidt, Hans Gál, Louis Moyse, Philiip Naegele, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, Eugene Istomin... the list is huge, as is the number of libraries and institutions Mr Potter consulted.

"The Break", the chapter that covers the context of Busch's self-imposed exile from Germany, is one of the most engaging accounts of pre-war musical life I have read. There is a particularly chilling section describing the Busch Quartet's arrival in Berlin on April 1st, 1933, the day on which the Nazis began an orchestrated and enforced boycott of Jewish-owned stores. Late that night, following the quartet's performance of Haydn's Seven Last Words at Berlin's Marienkirche, Busch called a meeting and resolved to cancel the rest of the Busch Quartet's German tour, as well as all his own concerto appearances and recital performances with Serkin. The events of spring 1933 marked the beginning of legislated racism and represented a fulcrum in the lives and allegiances of German artists. It is at this point that Busch's future was determined. His position as an an enemy of Nazism remained utterly uncompromising, despite several overtures from Goebbels and the Nazi state, amd it was not until 1949 that a German audience again heard his violin. Busch's decision – and, it must be said, that of his brother Fritz, one of Germany's finest conductors – set him apart from most of his colleagues.

Busch Quartet c. 1932

This is a magisterial account of Busch's life and times, and it is impossible to imagine anything surpassing it. But this is only part of its substance. Tully Potter's substantial detours into the lives and attitudes of colleagues and contemporaries, are of equivalent value. There are fascinating discussions about Fürtwangler, Tovey, Serkin and Casals for example, which add an unusual and variegated richness. The  detailed biographical portraits of Busch's family and colleagues in Volume II further augment this wealth of detail. Tully Potter's great achievement is his success in fusing the particularities of Busch's life with a nuanced and engaging musical history of the first half of the twentieth century.

While Busch as violinist and chamber musician is well-represented on disc (less so as a soloist) his compositions remain unexplored. One hopes that Tully Potter's extraordinary work will renew interest in an artist whose creative ability was as well-developed as his virtuosity and interpretive powers.

Simon Wynberg

The Most Musical Nation, James Loeffler

Yale University Press have just published James Loeffler's The Most Musical Nation, which explores the history of Jewish music and musicians in nineteenth century Imperial Russia. It is a much-needed study, covering the contributions of Anton Rubinstein and the creation of the St Petersburg Conservatory; the work of Joel Engel (sometimes described as the "father of Jewish music") and the emergence, influence and disintegration of the St Petersburg School. Although most of the book is devoted to the final decades of Imperial Russia, James Loeffler provides valuable insights into the history of Jewish music in the Soviet Union: his account of the mutual influence of Dmitri Shostakovich and Mieczyslaw Weinberg is compelling.

This is no easy, linear history. The subject is intricate and fraught with questions surrounding Jewish identity, the splintering of Jewish perspectives and allegiances, and the diaspora that followed Russia's turbulent political and social upheavals.

The Most Musical Nation is a fascinating and beautifully written book, meticulously researched and well-considered. For those of us who have wondered how the city of Odessa came to produce so many great violinists – Nathan Milstein, David Oistrakh, Toscha Seidel – and why Jews constituted not only an overwhelming percentage of  virtuosi but an apparently anomolous percentage of Russian musicians – by 1913, 50% of the St Petersburg Conservatory's students were Jewish – James Loeffler provides both balanced explanation and finely drawn historical and political context, carefully charting the undulations of domestic anti-semitism, as well as the influence of the pernicious racial theories of Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

I found the section devoted to Joel Engel and his pioneering ethnographical work in the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement, where he collected Jewish songs, particularly engrossing. In an attempt to integrate with the locals, Engel and his two colleagues, Ansky and Yudovin, decided they would speak only Yiddish on their expedition, a language in which none of them was fluent. Engel's experiences, are whimsically and touchingly recounted in his unpublished memoirs. The songs were recorded using a horn and the recently-invented wax cylinder, but shtetl residents found the process so mysterious and exciting that the entire project was put in jeopardy. Collecting and authenticating material was challenging: when Engel offered five kopeks per musical piece, children attempted to augment their earnings by improvising songs "on the spot". Ultimately, as explained in a letter to Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai's son, Engel's travels and his exposure to Jewish life in the Pale challenged his very identity as an urban Russian intellectual.

Although James Loeffler's book adds significantly to our knowledge and understanding of Jewish musical history, it deserves a readership well beyond the scholarly or musicological. Its accessibility and readability are the equal of its impressive scholarship, and anyone interested in Jewish or Russian musical history will find much to divert them.

Simon Wynberg

The ARC Ensemble launches third album, Two Roads to Exile

It’s hard to imagine a more fitting venue for a spring concert than the Royal Conservatory of Music’s new second-floor theatre: the bright and airy room has two walls of windows looking out over busy Bloor Street in Toronto. On Thursday May 6th, the ARC Ensemble launched its third album, Two Roads to Exile, in this beautiful space to an excited gathering of musicians, students, arts supporters, and pillars of the music community. Two Roads to Exile builds upon the ensemble’s previous two Grammy-nominated recordings (On the Threshold of Hope and Right Through the Bone) in highlighting the repertoire of two composers, Adolf Busch and Walter Braunfels, whose largely forgotten work has finally been resurrected to great critical acclaim.

Florence Minz, ARC Ensemble Project Advisor

The festivities began with a few words from Dr. Peter Simon, President of the Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM), who outlined the importance of the album, released on Sony’s RCA Red Seal label. The ARC Ensemble boasts some of Canada’s most talented chamber musicians, all faculty or former students of the RCM’s Glenn Gould School. He was followed by Florence Minz, former chair of the RCM board and the ARC Ensemble's project advisor, who expanded on the mission of “Music in Exile,” which began as a means of exploring the context and works of composers who fled Germany in the 1930s, as well as those who stayed behind, resisted the regime and became “internal exiles.” As the child of Holocaust survivors, Ms. Minz emphasized the significance of recalling and celebrating these composers and their lost repertoire as a means of historical remembrance and tribute.

Simon Wynberg, Artistic Director of the ARC Ensemble and the curator of “Music in Exile,” then spoke briefly about the works themselves and the two composers, Busch and Braunfels—each with a distinct but equally harrowing story of exile. Adolf Busch, praised by Hitler as “our German violinist” to differentiate him from his Jewish colleagues, was one of Europe’s pre-eminent virtuosi. Busch was both ashamed and embarrassed by the Nazi regime and in 1933 left Germany for Switzerland, moving to America just before the war. Walter Braunfels, half-Jewish, although a practicing Catholic, moved to Überlingen, a small town on the shore of Lake Constance, where he was hidden from the Nazis: an internal exile immobilized by his attachment to his homeland.

Ottie Lockey and Saul Rubinek, friends of the ARC Ensemble

As Mr. Wynberg noted, the warring aesthetics that left these works languishing in obscurity have now petered out. Over time, the integrity of the work is what matters, and Two Roads to Exile attests to this process. Following his speech, Mr. Wynberg introduced some of the artists featured on the album (Benjamin Bowman and Marie Bérard, violins; Steven Dann, viola; and Bryan Epperson and David Hetherington, cellos) who performed the “Finale” of Walter Braunfels’s String Quintet op.63 (1945).

Although most in the audience had never heard the Braunfels piece before, there was a sense of rapt attention and delight during the performance. It was an intimate experience, brief as such delicate moments are, and the desire to hear more was palpable—fortunately all attendees received a copy of Two Roads to Exile to take with them.

Members of the ARC Ensemble at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto

“So bad it’s good”

An article by Anne Midgette on the sales of classical recordings recently appeared in the Washington Post. Among the more alarming revelations was the following:

"The dirty secret of the Billboard classical charts is that album sales figures are so low, the charts are almost meaningless. Sales of 200 or 300 units are enough to land an album in the Top 10 [...] In early October [2009] pianist Murray Perahia's much-praised album of Bach partitas was in its sixth week on the [Soundscan] list, holding strong at No. 10. It sold 189 copies."

It has always been dangerous to compare classical sales to those of popular music—I remember hearing an anecdote in the 1980s that described Alfred Brendel's astonishment at the difference—and it is more than worrying when our niche becomes practically invisible. However the worlds of commercially successful music and, for want of a more inclusive term, "classical music," are too far apart to warrant comparison based on sales or downloads.

Ignoring for a moment issues of track length, radio format, marketing and demographics, there is the very basic issue of publishing royalties: the residuals attached to the "work" (composition) when it is performed, recorded, broadcast, arranged or sold as sheet-music. After a composer has been dead for fifty years (seventy years in some territories), the work enters the public domain and can be exploited without charge. This is true of the bulk of recorded classical material, where no one really has a vested financial interest in the music itself. In the commercial world where, more often than not, the composer is very much alive, there are huge financial benefits attached to the publishing rights. Put another way, in an industry now driven primarily by fashion and style, and less by content and quality, a dead composer is unlikely to prove particularly hip, nor is he likely to make anyone rich.

There are the exceptions to the rule however and they are fascinating. Sting's fairly recent Dowland project Songs from the Labyrinth particularly so (see Norman Lebrecht for a balanced and musically informed review). For those who might have missed that extraordinary singularity, when John Dowland's star shone incandescent over the earth before fizzling out in the waves of disbelief generated by his more traditional fan-base, this was Sting's take on the lute-songs of one of Elizabethan England's finest musicians.

It was greeted by many classical and early-music listeners with open-mouthed horror. But, and this is a big but, the album did well enough to climb to number 25 in the Billboard 200 album chart, a place as unfamiliar to classical musicians as the depths of the Mariana Trench are to a goldfish. One might argue that the opportunism of Deutsche Grammophon, coupled with Sting's huge celebrity and his inability to contain either ego or creative impulse, would have fuelled similar success, no matter what the repertoire, but that still does not provide a good explanation, although it clearly tells us that it is the messenger rather than the message that counts.

There are now thousands of unfortunate "crossover" recordings, most probably less well-intentioned than Songs from the Labyrinth, which was clearly motivated by self-fulfillment rather than self-aggrandizement.

An old favourite—and I am told its motivation places it squarely into the first "serious" category—is Mrs. Miller's remarkable rendition of Groovy Kind of Love.

Apparently someone at Capitol Records saw the financial potential in her vocal performance, although Mrs. Miller herself, at least in her initial ventures into the studio, was convinced of her musical bona fides.

One is simultaneously fascinated and repelled; the aural equivalent of watching a televised hernia operation. If you need more of these alternative covers from the not-so-swinging-sixties, try her rhythmically fearless and lyrically creative version of Downtown and the unparalleled There Goes my Everything, double-tracked for a doubly-troubling vocal experience. Her most ebullient and popular track remains A Lover's Concerto.

A typical listener comment maintains that a Mrs. Miller track is "so bad it's good." In truth she succeeds because she just manages to stay on the right side of musical catastrophe: she almost sings in tune; almost phrases like Petula Clark; almost adheres to a pulse; almost remembers the words. It is this "almost" quality, her daredevil attempts at improvisation and her senior's wobble that create something infinitely and hilariously memorable, but not, by any regular standards (and pace Julie Andrews), something "good." Something good doesn't often sell in the hundreds of thousands.

Simon Wynberg

War Stories from a Musical Front

Here is the first of what we hope will become regular additions to the ARC blog: "war-stories" describing some of the more unusual musical experiences of ARC members―visitors are most welcome to add theirs. The first, recounted below by ARC's violist Steven Dann, is as bizarre as they come.

Steven Dann, Violist

Apropos our recent recording of the Braunfels quintet, Simon has asked me to relate a brief tale which happened around another cello quintet recording that I was involved in. Here goes.

In the early 90s I was lucky enough to be involved in a series of recordings for Sony Classics which took place in New York City at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Schubert C major cello quintet was our first disc (and won a Diapason d'Or!). They were all joint ventures between the Dutch string trio Archibubelli and the Smithsonian Chamber Players. I was replacing the violist of Archibudelli who played backwards. But that's another story.

The recordings were all done using the collection of Stradivarius instruments from the Smithsonian Institute (as many as eight at a time!) and as such we were surrounded by maximum security while in New York. Up at 155th and Riverside Drive back then there were still some very dodgy elements to the neighbourhood, and the museum curators were very nervous about having circa 50 million dollars of their inventory in such a locale, and so far from their vaulted home at the Museum of American History in D.C.

At the end of each day, always late in the evening, the guards would arrive, take the instruments to a safe haven nearby, and securely put them to bed. One night however, upon exiting the recording session, it was found that the keys had been locked into the security van. Somewhat embarrassing? At that time of night, as one could imagine, it was hard to get a locksmith to come up to Harlem ("Where are you? Why do you need a locksmith? To break into a car? Hmmm..."). It was known that the neighbourhood was a far from safe place in which to leave valuables in cars. Strads included. But an obvious solution occurred to one of us. Anner Bylsma, one of our cellists, a lateral thinker of the first order, made the observation the we could likely find a local "professional" willing to make a few extra dollars by breaking into our van for us. Being a consummate communicator and a brilliant assessor of character, as those who know him will attest, off he went and I know that none of us were terribly surprised when minutes later he was back with a "professional" who just happened to have the necessary tools at hand and had the security van open in minutes. It's all about local talent, really, isn't it?