Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe 9780520957701

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and Acronyms
Introduction
West Germany: Retrenchment versus A Survivor from Warsaw
Austria: Homecoming via A Survivor from Warsaw
Norway: Performing Remembrance with A Survivor from Warsaw
East Germany: Antifascism and A Survivor from Warsaw
Poland: Cultural Diplomacy through A Survivor from Warsaw
Czechoslovakia: A Survivor as A Survivor from Warsaw
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe

california studies in 20th-century music Richard Taruskin, General Editor 1. Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences and Ritualized Performance in Modernist Music Theater, by W. Anthony Sheppard 2. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement, by Simon Morrison 3. German Modernism: Music and the Arts, by Walter Frisch 4. New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification, by Amy Beal 5. Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of Modernity and Nationality, by David E. Schneider 6. Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism, by Mary E. Davis 7. Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier 8. Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in TwentiethCentury Art Music, by Klára Móricz 9. Brecht at the Opera, by Joy H. Calico 10. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media, by Michael Long 11. Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, by Benjamin Piekut 12. Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981, by Eric Drott 13. Music and Politics in San Francisco: From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, by Leta E. Miller 14. Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, by Beth E. Levy 15. In Search of a Concrete Music, by Pierre Schaeffer, translated by Christine North and John Dack 16. The Musical Legacy of Wartime France, by Leslie A. Sprout 17. Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe, by Joy H. Calico

Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe joy h. calico

University of California Press berkeley

los angeles

london

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Calico, Joy Haslam, 1965– , author. Arnold Schoenberg's A survivor from Warsaw in postwar Europe / Joy H. Calico. pages cm. — (California studies in 20th-century music ; 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28186-8 (hardback) — isbn 978-0-520-95770-1 (e-book) 1. Schoenberg, Arnold, 1874–1951. Survivor from Warsaw. 2. Schoenberg, Arnold, 1874–1951—Appreciation—Europe. I. Title. ML410.S283C25 2014 784.2′2—dc23 2013048526 Manufactured in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). Cover image: Original manuscript page from A Survivor from Warsaw by Arnold Schoenberg, mm 78–80. Used by permission of Belmont Musical Publishers. Image courtesy of The Arnold Schoenberg Center, Vienna.

For Chris

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Contents

Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations and Acronyms Introduction

viii ix xiii 1

West Germany: Retrenchment versus A Survivor from Warsaw

20

Austria: Homecoming via A Survivor from Warsaw

41

Norway: Performing Remembrance with A Survivor from Warsaw

66

East Germany: Antifascism and A Survivor from Warsaw

87

Poland: Cultural Diplomacy through A Survivor from Warsaw

112

Czechoslovakia: A Survivor as A Survivor from Warsaw

136

Afterword

161

Notes

169

Bibliography

213

Index

233

Illustrations

map Central Europe after 1949

xvi

photographs René Leibowitz in Paris, ca. 1952

12

Hermann Scherchen, 1950s

27

Pauline Hall, c. 1953

72

Herbert Kegel in Poland, October 1958

92

Herbert Kegel rehearsing the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir in the Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall, 28 September 1958

125

Karel Berman

156

viii

Acknowledgments

Many institutions and individuals made it possible for me to research and write this book, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge their support. A Howard Fellowship from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation and two Research Scholar Grants from Vanderbilt University funded extensive archival research in Europe over the course of three summers. A Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies enabled me to spend academic year 2009–10 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where I was challenged and inspired by a cohort of extraordinarily intelligent colleagues. At Vanderbilt I am fortunate to work with two generous deans, Carolyn Dever of the College of Arts and Science and Mark Wait of the Blair School of Music, who have supported this project in ways both great and small. I benefited from the assistance and expertise of a great many archivists. I must thank Therese Muxeneder and Eike Fess of the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna; Werner Grünzweig, Anouk Jeschke, and Daniela Reinhold of the Musikarchiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Jörg-Uwe Fischer of the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv; Ulf Rathje of the Bundesarchiv, BerlinLichterfelde; Ulrich Geyer of the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts Berlin; Rüdiger Koch of the MDR Rundfunkchor, Archiv; Steffen Held of the Ephraim Carlebach Stiftung Leipzig; Roswitha Meister and Alexander Hartmann of the Bundesbeauftragte für die Stasi-Unterlagen; Mieczysław Kominek, Izabela Zymer, and Beata Dz´wigaj of the Polish Music Information Center, which houses the Archiwum Zwia˛zku Kompozytorów Polskich; Joanna Mitko and Jacek Konecki of the Archiwum Akt Polskiego Radia S.A.; Jolanta Szopa of the Archiwum Ministerstwa Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego; Andrzej Budzyn´ski and Edyta Pawłowska of the Os´rodek Dokumentacji i Zbiorów Programowych Telewizja Polska; Sidsel Levin of ix

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the Jødisk Museum i Oslo; Øyvind Norheim of the Nasjonalbiblioteket Norsk musikksamling; Rolf Jonsson of the Norköpings stadsarkiv; Christine Sundby of the Riksarkivet, Sweden; Thomas Bab and Brigitta Bredskog of the Judiska Församlingen i Stockholm; Anders Hammarlund of the Svensk visarkiv; Jan Kahuda of the Národní archiv; Zuzana Petrášková of the Hudební oddeˇlení Národní knihovny Cˇeské republiky; Bohumil Sládecˇek of the Archiv Pražského filharmonického; Helena Bartíková of Supraphon; Zdeneˇk Jerˇábek of the odbor Archivních a programových fondu˚ Cˇeské rozhlasu; and James Keller of the National Archives and Records Administration. Archival research can be an adventure, and navigating the archives in Norway, Poland, and the Czech Republic would have been impossible without the help of some extraordinary research assistants. Audun Jonassen did exemplary work in Oslo, where I also had the great good fortune of meeting Astrid Kvalbein, who generously shared her knowledge of and enthusiasm for Pauline Hall and tracked down the photograph of Hall that appears in chapter 3. I will be forever grateful that, when I told Tereza Havelková at Charles University in Prague I was looking to hire an assistant there, she put me in touch with Katerˇina Nová. Katerˇina and I worked together in Prague on two separate research trips, after which she continued to track down leads, conduct correspondence, and proofread Czech without ever losing her trademark sense of humor. Lisa Jakelski was still a graduate student when I hired her to work with me in Warsaw, and her expertise on the ground was invaluable. Since then she has patiently answered countless questions and shared insights gained from her own work. I am enormously grateful for her generosity and her friendship. Andrea Bohlman and Lisa Cooper Vest kindly followed up on archive leads for me in Warsaw. In Leipzig, Bernd-Michael Gräfe became an unofficial research collaborator of sorts, facilitating contacts and providing a wealth of valuable information. He and his wife, Heidemarie, were the most gracious of hosts. Inbal Prag of Tel Aviv conscientiously compiled the materials pertaining to Heinz Freudenthal’s career in Israel. Liv Glaser, Sidsel Levin, and Peter Freudenthal graciously answered questions about their fathers. When Tina Frühauf and I discovered that we were using the same Jewish publications from East Germany, she kindly shared her findings with me. Julian Ledford doggedly and cheerfully followed leads on René Leibowitz through Paris. Mary Mathews assisted me as part of an Undergraduate Research Supervision Grant from Vanderbilt. Numerous other colleagues shared their knowledge of archives and sources, both primary and secondary: David R. Beveridge, Evan Burr Bukey,

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Timothy Frieze, Jarmila Gabrielová, Jay Howard Geller, Steffi Kandzia, Violetta Kostka, Libor Koudelka, Mark Kramer, Ralph Locke, Pamela Potter, Else-Beth Roalsø, Peter Schmelz, Anne C. Shreffler, Jan Straka, Tove Træsdal, and John Tyrrell. Beatrix Brockman, Malgorzata Hueckel, and Kirsti Spavin provided invaluable copyediting in German, Polish, and Norwegian, respectively. Joseph Auner, Walter Frisch, and Bryan Gilliam wrote letters of support for fellowships from the ACLS and the Howard Foundation, without which the book could never have come to fruition. I am humbled by and grateful to the friends and colleagues who took the time to read the manuscript as it developed. I am indebted to Amy Beal, Klára Móricz, and Sabine Feisst in particular for providing insightful and comprehensive feedback on the entire book. Tina Frühauf, Fritz Hennenberg, Lily Hirsch, Lisa Jakelski, Hillel Kieval, Helga Kuschmitz, Neil Lerner, Brian Locke, Arnulf Mattes, Michael Meng, Alexander Rehding, Laura Silverberg, Thomas Svatos, Simon Walsh, Gregory Weeks, and Amy Lynn Wlodarski read one or more chapters and asked probing questions, challenging me to sharpen arguments and tighten prose. My friends and colleagues in the GFC writing group constitute the ideal interdisciplinary audience. A group of super-smart women whose areas of expertise have nothing to do with those addressed in this book, they are cheerfully insistent that scholarship be intelligible to nonspecialists. The contributions of all these individuals have made the book immeasurably better. I count myself fortunate to work with the University of California Press again. Portions of the introduction and a previous version of chapter 1 were originally published as “Schoenberg’s Symbolic Remigration: A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar West Germany,” Journal of Musicology 26, no. 1 (2009): 1743. © 2009 by the Regents of the University of California. Mary Francis has supported this project for many years. I am very grateful to series editor Richard Taruskin for including the book in the California Studies in Twentieth-Century Music series. He read the manuscript with a keen eye for improving both prose and argument, and I cannot imagine a better reader. Kim Hogeland, editorial assistant at the Press, has been a stalwart companion in the production process, a veritable font of knowledge and logistical troubleshooting. My thanks to Jordan Holland, who was looking for work at precisely the moment I needed an assistant for the final stages of manuscript preparation. The process was made much smoother by his project management skills. Given the extraordinary assistance acknowledged in these pages, any remaining errors in fact or judgment are clearly mine alone. The role of friends and family in such an undertaking can scarcely be overestimated. In addition to those already mentioned, I am happy to thank

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Vanessa Beasley, Britta Duvigneau, Hilary Poriss, Despina Stratigakos, and Laurel Zeiss. My parents, Larry and Malissa, and my sister, Hope, have always been great sources of inspiration and strength, while my husband, Chris, remains my favorite in every way. This book is dedicated to him.

Abbreviations and Acronyms

ASC ASC GSC AAN ACˇR AdK AK Archiwum ZKP BArch BWKZ CDU CˇSR CˇSSR CZIM DEFA DPs DRA FAZ

Arnold Schoenberg Center Arnold Schoenberg Center, Gertrud Schoenberg Collection Archiwum Akt Nowych (Polish New National Archive) Archiv Cˇeského rozhlasu (Czech Radio Archive) Akademie der Künste, Berlin Armia Krajowa (Home Army, Poland) Archiwum Zwia˛zku Kompozytorów Polskich (Archive of the Polish Composers’ Union) Bundesarchiv, Berlin Biuro Współpracy Kulturalnej z Zagranica˛ (Polish Bureau of International Cultural Relations ) Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (Christian Democratic Union Party) Cˇeskoslovenská republika (Czechoslovak Republic) Cˇeskoslovenská socialistická republika (Czechoslovak Socialist Republic) Centralny Zarza˛d Instytucji Muzycznych (Central Administration of Musical Institutions) Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (East German Film Company) Displaced Persons Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv (German Radio Archive) Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung xiii

xiv

/

FRG GDR IFNM IRG ISCM KPD KPÖ KSCˇ LDPD LRSO MfAA MfK MKiS MŠK NA NARA NDPD NRK NS NSDAP NWDR OdF ÖMZ

Abbreviations and Acronyms Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) German Democratic Republic (East Germany) Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (International Summer Courses for New Music) Israelitische Religionsgemeinde (Jewish confessional community) International Society for Contemporary Music Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party) Kommunistische Partei Österreichs (Austrian Communist Party) Komunistická strana Cˇeskoslovenska (Communist Party of Czechoslovakia) Liberal-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (Liberal Democratic Party) Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra Ministerium für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten (East German Ministry of Foreign Affairs) Ministerium für Kultur (East German Ministry of Culture) Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki (Polish Ministry of Culture and Art) Ministerstvo školství a kultury (Czech Ministry of Education and Culture) Národní archiv (Czech National Archive) National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland National Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party) Norsk Rikskringkasting (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) Nasjonal Samling (Norwegian fascist party) Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi Party) Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (Northwest German Broadcasting) Opfer des Faschismus (Victims of Fascism) Österreichische Musikzeitschrift

Abbreviations and Acronyms ÖVP PAAA PDA PR SA PRP PZPR RA RKK RSK RŽNO

SA SBZ SCˇS SED SPÖ SRK SS Stasi SWF VKM

VVN ZKP

/

xv

Österreichische Volkspartei (Austrian People’s Party) Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts (Political Archive of Foreign Affairs, Berlin) Paul-Dessau-Archiv of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin Polskiego Radia S.A. (Polish Radio Archive) Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa (People’s Republic of Poland) Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers’ Party) Riksarkivet (National Archives of Norway) Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture) Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Chamber of Literature) Rada židovských náboženských obcí v zemích Cˇeské a Moravskoslezské (Czech Council of Jewish Religious Communities) Sturmabteilung (NSDAP Paramilitary organization) Sowjetische Besatzungszone (Soviet Occupation Zone in Germany) Svaz cˇeskoslovenských skladatelu˚ (Union of Czechoslovak Composers) Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of East Germany) Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (Social Democratic Party of Austria) Staatliches Rundfunkkomitee (East German State Radio Committee) Schutzstaffel (NSDAP paramilitary organization) Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (East German State Security Service) Südwestfunk (Southwest German Broadcasting) Verband der Komponisten und Musikwissenschaftler (Association of Composers and Musicologists of the GDR) Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime) Zwia˛zek Kompozytorów Polskich (Polish Composers’ Union)

Founding members of the North Atlantic Alliance (NATO) 1949 NATO Entry: West Germany 1955 Founding members of the Warsaw Pact 1955 Warsaw Pact Entry: East Germany 1956 NORWAY Neutral or non-aligned

0

SWEDEN

Oslo

200 mi

FINLAND

SWEDEN

100 200 300 km

UNITED KINGDOM

AL

DENMARK

B

NORTH SEA

TI

C

SE

A

0

100

N

NETHERLANDS Berlin EAST GERMANY Leipzig Terezín

WEST BELGIUM GERMANY

Darmstadt

Paris LUX.

Prague

SWITZ. SWITZ.

Kraków

CZ E Brno CHOSLO

Vienna AUSTRIA AUSTRIA FRANCE

Warsaw POLAND

VAKIA

HUNGARY ROMANIA

LIECH. ITALY

Central Europe after 1949.

YUGOSLAVIA

Introduction

Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) seemed designed to irritate every exposed nerve in postwar Europe. A twelve-tone piece in three languages about the Holocaust, it was written for an American audience by a Jewish composer whose oeuvre had been the Nazis’ prime exemplar of entartete (degenerate) music. Said composer was both admired and reviled as a pioneer of dodecaphony and had immigrated to the United States and become an American citizen. Clocking in at approximately seven minutes, A Survivor is too short to occupy either half of a concert yet too fraught with meaning to easily share the bill with anything else. For all of these reasons, the decision to program, perform, review, or otherwise write about A Survivor in postwar Europe was not taken casually. Its presence was always by design, and it was always understood to mean something important. That meaning proved remarkably multivalent, and A Survivor was susceptible to appropriation for a surprising range of designs. Like all meanings and uses, these were determined by time (the early Cold War, between 1948 and 1968) and place (six different countries in postwar Europe). A Survivor might signal acknowledgment or commemoration of the Holocaust, as in Norway or, obliquely, Czechoslovakia; it could represent an endorsement of Schoenberg specifically, of dodecaphony, or of modernist music generally, as in West Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Resistance to A Survivor is also telling, as it was frequently met by recourse to easy anti-Semitic or anti-American tropes and sometimes both, as in West Germany and Austria. In the Eastern Bloc, A Survivor acted as a canary in the cultural-political coal mines. In the early years of the Cold War, Schoenberg’s music was officially endorsed there only during occasional moments of relative relaxation, such as the Thaw. Otherwise, 1

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Introduction

ad hominem attacks on the composer and rejection of his music typified the early status quo as well as noxious episodes of retrenchment. Thus A Survivor’s appearance behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1950s was an indicator of just how warm the Thaw had gotten in each satellite, although even then its presence required de-Semitization in the name of antifascism, most obviously in East Germany. A Survivor could also be a vehicle for cultural diplomacy, as when East Germans gave the Polish premiere in Warsaw. For all of these reasons and many others, the performance and reception history of A Survivor as it circulated through postwar Europe is uniquely suited to serve as the basis for a cultural history of that time and place. It is also a piece that continues to provoke discussion, although the critique is more often framed in terms of taste and artistic quality than symbolic content; such questions, in fact, have been part of its reception from the beginning. Plenty of erudite people take issue with A Survivor: some find it campy and melodramatic, arguing that the extreme expressionist musical gestures reduce the Holocaust to the clichés of a B-grade Hollywood film soundtrack; others find the choral finale distasteful because it panders to an audience’s preference for the heroic redemptive narrative arc and lets the listener off the hook; there are also those offended by what they perceive to be its exploitation of the suffering of others for entertainment. Nonetheless I pursue the project of reading the cultural history of the early Cold War in Europe through its performance and reception history for several reasons. First, A Survivor occupies a unique position in the oeuvre of a major composer. It may not have been the first piece of art music to treat the subject of the Holocaust, but it has been surprisingly popular.1 The prestige of its composer’s name, its status as a late work, and its subject matter have all drawn keen critical interest, and it has had a significant, even disproportionate, influence on the composer’s overall reception as well as on perceptions of his Jewishness.2 For these reasons, reconstructing its reception history as it circulated through postwar Europe fills in gaps in our knowledge about a well-known work by a historically significant figure. Second, there is no minimum aesthetic standard a piece of music must meet to be historically, culturally, or personally significant. Because of the unique combination of attributes and conditions outlined above, the performance and reception history of A Survivor is ideally positioned to teach us about the postwar period in Europe. Furthermore, it is still not a work people program merely to fill seven minutes of air time; if anything, its presence may be weightier now because it has accrued more meanings with the passage of time. In 1992 the World Monuments Fund kicked off a

Introduction

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3

fund-raising campaign for the restoration of Tempel Synagogue in Kazimierz, the Jewish district of Kraków, with a televised broadcast of the Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra performing A Survivor in the unrestored sanctuary. On 9 November 2009, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the musical highlight of the day’s festivities was a concert at the Brandenburg Gate, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Barenboim carefully crafted this concert’s highly symbolic program: it featured music by Wagner (overture to the third act of Lohengrin) and Beethoven (fourth movement from Symphony no. 7), the premiere of a new piece by a former East German composer (Es ist, als habe einer die Fenster aufgestoßen by Friedrich Goldmann), and A Survivor. Barenboim said he wanted to remind people that long before the ninth of November became known as a day of rejoicing, it had had a far darker historical significance: Kristallnacht. For better or worse, A Survivor lends itself to the grand gesture. It is quite common to follow A Survivor with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, resulting in what might charitably be described as a problematic if audience-friendly narrative trajectory of heroic redemption. Celia Applegate has written about the inverse as well, in which Beethoven’s Ninth is followed, and perhaps neutralized, by A Survivor.3 Simon Rattle has conducted A Survivor and gone directly and without pause into Mahler’s Symphony no. 2 (Resurrection). At the 1948 premiere in Albuquerque, Kurt Frederick opened with Leopold Stokowski’s arrangement of Bach’s “Come Sweet Death” followed by A Survivor and Jaromir Weinberger’s Timpani Concerto; after intermission he offered Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. In November 2012 Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra offered a concert described in the program notes as a tribute to “true idealism”: the overture to Beethoven’s Fidelio was followed by Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon and A Survivor, and the second half featured Luigi Nono’s Julius Fucˇík, based on the diary Notes from the Gallows that Fucˇík had written while imprisoned under the Nazi regime. The audience was instructed not to applaud after the Nono piece but to wait until after Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the final piece on the concert, was complete. From the podium Jurowski announced that the program was dedicated to all who had suffered oppression and was “conceived as a spiritual journey or dialectical confrontation.”4 Others have taken aggressively interventionist approaches. In 1972 Hans Zender inserted A Survivor between parts 1 and 2 of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion; the singer performing the role of Christ also narrated the title role of A Survivor. In 1978 Michael Gielen wedged it between the third and fourth movements of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in an effort to disrupt what had become the normative

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Introduction

relationship between the two works. Whatever one makes of these choices, all have some root in the pragmatic issues of concert-giving: it doesn’t make much sense to bring in a choir for a single, seven-minute piece, and putting Schoenberg last on the program risks an early audience exodus. In February 2013 the Nashville Symphony opened a concert with A Survivor followed attacca by Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, then Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto no. 1; in a nod to the Schoenberg piece, the second half was given over to John Adams’s Harmonielehre, which owes its title to Schoenberg’s 1911 treatise on harmony of the same name. Ives’s tone poem presents a hushed, sustained soundscape of diatonic strings over which a trumpet poses an atonal “question” seven times. Woodwinds attempt to respond until the trumpet’s final query is left hanging in the air, suspended above a sustained G-major triad. The Unanswered Question provided the audience with a contemplative transition away from the Schoenberg. It also functioned as a buffer between A Survivor and applause, as audience members frequently express uneasiness about applauding at the end of that work. The narrator for A Survivor was George Takei, actor of Star Trek fame and queer icon. Takei has a distinctively resonant bass speaking voice, but that is not the primary reason he has begun performing this part. Born in Los Angeles in 1937, he was imprisoned with his family from 1942 to 1945 in Japanese-American internment camps in California and Arkansas. This history is part of the public relations campaign that attended his performances of A Survivor in Little Rock and Nashville, and it forms the basis of the musical Allegiance, in which he plays the starring role. Takei has uniquely American survivor credentials, and his embodiment of A Survivor could represent what Holocaust scholar Cathy Caruth calls “an encounter with the real.”5 This concert provides a tantalizing link to the Czech case study in chapter 6, in which I discuss how a Holocaust survivor frequently performed the title role in A Survivor. Takei’s recent embrace of the role suggests that Schoenberg’s piece is still relevant, and that it is doing some cultural and political work in the United States today. In the Nashville performance he narrated the text entirely in English, translating the original German quotations to English. (We will see that other performers have made adjustments to the text as well, either through translation, as here, or through word substitution, in an apparent attempt to soften the impact of graphic description.) Third, when Schoenberg wrote A Survivor in 1947, there was no established vocabulary—literary, musical, or visual—for responding to the Holocaust. There were no extant ceremonies or rituals for mourning such loss, either. Hasia R. Diner has challenged the prevailing wisdom that Jews

Introduction

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5

in the United States remained silent about the Holocaust in the immediate postwar period, demonstrating that they actually said and did quite a lot about the matter. But because the Holocaust was without modern precedent, and because American Jewish life takes so many different forms, there were no common models and no agreed-upon modes of behavior or expression: “Holocaust commemorations of the postwar era reflected a set of onthe-ground realities that deeply influenced how American Jews constructed their commemorative culture. They had no obvious precedent to guide them as they took first steps toward creating new ceremonies, writing new liturgies, setting aside days of mourning, and orchestrating pageants that confronted the horrendous story of death and destruction, mass murders, gassings, and cremations of millions of Jews.”6 In other words, they were making it up as they went along—adapting rituals and language, what Diner refers to as the “deeds and words” they already knew—to commemorate the victims of heretofore unknown and unimaginable events.7 Schoenberg was doing something similar in A Survivor: adapting rituals (concert-going and performance, recitation of the Sh’ma) and musical language (expressionism, whose gestures had become part of the vocabulary of Hollywood film scores for horror movies and thrillers, and dodecaphony) in an effort to commemorate events that defied description. Diner interprets the deeds and words of millions of Jews in the United States during this period as constituting “a vast unorganized spontaneous project that sought to keep alive the image of Europe’s murdered Jews,” all of which contributed to the creation of “a memorial culture.”8 A Survivor is part of that memorial culture because Schoenberg was a citizen of the United States writing a piece for an American audience, even if that piece was naturally informed by his European background. As Diner has shown, there were many Jews in the United States responding to the Holocaust in a variety of ways, and European Jewish emigrants were surely among them. In that context, Brigid Cohen’s observation that “accounts of musical modernism in migration should recognize those forms of belonging that arise through emergent affiliations rather than simply reaffirming pre-given national identities” is pertinent.9 We will also see that many Europeans who wrote about A Survivor experienced it as a work from the United States, because of its predominantly Englishlanguage text, Schoenberg’s naturalized citizenship, its tonally-inflected dodecaphony and social engagement (both associated with the composer’s late, American style), or its promotion by US-backed institutions. Even while A Survivor is part of an American Jewish memorial culture, it is also, simultaneously, a piece of art music for concert performance, and one written by a prominent composer at that. Its dual identity as memorial and concert

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Introduction

work is necessarily an uneasy fit. Appropriate representation and commemoration of the Holocaust remain important topics of debate; and yet, just as Diner casts a compassionate eye upon other documents of early Holocaust memorial culture, I am inclined to give A Survivor the benefit of the doubt as well. Schoenberg wrote A Survivor in his adopted home of California in 1947. The composition appears to have emerged from discussions with the Russian dancer and choreographer Corinne Chochem (1905–90), whose efforts to commission a work stalled as she was unable meet the composer’s price.10 The project came to fruition when shortly thereafter the Koussevitzky Music Foundation contacted Schoenberg about writing a piece, and the composer responded that he was already working on something he could complete quickly. He did so in the fall, and René Leibowitz (1913–72) prepared the orchestral score under Schoenberg’s supervision in December of that year. Schoenberg also wrote the text.11 The survivor, a male narrator, recalls in English the terror of internment during the Holocaust: the roll call, the abuse of prisoners, the selection of those who would be put to death. This account is twice interrupted by German phrases when the narrator quotes the words of the feldwebel (German sergeant). At the end of the narration, the survivor recalls that those going to their deaths “all of a sudden, in the middle of it, [they] began singing the Schema Yisroel,” and the work ends with a male chorus singing in Hebrew a portion of the Sh’ma (“Hear, O Israel”), the Jewish statement of faith and the most important prayer in Judaism: I cannot remember ev’rything. I must have been unconscious most of the time. I remember only the grandiose moment when they all started to sing as if prearranged, the old prayer they had neglected for so many years the forgotten creed! But I have no recollection how I got underground to live in the sewers of Warsaw for so long a time. The day began as usual: Reveille when it still was dark. Get out! Whether you slept or whether worries kept you awake the whole night. You had been separated from your children, from your wife, from your parents; you don’t know what happened to them how could you sleep? The trumpets again— Get out! The sergeant will be furious! They came out; some very slow: the old ones, the sick ones;

Introduction

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some with nervous agility. They fear the sergeant. They hurry as much as they can. In vain! Much too much noise; much too much commotion—and not fast enough! The Feldwebel shouts: “Achtung! Stilljestanden! Na wirds mal? Oder soll ich mit dem Jewehrkolben nachhelfen? Na jutt; wenn ihrs durchaus haben wollt!” The sergeant and his subordinates hit everybody: young or old, quiet or nervous, guilty or innocent. It was painful to hear them groaning and moaning. I heard it though I had been hit very hard, so hard that I could not help falling down. We all on the ground who could not stand up were then beaten over the head. I must have been unconscious. The next thing I knew was a soldier saying: “They are all dead,” whereupon the sergeant ordered to do away with us. There I lay aside halfconscious. It had become very still—fear and pain. Then I heard the sergeant shouting: “Abzählen!” They started slowly and irregularly: one, two, three, four “Achtung!” the sergeant shouted again, “Rascher! Nochmal von vorn anfangen! In einer Minute will ich wissen, wieviele ich zur Gaskammer abliefere! Abzählen!” They began again, first slowly: one, two, three, four, became faster and faster, so fast that it finally sounded like a stampede of wild horses, and all of a sudden, in the middle of it, they began singing the Shema Yisroel.12

The narrator’s Sprechstimme part is notated on a single staff line, with explicit rhythmic values and pitch symbols that indicate ascending and descending gestures relative to that central line, as well as chromatic alterations of those relative pitches. The plot is not taken from any single historical record, and the text combines accounts from various concentration camps and ghettos with ideas from the composer’s imagination in what Camille Crittenden describes as the composer’s “own dramatic synthesis.” Schoenberg acknowledged as much when he stated that the text of A Survivor was “based partly upon reports which I have received directly or indirectly,” and when he wrote to Kurt List that “even though

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Introduction

such things have not been done in the manner in which I describe in the Survivor. This does not matter. The main thing is, that I saw it in my imagination.”13 The narrative may be a synthesis, but the title is deliberate and specific. This survivor is not from Treblinka or Auschwitz. He is from Warsaw, and that would have triggered an immediate association in the minds of audience members in the United States: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Fighting began in earnest on the eve of Passover on 19 April 1943, and against all odds the ragtag resistance held German forces at bay for nearly a month before they were defeated.14 The uprising quickly achieved iconic status in the United States as the most famous of the one hundred or so known instances in which Jews resisted the Germans in armed combat. When Viennese Jewish refugee Adolf R. Lerner spearheaded an initiative to build a Holocaust memorial in New York in 1947, the fund-raising materials described it as honoring “the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto, who, without outside aid, rose up against the might of the German Army in an epic battle of forty days and nights until nothing remained but ruin and smoke—to reaffirm those ideals of human liberty for which six million Jews sacrificed their lives.”15 The American Jewish Congress convened a committee to produce the Seder Ritual of Remembrance in 1952, and the only reference to a specific historical event from the Holocaust to be included was the “already famous” Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.16 Warsaw had that emblematic significance for Schoenberg, too: he wrote to Kurt List, “The title will be ‘A SURVIVOR FROM WARSAW’ because it was my inspiration and the geographical meaning includes the ghetto and all what happened there.”17 “All what happened there” encompassed everything from the 1942 operation that resulted in the deportation of some 280,000 Jews from the ghetto to Treblinka to the resistance movement’s response to that action.18 That armed resistance is not part of A Survivor’s narrative, but Schoenberg’s title seems to draw an analogy between the symbolic victory of the uprising and the unison Sh’ma, which he interpreted as a victory of faith: “The miracle is, to me, that all these people who might have forgotten, for years, that they are Jews, suddenly facing death, remember who they are. And this seems to me a great thing.”19 This interpretation is supported by his setting of the Sh’ma. He set the text of Deuteronomy 6:4–7, so that the piece ends with the moment of rising up: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions which I charge you this

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day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead. Inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. [emphasis added]

Hillel Kieval has suggested that Schoenberg’s decision to use the abbreviated text might also be interpreted as an example of midrash, as “an ironic critique of divine providence.”20 Certainly the brief orchestral coda that reprises the introduction after the Sh’ma makes it clear that the literal “rising up” did not succeed, a gesture Steven J. Cahn reads as a bitter irony.21 Elsewhere Schoenberg’s comments on the piece do not suggest irony so much as an attempt to align the work with the iconic symbol of Holocaust defiance: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. We will see that the uprising had symbolic significance elsewhere as well. In the Eastern Bloc the historic event, like A Survivor itself, was appropriated as an emblem of de-Semitized antifascist resistance. The score is dodecaphonic, and like many of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone works, it employs hexachordal combinatoriality, meaning that the two sixnote halves of the row are ordered to facilitate particular contrapuntal relationships among their permutations. In A Survivor, the primary relationship is between P0 (F# G C AaE EaBaDaA D F B) and I5, its inversion transposed down a fifth (B BaF A DaD G E AaEaC F#). A significant feature of the row is the prevalence of the augmented triad AaC E, which permeates and unifies the work harmonically and melodically. Schoenberg circled this configuration in all six permutations in which it appears on his row chart (P0, P4, P8, and their inversions). Symbolic significance has also been ascribed to it, as it is the melodic motif to which the chorus sings the text “Adonoi Elohenu” (“Lord Our God”). David M. Schiller observes, “Like the word ‘Adonoi’ itself, the AaC E augmented triad is here presented as a substitute for the unpronounceable name of God: it is a God motif.”22 Joe R. Argentino finds even greater motivic and symbolic unity by expanding the analysis beyond the augmented triad AaC E to other manifestations of symmetrical trichords such as BaD F# and argues that the omnipresence of such sonorities (not just those pitched at AaC E) represents an attempt to suffuse the work with the presence of God, who must remain invisible and ineffable.23 Amy Lynn Wlodarski has shown that “a mnemonic reading reveals that the augmented triad plays not only a motivic role” but also “determines the largescale structure of the cantata,” supporting an argument for “the omnipresence of God in Schoenberg’s account.”24 More importantly for the ear, perhaps, is that the row is designed to foreground those augmented triads,

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Introduction

and the prevalence of that sonority harmonically and melodically gives the music a tonal inflection. This is combined with recurring motifs as well as striking surface elements, violent “expressionist gestures of fear and anxiety” that had been part of Schoenberg’s musical language since 1909.25 Commissions by the Koussevitzky Foundation were frequently premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but Schoenberg granted that honor to Kurt Frederick and his amateur Albuquerque Civic Orchestra instead, with the stipulation that Frederick extract a set of parts from the conductor’s score that would then belong to Schoenberg. Frederick (1907–97), born Fuchsgelb, was himself a Viennese Jew and a formidable musician. He had been choral director at Vienna’s City Temple, also known as the Seitenstettengasse Temple, where the legendary cantor Salomon Sulzer had worked for forty-five years. Frederick was in that post at the time of the Anschluss in 1938, and in 1991 was believed to be the only surviving music director of Vienna’s prewar Jewish community.26 Between 1938 and 1942 he was violist in the Kolisch Quartet. Not only did he write out the parts for A Survivor, he also made several corrections to the word stress and text underlay of the Hebrew; many years later he produced a piano-vocal reduction as well. Frederick presided over the world premiere on 4 November 1948 with a chorus consisting of students and community members supplemented by voices from nearby Estancia; the narrator was Sherman Smith, professor of chemistry and department chair at the University of New Mexico. The earliest published responses to A Survivor defined the contours of its subsequent reception. Critics noted its overwhelming effect upon audiences, analyzed its twelve-tone compositional technique, and grappled with the ethics of art derived from the Holocaust. The Albuquerque Journal reported that audience members were rendered “a little breathless and bewildered,” which prompted Frederick to ask if they would like to hear it again. When they indicated that they would, the ensemble complied, and the audience responded with “sincere” and “thundering applause . . . meant as much for the composer as for the conductor, musicians, narrator, and chorus.”27 Apparently the convention of repeating the work began with its premiere. The concert was deemed newsworthy even for the general populace: Time magazine ran a story about it ten days later.28 Also writing in November 1948 was Kurt List, a Schoenberg advocate who was nevertheless ambivalent about A Survivor. He broached the ethics question when he expressed misgivings about “the tragedy of the Warsaw Ghetto [as a stimulus for] artistic creation” and linked Schoenberg’s fictional dramatization to

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Hollywood stylization, as others have also done, even while citing the musical strengths of the work.29 The second performance, which was also the European premiere, occurred within weeks, when Leibowitz conducted A Survivor in Paris with the Orchestre Radio-Symphonique in December 1948. The enigmatic Leibowitz must be counted among Schoenberg’s most ardent supporters in postwar Europe, lecturing on his music at Darmstadt, publishing some of the earliest studies of dodecaphony, and programming his music on concerts. He would also give the Israeli premiere of A Survivor in Jerusalem on 26 February 1957, with the Kol Israel (Radio) Orchestra augmented by members of the Israel Defence Forces’ Symphony Orchestra, the Kol Zion Lagola Male Choir, and Yehoshua Zohar as narrator.30 The relationship between Schoenberg and Leibowitz was frequently tumultuous, however, as the latter had a habit of performing and recording the former’s works without paying royalties, and in his zeal to preach the twelve-tone gospel abroad, he frequently spread misinformation. Claude Rostand and Noël Boyer alerted listeners to the upcoming broadcast in their column for the Radio France circular Radio. For them, the main attraction was the French premiere of Schoenberg’s Second Chamber Symphony, although they also noted (mistakenly) that the performance of Un survivant de Varsovie, as it is known in French, would be the world premiere.31 Presumably they received this information from Leibowitz, who believed that Schoenberg had promised the world premiere to him, a misunderstanding which no doubt exacerbated emerging tensions between the two.32 The performance was heard on French radio on 20 December 1948, with baritone Lucien Lovano performing the role of A Survivor in Leibowitz’s French translation.33 The European premiere did not garner much attention at the time. In his book L’artiste et sa conscience (1950), Leibowitz attempted to “situate Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw within” Sartre’s concept of committed art by arguing that “Schoenberg’s development and use of twelve-tone technique constituted a form of artistic commitment equivalent to the political commitment embedded in the text” of A Survivor.34 A Survivor was assimilated into a larger debate about committed art that was carried out in numerous French forums in the late 1940s and early 1950s, including the pages of Sartre’s journal Les temps modernes and in Leibowitz’s L’artiste et sa conscience, for which Sartre wrote the foreword. Both Frederick and Leibowitz were working with parts they had copied out themselves. Boelke-Bomart published the score in 1949, and the first performance in a major US musical center took place on 13 April 1950, in a concert by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of

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Introduction

figure 1. René Leibowitz in Paris, ca. 1952. Photograph by ? Paris (Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel, René Leibowitz Collection).

Dimitri Mitropoulos. That performance generated further media attention, beginning with a scathing review from New York Times critic Olin Downes. He described it as “poor and empty music” that featured “bogy noises which have been heard many times before in Schoenberg’s scores. These sounds are neither novel nor convincing.” A choreographed moment for the chorus (not indicated in the score) came across as “hammy” but was “not incongruous with the character of the composition.”35 Imbedded in his rancorous prose is an objection similar to that which List had raised more delicately eighteen months earlier when he detected an incongruous link to Hollywood. In another New York Times piece, however, Louis Stanley opined that Schoenberg used “his advanced techniques to give a musical intensification and interpretation of an excitingly dramatic text. If there are dissonances and disjointedness, they are dissonances and disjointedness which dramatize.”36 A review in Musical America opted to emphasize the work’s effect rather than its compositional processes, because “an academic approach would misrepresent the work, for it is a direct, telling, and affecting personal document, and its emotional impact is more memorable than its manipulations of a constructional system.”37 Henry Cowell took a similar approach, dismissing as irrelevant those analyses fixated on dodecaphony (List’s and Leibowitz’s)

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because technique could not explain A Survivor’s musical and dramatic effectiveness. Instead, he focused on what Móricz identifies as the expressionist gestures in the score, singling out the same “bogy noises” Downes had dismissed earlier and, like Stanley, attributing the success of A Survivor to the appropriateness of that soundscape for the subject matter.38 Some of these themes—particularly the effect on the audience and the compositional method—surfaced in the broader European reception as well. Given the geopolitical proximity of continental performers and critics to the events recounted in A Survivor, however, it is not surprising to find a host of additional issues clustered around this piece. Anxieties about musical modernism, the formation of Holocaust memory and culpability, the coexistence of Jews and former Nazis, the dislocation of massive migration patterns, and the ubiquitous presence of the occupying forces, particularly the Americans, are all magnified through the lens of A Survivor as the piece circulated through postwar Europe. Its reception there was further determined by the defining characteristic of postwar Europe: mobility, both voluntary and otherwise. Millions of people forcibly displaced, either by the war itself or by the terms of the peace, crisscrossed the continent in waves of dislocation and relocation. Jan Gross estimates that 30 million Europeans were “dispersed, transplanted, or deported” between 1939 and 1943, and another 20 million were similarly on the move between 1943 and 1948.39 Some remained suspended in this nomadic state for years. As late as June 1950, more than 248,000 DPs (displaced persons) were still dependent upon the International Refugee Organization for “care and maintenance” in temporary shelters.40 Some who had been fortunate enough to escape the continent altogether returned as well, mostly from the United Kingdom and the Americas. Among them were artists and intellectuals who had gone into exile, many of whose works had been banned under the Third Reich. Remigration has long been a focal point of scholarship on postwar German literature.41 Such homecomings were frequently difficult and not always voluntary. For example, in 1948 Schoenberg’s former student Hanns Eisler left the United States for Europe to avoid deportation after a run-in with the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Schoenberg did not return to Europe, but his music did. After an absence of more than a decade and for all the reasons cited previously, the “represence” of his music was conspicuous and significant.42 It can be regarded as a kind of remigration. My approach differs from that which has historically typified remigration studies as a subset of the German field of Exilforschung, which has focused on the physical return of individuals after

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Introduction

the war, minimized the significance of works produced in the Unites States, and laid claim to that repertoire as part of a (European) national music history.43 Instead, this book focuses on Schoenberg’s noncorporeal return, in the form of his music; foregrounds the significance of a work from his American oeuvre; and traces its European reception, not to assimilate A Survivor into European nationalist narratives but to call attention to them as a part of postwar cultural history. The impetus for my interpretation of remigration came from the work of several scholars. Hans-Ulrich Wehler has asserted that “the history of remigration cannot proceed primarily biographically” but must “take up the challenge of cultural history, whose merit is not only the question of historical subjects but also of their Aktionsradius [range of operation or sphere of influence].”44 Marita Krauss’s concept of “remigrating ideas” is particularly relevant to the present undertaking, as it refers to the agency and reception of literature that circulated in postwar Europe, created by émigrés who did not themselves physically return.45 Finally, Hans Mommsen emphasizes that remigration studies must not make “the mistake of holding the personal, physical presence of the remigrant as the deciding factor.”46 By these measures, remigration is not limited to and does not require the physical presence of the individual. And given the extent of Schoenberg’s Aktionsradius, one could argue that the return of his music to any part of Europe represented some sort of remigration. Indeed, all of the book’s case studies may be understood as such, be it to Europe generally from the United States; specifically to Germany, which had once been Schoenberg’s cultural milieu; to Austria, the country of his birth; or to Poland, the locus of the event to which A Survivor gestures. A more general theory of mobility unifies this study, however, one that is less destination-driven than that of remigration. The creative-product analog to all of that postwar human movement across the continent is Stephen Greenblatt’s cultural mobility, or the study of “what happens to cultural products that travel through time or space to emerge and be enshrined in new contexts and configurations.”47 What kinds of baggage did A Survivor accrue along the way, what kind of cultural work did it do, and what did it mean? Both Krauss and Greenblatt acknowledge that meaning does not reside within the artwork but is recreated anew in each context. A piece of music is appropriated, repurposed, adapted, and interpreted, and the local acoustics of each context will determine how A Survivor resonates there. That music circulates independently of the originating artist does not mean that human agency is not required—quite the contrary, as we will see—but that the agency is not necessarily that of the originating

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artist. This is particularly the case where music is concerned, since its mobility is far more dependent upon the physical presence of performers than of composers. Each chapter tracks the cultural mobility of A Survivor in a single context, proceeding chronologically: West Germany, Austria, Norway, East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. (The European premiere in France is recounted only briefly here in the introduction, because there is little evidence of it.) The twenty-year scope of the study, 1948–68, corresponds roughly to the first half of the Cold War. The roots of Cold War tensions can be traced to events that predated WWII, but the conflict took on its now-familiar frozen contours in the years between 1945 and 1947, as the Allies’ marriage of convenience deteriorated into a standoff, pitting the United States, Britain, and France against the Soviet Union. The performance history of A Survivor in Europe began one year later. The year 1968 is a logical terminus because it marks a turning point in twentieth-century history, roiled by international student uprisings, the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the Prague Spring, the subsequent Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and a conspicuous resurgence of anti-Semitism in Poland and elsewhere. These case studies were initially chosen based on the documentation that Boelke-Bomart, the publisher of A Survivor, provided to Schoenberg’s widow, Gertrud, with her royalty payments. Unfortunately Ricordi, the publisher’s partner responsible for A Survivor in Europe, was lax in collecting fees. Gertrud complained to Boelke-Bomart repeatedly, and with good cause, that she heard about many performances from friends in Europe for which she never received payment. Several such instances were identified in the course of researching this project, including the first performance in Czechoslovakia. The countries chosen as case studies represent a rich variety of contexts. The fate of A Survivor in each place was influenced by local wartime experience, Jewish presence, Schoenberg’s history in the region, opinions about modern music, and Cold War political alignment (NATO, neutral or occupied, Warsaw Pact). Each case study is unique, and the characteristics that distinguish one from another are at the heart of this investigation. Some reciters used translations of the narrative into the local language (those in France, Norway, Austria, Czechoslovakia), whereas others used the original English (in West Germany, East Germany, Poland). All choirs sang the Sh’ma in the original Hebrew, and I found only one program that provided a translation of that text in the vernacular (Czech). West Germany is often portrayed as the new-music nirvana of postwar Europe and Schoenberg as the early luminary of Darmstadt, yet there was ample resistance to Schoenberg’s re-presence

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Introduction

there, particularly in the form of A Survivor, and that resistance was marked by both anti-Semitism and resentment of the American occupation. Because Schoenberg had been born in Austria, the return of his music to his hometown of Vienna was informed by all of the problems of remigration, further exacerbated by the Allies’ presence and that country’s claims to exceptional status as the Nazis’ first victim. Norway was an unlikely site, given its relative isolation from the larger continental new music scene, but Norway had had its own Holocaust, and A Survivor’s appearance there may be read as an effort to commemorate its victims. The chapters devoted to the Eastern Bloc are last because A Survivor appeared there only after Khrushchev’s “secret” speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 confirmed the end of the Stalinist reign of terror and the beginning of an era of relative liberalization that since 1954 had been known as the Thaw. East Germany was generally considered the most hardline of the satellites, yet A Survivor surfaced there first, albeit sublimated to the agenda of antifascism. From there it spread to the People’s Republic of Poland. A performance at the Warsaw Autumn Festival by the same East German ensemble was publicized as an act of atonement at the scene of the crime, although the sin thus recognized was the German destruction of the city of Warsaw in 1944 rather than annihilation of the ghetto and its Jews the year before. A Survivor finally appeared in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, where the Czechs twice cast an actual Holocaust survivor in the role of the narrator. Just as important for this project as a cultural history, however, are the common themes that emerge across the Cold War divide. Not surprisingly, “Schoenberg” was invoked as a cipher for dodecaphony, modernist music, Jewishness, or any combination of these, regardless of geopolitical context, as will be evident throughout. In fact, the composer’s identity proved to be remarkably mutable. He was interpreted variously as Austrian, Viennese, German, European, American, Jewish, modernist, and antifascist, and his life and music were such that a case could be made for each one. The identities projected upon him are a vital component of each narrative, and this book is less concerned with the legitimacy of these claims than with their construction and application in particular contexts. Each case study is informed by two other narratives as well. First is the place of modernist music in a culture before, during, and especially after the war, when musical style became closely bound up with Cold War political ideology.48 Second is the Jewish experience in a given geopolitical context, historically, during the Holocaust, and since war’s end. In plotting the convergence of these two lines of inquiry, I have tried to remain mindful of the “potential tensions

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and ambiguities,” the “potentially explosive political and ethnic sensitivities” at the intersection of Jewish studies and music.49 Finally, political power and the ways in which its institutions were determined by both the war and the terms of the peace provide the scaffolding for any cultural history in the Cold War era. The American presence in West Germany, Austria’s occupied and neutral status, the legacy of Norway’s wartime resistance movement, the manifestations of Soviet-style government and the Thaw in East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia: state apparatuses inevitably informed the performance and reception history of A Survivor, but they were not wholly responsible for it. This book situates its case studies within those political structures to better foreground the ways in which individuals exercised agency both within and in spite of their respective government institutions. There are also several common means of transmission that speak to the importance of both international and transnational networks, formal and informal, governmental and nongovernmental. Steven Vertovec uses “international” to refer to “interactions between national governments (such as formal agreements, conflicts, diplomatic relations), or concerning the to-ing and fro-ing of items from one nation-state context to another (such as people/travel and goods/trade).” He reserves the term “transnational” for “sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges among non-state actors based across national borders—businesses, non-governmentorganizations, and individuals sharing the same interests.”50 The cultural mobility of A Survivor was facilitated by both internationalism and transnationalism, although, as Lisa Jakelski has noted, the distinctions between the two were frequently blurred and overlapping; one individual could be engaged in both types of boundary crossing simultaneously. Jakelski observes that musicians who participated in international state-sponsored music festivals “were functioning as stand-ins for a particular nation-state,” but those musicians might also establish personal networks in that context that continued well beyond the duration of the festival.51 It is useful to bear this dual function in mind, given the importance of international festivals as conduits for A Survivor’s cultural mobility and the globe-trotting musicians who worked that circuit. Its West German premiere took place at the IFNM in Darmstadt, and its Austrian premiere occurred at the International Musikfest in Vienna; a Norwegian attended the Vienna performance and promptly set about programming the work in Oslo. The East Germans were responsible for the Polish premiere of A Survivor because they performed it at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, where a Czech critic heard it and gave it a positive review in the organ of the Czech Composers’ Union. (In fact, the

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Introduction

importance of Warsaw Autumn as a conduit for new music circulating in and out of the Eastern Bloc generally can hardly be overestimated.)52 Radio was similarly vital, and radio ensembles played a far greater role than other symphonic and choral groups. The European premiere in France was performed by the Orchestre Radio-Symphonique under the direction of René Leibowitz; Norwegian Radio cosponsored and broadcast the performance in Oslo; the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra gave the East German and Polish performances, which were broadcast in both countries; the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir in Prague made the first recording there in 1960, and Czech Radio broadcast it a year later. There is a subset of themes evident among the Eastern Bloc examples as well. A Survivor warranted discussion in the Soviet-style bureaucratic apparatus; the Jewish populations had been so decimated that actually existing Jews were virtually invisible in these states; the Jewishness of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was downplayed in favor of a general message of antifascist resistance; and advocates of modernist music pitched the work as evidence that dodecaphony could be deployed in the service of an approved political agenda (antifascism). This last endorsement stands in stark contrast to conventional wisdom in Western Europe in the late 1950s and beyond, when many modernists dismissed Schoenberg as passé, and musicologists favored a narrative of his life in the United States as lonely and fallow.53 A Survivor’s mobility from the United States to Western and Central Europe and finally into the Eastern Bloc is an example of the phenomenon Hungarian scholar György Péteri describes as the Nylon Curtain: cultural products had a circulation and an economy different from those of high politics, which were governed by the Iron Curtain.54 Most important, A Survivor’s cultural mobility required the transnational agency of dedicated conductors, performers, and scholars, regardless of geopolitics. Foremost among these was Hermann Scherchen (1891– 1966), one of Schoenberg’s most tireless advocates on the Continent. He conducted the premieres in West Germany and Austria, of which the latter was the catalyst for the performance in Norway, and at least three additional performances in 1950–51 alone. Pauline Hall (1890–1969) was almost single-handedly responsible for the performance in Oslo; she recruited the conductor Heinz Freudenthal (1905–99), a German Jew by birth and a naturalized Swedish citizen who was at that time enjoying a successful career in Israel. It is no exaggeration to credit Herbert Kegel (1920–90) with blazing A Survivor’s trail through the Soviet satellites in Central Europe. He seems to have encountered the work through Paul Dessau (1894–1979) and was subsequently responsible for programming it in Leipzig and taking

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it to Warsaw, where an influential Czech critic heard it. In Czechoslovakia the musicologist Jirˇí Vysloužil (b. 1924) held up A Survivor as proof that Schoenberg’s American oeuvre was a model for politically engaged and socially committed composers, and the Holocaust survivor Karel Berman (1919–95) played the title role of A Survivor repeatedly into the 1970s. Scherchen will be familiar to musicologists who study the period, but the others are probably less well-known. Their personal networks were essential for A Survivor’s cultural mobility, and recovering these individuals’ stories is an essential part of writing the cultural history of the postwar period in Europe.

West Germany Retrenchment versus A Survivor from Warsaw

The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany) figures prominently in most American musicological narratives of Western Europe during the Cold War because of its distinctive relationship with the United States, and because of its unrivaled support for new music. That support included dedicated international events, most famously Darmstadt’s Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (IFNM), which worked in tandem with radio stations to commission, record, disseminate, and promote new repertoire. Initially, this agenda featured music that had been repressed by the Nazis; eventually, the focus shifted to newly composed music. It also nurtured composers from abroad, some of whose works were ignored or maligned in their own countries.1 From this perspective, the FRG resembles a kind of Cold War musical hothouse, a nation whose cultural mission was to cultivate modernist and avant-garde repertoire that was too fragile or thorny to flourish in any other soil. That mission did not go unchallenged: there was notable resistance to this repertoire and to the use of federal funds to pay for it. New music met with both unparalleled support and virulent resistance in the FRG because, while the festival-radio enterprise was internationally renowned, it was also anomalous—a man-made biosphere in an otherwise inhospitable climate. Scholars of European history who study musical culture have noted this, as have some musicologists publishing in Germany.2 Despite the undeniable significance of Darmstadt and new music in general, the postwar period was primarily a time of retrenchment, one in which “West German musical culture and its educational infrastructure were largely unreconstructed.”3 West German performance and reception of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in the 1950s occasioned a collision between advocates of new music, whose position has been well studied, and the less-well-known 20

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forces of retrenchment. Schoenberg, and A Survivor in particular, acted as a lightning rod for a host of real-life postwar controversies, the importance of which is not readily apparent when accounts focus only on West Germany as a haven for new music. Anxieties about the role of former Nazis in postwar society, persistent anti-Semitism, the memory of the Holocaust, resentment of the occupying military presence, unease about the return of émigrés (either in person or symbolically, in the form of their art), and the ongoing controversy about modernist music all shaped the reception of A Survivor in postwar West Germany. Of these themes, the importance of returning émigrés for the reconstruction of West German musical life in the postwar period is now garnering musicological attention.4 It is estimated that only about thirty thousand of the half-million German-speaking emigrants returned, and reintegration into postwar society was frequently difficult. By the beginning of the 1950s, approximately 7.9 million ethnic Germans from the former eastern parts of the Reich and East Central Europe had also migrated to West Germany, accounting for about 16 percent of the country’s population and further complicating relations among postwar citizens.5 As with émigré populations generally, remigration of musicians and musicologists was the exception, and nonremigration was the rule. Maren Köster reports that only two hundred to four hundred of approximately four thousand displaced musicians returned to the Germanys after the war. This is a tiny fraction of the number of literary figures who did so, and a statistic that has probably contributed to the relative absence of this topic in musicology.6 However negligible these data may appear, remigration was a vital component of postwar society, particularly when one expands the concept beyond the physical presence of the composer to include the presence of music by composers who had not been heard under the Third Reich. Schoenberg never returned to Germany, his country of residence and employment when he left Europe altogether in 1933, but the reception his music received there after such a long hiatus indicates that some experienced its return as a kind of symbolic remigration. Remigration for the pioneer of dodecaphony was further problematized by his Jewishness. Marita Krauss has noted that all returnees were outsiders, easy targets “for resentment and anger” about Germans’ wartime suffering, but Jews were particularly susceptible because of persistent antiSemitism, fears that they would take revenge, projection, and guilt on the part of those who had remained.7 In December 1946 only 22 percent of Germans in the American zone thought émigré Jews should return unconditionally, and in October 1951 “about the same percentage held the Jews

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partially responsible” for the Holocaust.8 Not surprisingly, Schoenberg’s symbolic remigration was not universally welcomed. Some performers involved in the West German premiere of A Survivor at the IFNM on 20 August 1950 were resistant, critics alluded to broader hostility in certain circles, and several years later at least one critic continued to perceive A Survivor as an unwelcome remigration. Hans Schnoor (1893–1976) decried the presence of music by a Jew, the iconic emblem of modernist music no less, who had since become a citizen of the country he resented as an occupying force. Schnoor’s resistance to Schoenberg’s symbolic remigration in the form of A Survivor represents the retrenchment that opposed the better-known proponents of new music in the postwar period.

schoenberg’s music and reputation in west germany before a survivor Given the international polyglot composition of the IFNM audience, Schoenberg’s vaunted status at Darmstadt during the early years, and the relationship between the United States and the FRG (not to mention the relationship established between the United States Office of Military Government and the IFNM), it is plausible that some listeners and critics would have been aware of the work’s early reception before its West German premiere in 1950.9 If so, that knowledge probably came through René Leibowitz, the Polish-French conductor and composer who had produced the full score of the piece and given its European premiere in Paris in December 1948. IFNM participants would certainly have known the French pro-Schoenberg perspective, given the prominent role Leibowitz played there from 1948 onward. In 1949 Leibowitz published his Introduction à la musique de douze sons, which included a thirteen-page description of A Survivor devoted almost entirely to analysis of its serial components disconnected from its subject matter. The positivist approach he took in that book stands in stark contrast to the philosophical orientation of his article “Arnold Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, or the Possibility of Committed Art,” published in the London-based Horizon the same year and a preview of the argument he would soon pursue with Sartre, as noted in the introduction.10 German readers may have read his “Tragödie unserer Zeit,” an article published in the Düsseldorf newspaper Der Mittag on 15 November 1949 in which Leibowitz provided some of the narration from A Survivor as well as both accurate and inaccurate information about the piece. (Among the more tenacious bits of misinformation was Leibowitz’s claim that the

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narrative was the true account relayed by a single survivor from the Warsaw Ghetto to the composer, which has been widely repeated.) Otherwise he attempted to reconcile the positivist and hermeneutic perspectives tested in the publications mentioned by claiming that A Survivor “is a work that achieves the highest synthesis of extra-musical and purely musical elements, a work which makes our present-day fate clear to the listener by musical means,” even while it reaches “an extraordinary artistic level precisely through its treatment of this fate.” Leibowitz was adamant that the piece emanated from both the “purely human” and the “purely musical.” His account of the score was reduced for a nonspecialist audience, but it does note that A Survivor is “programmatic, ‘descriptive’ music” composed in a strict and radical dodecaphonic way that “leads to quite new principles of variation which, for lack of a better term, I would be inclined to call ‘athematic.’” All of this suggests that Leibowitz was appealing to the broadest possible audience: experts interested in dodecaphony as well as those who preferred something more accessible. The most intriguing aspect of the essay is Leibowitz’s account of the Parisian reception of A Survivor. He claims that an audience member told him afterward, “Whole volumes, long essays, many articles have been written about this problem, but in eight minutes Schoenberg has said far more than anyone has been able to do before.” He did not identify “this problem,” but it is clear by the end of the essay that he is not really talking about resistance to twelve-tone music: It was the extraordinary newness of the work that so gripped my audience. Many of them came to me with tears in their eyes, others were so shocked that they could not even speak, and only talked to me about their impressions much later. But not only the audience were impressed in this way; from the first rehearsal onward, the entire orchestra and chorus were so moved that there was none of the usual resistance one tends to meet in rehearsing a new work of such difficulty. Rehearsals proceeded in the greatest calm, and with a seriousness I have rarely met.11

The tone of this account is self-consciously instructive, almost pedantic. Perhaps this reflected the priorities of the newspapers editors: Wolfgang Steinecke, the founder of the IFNM and one of Schoenberg’s staunchest allies in West Germany, was a cultural editor for Der Mittag. It certainly would have suited Steinecke’s agenda to get into print an essay that might head off West German resistance to A Survivor by noting how French audiences and performers had behaved. If that was its purpose, however, it was not entirely successful.

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Steinecke was one of several influential advocates working on Schoenberg’s behalf in the three western allied zones of occupation and their subsequent incarnation as the FRG. Others included Schoenberg’s former pupil Winfried Zillig, who was conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1947 to 1951; musicologist and critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, based in West Berlin; and music administrators Heinrich Strobel and Steinecke. In 1945 the French military government appointed Strobel, another returning émigré, director of the Baden-Baden radio station that would become SWF (Südwestfunk), and, when the station reinstated its Donaueschinger Musiktage festival in 1950, he took responsibility for that as well.12 As editor in chief of the new-music journal Melos, which resumed publication in 1946, he identified his primary editorial task as “educating a completely ignorant public about the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and others.”13 His personal tastes inclined more toward Stravinsky, and ultimately he was more invested in promoting the music of younger composers, but he was a staunch ally when Schoenberg came under attack and used Melos to mount a counteroffensive. In 1956 Strobel also became chairman of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM), further enlarging his sphere of influence. Steinecke had worked as a music critic at several German newspapers during the 1930s and 1940s, and, when appointed cultural advisor to the city of Darmstadt in 1945, he founded the summer courses for new music.14 The first two seasons focused on the music of Hindemith to the exclusion of the Second Viennese School, and there were those who considered Schoenberg’s music irrelevant to discussions of modern music.15 This began to change in 1947, however, when Stuckenschmidt and the conductor Hermann Scherchen lectured on Schoenberg topics, and Das Buch der hängenden Gärten and the Second String Quartet were performed. Schoenberg took center stage in 1948 when Leibowitz taught a course on twelve-tone composition and conducted the West German premieres of the Second Chamber Symphony and the Piano Concerto, all to great acclaim. From that point Steinecke worked tirelessly to bring Schoenberg to Darmstadt, and although that dream was never realized, he was utterly committed to promoting and programming Schoenberg’s work. In 1949 an article in Der Spiegel announced the young guard: “The group of ‘dodecaphonists’ of the young French twelve-tone composers from the school of René Leibowitz have their own hierarchy of musical greatness. Arnold Schoenberg stands at the top, beyond all criticism and opposition, and immediately under him comes Leibowitz. But Stravinsky ranks at the bottom of this Jakobsleiter.”16 Between 1949 and 1951 the IFNM offered courses such as The Way of

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Twelve-Tone Music, taught by Willi Reich; Arnold Schoenberg, taught by Josef Rufer; and a Webern course, taught by Theodor Adorno. It also programmed at least seven, mostly new, major works. The tide would inevitably turn again after Schoenberg’s death in 1951, with the emergence of a forceful younger generation of composers. Nevertheless, for Steinecke, the Schoenberg project defined the IFNM. In a letter dated 26 March 1957, he told the composer’s widow that the two most important achievements of the IFNM’s history and mission to that point were these: (1) that it had emerged when the war was barely over; and (2) that it was responsible for the European and West German premieres of so many Schoenberg works.17 Thanks to the work of his well-placed allies, Schoenberg benefited considerably from the early postwar agenda to use the festival-radio apparatus as part of a large-scale cultural re-education plan in the FRG. This was further facilitated in 1950 when six radio stations (excluding RIAS— Broadcasting in the American Sector—in West Berlin) formed ARD, the working group of public broadcasting corporations in the FRG. The arrangement allowed for program exchange, shared studio productions, and technical interaction. All affiliates agreed to follow the guidelines of the Bildungsauftrag, “accept[ing] this pedagogical obligation to prepare listeners for the unconventional music they heard” in exchange for subsidized house orchestras, recordings, and state-of-the-art facilities.18 The extensive radio infrastructure was closely linked with numerous festivals and concert series devoted to new music. In addition to the IFNM, other festivals founded after the war included Musica Viva in Munich; Berliner Festwochen and Musik der Gegenwart in Berlin; Das Neue Werk in Hamburg; Musik der Zeit in Cologne; Musik unserer Zeit in Stuttgart and Karlsruhe; Tage der neuen Musik in Hannover; and Ars Nova in Nuremberg. Several organizations that had been shut down under the Third Reich were also resuscitated, including the Donaueschinger Musiktage, the German chapter of the International Society for Contemporary Music, the Kasseler Musiktage, and the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik. In the 1950s, new-music programming frequently featured some combination of avant-garde or experimental music plus formerly banned modernist repertoire, much of it by composers who had gone into exile and were, in a sense, remigrating in the form of their music.19

a survivor in west germany: 20 august 1950 Such were the conditions under which the West German premiere of A Survivor occurred, as part of a special IFNM concert at 7:00 p.m. on Sunday,

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20 August 1950, at the Darmstadt Stadthalle. Scherchen conducted a program that featured Wolfgang Fortner’s Concert Suite based on his ballet score for Die weiße Rose, A Survivor, the European premiere of Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation, and Ernst Krenek’s Fourth Symphony. For A Survivor the Landestheater Orchestra was joined by Hans Olaf Heidemann as narrator and a small male choir consisting of IFNM participants. Heidemann performed the narration in English, and no translation was provided in the program. The performance was broadcast by at least three ARD stations: Radio Bremen, SWF in Baden-Baden, and Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) in Hamburg.20 Scherchen had been promoting Schoenberg’s music since the two shared conducting duties on the Pierrot lunaire tour of 1912. During the Weimar Republic he become a proponent of new music, workers’ choruses, and leftist politics, and even though he was neither Jewish nor a member of the Communist Party, it was clearly in his best interest to make his home base in Switzerland starting in 1933. After the war he became a fixture on the new-music festival circuit, and he frequently programmed Schoenberg’s music for those appearances. After he conducted A Survivor at Darmstadt, he gave performances at the Venice Biennale on 13 September 1950 and Vienna’s International Musikfest on 10 April 1951; meanwhile he performed the work at least two more times in Rome and Genoa. Among other things, he was responsible for the world premiere of the golden calf scene from Moses und Aron as well as a memorable 1954 performance of the Piano Concerto with Eduard Steuermann as soloist. Tireless and tenacious, he may have been the composer’s most effective performing advocate. He wrote Schoenberg from Zurich on 13 July 1950, informing him that he would perform A Survivor on the Darmstadt concert just five weeks later, and asked the composer if he had any special instructions regarding its execution.21 Schoenberg was quite ill at this time, and there is no record of a response. In the interim, Scherchen’s diary refers to time he spent working one-on-one with Heidemann, the narrator.22 The recording of their performance reveals that they altered one of the German quotations: the line “wieviele ich zur Gaskammer abliefere” (how many I am delivering to the gas chamber) was rendered as “wieviele ich abliefern kann” (how many I can deliver).23 Omitting explicit reference to the gas chamber, the method of execution so strongly associated with the mass extermination of the Jews, appears to have been a concession to the sensibilities of Germans in the audience. Apparently the concession was not sufficient for Heidemann, a baritone who became known as a Bach specialist, because he let it be known that he

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figure 2. Hermann Scherchen, 1950s. Courtesy of the Scherchen Family represented by Myriam Scherchen.

was not happy about performing the piece. Scherchen reported that Heidemann told him afterward “how unpleasant it had been for him (on political grounds) to speak in this work.”24 Evidently he did not refrain from sharing this opinion with the press, either. Holger Hagen, a German who worked as an American music officer from 1945 to 1948, reviewed the concert for Die Neue Zeitung in Frankfurt. This paper, published by the Press Division of the Office of the United States High Commissioner for Germany, billed itself as “An American Newspaper for the German People,” and its position on re-education of the local population is evident in Hagen’s review. Although he opined that A Survivor is not one of Schoenberg’s strongest pieces, he expressed outrage at Heidemann’s behavior: “That a professional performing artist has the nerve to resist participating as the speaker, and then to take part only (in his words) under moral pressure—while doing his

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utmost to make his interpretation of the text ‘more neutral’—that this artist publicly claimed after the performance: ‘that is the biggest mess with which we could besmirch ourselves’—that is unspeakably shameful.” He deemed the incident shameful for the artist, for those who agree with him, and “for all decent-thinking people who do not want a glaring injustice to be ‘forgotten’ by hushing it up.”25 Other critics also referred to rumblings of discontent, even if they did not address them as directly. Writing for Die Abendpost in Frankfurt, Willy Werner Göttig reported that “even before the performance this realistic subject severely shocked certain circles that are not yet completely deNazified.”26 A few days later, a critic for the Aachener Nachrichten noted that “it has been discussed whether it was right to perform Schoenberg’s Der Überlebender von Warschau in Germany” and decided that “the strong artistic impression of the poignant musical tragedy, the most compact and at the same time the greatest of the works Schoenberg created in exile, proves that the initiators were correct.”27 Klaus Wagner’s review for the journal Musica noted that “extramusical events” associated with the concert were ample evidence that “political intolerance” had returned, and those events “rather spoiled” the memory of the performance.28 In addition to the objections raised by the narrator, there were also problems with members of the orchestra and choir. Anne C. Shreffler conducted an interview with a musician who had participated in the performance, and he reported that “the director of the chorus, Konrad Lechner, felt called upon to apologize to the chorus at the beginning of the first rehearsal, to the effect of, ‘this is a very unpleasant piece and I don’t want to do it, but we have to so let’s make the best of it.’ ” The musicians were given a German translation of the English text, and when they asked for a translation of the Hebrew text, the response was “You have a translation at home. You all have a Bible, don’t you?” The orchestra players were resistant as well. “This piece was viewed as anti-German. The orchestra was aghast that they had to play it, and held a meeting to discuss whether they should refuse or not. By a narrow margin they voted to go ahead and play it.” He reported that one orchestra member said, “The Amis [Americans] should play it themselves.” When Shreffler asked if “the Amis” were stand-ins for “the Jews,” the interview subject confirmed that they were.29 In the end there were very few IFNM students in the chorus, and several critics complained that its small size as well as its placement in the hall had deleterious effects on the performance. Many critics still found much to praise in the music and in the performance, however. Writing for Der Mittag of Düsseldorf, the same newspaper

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in which Leibowitz had published his preview in November 1949, FrenchRomanian musicologist Antoine Goléa reported that the performance was a “gigantic success, of particular worth from both a musical and an ethical standpoint. One of the most horrid tragedies of the Second World War is conjured here in the tersest, yet simultaneously most striking, most disturbing way.” He noted that even if the text in English and Hebrew was lost on much of the audience, “the enormous eloquence of the music did not miss its aim.” Goléa compared the density and style of the surface gestures to those in Erwartung and quoted Leibowitz’s 1949 article from the same newspaper to explain their effect: “One remains disturbed that one has heard so much in so short a time.” This critic believed, however, that “ ‘disturbed’ is putting it too mildly. Shaken to the core and to the bone from the atrocities of the pre-atomic age,” he deemed it “music of experience, precisely appropriate for our time.” He did not go so far as to translate the libretto but did provide the title in German. Perhaps the title and general description were sufficient to convey the subject matter, thus sparing both critic and reader the unpleasant recitation of familiar, recent history. He might also have counted on readers to remember the portion of the libretto Leibowitz had provided in the same newspaper seven months earlier. As Amy Lynn Wlodarski has noted, the reference to the pre-atomic age seems calculated to redirect some attention away from German culpability for the Holocaust to the American role in more recent horrors. Goléa used the nuclear bomb as a chronological placeholder again when he described Varèse’s Ionisation, identifying it as a piece from the pre-atomic era. His review makes it clear that from a musical perspective it was Varèse’s piece that provided the “obligatory scandal” every proper contemporary music concert must have, not Schoenberg’s.30 The leading Jewish newspaper in the FRG does not appear to have noted the Darmstadt performance of A Survivor. Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, the “Weekly Newspaper for Politics, Culture, Religion, and Jewish Life,” had been founded in 1946 in Düsseldorf by Karl Marx (1897–1966), a journalist who returned from exile for the express purpose of reviving the Jewish press in Germany. Schoenberg turned up in its pages repeatedly the following year, as the paper reported radio broadcasts and performances such as the premiere of the golden calf scene at Darmstadt in July as well as news of his death. The independent Berlin Jewish newspaper Der Weg also published Konrad Latte’s laudatory article in honor of Schoenberg’s seventy-fifth birthday on 9 September 1949.31 Of course, Allgemeine Wochenzeitung could be forgiven for overlooking such an event in light of the large number of pressing issues facing Jews in the

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FRG in 1950. Data are scarce for this early postwar period, but a study conducted by the American Joint Distribution Committee found that there were approximately 27,634 Jews living in the FRG in March 1950.32 That number does not include some 11,470 displaced persons, more than 10,900 of whom were housed in the American zone.33 Therefore, at the time of the Darmstadt performance, there were fewer than forty thousand Jews in a country of over 50 million people, many of whom were in dire circumstances, and since the Allies had officially transferred control to the Germans in 1949, there had been several high-profile anti-Semitic incidents. Marx had no shortage of news to report in Allgemeine Wochenzeitung, but in 1950 most of it was not cultural. The paper did develop a regular column entitled “Wort und Ton” (Word and tone) that aggregated cultural events thought to be of interest to Jewish readers, and in the early years that included radio broadcasts and concerts of music by Jewish composers and performers, among them Felix Mendelssohn, Aaron Copland, Darius Milhaud, Leonard Bernstein, and Serge Koussevitzky. A Survivor was performed in the FRG at least once more before Schoenberg died, when Hermann Spitz conducted the work with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra on 13 June 1951 as part of the inaugural season of the Hessischer Rundfunk series Das neue Werk. The narrator was Hans Herbert Fiedler (1907–2004), the bass who went on to create the role of Moses in the 1954 premiere of Moses und Aron. This performance was part of an evening devoted to Schoenberg’s music, and the broadcast was reported in Allgemeine Wochenzeitung, as was Scherchen’s performance of the golden calf scene from Moses und Aron at Darmstadt and the composer’s death, both in July 1951. On 13 September 1951 “Wort und Ton” alerted readers to a memorial broadcast for the “American Jewish composer” on NWDR, featuring the choral piece “Friede auf Erden,” the Second String Quartet, and commentary by Theodor Adorno.34 There were about a dozen additional performances of A Survivor in West Germany over the next decade.35 During this period Adorno also published two essays that linked A Survivor with Picasso’s Guernica. Those remarks have been cited many times as evidence of Adorno’s unequivocal endorsement of the piece, but Klára Móricz detects a profound ambivalence in his efforts to “situate Schoenberg’s new composition within [his] own post-Holocaust aesthetics,” since “in Adorno’s view postwar art was problematic in any event, whether it ignored the Holocaust or used it as subject matter.”36 By the time Adorno published “Commitment” in 1962, he could criticize A Survivor directly, on the grounds that it made “the unthinkable appear to have had some meaning.” This perspective, which became

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widespread in the 1960s, marked a drastic change in the work’s reception from the 1950s and can be read as reflective of a larger shift in thought about the Holocaust more generally.37

music critic hans schnoor and a survivor The resistance that was part of West Germany’s A Survivor reception in the early years of the Cold War is apparent in the writings of music critic Hans Schnoor (1893–1976). Schnoor had written his dissertation under Hugo Riemann and was his last assistant. He was a scholar of the music of Carl Maria von Weber, and his papers on that composer are housed at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Schnoor was music critic for the Dresdner Anzeiger from 1926 to 1945 and became a member of the NSDAP (the Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) on 1 May 1932 in Dresden, membership number 1131053. This is not a prestigiously low number, meaning he was not an important, early member, but it does predate Hitler’s rise to power, suggesting that he was sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Schnoor became chairman of the Dresden chapter of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Musikkritiker and was also a member of the Reichsschrifttumskammer of the Reichskulturkammer (RSK RKK).38 Among the supporting documents he submitted with his application to the RSK RKK was his biographical entry from the eleventh edition of Riemann’s Lexikon. Schnoor spent the war years in Dresden and then moved briefly to Berlin; presumably he underwent the denazification process in one of those cities under Order 201, the Soviets’ major denazification initiative. It made a clear distinction between nominal Nazis, who were needed for reconstruction and could be trusted, and a group that included former active Nazis, militarists, and war criminals, all of whom were to be brought immediately to justice. Schnoor was almost certainly in the former group and therefore would have been swiftly processed and employable. He settled in Bielefeld, West Germany, in 1949, where he worked as a music critic and musicologist until his death in 1976.39 In many ways, his story was not unusual; he was just one of many former low-level party members living and working in postwar West Germany. As a critic for Bielefeld’s Westfalen-Blatt, Schnoor used his regular column “Wir und der Funk” as a bully pulpit from which to rail against the programming of modern music by West Germany’s publicly funded radio stations. His column of 16 June 1956 concluded with a reference to A Survivor: “Next Thursday the Bremen station will broadcast Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, that disagreeable piece that must strike all decent

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Germans [anständigen Deutschen] as a mockery. In order to achieve the full effect of this provocative obscenity, the conductor for this broadcast, Hermann Scherchen (who else?), has placed Schoenberg’s hate-song [Haßgesang] next to Beethoven’s Egmont overture. How long shall it go on like this?”40 Schnoor packed a lot of significant references into a brief paragraph. His derision of modernist repertoire and its advocates (Schoenberg, Scherchen) was typical, but the manner in which he did so warrants investigation. When he appealed to all anständigen Deutschen, he addressed his fellow citizens using a term Hitler had applied to them. Readers would have recognized in the National Socialist rhetoric an appeal to reject A Survivor for all the reasons it would have offended Nazi sensibilities: a dodecaphonic piece, written by a Jew, in which Germans and their role in the Final Solution were cast in a negative light. Haßgesang may not have been a casual reference, either. The “hymn of hate” could refer to a relic of Anglophobic propaganda from World War I, a rousing poem written by Ernst Lissauer in 1914 entitled “Haßgesang gegen England.” Its enormous popularity during that war can be attributed to its simple efficacy, as “it builds up the single idea of hatred for the enemy into an incantatory and self-conscious crescendo.” It was the source of the slogan “Gott strafe England” (God punish England), and its message was unmistakable: “We love as one, we hate as one, we all have only one enemy: England!”41 Given the British presence in the FRG in the postwar period, the appearance of the term seems calculated to sound a nationalist alarm: “The enemy is among us.” Schnoor’s application of the term to A Survivor could have other connotations as well; perhaps it was meant to reduce A Survivor to the level of wartime propaganda or to imply that Schoenberg had written a work to unite the Jews and their allies in hatred against a different common enemy (Germany). Schoenberg and Lissauer were also fellow Jews, both renounced by the Nazis. Lissauer had received the Order of the Red Eagle from the kaiser for his patriotism in WWI, but his Haßgesang was not revived for the German war effort in WWII because he was Jewish (Lissauer died in 1937, having denounced the poem). Finally, the juxtaposition of Schoenberg with Beethoven, the unassailable, quintessential symbol of German musical nationalism, was not to be tolerated. In the context of this highly charged rhetoric, “how long shall it go on like this” sounds like nothing less than a call to arms. Schnoor’s column of 16 June 1956 might have gone unnoticed outside of the Westfalen-Blatt’s regional readership had it not been for his participation just ten days later in a conference that received national coverage in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).42 The conference The

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Intelligent Person and the Radio was hosted by the Protestant Academy for Radio and Television, and Schnoor had been invited to speak on a session called “The Place of New Music in Radio Programming.” The other panelist was the aforementioned Winfried Zillig, Schoenberg’s former student and one of his staunchest supporters in the FRG. Like Schnoor, Zillig too had a Nazi-era past to overcome (as did some of Schoenberg’s other advocates, including Strobel and Steinecke). Although Zillig had not been a party member, his career had flourished under the Third Reich, as he was appointed to conducting posts in Düsseldorf (1932–37) and Essen (1937–40) before becoming musical director of the Reichsgautheater in occupied Poznan´, Poland (1940–43). After the success of his film score for Der Schimmelreiter (1933), he received commissions for film and incidental music, including commissions for the Reichsfestspiele at Heidelberg. In 1936 his Romantische Sinfonie in C was commissioned and performed by the Reichssinfonieorchester of the Nationalsozialistische Kulturgemeinde. The Schoenbergs knew of Zillig’s activities during the war and remained close to him; he was entrusted with the completion of Jakobsleiter and the vocal score of Moses und Aron. His postwar claims that the Nazis had banned his music were clearly specious, as many of his compositions were premiered in Nazi Germany, but, as was generally the case, such activity does not appear to have jeopardized his postwar prospects.43 Zillig was the first speaker on the session and advocated boldness in radio programming, arguing that educating listeners about new music was part of radio’s duty, as stated in the ARD mission statement described previously. He used most of his time to demonstrate the pedagogical method he advocated by sketching a history of Schoenberg’s development as a composer, featuring musical examples that spanned his career from 1899 (Verklärte Nacht) to 1950 (Modern Psalm). Zillig argued that listeners could be brought along, but radio programming needed to build a foundation with older music, beginning with Mahler, and then explain how new music developed from that as new repertoire was introduced. He encouraged station managers not to be unduly swayed by the minority who wrote numerous letters of complaint and exhorted new music supporters to thank their stations in writing to counterbalance the naysayers. In conclusion he noted that, until very recently, he had known his co-panelist Schnoor only for having given one of his operas a positive review in 1937 but now knew something else of him; Zillig then proceeded to read aloud the WestfalenBlatt article previously cited. Declaring himself bound to his teacher in the highest admiration, he then refused to engage with Schnoor in any way.

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Evidently Schnoor refused to explain himself and left the symposium amid a ruckus; the session ended with the remaining participants listening to a recording of A Survivor.44 The next day twenty-one of the fifty-one participants signed a letter sent to Schnoor’s editor-in-chief, Hermann Stumpf, informing him of the events.45 The incident came to national attention on 30 June 1956 when Walter Dirks (1901–91) reported it in FAZ and used it as a point of departure for an exposé on Schnoor, or, more accurately, the phenomenon he represented. Strobel promptly reprinted it in Melos, thereby assuring maximum exposure. Dirks was a leader in the CDU and represented an important minority in German Catholicism, namely leftist intellectuals who sought to promote democracy through Christian socialism. He published broadly as a freelance contributor to numerous newspapers and in the early 1950s had become affiliated with the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, where he worked with Adorno editing the Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie. From 1956 to 1966 he was also head of the Department of Culture at the Westdeutsche Rundfunk in Cologne, which meant he was a public intellectual with a vested interest in the role of radio in postwar society. He was also in a position to draw considerable attention to Schnoor’s behavior. Dirks cited several articles by Schnoor, selecting choice rants against federally funded radio in particular (quoting Schnoor): “[Radio stations at] Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt and Baden-Baden enjoy positions of authority whereby they impose the tyranny of those people that flooded broken Germany after 1945 in the wake of a certain remigration (one could also say, in the pathetic procession of the occupying army). So far, names have not come into it. But soon one will be ready to speak publicly and specifically about all these things. There will be a rebellion—not of the masses, but of the best.” Schnoor’s resentment of the occupying armies extended to blaming them for facilitating “a certain remigration,” perhaps an allusion to Schoenberg or even Hindemith, newly minted US citizens whose formerly banned music had made a triumphant return on state-funded airwaves. Furthermore, his vaguely ominous statement that “so far names have not come into it” suggests that he was prepared to “name names” of those radio station employees that he deemed complicit with the “tyranny” of “the occupying army”—inflammatory language that stops just short of outright accusations of collaboration. Dirks conceded that Schnoor had every right to complain about the music but argued that the critic had crossed a line: “This rejection of new music and the inclination to aggressively insult and insinuate evil intentions is strung together with an antiSemitic nationalism. What Dr. Schnoor pursues—the combination of a kind

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of criticism of new music and current music business with an anti-Semitic foundation—is not only a national socialist phenomenon, it is a national socialist act.”46 An editorial in Die Zeit published shortly thereafter praised Dirks for his exposé but demanded to know why the author had not identified the individual or committee at the Evangelical Academy of Radio Broadcasting and Television who had seen fit to invite Schnoor in the first place.47 Strobel published a correction from Schnoor in the next issue of Melos, in which the critic took issue with Dirks’s account of events at the conference as well as his characterization of Schnoor’s work. He defended his style of criticism, insisting that it “is not directed toward individuals as such, but rather toward principles and procedures, for example, against a television broadcast about the evolution of electronic music.” More specifically, “It is untrue that there is a question of a ‘national socialist phenomenon’ in my music criticism,” and “it is untrue that my music criticism is bound up with an ‘anti-Semitic foundation.’ ” As evidence he cited a positive review of his most recent book published in a German Jewish newspaper: “Jüdische Nachrichten in Munich described me as a ‘recommendable commentator and advisor.’ ”48 That book was Oper, Operette, Konzert—“a practical guide for theater- and concertgoers, radio listeners, and recording fans” (1955)—and may well not have exhibited the bias associated with his writings on new music. It was published by C. Bertelsmann in Gütersloh, a prolific publisher of Nazi propaganda during the Third Reich that had since been formally rehabilitated. Schnoor further claimed that he had “engaged in conversation of a peaceful nature” at the conference with several individuals after the incident with Zillig. Among the conversation partners whose names he invoked, presumably as character references, were the program director of Radio Netherlands in Hilversum named Mr. Hoek, a music writer (“Martin”), and the priest Hans Werner von Meyenn.49 The first two could not be identified, but von Meyenn was the director of Catholic Central Radio in Bethel-Bielefeld; he had figured prominently in a slander campaign waged in December 1952 against the writer Heinrich Böll for his pointed satire of Catholicism’s refusal to confront Nazism. Numerous people came to Schnoor’s defense in his skirmish with Dirks. On 7 July 1956 his newspaper gave over the entire current events section to an anonymous piece entitled “The Conspiracy against Dr. Schnoor,” followed by an open letter from von Meyenn to Schnoor in which he praised his music criticism and echoed the question Schnoor had often asked: Does the radio have to engage with new music, or is this just the agenda promoted by a certain clique? The Mainz publisher Adolf Fraund also pledged

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fealty, claiming that Dirks had actually staged the scandal at the conference. Stumpf, Schnoor’s editor-in-chief, left no doubt as to his position. He called the critic “the victim of an attack” and described the radio as being “occupied by those who trust the victor without ever determining what the populace thinks of these people.” He reiterated Schnoor’s description of A Survivor as a Haßgesang and argued disingenuously that surely Jews, in their own interests, could not want such a piece in regular rotation on German radio.50 Schnoor was just one in a rogue’s gallery of music critics and musicologists writing for the general public whose careers continued from the Nazi era into the postwar era, and whose style remained essentially unchanged. Others include Rudolf Bauer; Rudolf Kloiber; Hans Koeltzsch; Otto Schumann; the former Nazi Walter Abendroth, who would defend Schnoor when his Musik und Chaos was savaged in print; and the Austrian Alois Melichar, who lived in Munich and specialized in publishing diatribes against Schoenberg throughout the 1950s. His efforts culminated in Schönberg und die Folgen: Eine notwendige kulturpolitische Auseinandersetzung, in which he decried the “twelve-tone fascism that declared total war on the tonal world, in which anyone who doesn’t like Schoenberg’s music is branded an anti-Semite.” According to Michael Kater, “Melichar deplored the ‘bad’ kind of anti-Semitism because it discredited the ‘justified’ kind.”51 Their sphere of influence may have been significant; for example, Kater notes, “Abendroth, Pfitzner’s old friend and a former Nazi and pronounced anti-Semite, after 1947 found his way into the newly constituted liberal weekly Die Zeit as chief of its cultural desk.”52 It is perhaps not surprising that critics did not take it upon themselves to revise their language; for Jens Malte Fischer, the more disturbing fact is that their publications sold so well and that there was apparently no social pressure to reform their use of “NS-jargon.” In other words, Schnoor and all the rest had an audience. The naïve or uninformed reader could imbibe the bias unawares, but hundreds of thousands of copies sold suggests that many were sympathetic.53 Rumors of the Schnoor affair eventually reached Gertrud Schoenberg in California. In a letter dated 31 July 1956, Zillig described the symposium to her as “an unholy mess”: “In my talk I slaughtered a guy named Dr. Schnoor, who is as infamous as he is crazy (surely you have already heard about this).”54 According to him, many newspapers had reported the event and decried Schnoor’s behavior, including Die Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Die Welt, Die Tat, and Die Süddeutsche Zeitung. Two months later, Zillig wrote again to Mrs. Schoenberg about the Schnoor situation: “Of course a

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so-called art critic can do Schoenberg little harm today . . . but this is no art critic; this is Stürmer plus Schwarzes Korps [the official newspaper of the SS].” And elsewhere: “I have found in this toadstool Schnoor the first true neo-Nazi.” Zillig advised her to take it up with the American embassy: “Since Schoenberg was one of the most prominent American citizens of this century, then a civil lawsuit must be brought against this guy suing for a lot of money in damages.”55 Strobel likewise took the matter very seriously. In a highly personal letter dated 5 October 1956, Strobel urged Gertrud to sue Schnoor for antiSemitic remarks about Schoenberg and A Survivor in particular, since under German law only the injured party or immediate family could initiate such legal proceedings.56 In her reply to Strobel (and later to Arnold Buchthal, Frankfurt district attorney, who wrote her in December), she acknowledged that she had heard about the Schnoor episode but declined to get involved in German politics.57 Instead, she referred the matter to A Survivor’s publisher Boelke-Bomart, with the apparent expectation that it could sue for damages in lost revenues.58 In point of fact, the publisher could not bring such a suit; it could only come from the offended party or his family, and under German law there was no assurance of damages even if the publisher were to win a suit. There was another lawsuit, however, for which there is ample evidence. On 17 July 1956, a twenty-eight-year-old radio journalist named Fred Prieberg reported these events on Southwest Radio in Baden-Baden. Prieberg called Schnoor “a national socialist music critic” on the air and accused him of continuing to write National Socialist criticism, just as he had done under the Third Reich.59 Schnoor and his publisher promptly sued Prieberg for defamation. In June 1957, the first district court in Bielefeld ruled against Schnoor, saying in essence that speech cannot be considered defamatory if the content of that speech is true. (Schnoor had, in fact, been a member of the Nazi party.) Evidence cited in this decision included an article Schnoor had written in 1939 entitled, “An Embarrassing Defense of Riemann: ‘German’ Jews in the New Music Lexicon,” in which he described Jews in explicitly anti-Semitic terms.60 The court agreed that Schnoor’s criticism had continued to demonstrate a pattern of deriding Jewish composers and conductors into the postwar period, such as referring to them with the article “der” rather than with the title “Herr.” Elsewhere he referred to Adorno as “Wiesengrund,” pointedly using the surname of Adorno’s assimilated Jewish father instead of the maternal Corsican surname he preferred, and wrote about the Jewish poet Heine as Adorno’s “comrade.”

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Among the more intriguing aspects of the decision was the court’s opinion that, given the virulent nature of Schnoor’s criticisms, Prieberg was entitled to respond in kind: The private plaintiff [Schnoor] to item 2) rejects modern music and electronic music and opposes it in extremely harsh reviews, which are published in the Westfalen-Blatt edited by the private plaintiff to item 1). He refers to it as “usufructuary music, anal art, foreign outsiderdom, disgusting pieces, spawn of the electronic studio” and purports that in decisive positions of the German radio system, “those people, who after 1945 flooded broken Germany in the miserable convoy of the occupying armies as liquidators of the breakdown, still exercise their tyranny”; he accuses them of the intent to dumb down the public. If the accused [Prieberg], who is a permanent employee of the Südwestfunk, therefore has as harshly attacked the political attitude of the private plaintiff [Schnoor] and quoted the harsh articles from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he is thus subject to the protection of § 193 StGB. The private plaintiff for item 2) [Schnoor] must acquiesce to a like response to his crude attacks.61

The statute invoked, § 193 StGB, protects appropriate counterresponses, and the court found that Prieberg’s statements fell within that category; evidently Schnoor’s attacks on radio stations had been so vociferous that Prieberg could defend himself in kind. The document quoted several excerpts from Schnoor’s writings that exhibited what was described as “the language of National Socialist journalism” and compared Schnoor’s language, as Zillig had, to that of the SS paper Das schwarze Korps. That Schnoor would sue Prieberg for defamation of character when his membership in the Nazi party was a verifiable fact (and not all that unusual for the time) seems extraordinary, until one considers the immediate context of denazification. Such suits were frequently brought out of a sense of honor, even if the outcome was virtually preordained. Indeed, “the power of a German ‘insult culture’—of honor and its defense in the courts—remains strong to this day.”62 Furthermore, in the postwar period, historian Ann Goldberg finds that “the legal discourse of honor came to be stamped by the notion, dating back to the nineteenth century, of ‘personal rights’ (Persönlichkeitsrechte) and the value of protecting a universal right of the individual to ‘free self-determination.’”63 Persönlichkeitsrechte includes the right to control one’s public image, a core value of continental privacy law.64 In defense of his honor, his public image, or both, then, Schnoor and his publisher appealed the decision, but in December 1957 the sixth criminal division of the District Court in Bielefeld upheld the lower court’s ruling.65 Schnoor was involved in at least one other similar lawsuit: the Westdeutsche

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Rundfunk initiated defamation proceedings against Schnoor on 24 February 1958. The Bielefeld district court ruled in the station’s favor and imposed a fine that was then distributed to nonprofit institutions. Schnoor was fined not for what he wrote criticizing modernist and electronic music and the radio stations that played it, but for the way he wrote it, that is, once again invoking the language of National Socialist journalism.66 Schnoor and Prieberg each went on to publish books in which they recounted the lawsuit: Schnoor in Harmonie und Chaos, published in 1962, and Prieberg in Musik im NS-Staat, in 1982. In neither instance is Prieberg identified as the defendant. Schnoor referred briefly to the suit and defended his still-negative opinion of A Survivor by quoting a letter he received from “a great attorney and the most honorable of men,” who had shared his view of the work in 1956: “It is not a work of art . . . its crude naturalism . . . cannot compare to J. S. Bach’s portrayal of the Jews in his passions. . . . I agree with you that its performance will only perpetuate hatred among men.”67 Schnoor’s attorney appears remarkably prescient, given the discussions of anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism that emerged regarding Bach’s St. John’s Passion in the 1990s, but to the best of my knowledge, this was not yet a line of scholarly inquiry. When Prieberg recounted the lawsuit, he identified the defendant (himself) simply as “an employee of Southwest Radio in Baden-Baden.”68 In postwar West Germany, new music enjoyed the support of prominent intellectuals, generous radio and festival subsidies, and the protection of state and federal law, but it also encountered significant resistance. In the case of Hans Schnoor, the resistance to new music generally and to Schoenberg’s A Survivor in particular was manifested in prose that reveals a host of contemporary social anxieties. From the court’s perspective, the most significant aspect of Schnoor’s criticism was the use of National Socialist language as a proven rallying cry against familiar foes. There was certainly cause to believe that, as a former Nazi Party member and journalist, he could deploy that language to appeal to persistent anti-Semitism. His career suggests that those opinions resonated with a wide readership. He continued to publish his views to a broad audience via the Westfalen-Blatt, the newspaper’s publisher backed him in many such lawsuits, and he found a prominent publishing house for his book on twentieth-century music entitled Musik und Chaos, albeit one with its own Nazi past. (The publishing house of J. F. Lehmann in Munich had published books on racial hygiene under the Third Reich.)69 The presence of American, British, and French troops was a sensitive issue as well. Schnoor accused those who programmed new music on the

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radio of collaborating with the “occupying army” and contributing to the loss of German national sovereignty and identity. He also blamed the Western Allies for a “certain remigration,” and his use of the term confirms that the question of returning émigrés was a defining issue of the postwar period. The few displaced musicians who remigrated to the Germanys after the war, either physically or symbolically, were essential to the reconstruction of musical life in the 1950s.70 In the turbulent postwar context, this piece (a dodecaphonic work that confronted the Germans with their responsibility for the Holocaust and praised the courage and religious devotion of the Jews) by this composer (a Jew, a composer who had long been the vilified icon of European musical modernism, and a naturalized American citizen) was sufficiently provocative that Schoenberg’s physical absence was no obstacle to considering the presence of A Survivor as symbolic remigration. Because only about 4 percent of the Jews who had been able to escape the Nazi regime returned to Germany after the war, even the symbolic remigration of a prominent Jew would have been quite conspicuous. Schoenberg’s trilingual text would also have connoted his émigré status: narration in his rather unidiomatic English, a handful of German phrases as Nazi quotations, and a concluding chorus in Hebrew. Ruth R. Wisse has identified multilingualism as “the most complicating feature of modern Jewish literature,”71 partly because it poses a direct challenge to the standard nationalist model of analysis and is so often indicative of émigré status. Neither the English nor the Hebrew text was translated for audiences at the German premiere, which might have been intended to protect audiences by giving them the cover of incomprehension. It also might have been construed as a kind of linguistic imperialism under the aegis of the US High Commissioner for Germany, particularly given the manner in which the member of the Darmstadt orchestra conflated Americans and Jews in his resistance to A Survivor. This, then, is the counterbalance to the persistent image of the FRG as the postwar utopia for modernist music under the auspices of federally funded radio and festivals: retrenchment in the form of a former Nazi music critic, rehabilitated in name only, resisting the Allied-led, modernist musical remigration with the familiar rhetoric of National Socialist journalism.

Austria Homecoming via A Survivor from Warsaw I would like it best if performances of my music in Vienna were banned completely and forever. People have never treated me as badly as I was treated there. —Letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Hermann Scherchen, 29 January 1951

Such was Schoenberg’s response when the conductor Hermann Scherchen informed him that he was planning to perform A Survivor from Warsaw in Vienna and asked the composer for his blessing. Schoenberg had long had a love-hate relationship with his hometown. Just sixteen months earlier, in October 1949, he had expressed heartfelt delight at receiving honorary citizenship in Vienna from that city’s mayor, even while his correspondence with Viennese friends revealed a deep and abiding ambivalence. He had ample cause to proceed with caution. An organized antiSemitic faction had torpedoed his academic career there, and the press had regularly savaged his music as well as that of his students. Given that history and the warm welcome Austria had offered the Third Reich in 1938, he was understandably wary of postwar rapprochements and had declined invitations to engage with the resuscitated Viennese music scene. Nevertheless, on 10 April 1951 Scherchen did perform A Survivor in Vienna, on a concert for the Konzerthausgesellschaft’s Fourth International Musikfest. The first half showcased new twelve-tone works: world premieres of Josef Matthias Hauer’s chamber oratorio Wandlungen and Mario Peragallo’s Piano Concerto, followed by the Austrian premiere of Schoenberg’s A Survivor as Ein Überlebender von Warschau. The narration of A Survivor, recited by Viennese actor Albin Skoda, was performed in German translation for the first and perhaps only time. After intermission the combined forces of the Vienna Symphony, Vienna Singakademie, Vienna Chamber Choir, and several soloists returned to the stage for Verdi’s Quattro pezzi sacri (“Ave Maria,” “Stabat Mater,” “Laudi alla Vergine Maria,” “Te Deum”). Scherchen had not defied the composer’s wishes so much as he had softened him up, as is evident from a letter Schoenberg sent him in February 41

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1951: “I was not happy about giving my consent for the performance of A Survivor in Vienna; six minutes, next to many times that much space allotted to other contemporary pieces. But of course I will not prevent you from doing what you want to do.”1 When Schoenberg wrote this letter he was seventy-six years old, in poor health, and living in California; he died five months later, on 13 July 1951. He was enjoying a measure of vindication in his twilight years, thanks to the prominence accorded his work across Europe since the end of the war, and was reluctant to give the Viennese the satisfaction of using him as a pawn in their cultural politics even as he fretted that his reputation warranted representation with a much larger work. Besides, A Survivor may be a short piece, but he must have known that it would pack a wallop in postwar occupied Vienna: a piece about the Holocaust (an event for which the Austrians had shown no hint of acknowledging culpability, performed in a city with entrenched antiSemitism), composed with the controversial twelve-tone method by a Jewish native son (shunned by his hometown and his music banned under the Third Reich). Furthermore, the narration was performed in German, the audience’s native tongue, rather than in the original English. Other pieces by Schoenberg had been performed in the city since 1945, but this was the first of his works featured on the city’s new music festival, and it appears to be the first performance for which he gave express written consent. Greenblatt’s theory of cultural mobility provides the point of departure for this entire book, but the case of Schoenberg in Austria represents a particular type of cultural mobility.2 It is defined by location as destination in a way the other case studies are not: it is a homecoming of sorts, a return to the city of his birth, and that destination makes A Survivor’s presence in Vienna a form of remigration. If one accepts Hans Mommsen’s postulate, quoted in the introduction, that an individual’s corporeal presence is not a prerequisite for remigration, then Marita Krauss’s “remigrating ideas,” by which she means the circulation of literature in postwar Europe, created by émigrés who did not themselves physically return, is germane.3 This is particularly the case with music, which depends for its mobility more on the presence of performers than composers. Krauss’s concept of remigrating ideas is similar to that of Greenblatt’s mobile cultural products, but it emphasizes destination rather than process, and it is the particular identity of the destination—Schoenberg’s former hometown—that distinguishes the present case study. This chapter investigates A Survivor in Vienna as a form of musical remigration and asks, how did A Survivor get to the city of Schoenberg’s birth, and what did it mean when it got there?

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anti-semitism and the holocaust in austria Given Schoenberg’s multiple identities (Jewish, Viennese by birth, culturally Germanic, American by citizenship) and the subject matter of A Survivor, Austrian anti-Semitism must be considered one of the most important factors informing the composer’s postwar remigration and Vienna’s reception thereof. Anti-Semitism was prevalent in Austria when Schoenberg lived there; thrived during the Anschluss; and persisted in the postwar period, both in popular sentiment and politics. In 1946 the Jewish Religious Community in Vienna (IKG—Israelitische Kultusgemeinde) reported, “Vienna now as before is the center of the ugliest and most treacherous anti-Semitism” and asserted that if it were not for the four occupying powers, “not one of the 4,000 Jews would be able to appear in the streets.”4 Leopold Kunschak was elected president of the Austrian National Assembly after a speech he gave in September 1945 declaring that “I myself have always been an anti-Semite” and blaming Jews for all of Austria’s political and economic ills, prompting the American Jewish Year Book to conclude that “of all the new regimes in the European countries, the Austrian Government is the most anti-Semitic.”5 Tracing Schoenberg’s personal exposure to the phenomenon before his emigration and remigration establishes this residual context. Schoenberg converted to Protestantism while the famously anti-Semitic mayor Karl Lueger was in office from 1897 to 1910, he to whom the infamous statement “I decide who is a Jew!” is attributed. Moshe Lazar chronicles the culturally normative anti-Semitism to which Schoenberg would have been subjected as a Jew in Lueger’s Vienna and notes that he seemed to ignore or repress such messages until 1921,6 although there were many slights he could not have overlooked. Former student Erwin Stein reported that in 1910–11 Schoenberg withstood “anti-Semitic attacks from political quarters (it having become known that he was to be offered a professorship at the Academy [of Music and Fine Arts in Vienna].”7 This coordinated maneuver cost him the position. A relatively minor incident in the summer of 1921 marked a turning point in how seriously and personally Schoenberg took such matters. He had to cut short his family vacation in the Austrian spa town of Mattsee when he was informed that Jews were not permitted there without presenting their baptismal certificates as proof of conversion.8 Not having anticipated this requirement, Schoenberg did not have his with him. When he reported the incident to his student Alban Berg he put a sardonic spin on it (“The people there seemed to despise me as much as if they knew my music”) but then he alluded to a broader concern: “But it’s just as unpleasant outside one’s profession as within

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it—only there one has to accept it. Perhaps here too? I wouldn’t know why.”9 Concerned for his teacher’s reputation, Berg urged his wife not to tell anyone about the incident: “Do not tell or write anything to anybody; absolute discretion. Nobody must know about the ‘anti-Jewish animosity.’”10 Shortly thereafter the story was reported in the press however, and more disturbing yet was a short follow-up item published in the Wiener Morgen-Zeitung, entitled “Schoenberg, Mattsee, and Denomination”: “A reader writes to us: ‘As to your report that the composer Arnold Schoenberg had abandoned his summer holiday on the Mattsee near Salzburg—where Jews are not welcome—although he is Protestant, one could counter that Mr. Schoenberg’s Protestantism is not very old. He was actually born a Jew and was baptized when he was a young student. Since he thus is a non-Aryan, he preferred to leave the ‘Aryan’ Mattsee to avoid further trouble. The baptismal certificate sometimes also lies.’”11 Anti-Semitism cost him another professional opportunity in 1923, when Kandinsky invited him to Weimar to lead the music academy there. Schoenberg declined because of reports of anti-Semitism among faculty at the Bauhaus, including Kandinsky. A newly heightened awareness of his status is summarized in a letter to the artist: “For I have at last learned the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year, and I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely even a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their races to me), but I am a Jew.”12 In May 1923, five months before the Beer Hall Putsch, Schoenberg was monitoring Hitler’s activities: “I can’t very well tell each of them that I’m the one [Jew] that Kandinsky and some others make an exception of, although of course that man Hitler is not of their opinion”; in the same letter to Kandinsky he decried the dangerous popularity of the fraudulent Elders of Zion and wrote presciently of the fruits of anti-Semitism: “But what is anti-Semitism to lead to if not to acts of violence? Is it so difficult to imagine that? You are perhaps satisfied with depriving Jews of their civil rights. Then certainly Einstein, Mahler, I and many others, will have been got rid of.”13 In 1926 he moved to Berlin to take the type of prestigious post long denied him in Austria, as professor at the Prussian Academy of the Arts, and he retained that position until he was dismissed under the Nazi Civil Service Law in 1933. In sum, anti-Semitism was something Schoenberg knew all too well, and it was one of the reasons he could be contemptuous of invitations to participate in the renewal of Vienna’s postwar musical life. In 1928 the fractious Nazi party in Austria had only 4,400 members, but Hitler’s ascension to German chancellor gave the movement momentum,

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and by the time the party was banned in Austria in June 1933, its members numbered approximately 68,000; after that, they went underground.14 Between 1934 and 1938, Austrofascism provided greater legal protections for Jews than Germany’s National Socialist government. Jewish musicians could perform and record there, perhaps none more famously than Bruno Walter, who conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony as late as 16 January 1938, just two months before the Anschluss. The regime’s particular brand of Christian authoritarianism did nothing to curb anti-Semitic sentiment, however. The Anschluss triggered such physical and legal violence against Austrian Jewry that within eighteen months approximately two-thirds of that population had emigrated, and those who could not get out were sent to camps in Poland, where approximately 65,000 died. According to Robert Wistrich, “This was a ‘tribute’ to the brutality of Viennese anti-Semitism, which was far more radical than anything hitherto seen in the ‘Old Reich,’ Nazi Germany before the Anschluss.”15 This antiSemitism manifested itself in crimes against Jews, disproportionately committed by Austrians serving in the SS. Political scientist David Art has written, “Although Austrians comprised only 8 percent of the Third Reich’s population, over 13 percent of the SS were Austrian. Many of the key figures in the extermination project of the Third Reich (Hitler, [Adolf] Eichmann, [Ernst] Kaltenbrunner, [Odilo] Globocnik, to name a few) were Austrian, as were over 75 percent of commanders and 40 percent of the staff at Nazi death camps. Simon Wiesenthal estimates that Austrians were directly responsible for the deaths of 3 million Jews.”16

postwar austria and the occupation If the presence of the Allied occupiers made the streets of postwar Vienna safer for Jews, it did not change fundamental attitudes about them. In fact, the Allies made three decisions that allowed anti-Semitism to persist, however inadvertently: the first was the conferral of official first-victim status upon Austria in 1943, which meant that the country was not as accountable as Germany for its Nazism or its role in the Holocaust. This was further enabled by a denazification process that initially included the option of suspended sentencing for good behavior (members had never “misused” their membership and they exhibited “a positive attitude” toward the independent Republic), an exemption claimed by 85 to 90 percent of the party’s 537,000 former members. By the time that law was revised in 1947, patience was running thin and the Allies had turned their attention to the Cold War; mass denazification ended in 1948.17 The third decision was encouraging

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Austria to include a provision for political neutrality in the constitution of the Second Republic in 1955. Not only did this reinforce national perceptions of exceptionalism, but it also effectively took Austria out of the Cold War and off the international radar, except when it had occasion to play the role of bridge between East and West.18 In essence, the Allies set up the punch line for the oft-repeated quip that Austria’s two greatest accomplishments have been convincing the world that Hitler was German and Beethoven was Austrian. Austria was divided into four zones and occupied by the Allied powers from 1945 to 1955. From the very beginning it enjoyed far more political independence than Germany, so even though the official occupation lasted longer in Austria, some issues proved more intractable there than in Germany. Like Berlin, the capital city of Vienna was divided and occupied, and situated within the Soviet zone. The Allies agreed to withdraw only after signing the Austrian Independence Treaty of 15 May 1955, supporting “the re-establishment of an independent and democratic Austria”; the Allies were gone by 25 October. The Austrian parliament promptly passed the Declaration of Neutrality, amending the constitution to make the country permanently neutral. This was thought to appease the Soviets, who wanted assurances that Austria would not join NATO, and its constitutionality has since made neutrality a fixture of Austrian politics and identity. This chapter of postwar European history is less familiar to most North Americans than the story of the two Germanys and occupied Berlin, presumably because Austria’s neutral status meant that it was not a prominent player in Cold War geopolitics. During that first postwar decade, however, Vienna was arguably home to as much cloak-and-dagger intrigue as Berlin. The city’s districts were divided among the Allied powers, with the exception of the first district (Innere Stadt), which was jointly occupied by the Allied forces under a quadripartite plan that allotted administrative authority to one Ally at a time, on a rotating basis. As noted, the first factor that enabled persistent anti-Semitism and, with it, silence about the Holocaust was the 1943 Declaration of the Four Nations on General Security signed in Moscow, which identified Austria as Nazism’s first victim. (The clause reminding Austria that she would be held accountable for her actions was conveniently ignored.) The federal government was quick to promulgate the “victim theory,” emphasizing Austrian resistance and depicting National Socialism as “a foreign tyranny.”19 Official first-victim status was broadly construed as granting absolution from all manner of wartime events, including Austria’s own Nazism and its role in the Holocaust, and one unintended consequence was that it allowed anti-

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Semitism to flourish virtually unchecked during the occupation and beyond. Robert Wistrich notes, “Although anti-Semitism was officially taboo after 1945 (as in Germany), it has never disappeared. Though it was no longer a state doctrine, a party political program, or a plausible response to social and economic competition with Jews (in 1945 Viennese Jews were, after all, a mere 0.1 percent of the population), its grip on the popular imagination remained alive.”20 First-victim status had unexpectedly long-term consequences: only after the so-called Waldheim Affair in 1986, when Kurt Waldheim’s presidential election brought scrutiny to his wartime service, did Austria’s role in the Holocaust come to the fore of public discourse.21 There was considerable concern about anti-Semitism in Vienna at the time A Survivor was performed there. In its report on the status of Jews and Judaism in Austria for 1951–52, the American Jewish Year Book observed that “popular anti-Semitism is widespread far beyond ex-Nazi circles and is much older than Nazism,” noting that this was especially in evidence in what it called the “boulevard press,” such as Wiener Montag, a leading purveyor of postwar Viennese anti-Semitism; it occasionally surfaced in the press of the more mainstream ÖVP (Austrian People’s Party) as well.22 This popular sentiment turned brutal on 2 April 1951, just one week before Scherchen’s concert, with the eruption of the first large-scale, public act of anti-Semitic violence in postwar Austria. Protesters demonstrating against the screening of Veit Harlan’s new film Unsterbliche Geliebte in Salzburg, in the American zone, were attacked by some sixty former members of Nazi organizations, yelling, “Jews and Americans get out!” Thirty Jews were injured, twelve of them seriously, and witnesses reported that police also turned on the protesters.23 Harlan had been a one of Goebbels’s favorite filmmakers and was known for directing the quintessential anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß (The Jew Süß) in 1940.24 (The IKG in Vienna had successfully lobbied the city’s police and the Ministry of the Interior to prevent its screening in the capital city.)25 That thirty Jews were injured in the attack belies that there were scarcely any Jews living in Austria at this time: at the end of June 1952, they numbered only about 14,000. Approximately 11,560 were registered with religious communities, 9,547 of those in Vienna alone; 2,000–3,000 were thought to be unaffiliated; and nearly 1,200 lived in DP camps in Vienna, Salzburg, and Linz.26

music and cultural politics in postwar vienna As in Berlin, postwar concerts were staged before the smoke had cleared, and they were as much hopeful signs of a return to normalcy as symbols of

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resilience and defiance.27 The Red Army entered Austria on 29 March, launched the Vienna Offensive on 2 April, and took the city eleven days later. On 27 April, the day on which Austria was officially severed from Germany, the city’s flagship ensemble, the Vienna Philharmonic (Philharmoniker), gave a concert for invited political functionaries under the direction of Clemens Krauss. The program featured two Viennese mainstays (Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony and Beethoven’s Leonora Overture no. 3) and, in a gesture of goodwill toward the Soviet officers in the audience, a favorite Russian work (Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony). For all its triumphant symbolism, however, one would never have known from the musicians amassed onstage that the Nazis had been defeated: Krauss was compromised by his work as an emissary of Third-Reich cultural politics, and 45 percent of the one hundred seventeen musicians in the Philharmonic were NSDAP party members; half of those had joined before the Anschluss, and two were members of the SS. Compare that to the status of the Berlin Philharmonic at war’s end: of its one hundred ten musicians, twenty were NSDAP members.28 On 30 April the Soviet newspaper Österreichische Zeitung affirmed the importance of the rebirth of Austrian culture as part of its agenda for the country, and on 20 May it declared that Gustav Mahler would figure prominently in that agenda, now that Austria was free from “the foreign domination of the Nazis and the chains of fascist censorship.”29 Mahler had not been heard in Vienna since 1938, and the return of his music was part of the city’s rehabilitation project. The Vienna Philharmonic gave its first postwar concert on 3 June, with Robert Fanta conducting Mahler’s First Symphony. Fanta had been forbidden to work under the Nuremburg race laws, so his return to the podium was as symbolic as the repertoire he conducted. The other major ensemble in the city was the Vienna Symphony (Wiener Symphoniker), house band at the Konzerthaus, which had been forced to cease operations in 1944. The resurrected ensemble gave its first postwar concert on 16 September under the direction of Josef Krips, another conductor who had been unable to work under the Nazis. On the program: Mahler’s Third Symphony. These concerts served public notice that Vienna’s musical heritage had survived the Anschluss, a purpose that also might have been served by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, or any of the other beloved masters of the Viennese tradition. But Mahler conveyed a more specific political message: his return was supposed to symbolize a new democratic Austria, a vindication against the antimodernist, anti-Semitic agenda of the German Nazi regime.30 Austria’s first-victim status enabled the pretense that there

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had never been any home-grown opposition to Mahler rooted in antimodernism or anti-Semitism. Not all Jewish composers’ remigrations were equal, however; Mahler’s music was suited to this purpose because it was more accessible and readily popularized than Schoenberg’s, or even Franz Schreker’s.31 Unlike the music of the Second Viennese School, Mahler’s music was easily appropriated for the discourse of Austrian Volk and Volkstümlichkeit (folksiness) that accompanied the nation’s postwar reinvention of itself.32 Schoenberg also had advocates in 1945, although they were concentrated among the aficionados and specialists. Already on 20 April 1945, Schoenberg’s former student H. E. Apostel reconstituted the Austrian section of the International Society for New Music (ISCM), an organization that had been founded in Austria in 1922. One of its first concerts, on 28 June, was an evening of chamber music featuring Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet and works by Prokofiev, Hindemith, Eisler, and de Falla, held at the Brahms-Saal of the Musikverein. On 26 September the ISCM hosted a song recital, with the Wagnerian mezzo-soprano Elisabeth Höngen performing works by the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Apostel). The program leaflet listed an ambitious set of repertoire for the rest of the season, including six works by Schoenberg, the most by any composer. It is not known how many of those were actually performed, but it is clear that the ISCM recognized Schoenberg’s symbolic significance almost from the moment the organization was resuscitated. The protocol of the executive committee meeting on 9 March 1946 includes the announcement that Schoenberg had accepted its invitation to serve as honorary president.33 The most important figure behind the scenes of Vienna’s more public art-music culture in the postwar period was an attorney-turned–arts administrator and -editor named Egon Seefehlner (1912–97). He had studied law at the Vienna Consular Academy, and from 1938 to 1943 he worked for the Berlin offices of AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft— General Electric Company). Immediately after the war, he began editing the literary journal Der Turm and also became general secretary of the Austrian Cultural Union (Kulturvereinigung). When that division was moved under the Ministry of Education, he was entrusted with overseeing their deNazification procedures, which gave him considerable discretionary power.34 In July 1946 he was also hired as general secretary of the Vienna Concert House Society (Konzerthausgesellschaft), and he held both positions until 1963. Apparently indefatigable, he added the title of assistant director of the Vienna Staatsoper to his resume in 1954 as well. Seefeehlner found the city’s major cultural institutions (Burgtheater, Konzerthaus,

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Musikverein, Staatsoper, Philharmoniker) too hidebound by Viennese tradition. There was one homegrown tradition audiences did not rush to embrace, however: the dodecaphony of Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School. Seefelhner established the International Musikfest under the auspices of the Konzerthausgesellschaft to persuade nonspecialist Viennese audiences to reengage with modernism’s international mainstream. After all, in the immediate postwar period, dodecaphony very nearly was international modernism. If Vienna was ever going to be relevant to the new music scene again, he reasoned, it had to make amends with its native son Schoenberg and his music.

Schoenberg and Postwar Viennese Cultural Politics In December 1947 Seefehlner asked Schoenberg for permission to program one of his works for the second International Musikfest in 1948. He was especially keen to have a new piece (“It would be a great honor if you would allow us to premiere one of your works”) and invited him to attend the festival as a guest of the Konzerthausgesellschaft.35 Schoenberg’s response on 10 January 1948 was measured. He pointed out that Seefehlner did not need permission to perform his music and suggested that he take the usual route of making arrangements through the publisher; he also recommended René Leibowitz as a conductor. But then he added, “I hesitate understandably to give you a personal agreement. I have the impression that in Vienna racial issues are still more important than artistic merit for judging artwork,” indicating that he had kept abreast of events there. “If it were otherwise the need to cultivate my works after so many years of neglect would have emerged sooner, and not just at the second international Musikfest.” Perhaps anticipating Seefehlner’s response, he warned, “Do not say that it would be better for me to forget the evil that was done to me.”36 Apparently undeterred, Seefehlner protested, “I don’t believe that it is correct for you to hold this suspicion of contemporary musical life in Austria,” and assured him that as general secretary of the Konzerthausgesellschaft, he had never selected repertoire on the basis of a composer’s race. He reported that Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony had already been performed, and plans for Pierrot lunaire and Ode to Napoleon had been scuttled for logistical reasons only. He pleaded with Schoenberg to entrust him with the cultivation of his music in Vienna, but the composer was unmoved. Other individuals attempted to draw Schoenberg back into the Viennese orbit as well. In March 1946 Austrian cultural politico and music critic Peter Lafite (1908–51) asked him to contribute an essay to his new journal,

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Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, a forum that promoted all musical modernisms, but Schoenberg begged off, citing other obligations.37 In October 1948 he was contacted by civil servant Friedrich Wildgans (1913–65), a clarinetist and composer then working as a musical advisor (Musikreferat) to the city of Vienna. Wildgans wrote to inform the composer of his newly venerated status in the city: “Your person and your music are no longer just a battle cry and a point of contention in Viennese musical life, but are being reassessed by ever larger circles as one of the most valuable contributions to twentieth-century Austrian music.” As tangible proof of Schoenberg’s new status, Wildgans noted that the municipality of Vienna had purchased Gerstl’s 1906 portrait of the composer and gave it a place of honor next to Schoenberg’s self-portrait in the Galerie der österreichischen Künstler.38 And someone working at the independent newspaper Die Presse cared enough about Schoenberg’s American career to report that the world premiere of A Survivor had been given in Albuquerque under the direction of Viennese native Kurt Frederick; it was described as a huge success. The reporter marveled that the chorus who sang the difficult work included cowboys and farmers and that the narrator was chair of the University of New Mexico’s chemistry department.39 It should not be thought that these individuals represented any great public groundswell of support for Schoenberg’s return. Viktor Matejka, city cultural councilman (Kulturstadtrat) and leader in the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ), was thwarted in his attempts to bring the composer to Vienna when municipal authorities could not even agree to secure Schoenberg an apartment. Given this context, Otto Karner describes their decision to award him honorary citizenship of the city of Vienna in 1949 as “almost tragicomic,” and such circumstances render Schoenberg’s apparently heartfelt acceptance all the more poignant.40 Karner attributes the generally tepid response to the prospect of Schoenberg’s return to the lack of interest in confronting the Nazi-era bias against modern music there combined with the “half-hearted” de-Nazification of so many prominent musicians, who promptly picked up again where they had left off.41 This environment proved bitterly disappointing for Apostel, Schoenberg’s former student. Frustrated with what he described as the “unqualified” people trying to run the new music scene, he resigned from the ISCM presidency in 1948 and was succeeded by Wildgans. Apostel lamented the postwar absence of Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and David Joseph Bach, without whom “the reactionary element in the concert audience is rampant, even among the youth. I can only give a dark, fatalistic prognosis.” He reported that the concert the ISCM and the Vienna Symphony gave on 7 October

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1949 in honor of Schoenberg’s seventy-fifth birthday was marred by the lack of performers skilled in contemporary music and opined that it was probably best that Schoenberg was far removed from the situation.42 There was the occasional cause for optimism, however. On 8 February 1950 the ISCM co-sponsored a concert by the ensemble Die Reihe that must have conjured memories of the Society for Private Musical Performances, an organization Schoenberg and his circle had run from 1918 to 1921. It featured two performances each of works by Bo Nilsson, Luigi Nono, and Webern, arranged around Schoenberg’s Five Piano Pieces, op. 23, and “Dreimal Tausend Jahre.” Apostel also reported that the Amsterdam String Quartet performed Schoenberg’s Fourth String Quartet in Vienna to six curtain calls, and that the audience response was a hopeful sign of resistance to “philistines and bigotry.” Nevertheless he was having difficulty promoting his own dodecaphonic music or that of another member of Schoenberg’s circle, Hanns Jelinek, because “so-called neoclassicism unfortunately has more advocates than it needs, while Berg and Webern, and by extension Jelinek and myself, are left out as orphans.”43 Apostel divided the new-music scene into four groups: the post-Romantic group led by the composer Karl Marx; the neoclassicists led by J. N. David; the political group, by which he meant those advocating the antiformalism and accessibility of Soviet socialist realism; and the dodecaphonists, “who must make do with the cold comfort” that history will treat them differently.44 Apostel’s prediction about history’s perspective on his circle of dodecaphonists may have been unduly optimistic. For all the ink spilled over the Second Viennese School, the spread of dodecaphony, and its serialist descendants after WWII, very little of that has concerned developments in the city or country of its birth; the first study of postwar Austrian dodecaphony did not appear until 1988, and it remains an understudied field.45 Clearly frustrated by his perceived marginalization, Apostel attributed the success of some trends to a continuation of musical politics and aesthetics that had been promoted under the Third Reich. He was especially resentful of the proliferation of “a certain neoclassicism” and invoked its putative links to National Socialism, an argument first put forth in the 1930s, to bolster his aesthetic opposition with political justification. He described it as “a secondary postwar late flowering of the Third Reich (Nachblüte des Dritten Reiches)” and bemoaned that the Konzerthaus was less sympathetic to the music of the Second Viennese School than to Hindemith’s neoclassicism, which was “reaching back to the recorder of the Third Reich (Blockflöte des Dritten Reiches).”46 “Blockflöte” may be an allusion to the term “Blockflötenkultur,” coined by the Viennese Ernst Krenek in the mid-

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1930s in his critique of the youth music movement (Jugendmusikbewegung) and Hindemith in particular; Adorno claimed to see an ideological link between that movement and National Socialism.47 Hindemith had been in favor with the Third Reich before he was out of favor, and his name had long been associated with neoclassicism. The two composers had had an uneasy relationship since the 1920s in Berlin, and by 1945 Schoenberg was certain that Hindemith was “in a camp opposite to his, believing him to be an arch-conspirator.”48 Schoenberg was contemptuous of him as a commercial sellout. Told that Wildgans had renounced dodecaphony, Schoenberg’s response was that “he has now apparently chosen the more profitable side and gone over to Hindemith”; elsewhere Schoenberg complained that Heinrich Strobel of the BadenBaden festival “has only two gods, Hindemith and Stravinsky” (the latter being the composer whose popularity irked Schoenberg the most).49 Hindemith was then touring postwar Europe in an effort to revive his career there, and audiences were receptive. Seefehlner took pride in having introduced Hindemith to the Viennese, describing him as “the star” of the first International Musikfest in 1947.50 His starring role continued for several years; between 1947 and 1951 Hindemith had four world premieres and five Austrian premieres at the festival, whereas Schoenberg had one Austrian premiere only (A Survivor in 1951).51 In other words, Apostel’s sense that the Second Viennese School was neglected was not merely paranoia: the repertoire he described as neoclassical was programmed far more often than dodecaphony. Krenek attributed Hindemith’s extraordinary success in postwar Austria to the fact that people who had been “official Nazis” were “secretly interested in a kind of music that appears progressive, but is actually very simple and traditional.”52 Regardless of motivation, between 1945 and 1953 the Konzerthausgesellschaft programmed seventy-two performances of large works by Hindemith, fifty-three by Stravinsky, fortytwo by Bartók, and forty by members of Les Six, as compared to fifteen by Schoenberg, six by Berg and three by Webern.53

The Concert This, then, was the context in which Scherchen asked Schoenberg to give his blessing to a performance of A Survivor in Vienna. Between his personal experience in that city and Apostel’s updates, the letters from Seefehlner and Wildgans must have struck Schoenberg as obsequious, selfserving attempts to manipulate him for political purposes. Besides, Seefehlner had already declared that the theme of the fourth International Musikfest would be the Second Viennese School, and that A Survivor

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would be on the program. An announcement had appeared in the January 1951 issue of ÖMZ, noting that Schoenberg’s circle was known worldwide and hailing that year’s series as the most comprehensive attempt thus far to demonstrate the global significance of Vienna to contemporary music. A performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony was deemed the other major attraction of the 1951 Musikfest, since it had not been played in Vienna for fifteen years.54 ÖMZ returned to Schoenberg repeatedly in the ensuing months, with features such as Friedrich Saathen’s response to Winton Dean’s review of Style and Idea and Josef Rufer’s primer on dodecaphony.55 Schoenberg may have heard about the scheduled performance first from Apostel, who contacted him as soon as he read the announcement.56 In his letter to Scherchen on 30 January 1951, the elder man did not mention A Survivor, although he mentioned that he had little hope of being able to come to Darmstadt because of “health, cost, Nazi disturbances [Nazistörungen], etc.”57 In February Scherchen tried to persuade Schoenberg to consent (“I write on behalf of myself and all your true friends in Vienna, and ask you to please send a friendly telegram giving permission for A Survivor”) by insisting that a genuine fresh start was underway in his hometown; besides, “despite everything, Vienna is a musical breeding ground like no other.” He was also adamant that “there would be no Nazi disturbances” in Vienna and attempted to put the composer’s mind at ease by reminding Schoenberg that he had already dealt successfully with opposition at Darmstadt.58 Such an assurance probably did not inspire much confidence. And even though Schoenberg eventually relented, Seefehlner may have read too much into that concession; the composer took great offense at a subsequent invitation from the International Musikfest to serve on the honorary festival committee.59 It appears that Scherchen managed to hold the event together by sheer force of will. As one of Schoenberg’s most effective advocates in postwar Europe, he was closely associated with A Survivor; he had conducted its controversial German premiere in 1950 as well as performances in three different Italian cities since then.60 The most distinctive feature of the Viennese performance was surely that the narration, originally written in English, was recited in German translation. The publisher had asked Schoenberg to prepare a German translation himself, but he had hesitated, saying, “It destroys the effect of the German words which appear suddenly among the English. I cannot tell at present whether this effect must or can be preserved. I will have to think it over.”61 Apparently the publisher went ahead without him, because a German translation attributed to Margaret Peter appeared in the 1949 edition of A Survivor, right next to the approved French translation by René

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Leibowitz.62 Schoenberg was furious: “This translation into German is absolutely un-useable. You must take it out and replace it by one which I will acknowledge. I refuse to acknowledge this. It is not translated into German, this is translated into jargon which might have been spoken in Berlin at one time, but I don’t allow this with my writings. How was it possible that you publish such a thing without asking me.”63 Someone involved with the Viennese performance, perhaps Seefehlner or Scherchen, may have been aware of this situation, because the Konzerthausgesellschaft hired retired diplomat and professional translator Hanns von Winter (1897–1961) to produce a new version. The Viennese actor Albin Skoda recited Winter’s text in performance, and it was printed in its entirety in the program.64 Schoenberg found out about the translation after the fact, when Winter sent it to him and asked for his endorsement.65 Winter claimed to have been an early member of the Society for Private Musical Performances. Schoenberg did not remember him, but Apostel vouched for him as an ally. Winter had endorsed the Second Viennese School in print, including a 1950 essay in ÖMZ in which he chastised the Viennese for neglecting their music, noting that dodecaphony was then being taught in Berlin, Stuttgart, Munich, Paris, and even at the University of Illinois—but not in Vienna.66 The unauthorized Peter translation from the 1949 score has several errors, some of which, such as the frequent misuse of apostrophes, suggest the intervention of an overeager American copyeditor. Generally speaking, however, it hews fairly closely and consistently to the style and tone of Schoenberg’s original English prose and can be recited with minimal adjustments to the notated rhythm. Perhaps Peter was attempting to recapture the nonidiomatic flavor of the original. For American audiences this feature clearly marks the language as the survivor’s non-native tongue, the narrative as a story he is telling in a place other than his homeland, and the listeners as not his own people. The extent to which Schoenberg recognized that his English text sounded like that of a non-native speaker is not clear, however; if he did not consider it particularly nonidiomatic, that perspective might account for his indignant reaction to a German translation in a similar style. His accusation that it sounds like “Berliner jargon” is difficult to explain since the only obvious regionalisms are German expressions spoken by the Feldwebel, and Schoenberg had used them in the original: “na jut” and “Stilljestanden” ([stand at] attention!) would have been recognizable to German speakers as markers of Berlin or Brandenburg dialect. Unlike Schoenberg’s original English or Peter’s German translation, both of which are unidiomatic prose, Winter’s Austrian version is lyrically poetic.67 The narrator would have to make substantial adjustments to the

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notated rhythms to recite this text in performance, but it can be fitted to the general gestures and contours of the line. Winter exhibits a decided preference for ten-syllable lines; he adds adjectives, punctuation, and phrases for color; he uses proper and formal diction throughout. In other words, it is calibrated to sound like, and be heard by, educated native German speakers. Some of his choices are significant and go beyond the general elevation of the language. He renders the end of the line “the old prayer they had neglected for so many years—the forgotten creed!” as “Ein vergessen Lied!” (a forgotten song), which is less weighty than the forgotten creed; similarly, at the very end of the narration and just before the chorus enters, he adds the text “Ihr altes Lied” (their old song) before announcing the Sh’ma. The line “how could you sleep?” is rendered as “Wer fand da Schlaf?” (Who found there sleep), a rhetorical question with an interrogative (who) that is far less direct than the second-person address of the original. Most conspicuous is the omission of the term Gaskammer (gas chamber) from the sergeant’s final rant: “In einer Minute will ich wissen, wieviele ich zur Gaskammer abliefere!” (In a minute I want to know how many I am delivering to the gas chamber!). Winter renders the second clause as simply “wieviele ich abliefere!” (how many I am delivering!). This omission may have originated with Scherchen. The recording of the German premiere at Darmstadt in 1950, which he also conducted, reveals that narrator Hans Olaf Heidemann said “wieviele ich abliefern kann” at this point.68 Omitting an explicit reference to the Third Reich’s distinctive method of mass execution makes the text less graphic by a degree and seems calculated to soften the impact on German audiences, but it does not substantially alter its content. Winter’s treatment of the character of the sergeant is noteworthy. Schoenberg used the word Feldwebel one time in the original text, when he introduced the first German-language quotation; the other six references to this character are all in English (sergeant). Winter used Feldwebel the first three times and then switched to Spieß (spear). Feldwebel is a distinctly German military rank, and Spieß is an equally German military nickname for Hauptfeldwebel (regimental sergeant major). The Austrian military counterpart to the Feldwebel was Wachtmeister or Unteroffizier, except during the Anschluss, when the nomenclature of the German military would have been used. No nickname is called for in the original. Therefore the deliberate use of a German nickname for the NCO (even if inaccurately applied in the case of Spieß to Feldwebel) suggests that Winter was making a distinction between Austrians and Germans: even if an Austrian had held the rank of Feldwebel during the Anschluss, he would not have been known

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as der Spieß.69 It disassociates Austrians from the acts recounted in the narrative. This seems to contradict the other adjustment Winter made to the sergeant’s role, which was to remove the markers of Berlin-Brandenburg dialect that Schoenberg had provided in the Feldwebel’s first statement. (The typescript Winter sent to Schoenberg for his approval after the performance retained this original wording, perhaps in an effort to avoid offending the famously prickly composer.)70 Winter replaced Stilljestanden with Stillgestanden and Na jut with Meinetwegen, both standard hochdeutsch without regional implications. This could be read as an attempt to broaden the scope of German-speaking culpability beyond Brandenburg to hochdeutsch speakers generally, including those in Austria. However, given the poetic nature of the text and the use of elevated language throughout, it seems likely that the quotation was tweaked to bring it into alignment with the diction used in the rest of the narration. In a plot twist that typifies the complicated reality of the postwar period, Winter had also been a member of the Nazi party: he joined on 3 March 1932 under the pseudonym Walter Hengauf, membership 896020.71 The biography he submitted with his application to the SS in June 1939 recounts his faithful service to the party from far-flung diplomatic posts, including reports to Viennese gauleiter Alfred Frauenfeld from Moscow and Paris (presumably the reason for the pseudonym, since the Austrian police carefully monitored known Nazis even before the party was outlawed in 1933), and close collaboration with the Gestapo branch in Turkey while stationed in Istanbul during the party’s ban. Marital purity was of primary concern in the SS, so he also had to demonstrate appropriate partnership. Winter reports that he married his Russian wife in 1930 and that she had been imprisoned by the Soviets numerous times after the Bolshevik Revolution, including a stint in the notorious labor camp on Solovetsky Island.72 The fact that a former Nazi was responsible for the German translation of A Survivor used for the Austrian premiere, ironic though it may seem now, is also typical of daily life in postwar Germany and Austria: one could not hope to get anything done without working with a few former Nazis, rehabilitated or not.

The Faustian Connection The reception afforded Schoenberg’s remigration to Vienna via A Survivor was also informed by the reception of two other exiles who had gotten there first: they were Mahler, as previously noted, and Thomas Mann. Schoenberg became linked with them in a kind of Faustian constellation in postwar Viennese intellectual life, and this shaped his hometown reception. Like

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Schoenberg, Mann was a German-speaking émigré living in California who had become an American citizen, and his works had also been banned under the Third Reich. His 1947 novel Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde ignited a firestorm of controversy in Germany over its portrayal of his former homeland’s decline into barbarity. The novel was inflammatory to Schoenberg, too, because the composer Adrian Leverkühn, the main character in Doctor Faustus, was so obviously patterned after him—and the portrait was not flattering. Leverkühn trades his soul to the devil in exchange for twentyfour years of unparalleled twelve-tone creativity before succumbing to syphilis-induced madness, all as an allegory for Germany’s fate after having sold its soul to Hitler. Schoenberg’s vision was very poor by this time and he did not actually read the novel, although his wife and others apprised him of its contents. The matter was exacerbated when Mann sent the composer an autographed copy with the inscription “Arnold Schönberg, dem Eigentlichen” (to Arnold Schoenberg, the real one).73 Because Theodor Adorno had acted as Mann’s musical informant, the descriptions of Leverkühn’s compositional process have the ring of authenticity, and the composer fretted that readers might think Mann had invented dodecaphony. He worried about his personal reputation as well. Marta Feuchtwanger recalled an encounter with the composer in the produce section of a Brentwood supermarket in which he shouted, “Lies, Frau Marta, lies! You have to know, I never had syphilis!”74 If he was concerned about such matters in California, he might also have wondered how those rumors were playing in his hometown. Mann’s novel was known to the Viennese intelligentsia by the time A Survivor arrived, but it is doubtful that many of them had actually read it; the initial European print runs in Switzerland and West Germany totaled only 21,000 copies, and the book was such an elusive hot commodity that at least one German critic publicly accused a colleague of faking a review. (“He hasn’t read the book. It’s simply unobtainable here.”)75 The situation in Austria could not have been much different. In 1950 Winter cited Mann’s novel as evidence that the Second Viennese School was receiving a lot of positive press abroad, suggesting that he hadn’t read the book and was unaware of Schoenberg’s opinion on the matter.76 One writer who did appear to have read Doctor Faustus was Ernst Fischer, a respected literary figure and prominent member of the KPÖ who had returned from exile in Moscow to become a member of the Central Committee. In 1949 he published a critique of Mann’s novel entitled “Doktor Faustus und die deutsche Katastrophe: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Thomas Mann,” in which he measured the book according to the Soviet aesthetic of socialist realism.77 Not surprisingly,

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Fischer found it insufficiently Marxist in its assessment of the rise of fascism. György Lukács’s analysis appeared in German as Die Tragödie der modernen Kunst in the same year, and even though it is marred by a clumsy attempt to “harness the novel to Soviet campaigns against modernist music,” it also provided the first thoughtful “refutation of the accusation that the novel was ‘anti-German.’ ”78 Therefore, even if the Viennese intelligentsia hadn’t read Doctor Faustus, many knew of the book and were aware that Mann had patterned his antihero after Schoenberg. Finally, the Faustian context binding Schoenberg to Mann also includes Mahler. His Eighth Symphony, which famously sets a text from Goethe’s Faust, was on the Musikfest program in 1951 as well. This was the Faustian constellation—Schoenberg-Mahler-Mann—that inflected the critical reception of A Survivor in Vienna.

The Reviews Critics in Vienna and Berlin regularly denigrated Schoenberg’s music by connecting it to unfavorable political movements. At the premiere of his Chamber Symphony, op. 9, in 1907, a critic for the Illustrierte Wiener Extrablatt complained that it was a “wild, unkempt, democratic noise that no nobleman could mistake for music [emphasis added]”; in 1915 another compared his abandonment of the traditional rules of composition to Max Stirner’s anarchy; and in 1919 a Berlin critic made Schoenberg the first recipient of the epithet “musical Bolshevist,” a variant of “cultural Bolshevist” that would gradually absorb Jews, Bolsheviks, and blacks into Nazi propaganda and morph into “degenerate” (entartet).79 These associations were rarely just about unpopular politics, however. The aforementioned Viennese critic from 1907 also lambasted Mahler for presiding over such “degenerate music,” making the writer a prescient, early adopter of the term “entartet” (for the previous half century the term “Zersetzung” [decay] had been commonly associated with anti-Semitism). He expressed exasperation that “the most uncouth people have made themselves at home here to make noise [Lärm],” a short sentence that nonetheless incorporates numerous Viennese stereotypes associated with Jewish immigrants from the east: unsophisticated, itinerant, and noisy. “Lärm” is a term for noise that Ruth HaCohen locates at the center of the centuries-old music libel against the Jews, in which cacophonous synagogue music is positioned as the polar opposite of Christian harmony.80 Gerhart Scheit and Wilhelm Svoboda have noted in their work on postwar Mahler reception in Austria that the absence of conspicuous markers of Nazi ideology, such as the discourses of health, hygiene, race, and degeneracy, does

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not necessarily signal the absence of anti-Semitism; authors could use lessstigmatized code and communicate the same meanings to receptive readers.81 This is true of more than anti-Semitism, of course. (And it bears repeating that criticism of Schoenberg or of A Survivor is not ipso facto anti-Semitic.) Knowledge of the overlapping contexts identified thus far enables the reader to recognize coded language, subtexts, and allusions of all kinds that may have been meaningful to a Viennese reader at the time but have since been lost. The language used to identify the composer, as well as the victims and perpetrators, reveals much about a divided, occupied city in which each faction is represented by its own media presence. The Wiener Kurier, the newspaper of the US Army Group Press, was innovative and colorful and is generally considered the first Austrian tabloid. Its reviewer lauded “the creative power of the old master of the Vienna School (who is highly respected in America),” which “shows itself to be ignited anew and with shattering intensity in this portrayal of mass murder that was once a gruesome reality.” Asserting that Schoenberg was valued in the United States burnished America’s cultural credentials while implying that the Viennese did not grant him sufficient respect; furthermore, not only are his creative powers undiminished by advanced age or immersion in America culture, they are renewed and enriched. The reviewer praised the realistic portrayal of recent history as “imbued with the ethical magnitude of this statement, which extends beyond the narrow range of [A Survivor]” and described the speaker’s narration as an “accusation” leading to the “Chorus Mysticus of the doomed, who sing together the Sh’ma Israel.”82 Naming the Sh’ma identifies the victims and, if only by implication, the accused. Through the Chorus Mysticus the critic also links Schoenberg to Mahler—the other great Viennese Jewish composer whose political utility had already been demonstrated—and to Faust. It is at once a reference to the conclusion of part 2 of Goethe’s Faust and to the setting in the finale of Mahler’s great Eighth Symphony, the other work Scherchen was scheduled to conduct on the festival just a few days hence. Goethe’s text reads, “All transient things are but a parable, the inaccessible here becomes actuality; here the ineffable is achieved; the Eternal-Feminine draws us onwards.”83 The analogy to the Chorus Mysticus suggests that the critic interpreted the singing of the Sh’ma as a triumphant act in the face of death that will end this mortal life and bring the transcendence of the next. He may have taken his cue from Schoenberg’s paean to Mahler, written in 1912 and revised in 1948 for inclusion in Style and Idea (1950), a collection recently reviewed in ÖMZ. In it he remarked upon Mahler’s description of the final scenes of Faust (“The Eternal Feminine has drawn

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us upward—we are there—we are at rest—we possess what we on earth could only long for, strive for . . . ”): “That is one way to reach the goal! Not just with the understanding, but with the feeling that one already lives there oneself. He who looks on the earth thus no longer lives upon it. He has already been drawn upwards.”84 The Wiener Kurier was a midday publication. That evening, the Weltpresse Wien, representing the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), responded with a very negative review of the concert and of A Survivor particular. The Weltpresse Wien had been published by the British Information Service in Vienna from 1945 to 1950 and propagated the views of the British Labor government, which were generally close to those of the SPÖ; the British ceded control of the paper in 1950, and it was still printed in the British zone. The critic N. B. demonstrates a passing familiarity with the technical aspects of dodecaphony but misrepresents the method. This was not unusual; no accurate account of twelve-tone composition had been published in 1951, and even advocates, such as Leibowitz, were unreliable. In this case, the critic claimed that the method was “a misunderstanding and an abuse” of the intervallic relationships of tonality that rarely succeeded, and when it did, that success was attributable to the “residue of those tonal relationships.” The author concedes that “it may be that just such a lifeless use of tones is suitable for the portrayal of fear and horror” in A Survivor. The “lifeless” manipulation of tones smacks of Nazi-era critiques of atonal music as unnatural, degenerate, and unhealthy. In a clear illustration of the propagandistic nature of journalism in an occupied city, N. B. appears to have written his review with the Wiener Kurier at hand, incorporating references to all its key points—the United States, realism, and ethics—in his dismissal of the piece. “Of course this report was probably only meant for America. For us it is just not possible to have a sergeant’s commands included in the context of a work of art, no matter how high the ethical purpose that makes such realism necessary.”85 Sabine Feisst has chronicled and debunked the pernicious European myths about the deleterious effects of American culture on Schoenberg’s life and music.86 In this particular version, exposure to American philistinism has impaired Schoenberg’s aesthetic judgment so that he no longer meets the high artistic standards of his Viennese roots. Such a remark also reflects disdain for the “Coca-colonization” agenda of the American occupiers, which included the importation of everything from American art music to pop culture.87 Style aside, however, asserting that A Survivor was only meant for American audiences relieved the Viennese reader of any obligation to engage with its content, particularly the “accusation” identified by

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the first critic. Whether any ethical cause is lofty enough to warrant such realism in art is an age-old aesthetic debate, but in the context of 1951 Austria this deflection is disingenuous, particularly as the author never identifies the purpose in question; there is no indication of subject matter beyond “fear and horror.” The most eloquent review was written by Kurt Blaukopf for Der Abend, a paper affiliated with the KPÖ. Blaukopf (1914–99) was a Jewish communist and musicologist and had published a Marxist analysis of Schoenberg’s role in the crisis of capitalism in 1935 entitled Die Endkrise der bürgerlichen Musik und die Rolle Arnold Schönbergs using the pseudonym Hans E. Wind.88 Blaukopf fled Vienna in 1938 and lived in Jerusalem from 1940 to 1947; upon his return he established the Institute for Music Sociology and became the leading Austrian figure in that field. His review of A Survivor did not take the then-standard communist position of dismissing Schoenberg’s music out of hand as formalist. He described the function of the music in A Survivor as akin to “the pessimism of neorealist film, yet in the closing prayer it shows an approach to overcoming dissonant ideology and ideological dissonance.” His review is the most explicit about the subject matter, describing it as a “chronicle of the Jewish destiny in the Warsaw Ghetto” that then “opens into the sincere prayer of the chorus.” Blaukopf also took pains to distinguish between the “historical” Schoenberg and the character in Mann’s novel. “This is not the ‘revocation of the Ninth Symphony,’ not the repeal of the humanist ideal of Beethoven’s classic work,” he wrote, quoting from the narrator’s description of Leverkühn’s anti-Beethovenian masterpiece, The Lamentation of Doctor Faust, and the “Ode to Sorrow” with which it concludes. Rather, it is “an attempt to rediscover the countenance of the people in the rubble, reconstructing harmony out of dissonance.”89 This is a poignant image, surely resonant with the Viennese, who were themselves struggling to rebuild a war-torn, occupied city. Blaukopf described A Survivor as countering or defusing dissonance three times in his short review. Inverting “dissonance,” the typically negative descriptor of Schoenberg’s music, and attributing to it instead the postwar virtues of overcoming and reconstructing seem calculated to help that repertoire find a place in postwar Vienna. The critic for the Österreichische Volksstimme, the KPÖ’s “Zentralorgan,” was less accommodating, reflecting that paper’s official role as Austrian mouthpiece for the Soviets. Marcel Rubin (1905–95) was a Jewish Viennese composer who had studied with Darius Milhaud and spent the war years working with the Mexico City opera company. He joined the KPÖ there in 1940 and returned to Vienna in 1947 to work as a freelance composer and

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music critic. Rubin was explicit about the subject matter (“it depicts a massacre in the Warsaw Ghetto and ends with an old Jewish prayer”). He was also dubious about dodecaphony as a compositional method. He cited Ode to Napoleon as another “irrefutable” work “whose complaint and accusation were provoked by events of the Hitler era,” yet both pieces ask: to what extent can twelve-music reflect the life of the twentieth century? Rubin conceded that “the horror of the roll call in the ghetto, the roar of the sergeant, the grunts and groans of the defeated” are powerfully rendered in illustrative, filmlike music but complained that Schoenberg does not express feeling in music as Beethoven would have done (yet another way in which Schoenberg cannot measure up to his Viennese predecessors). According to Rubin, Schoenberg tried to evoke the positive, the affirmative, as the survival of the religious idea with the prayer at the end, but his attempt was unsuccessful. “As hopelessly as it started, the work ends.” He makes the bizarre observation that a work written in 1947 could not have known the path that survivors from Warsaw have since taken, which is the rebuilding of their city. Despite the previous reference to the ghetto, this has to be a reference to the city proper; the ghetto was not rebuilt, and very few Jews were left in Warsaw to participate in the city’s reconstruction. Rubin’s conclusion is that atonal music may be useful for conveying the fears of lonely individuals in bourgeois society, but atonality will not be the music of the future (postcapitalist) world of peace and freedom.90 Three other papers published shorter notices about the concert. The Wiener Tageszeitung was the central organ of the ÖVP (Austrian People’s Party), a party founded in 1945 to attract the bourgeois, patriotic, conservative vote. Musicologist Roland Tenschert wrote in this paper that the narration was an account that had been “entrusted” to Schoenberg and compared the expressionism of the musical gestures to that of Ode to Napoleon, suggesting that he knew Schoenberg’s oeuvre. He found the Sh’ma did not provide the expected elevation and comfort at the end of A Survivor, although Verdi’s Quattro pezzi sacri filled that role for him after intermission.91 This complaint need not be construed as anti-Semitic (although the ÖVP was not above that); it may simply reflect a personal aesthetic preference for the familiar, be it musical or liturgical. Neues Österreich represented the grand coalition of the Second Republic (SPÖ, ÖVP, and KPÖ) and was known as “The Organ of Democratic Unity.” Its critic (H. K. L.) noted that the content was “an authentic report of a grisly event from the second world war,” which Schoenberg illustrates “according to the uncompromising truth of his own style principles.”92 Describing his use of dodecaphony as a manifestation of “uncompromising truth” carries a whiff of

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the Adornian and is a far cry from the language in Weltpresse Wien cited previously, in which the same was described as lifeless. The final concert review appeared in Die Furche, a weekly cultural with strong Catholic leanings but no official status as voice of the church. H. A. Feichtner wrote simply, “Schoenberg yanks us into the recently-past present and illustrates the report of a survivor from Warsaw with dismally blazing colors.”93 For its part, the Soviet Österreichische Zeitung published a piece explaining that it had boycotted the whole festival because, despite the title, it was not a truly international event but rather a cosmopolitan one. Soviet composers had been snubbed, the repertoire was inaccessible to regular citizens of Vienna, and the only bright spot was the reappearance of Mahler’s Eighth.94 The concert was not covered in the two Jewish newspapers in Vienna at the time, Die Stimme and Neue Welt und Judenstaat, which were understandably focused on political problems at home and in Israel, where increasing tensions between Israel and Syria had escalated in the so-called al-Hamma Incident on 4 April 1951.95 Of the published writings about this performance, only three used any version of the word “Jew” when describing the subject matter of A Survivor (Blaukopf writing for the KPÖ’s Der Abend, Rubin for the KPÖ’s Österreichische Volksstimme, and the uncredited program notes); two more signaled Jewishness by naming the Sh’ma (the American Wiener Kurier and the ÖVP’s Wiener Tageszeitung), although how many readers would have recognized the Hebrew reference is debatable. This is significant because the title alone, A Survivor from Warsaw, would not have conveyed to those readers all that it conveys to us. Central Europe was full of survivors of one kind or another in 1951, and the word “survivor” did not yet have the Holocaust-specific connotations that have since accrued to it. Furthermore, it was common knowledge that the Germans had destroyed the entire city of Warsaw, so there was no reason to assume that a newspaper reader would make the connection to the ghetto without it being made explicit. What the program notes and all reviews have in common is a conspicuous silence: no one named the perpetrators. Rubin comes closest when he refers to A Survivor and Ode to Napoleon as two works responding to events of the “Hitler era” (Hitler-Zeit), but he does not assign culpability. In the Eastern-Bloc case studies (East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia), as we shall see, it is the Jews who go unnamed; in Norway and West Germany both parties are identified. Even if readers did not need to be told because everyone already knew the identity of the perpetrators (and it is safe to say they did), the code of silence is noteworthy. It participates in the

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maintenance of Austria’s first-victim status in two ways. First, most authors deployed oblique allusions to Jewish victims when they identified them at all, a rhetorical device that helped to sustain the proprietary illusion of sole, primary victimhood for Austria. Yet Austrian Jews had certainly been among the victims in Poland, if not in the Warsaw Ghetto then elsewhere. In October 1939 Jews in Austria and Czechoslovakia were deported to Poland; in late 1941 about thirty-five thousand Austrian Jews were transported from Vienna to ghettos the Germans occupied in the Soviet Union, such as Minsk and Riga, as well as Lodz, Sobibor, and Lublin in Poland; in 1942 Aktion Reinhard was devised specifically for the Generalgouvernemente, but thousands of foreign Jews, including Austrians, were also affected. The Warsaw concentration camp received four transports of foreign Jews from Auschwitz after the Ghetto Uprising, and Austrians were among them. Second, ignoring the possibility of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust (even in music journalism) contributed to the preservation of that saving silence, which hid the culpability of the past behind a facade of gemütlich (comfortable) national renewal. In fact, Austrian members of the SS had particularly distinguished themselves in Poland. Among the most prominent were the aforementioned Odilo Globocnik, gauleiter of Vienna and then supervisor of all death camps in Poland; Franz Stangl, kommandant at Treblinka and veteran of the T-4 euthanasia program; and Colonel Ferdynand von Sammern-Frankenegg, head of the Warsaw SS and Police, who commanded the first offensive to crush the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.96 Yet no critic acknowledged that those who perpetrated events described in A Survivor most certainly included Austrians, if not in Warsaw then surely elsewhere in Poland; no one named the Germans, possibly because the Austrians had been part of the Reich at that time. In each case what remained unsaid is at least as important as what was made explicit. It appears that Schoenberg’s ambivalence about symbolic remigration to Vienna in the form of A Survivor was well founded.

Norway Performing Remembrance with A Survivor from Warsaw The wounds have not yet healed from within; they can break open at any time; so it is no wonder that this work is not yet in the public sphere. —pauline hall, reviewing A Survivor from Warsaw in Oslo in March 1954

On 21 March 1954 the Scandinavian premiere of A Survivor from Warsaw was given by the Philharmonic Society Orchestra in Oslo (Filharmonisk Selskaps Orkester), in cooperation with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and the national section of the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music). Heinz Freudenthal was on the podium, Ola Isene performed the recitation, and Ernst Glaser was the concertmaster. The only other work on the program was Darius Milhaud’s Service sacré (Sacred Service), a setting of the Jewish liturgy for the Sabbath morning, featuring Swedish cantor Leo Rosenblüth as soloist. Like A Survivor, the Sacred Service was written by a Jewish émigré living in California in 1947 to fulfill an American commission. It, too, features a mix of Hebrew and vernacular languages, soloist, orchestra, and choir. Composer-critic Pauline Hall reviewed the performance for Dagbladet, the same newspaper in which she had promoted this concert in articles about the pieces, the composers, and the conductor. As chair of the local ISCM, Hall was the most important figure on the new-music scene in Norway. She had nearly singlehandedly hosted the international meeting of the organization the previous year, to great acclaim; she was subsequently instrumental in arranging the concert on which A Survivor and Sacred Service were performed. To find a representative of the ISCM endorsing Schoenberg at this time is not surprising, even in a country in which atonal and dodecaphonic music remained relatively rare. More distinctive is Hall’s sensitive description of the “wounds” inflicted by the events recounted in A Survivor as chronic and vulnerable to reinjury. Modernist music and Holocaust memory converged in the Oslo concert as a performance of remembrance in a context that was all but devoid of dodecaphony, Jews, and public acknowledgment of the Norwegian Holocaust. 66

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Unlike the other examples in this study, Norway was not a place where Schoenberg had personal contacts; in fact, he had few affiliations with Scandinavia at all. He had been to Denmark once, at the invitation of Paul von Klenau, to conduct a concert of his own music in Copenhagen in 1923 (the Chamber Symphony, op. 9, a chamber orchestra arrangement of “The Song of the Wood Dove” from Gurre-Lieder, and Acht Lieder, op. 6).1 The Danish music publisher Wilhelm Hansen also published Five Piano Pieces, op. 23, and Serenade, op. 24, and, much later, the choral work “Dreimal tausend Jahre,” op. 50a, was published in the Swedish music magazine Prisma. But it appears that he had no students hailing from Norway and none that went on to hold posts there. Hall was among many Norwegian musicians working and studying in Berlin while Schoenberg was on the faculty at the Prussian Academy of Arts (1926 to 1933), but it seems that none of them had personal contact with him, and the composer lacked the advocacy of prominent performers in Norway that he had elsewhere. In short, Schoenberg was virtually unknown in Norway, even by reputation, and the information available was not always accurate. For example, when J. Chr. Bisgaard published From the World of Music: Some Portraits of Modern Artists in Oslo in 1929, he included a sketch of Schoenberg in which he described his music as Wagnerian and therefore typically Viennese. The other figures Bisgaard selected as essential to musical modernism were Liszt, Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, Mahler, Mussorgsky, Cosima Wagner, and the Norwegians Johan Selmer and Hjalmar Borgstrøm—an eclectic and parochial list by continental standards.2 Schoenberg did acquire one Norwegian advocate in the 1930s: Olav Gurvin (1893–1974), a founding father of Norwegian musicology, who studied in Heidelberg and Berlin before earning his country’s first-ever master’s degree in the field at Oslo in 1928. A decade later he received his PhD with a dissertation entitled “Frå tonalitet til atonalitet: Tonalitetsoppløysing og atonalitetsfesting” (From Tonality to Atonality: Tonality’s Resolution and Atonality’s Affirmation). According to Nils Grinde, chronicler of Norwegian musical life, its significance was twofold: Gurvin’s dissertation was a landmark in the study of dodecaphony in Scandinavia, and it integrated Fartein Valen (1887–1952), one of the very few twelve-tone composers in Norway at that time, into the continental history of twentieth-century music.3 Valen knew Schoenberg’s music and had an affinity for it, having developed his own atonal style that he called “dissonant counterpoint”; in the late 1930s Valen also began using a distinctively modified row technique. The Norwegian reception of Valen’s music was always mixed, but he was generally well regarded; in 1935 he

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received a prestigious state award that granted him an annual stipend for life.4 Gurvin’s and Valen’s endorsement of musical modernism generally and of Schoenberg in particular was unusual, however. It appears that the only Schoenberg works heard in Oslo before the ISCM festival there in 1953 were Gurre-Lieder, Verklärte Nacht, and a handful of early piano pieces.5 Art-music culture there had long been dominated by variants of “Norwegianism”: a synthesis of traditional folk and church music, the Bach and Palestrina revival, and French neoclassicism, perhaps best exemplified by the work of David Monrad Johansen.6 Among the few who eschewed Norwegianism were Hall, whose Franco-Russian influences ranged from Ravel and Debussy to neoclassicism, and the aforementioned Valen.7 As elsewhere, the critics who opposed atonality and Schoenberg in particular did so in the name of defending tradition and good taste.8 With the significant exceptions of Gurvin and of Valen, atonality and dodecaphony had a minimal presence in Norway, even among the musical elite. Such conditions make the Norwegian premiere a good test of the assertion that A Survivor had a cultural mobility in postwar Europe that the rest of Schoenberg’s oeuvre did not. What did it mean to program, perform, and hear this work in such virgin musical terrain? As elsewhere, this performance of A Survivor was facilitated by international festivals and societies—in this instance the Fourth International Musikfest in Vienna in 1951, where Hall attended the performance of A Survivor, followed by the Norwegian section of the ISCM known as Ny Musikk (“new music”)—and by radio (NRK—Rikskringkasting). Also familiar, and essential, was the advocacy of dedicated individuals; in Norway those included the Swedish guest conductor Heinz Freudenthal and especially Hall, without whose commitment the performance surely would never have occurred. Unlike the other performances discussed in this book, there was no mistaking the Jewish focus of this concert: the conductor and composers were Jewish, as was the subject matter of both works, and most of the concert was given over to a liturgical work featuring a cantor as soloist. A Survivor followed by the Sabbath liturgy suggests that the concert was conceived as a performance of remembrance. That would make it one of very few such public acts in Norway. The Germans had occupied Norway for five years (1940–45), and the Resistance movement came to define that country’s postwar national identity, but the rescue and defense of Jews was not one of the Resistance’s primary, dedicated goals. Consequently the fate of Norwegian Jews did not become part of the national narrative about WWII until very recently. Furthermore, even though nearly half of Norway’s Jewish population perished, the number of casualties was dwarfed by

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the unfathomable losses incurred in Central and Eastern Europe. It was easier to ignore the absence of Jews in Norway, where they had never numbered more than about .06 percent of the population, than elsewhere. This chapter investigates the Oslo concert as a rare, early public performance of Norwegian remembrance in any medium.

norway’s forgotten holocaust Historians posit a couple of reasons for the absence of Norway’s Holocaust from that country’s postwar narrative about its wartime experience. First, Jews were a tiny minority that had never been particularly well integrated, and incidents of public anti-Semitism had spiked in the 1930s even before the German invasion.9 Furthermore, although the percentage of casualties was high—higher than the percentages of Jews killed in France (26 percent), Bulgaria (22 percent), or Italy (20 percent)10—the number of deaths was comparatively small; estimates place the total number of Jews in Norway at the beginning of the war at about 2,100 in an otherwise ethnically and religiously homogeneous country of approximately 3 million; that number includes some 350 stateless refugees in transit.11 According to Bjarte Bruland, historian and chief curator at the Oslo Jewish Museum, 772 Norwegian Jews were deported, of whom 34 survived; 28 more died as a result of anti-Jewish actions taken in country. The total number of Jewish Norwegian casualties was thus 766, “more than 49% of the 1,536 Jews registered by the Norwegian Police in early 1942,” a percentage surpassed in Western Europe only by the Netherlands and Germany.12 Nevertheless, those numbers have proved easy to ignore, both in Norway and in Holocaust histories generally. Little was done to mourn or honor victims of the Norwegian Holocaust in the postwar period, and the handful of camp survivors who returned did not receive the heroes’ welcome afforded the resistance fighters. The little that was done to honor the memory of Jewish victims was initiated by the tiny Jewish communities themselves. The synagogue in Oslo hosted a memorial service on 31 August 1945 that was attended by Crown Prince Olav as well as luminaries of the resistance such as Odd Nansen, the humanitarian who founded the organization Nansenhjelpen in 1936 to assist Jewish refugees from other parts of Europe already affected by Nazi aggression.13 Apparently there were no Jewish officiates in Oslo, so they were provided by the community in Copenhagen. The only monuments erected to honor Jewish casualties in this period were built by the communities in Trondheim and Oslo, and their location in Jewish cemeteries rendered them nearly

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invisible to the larger public. On 14 October 1947 the Trondheim community dedicated a memorial that bore the names of 130 victims from Trondheim and northern Norway.14 The Oslo community unveiled its monument in the Helsfyr Cemetery on 1 November 1948, and once again Denmark sent a cantor and chief rabbi to preside. Crown Prince Olav was in attendance, as were representatives of parliament, Oslo University, the Church of Norway, the state of Israel, and the diplomatic corps; this was followed by a public lecture about the Norwegian Holocaust at the University. The sculptor Harald Isenstein inscribed the 620 names of victims known at that time on the edifice; an urn containing ashes of those who died at Auschwitz was added in 1952.15 The 1948 unveiling was covered by the press, but there would be no general, public acknowledgment of the Norwegian Holocaust for several decades yet. Virtually all of the other museums and memorial sites that commemorate the Holocaust in Norway now have been built since the 1990s.16 Second, and Bruland is largely responsible for this important development in revisionist history, the Resistance movement became such a vital part of Norway’s national identity after the war that the myth could not accommodate the reality that Norwegians had participated in the Holocaust; when it was acknowledged at all, blame was placed entirely on the Germans and on the relatively small group associated with Vidkun Quisling (1887– 1945).17 Quisling was the founder of Norway’s fascist party NS (Nasjonal Samling), and he seized power in a German-backed coup during the invasion. His position was short-lived, however, as he wielded no authority with the populace, and the Germans quickly replaced him with their own government. He was later tried for war crimes and executed. Accounts of the Norwegian Holocaust by Oskar Mendelsohn and Samuel Abrahamsen can give the impression that only the Germans in Norway and their Quisling accomplices were responsible for actions against the Jews,18 but Bruland’s research demonstrates otherwise. Actions were taken against the Jewish population before deportation, and some of those were initiated and carried out by Norwegians. Most importantly, local civilian police participated extensively and, in some cases, zealously in the comprehensive deportation roundup in late 1942. Of course this does not mean that the Resistance movement did not help Jews, and Bruland’s work does not undermine that heroism; in fact, his research has brought some instances to light for the first time. Nor does it disregard the role of the Church of Norway, whose public stand became a rallying point for the resistance. The Church of Norway sent a public, formal letter to Quisling on 10 November 1942 protesting the un-Christian treatment of the Jews, although this gesture was

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too little, too late; Norway’s Jews were already in custody and would begin the journey to Auschwitz on 25 November.19

the organizer: pauline hall Pauline Hall (1890–1969) was one of the most influential figures in Norwegian musical life in the mid-twentieth century.20 She was also the primary liaison between that community and the international new music scene, yet she is little known outside her home country today. Hall studied composition and theory with Catharinus Elling in Kristiania (now Oslo) from 1910 to 1912 and then went to Paris, 1912–14, where she encountered the music of Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, and Mussorgsky. That experience proved transformative for her as a musician, and her compositions from the 1910s and 1920s are often described as impressionist. From there she went to Dresden to study composition with Erich Kauffmann-Jassoy, a student of Grieg’s; when her father died, she returned to Norway and settled in Oslo. She made her living as a pianist, and her compositions began appearing on concerts around town. She was involved in the founding of the Norwegian Society of Composers in 1917, an early indication of her affinity for administration and organization, and she served the society in numerous leadership positions over the years. From 1926 to 1932 Hall was based in Berlin as a cultural correspondent for the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet, which was affiliated with the Liberal Party (Venstre) and she reported regularly on everything from opera to museum exhibitions. She immersed herself in the city’s theater scene, where Brecht and Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper made an enormous impression on her. She was responsible for its first performance in Norway in 1930, producing and directing the work in a translation she herself had prepared, to great success. In this period her compositions took on a more neoclassical cast, a development that may reflect a synthesis of her French proclivities with a Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetic.21 In her reviews of the Berlin opera scene, she opined that prominent German composers needed to “lead the fight against dead tradition,” although she did not think Schoenberg was the one to do that. She wondered how “this sterile theorist” had come to occupy such a prominent place in contemporary music, describing as “weak souls” those who were taken in by his “slogans.” She took great pains to separate Berg from his teacher. “Several of the young, talented composers who belong to the circle around Schoenberg are now distancing themselves from their mentor and going their own way. One of them, Berg, has composed a music drama, Wozzeck, which represents a new

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figure 3. Pauline Hall, ca. 1953. Courtesy of the Hall family.

stage in German musical development, new life for the first time since Wagner.” She rated Berg’s Wozzeck the equal of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande—high praise from a Francophile such as herself.22 Hall also reported general news from Berlin, including a front-page story about Nazi rioters targeting Jewish businesses across the city on 13 October 1930.23 With tensions escalating in the Weimar Republic, she returned to Oslo in 1932 and took a post as critic for Dagbladet. In 1938 she cofounded the Norwegian section of the ISCM, known as Ny Musikk (new music), and was chair of that organization until 1961. The German invasion of Norway on 9 April 1940 disrupted her life just as it did the lives of all Norwegians. At first, the fledgling Ny Musikk attempted to carry on. All pretenses of normalcy ended in November however, when the first work by

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the composer Johannes Schartum was featured at a members-only concert. Unbeknownst to the membership, Schartum had joined Quisling’s NS, and several prominent party members attended the concert. Hall remembered, “Musicians and singers did very well, but for many it was otherwise a painful experience. Somehow Ny Musikk got through it. It goes without saying that all Ny Musikk activities were discontinued for the rest of the war.”24 Her work as critic was interrupted by the Germans as well. In a letter of July 1942 Hall wrote, “I am now being dismissed from my position as music critic at Dagbladet, effective immediately. It has been ordered that Trygve Torjussen be appointed my successor. The same happened to Finn Nielsen, the art reviewer. Economically it is not pleasant of course, but I have taken the matter very calmly.”25 Evidently this was in retaliation for her criticism of NS-sponsored concerts to mark the centennial of Norwegian composer Rikard Nordraak that year.26 Not surprisingly, the war also took its toll on her musical output; she composed very little between 1942 and 1945. In 1942 the Germans confiscated her flat, and Hall moved in with Caro Olden (1887–1981), a pioneer among women journalists who would be Hall’s partner for the rest of her life. During the occupation Olden was held for a year at Grini, a camp for political prisoners on the outskirts of Oslo, on charges of eksportorganisasjon (organizing the escape of refugees from the country).27 Records do not specify if she was arrested for assisting Jews or other Norwegians in escaping the occupation, but it is known that Hall and Olden were good friends with prominent Jewish musicians who survived the war by escaping to Sweden. These included the violinist Ernst Glaser and the pianist Robert Levin, colleagues with whom Hall worked closely in Ny Musikk. Neither Hall nor Olden talked much about their wartime experiences afterward. In what appears to be her only published account of that period, Hall described the systematic appropriation of Norway’s musical institutions and music, especially the centenary celebrations of Rikard Nordraak in 1942 and Edvard Grieg in 1943, and noted the resulting boom in house concerts throughout the country, but she did not mention the treatment of Jewish musicians.28 Nevertheless it stands to reason that her postwar engagement with Schoenberg, and particularly with A Survivor, was shaped by living in Berlin as the Nazis rose to power and then witnessing the surge in anti-Semitism in her own country during the war, particularly as it affected those she knew. The violinist Ernst Glaser is a case in point. He was an iconic figure in Norwegian musical life, so much so that his abuse at the hands of an audience in Bergen in January 1941 is often cited as a shameful landmark in the country’s fascist past. Glaser was a German-born Jewish musician who had

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moved to Scandinavia to take an orchestral position in the 1920s and risen to the rank of concertmaster in the nation’s premiere orchestra. He was scheduled to play Ole Bull’s own violin, a 1742 Guarneri del Gesù, in performances of a concerto by Christian Sinding and Bull’s Polacca Guerriera. Because of anti-Semitic demonstrations outside the concert hall, the conductor, Harald Heide, rearranged the program so that Glaser would not take the stage until the second half, hoping that the fascists would disperse, but the protests just moved inside. A riot was orchestrated by members of the NS, the Nasjonal-Ungdom (National Youth—the Norwegian analog to the Hitler Youth), and the Hirden (a paramilitary organization comparable to the Nazi SA, Sturmabteilungen, or Brown Shirts). Flyers rained down from the balcony decrying the desecration of Bull’s violin, a Norwegian national treasure, at the hands of “the Jew Moses Salomon (alias Ernst Glaser),” and a melee ensued. Heide quickly instructed the orchestra to launch into the national anthem, knowing that the Hirden would have to stand at attention for the duration, and that diversion allowed Glaser and the violin to escape to safety.29 The moment when the concertmaster of the leading orchestra in the country was humiliated and threatened in a concert hall became symbolic of the general breakdown in civility as well the increasing pressure exerted on Norway’s Jews. Glaser escaped to Sweden in 1942 and returned only after the war. At war’s end Hall resumed her position at Dagbladet, where she held sway as the most influential critic in Oslo. She devoted herself to administrative work and criticism and continued to compose; from around 1950 her music exhibited extended tonality and more dissonance.30 In 1949 she marked the occasion of Schoenberg’s seventy-fifth birthday with a column acknowledging his contribution to twentieth-century music and placed him on par with Debussy as one of the most influential and innovative composers of the era. Although her prose was not effusive, she no longer expressed the disdain that had characterized her writing about his dodecaphony from Berlin some twenty years earlier. She also appeared to have kept track of his oeuvre in the interim, as she included three pieces from his American period among his most important (the Piano Concerto, Ode to Napoleon, and A Survivor). A Survivor would have been brand new at this point, having been premiered less than a year before. Hall may have reconsidered her stance on Schoenberg during the immediate postwar period, when she resuscitated Ny Musikk and traveled frequently to new-music festivals across Europe. His music and influence would have been much in evidence on the international festival circuit in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In April 1951 she attended the Fourth

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International Musikfest in Vienna.31 She found it admirable that Austria, “which does not even have autonomy yet,” had invested so much in preserving its musical reputation. Hall reported that the festival showcased Viennese composers and included numerous twelve-tone works; of those, Josef Matthias Hauer’s Wandlungen and Schoenberg’s A Survivor impressed her the most. She compared the narration in the latter to that of Pierrot lunaire, noted the music’s eerie realism, praised Schoenberg’s richly varied orchestration, and described the concluding Sh’ma as “gripping.” She thought that hearing the narration in the original English instead of in German translation would have been more effective because the contrast would have made the German quotations more shocking, but even so, A Survivor took the listener in “a stranglehold” and created an “overwhelming effect.” (Her report also contains some errors, such as the common misconception that the narration is based on the account of a single survivor from the Warsaw Ghetto; she also seemed to believe that the Vienna performance was the European premiere.) Hall praised Hermann Scherchen, who led the performance of A Survivor, as “one of the conductors who has worked most selflessly” for the cause of new music, and “one of the most revered and beloved personalities in new music circles both on our continent and elsewhere.” Scherchen had been active in the ISCM since its inception, and she had heard him conduct at the ISCM festival in London in 1938. She noted with approval that even though he had been very successful in Germany, he had not hesitated to leave “Hitler-land” in 1933 to pursue his career elsewhere. (She may have been unaware that his leftist politics all but required this.)32 Thus Scherchen and the ISCM network may be credited with generating the initial impetus for the Norwegian performance of A Survivor. Schoenberg’s status at the 1953 ISCM meeting, which Ny Musikk hosted in Oslo, may also have influenced her reconsideration of the composer. Correspondence reveals that the aftermath of massive wartime displacement called for some diplomacy, since concert repertoire was selected according to composer’s nationality, and each country could only submit six works for consideration. Benjamin Frankel of the ISCM Committee of Direction wrote to the international jury in December 1952, noting, “The United States section points to the problem that arises for them owing to the large ‘number of eminent Europeans who have become American citizens.’ The American Jury had been very much in favor of suggesting the Schoenberg Violin Concerto for performance at Oslo, but on consideration did not feel that it was their responsibility to submit the score. They very much hope, nevertheless, that it will be possible for the International Jury

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to consider this subject seriously and they trust it will lead to a performance.”33 Hall was not on the international jury, but Elliott Carter wrote to her directly on the same subject, explaining that “while [the concerto] was written in America, we believed that it was written at a time when the composer was not yet an American citizen, and we were unable to find out the actual fact.”34 Carter was correct; Schoenberg had written the concerto in 1935–36, and he became a citizen in 1941. (Although Carter surely recognized that this technicality also allowed the Americans to submit their full complement of scores for consideration.) In the end, both Schoenberg and Milton Babbitt, whose Du was selected for performance by the international jury, were identified on the program as representatives of the United States. In late January Hall sent a telegram to Mátyás Seiber, a member of the international jury, and asked him to contact Tibor Varga about performing the Schoenberg concerto. She offered expenses plus 50 pounds for two rehearsals plus the concert, and Varga accepted the offer immediately.35 This was a coup for Ny Musikk, since it garnered for them the Scandinavian premiere of a major work by the violinist whose performance had most pleased the composer. The ISCM festival in Oslo was hailed as a great success both at home and abroad, but it left the Norwegian chapter in crippling debt. One of the few events Ny Musikk cosponsored in the 1953–54 season was the SchoenbergMilhaud concert of March 1954. In her history of the organization Hall wrote that they did so despite their dire financial straits, and described A Survivor as “Schoenberg’s powerful dramatic complaint and accusation” from a Jew who survived the German massacres. (She identified Milhaud’s Sacred Service as the other work on the program but provided no information about it.)36 It is also clear from Ny Musikk’s 1954 annual report that she considered the Schoenberg performance to be the main event that year, not only because A Survivor was not yet widely known in Europe but also because apparently none of Schoenberg’s music had been heard in Oslo since the 1920s, with the exception of Varga’s performance of the Violin Concerto the previous year.37 A Survivor appears to have had particular significance for Hall. I have no definitive proof that she was responsible for getting the work on the concert in March 1954, but it appears that Schoenberg and this piece had no other advocate in Oslo. Moreover, her role as chairperson of Ny Musikk put her in a position to exert considerable influence regarding repertoire and performers. She had given the conductor Heinz Freudenthal glowing reviews in the past, praising a concert in March 1953 as “spectacular.”38 Freudenthal performed Milhaud’s Sacred Service often, but he had no affinity for Schoenberg, as we will see. It seems likely

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that Hall persuaded him to program A Survivor as the complement to the Milhaud, a work that was fast becoming Freudenthal’s signature piece.

the conductor Heinz Freudenthal (1905–99) was born in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland, but at that time part of the German empire) and moved with his family to Nuremberg as a young child. He was the son of Dr. Max Freudenthal, a Reform rabbi and scholar of Jewish history. Trained as a violist, Heinz relocated to Sweden in 1928 to take a position with the orchestra in Göteborg. From there he developed his talents as a conductor and was hired by the symphonic and radio orchestra in Norrköping, the fourth largest city in Sweden at the time, a post he held from 1936 to 1953. This was a remarkably productive time for him. He was responsible for the Scandinavian premiere of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo there and conducted it in numerous other cities as well; he also directed performances of Bach’s Musical Offering and Art of the Fugue in various instrumental arrangements. From 1954 to 1961 he conducted the Kol Israel Symphony Orchestra in Jerusalem and then returned to Scandinavia, where he was director of the music school in Karlstad, Sweden, and then in 1969 he took a post as municipal music director in Kristiansand, Norway. In 1982 he moved to Munich, where he remained until his death. In 1927 he married the Catholic Elsbet Hippeli, also a musician, and his father threatened to resign his post as chief rabbi in Nuremberg in protest. Leo Baeck traveled from Berlin to intervene, and they were eventually reconciled.39 Heinz and Elsbet had two sons: Otto (born 1934 in Göteborg), a musician, and Peter (born 1938 in Norrköping), an artist. Freudenthal performed mostly canonical repertoire, but, like Scherchen, he also staked a claim at either end of the chronological spectrum with performances of early and recent music. In his unpublished autobiography he identified four works that had been critical to his development as a conductor: Das jüngste Gericht (BuxWV Anh. 3; 1682?), attributed to Dietrich Buxtehude, G. F. Handel’s Giulio Cesare (1724), Paul Hindemith’s Plöner Musiktag (1932), and Milhaud’s Sacred Service (1947).40 This assemblage suggests that his tastes ran toward newly rediscovered early music and, among the modernists, the neotonal and neoclassical rather than the atonal. After the war he also became a champion of Jewish music broadly construed. Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, the leading Jewish newspaper in West Germany, ran a lengthy story in 1956 about a radio program on Norddeutsche Rundfunk Freudenthal had created entitled “The

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Harp of King David,” which featured everything from liturgical music to folksong, all illuminated with Freudenthal’s educational commentary.41 While he was with Kol Israel his concerts mixed standard fare with works by Israeli composers, mostly from the so-called Mediterranean School (Menachem Avidom, Paul Ben-Haim, Marc Lavry, Oedoen Partos, Carl Salomon) but also from Verdina Shlonsky, a Boulanger pupil who eventually took up electronic music, and Josef Tal, who was Israel’s leading proponent of serialism before becoming its most prominent composer of electronic music.42 Of the four pieces he cited as formative, Freudenthal performed Milhaud’s Sacred Service most often. According to his autobiography, he took it up at the composer’s behest. Conductor and composer met in Israel in 1952, when Freudenthal was leading the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert of C. P. E. Bach, Beethoven, and Milhaud’s Symphony no. 1. Milhaud was pleased with Freudenthal’s interpretation and confided that he had written a large liturgical work that was very dear to his heart but rarely performed, because it needed not only a capable conductor but one that was also intimately acquainted with the Jewish religious tradition. “As the son of a rabbi” Freudenthal was deemed to be “the right man for the job,” and he went on to enjoy considerable international success with this work.43 The two corresponded regularly until the composer’s death in 1974. Freudenthal conducted Sacred Service in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Göteborg, Hamburg, Helsinki, and Oslo, and many times in Israel.44 The first time he conducted the piece in Israel, on 22 September 1953, was an occasion of some significance, so much so that the American Jewish Year Book mistook the national premiere for something larger. (“One of the main events in the musical life of the country was the world premiere [sic] of Darius Milhaud’s Sacred service conducted by Heinz Freudenthal.”)45 It is not surprising, then, to find Milhaud’s Sacred Service on the program when Freudenthal returned to Oslo for a guest turn with the Philharmonic Orchestra in March 1954, but A Survivor was a less-obvious choice for him. This appears to have been Freudenthal’s only performance of A Survivor, and he never mentioned the piece in his otherwise very detailed autobiography, presumably because his modernist tastes ran more toward the neoclassical.46 He did not take the work lightly, however. His son Peter remembers that his father consulted with Polish survivors in Norrköping as he prepared to perform A Survivor.47 He was certainly familiar with their plight, having established an aid agency to meet the needs of the Jewish refugees pouring into Sweden during the war, but presumably he expected that hearing more about their experiences or hearing

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their stories again would enhance his interpretation.48 A steady stream of extended family and other refugees also lived with the family throughout the war. Perhaps the decision to perform A Survivor was less about the music and more about the message. He conducted Milhaud’s Sacred Service frequently, despite his son’s assessment that Freudenthal “was not religious” (a perception confirmed by the conductor’s autobiography); he was, however, in his son’s estimation, “a very dedicated and conscientious Jew.”49

the concert The Philharmonic Society Orchestra in Oslo offered fifty events during its 1953–54 season, including twelve regular subscription concerts on Thursday and Friday nights and eight “extra” concerts offered throughout the week. Evidently the schedule was still in flux when the season program went to press, because the Schoenberg-Milhaud concert was listed as an Ekstrakonsert for Thursday, 18 March (in fact it occurred on Sunday, 21 March); the title of A Survivor was given as Warschawa Ghetto; and the reciter’s name was not listed. By contrast, the Milhaud piece was given its proper French title (albeit misspelled as Sacrée), and Rosenblüth was identified as the cantor, suggesting that Freudenthal was primarily interested in the opportunity to perform his signature piece. Elsewhere in the booklet the concert was advertised with a photograph of Freudenthal and a blurb about his success conducting Milhaud’s work in Sweden and Israel, including the information and that he was scheduled to open the International Festival in Jerusalem with the work in September 1953. No evidence survives regarding contract negotiations with the performers, and the publisher’s royalty statements confirm only that the Philharmonic Society Orchestra in Oslo rented the parts sometime in 1953, so details of the process are unknown.50 Dagbladet previewed the concert in the week leading up to the performance. On 16 March, Hall’s colleague Erle Bryn published an interview with “the well-known and beloved guest conductor Heinz Freudenthal.” Bryn informed readers that Freudenthal had taken a new position with the Israel State Radio Symphony since his last visit to Oslo and had been traveling extensively, conducting and lecturing on Israel. At this point there was evidently some intention to open the concert with the Brahms Tragic Overture. (That did not come to pass, although it was still included in advertisements as late as 20 March.) The article focused mostly on Milhaud. Freudenthal admitted that this would be his first performance of A Survivor and said rehearsals were scheduled to begin the following day (17 March),

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at which time he would meet the reciter, Ola Isene, for the first time. A Survivor “is just as dramatic as the title suggests,” he said, as the titular character is “one who survived the horrors of Poland’s capital.” The final sentence—“the composition ends with the Jewish creed”—is significant, because otherwise there is no indication that A Survivor is about the fate of the Jews as opposed to the German destruction of the city of Warsaw generally.51 As for the rehearsal process, Solveig Levin, wife of prominent pianist Robert Levin, remembers that the philharmonic asked her husband to assist the chorus with the Hebrew prayer.52 In a brief article of 20 March, Hall made the subject matter even more explicit: Schoenberg “wrote the text on the basis of an account by someone who escaped from the German massacres of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto [sic],” and she provided her own Norwegian translation of the entire narration. The work had been performed in Austria, she wrote, “but otherwise hardly at all in any European country, despite the fact that it should be of special interest in our part of the world in particular.”53 Given that Schoenberg’s music had not been of any “special interest” in Scandinavia up to this point, she seems to mean that the subject matter of A Survivor warrants particular attention. Perhaps this was an allusion to Norway’s own, largely unacknowledged Holocaust. The program notes contained just a brief summary of the piece, written by Hall. (Milhaud’s Sacred Service, on the other hand, received a lengthy, detailed analysis in Swedish attributed to the cantor Rosenblüth, although it seems likely that Freudenthal contributed as well.) She identified essential musical components for the listener—the narrator’s pitched recitation, the music’s dodecaphonic construction, the experience of the concluding chorus as the culmination of the row—but most importantly she explicitly identified the subject matter as that of the Holocaust: The text depicts a specific day in the ghetto in Warsaw. Thousands were murdered, and as they came face to face with death they sang the old prayer “Sh’ma Israel.” This song, interpreted by a male choir, forms the conclusion of the work. The music is distinctly realistic. Percussion instruments make a powerful impact. The score is woven through with changing trumpet signals, an expression of fear on the part of helpless victims. . . . In the original English text Schoenberg leaves the cries of the sergeant and the Feldwebel in German. It was the composer’s wish that this form be retained in future translations.

The claim that Schoenberg’s narrative describes a single, specific day in the Warsaw Ghetto is inaccurate (if common), but that does not diminish the impact that her description must have had on the Oslo audience members

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even before the first trumpet call was sounded, particularly if they had arrived with the expectation of easing into the modernist repertoire via Brahms’s Tragic Overture. Freudenthal, Isene, and the philharmonic performed A Survivor twice and then took an intermission before Milhaud’s Sacred Service. At the time, only one other setting of the Jewish liturgy had found a home on the concert stage: Ernest Bloch’s Avodath hakodesh (1933), which had been performed in both Europe and the United States. The idea to commission Bloch for a setting of the Reform Jewish Sabbath service originated with cantor Rueben Rinder of Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, who also provided the impetus for Milhaud’s Sacred Service.54 Milhaud’s setting is for baritone solo, narrator, mixed chorus, and orchestra or organ. Like Bloch’s, it is based on the Sabbath morning service from The Union Prayerbook for Jewish Worship, the American Reform movement’s principal prayer book, and hence appropriate for both concert and liturgical performance. This also accounts for the presence of the vernacular, as the text is given in Hebrew (performers can choose Sephardic or Ashkenazi) as well as English and French. The service has five main sections (morning blessing, the Sh’ma and blessings, the Amidah, the Torah service, closing prayers), and Milhaud divided these into twenty discrete musical movements. These include accompanied spoken recitation, accompanied solo canting, and choral singing. Accompanied recitation that is repeated by the cantor, the choir, or both may be omitted in concert performance, in which case those passages act as instrumental interludes.55 Rosenblüth was both cantor and reciter for the Oslo performance. Two performances of Schoenberg’s short work about the Holocaust followed by an hour-long Jewish liturgy invite interpretation of this performance as an act of commemoration, a rare act of public remembrance that was not initiated by the Jewish community itself. (One could argue that Brahms’s Tragic Overture, had it been included, would have fit that agenda as well, at least by title.) Perhaps the seed for this design was planted when Hall attended the Vienna performance in 1951, in which Scherchen programmed A Survivor as the concluding work in the first half and then gave over the second half to Verdi’s sacred choral Quattro pezzi sacri. To facilitate the audience’s engagement with the material, Isene performed A Survivor’s narration in Hall’s Norwegian translation, and the texts from Milhaud’s Sacred Service were printed in Swedish in the program. The convergence of Jewish liturgy with a culture defined by over 90 percent membership in the Lutheran Church of Norway seems particularly apt, given Schoenberg’s distinctive spiritual and theological background in

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Lutheranism and Judaism. Sabine Feisst, among others, has observed that A Survivor “alludes to Bach’s cantatas, not least because of its chorale-like last section.” Feisst cites David Schiller’s assessment that “like the chorale at the end of a Lutheran church cantata by Johann Sebastian Bach, the Sh’ema Yisrael implicitly invites Jewish members of the audience to pray along, to remember that they are Jews.”56 In this instance, the two rituals of concertgoing and liturgy intersect, because most of the content of the concert ritual consisted of the text and music from a religious ritual: a seven-minute secular piece (performed twice) that concludes with a liturgical prayer, followed by an hour of service music led by a cantor soloist who was clearly identified as such in the program. The audience would have heard the Sh’ma three times: a portion in each performance of Schoenberg’s A Survivor, where its performance is an act of Kiddush Hashem (the sanctification of God’s name before death), and then again in Milhaud’s service music, where it appears in its entirety as concertized liturgy. The timing of the concert may have been significant as well, at least for the handful of Jews involved in the performance, although no mention of the concert is found in documents of the Jewish Community of Oslo, known as the Mosaic Religious Community, or at the Oslo Jewish Museum. Originally scheduled for Thursday, 18 March, it took place on Sunday, 21 March, instead. Friday, 19 March 1954, was Purim, and Rosenblüth may have had community obligations back home in Stockholm that prevented him from being away. Purim marks the deliverance of the Jews from destruction in Persia and is typically the most festive holiday of the year; it is also a story of enormous bloodshed. When Haman’s decree against the Jews could not be annulled, the king allowed Mordecai and Esther to write a new one, and it declared that Jews could preemptively kill those who posed a lethal threat. Jews killed over seventy-five thousand of their enemies across the Persian empire in two days. Obviously the events commemorated in this religious holiday are not a perfect analog to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the event toward which Schoenberg’s piece gestures, but the taking up of arms in self-defense is a common denominator. According to Schoenberg, A Survivor is a call to remembrance for Jews in two ways: remember what has been done to them, and remember that they are Jews.57 This is not unrelated to the lesson of Purim, which reminds that Jews cannot rely on the government for protection and must always be vigilant. Making this connection would be consistent with what David Roskies describes as “the essence of the Jewish commemorative tradition,” which is “to make sense of contemporary events in terms of ancient texts, and to seize upon the symbols of the past in order to give meaning to the present.”58

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the reviews Unlike reviews discussed elsewhere in this book, most written by Norwegian critics did not avoid identifying the Jewish subject matter of A Survivor. This does not indicate a great willingness to confront the Holocaust so much as it reflects that the theme of the entire concert was “Jewish,” and it would have been well-nigh impossible to review the event without mentioning that fact. Hall’s concert review for Dagbladet makes it clear that she, at least, experienced the event as an act of commemoration: first a work recounting the horrible fate of the victims, then a liturgy that honored their sacred traditions and offered the listener some comfort. She described A Survivor as “a shocking symbol of the greatest tragedy we have witnessed in our time” and acknowledged that “the wounds have not yet healed from within; they can burst at any time.” For her, the work was not so much illustrative as it was “a commentary on the events restrained in form but intense, indeed ready to burst into the untamable frenzy quivering beneath the surface.” She was explicit about the Jewish content, identifying the scene as the Warsaw Ghetto and the final chorus as “the old Jewish creed,” and noted Schoenberg’s Jewish identity as well, lauding the work as his “own high-powered acknowledgement in which he relives the tragedy of his people.” (The few writings about him that were previously available in Norwegian suggest that he was not generally thought to be Jewish.) For Hall, Milhaud’s diatonic Sacred Service provided “insight into an ancient culture and a spiritual world about which we know all too little,” and she praised Rosenblüth’s performance in particular: “He has a rare expressive voice, equally nuanced and authoritative, whether he is singing or reciting. It was he, then, who led this ‘Service on the Sabbath morning.’ ” She contrasted the shock and frenzy of A Survivor with the “soft, full, rich, warm sound” of the orchestra and choir in the Sacred Service, describing Milhaud’s music as an “open embrace.” She concluded that “the performance of these two works was an event one will long remember and be thankful for,” noting the “great atmosphere in the hall” and that A Survivor was repeated “for all the right reasons,” while the response to the Milhaud was enthusiastic and “tumultuous.”59 Klaus Egge, chair of the Norwegian Composers’ Union, opened his review for the Norwegian Labor Party’s Arbeiderbladet with the obvious: “The music primarily concerned the Jews.” Unlike Hall, Egge found A Survivor realistic in the extreme, “uncanny” and even “doubly realistic”: “The tensions of the intervals segue into sounds of horror; the sole and entire purpose of this music is to instill dread in as concrete terms as possible.” Egge

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attempted to recreate that realism with comparably evocative prose, writing that “with fanatical nakedness, the music reproduces the cries, the groans, the whole abominable throng, pitched against the iron-hard discipline of the Germans—rhythmic yelling of commands in a mechanical, stomping beat.” In fact, the experience appears to have been overwhelming for him: “We experience the shock as it is re-evoked. Is the ‘purification’ process perhaps to consist of us, the listeners, coping with the strain and thus gaining something from it?” In religious terms, purification is part of the process of atoning for sins. Like Hall’s, Egge’s writing about the Sacred Service turned to historical context and a theme of comfort. “The Israelites’ service exists on two planes,” he explains, “both the worship of Yahweh and the upkeep of the national unity which the people gained on their exodus out of Egypt. The liturgical formulae, the special Jewish motif material used by Milhaud, are highly interesting in terms of musical history.” The music is “lovely,” “compelling,” “grand,” “dignified,” and “richly elaborated with harmonic effects of great beauty”; he went on to praise the “sympathy and dignity” of Rosenblüth’s work as soloist and “the solemnity” of the performance in general. “After all, the work is a glorification of Israel’s people and God. As such, the music is an important document of Jewish music.”60 Finn Benestad’s review for Verdens Gang, an independent daily newspaper founded by members of the resistance movement after the war, is brief and positive, if less insightful. The music of A Survivor was so realistic that “the fear and tension in those who are suffering is positively palpable,” and he described the choral prayer as “very moving.” Revealing unfamiliarity with Jewish liturgy, he called Milhaud’s Sacred Service a “Jewish Mass” with “elements of Jewish synagogue-al singing” and inexplicably attributed some features to “music found in Yemen.” Benestad lauded Freudenthal and his advocacy of new music, advising the conductor to take the audience’s enthusiastic response as “a sign that he is welcome back, and with other new works” as well.61 Dag Winding Sørensen’s review in Aftenposten, a paper historically linked to the Norwegian conservative party (Høyre), is similar. Asserting that this concert would be “remembered as one of the most distinctive of the season,” he praised Freudenthal’s penchant for presenting rare repertoire. A Survivor is “more discussed than performed,” and “it should be programmed again before too long.” Neither Schoenberg nor the story of A Survivor are identified as Jewish, although he does situate the action in wartime Warsaw and describes the effect as “caustic” as well as “immediate, intense and distressing, like the agonizing material it interprets.” In contrast, “Milhaud’s Sabbath music seemed soothing on top of this scream of terror from Warsaw.”62

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Børre Qvamme’s review for Morgenbladet was less accommodating. Morgenbladet, the country’s first daily, was shut down during the war and resumed publication as an independent newspaper in 1945 but with a more conservative political bent. Qvamme’s title, “Jewish Music at Aulean Hall,” was the only indication that both pieces on the program were somehow Jewish; the essay was really defined by the critic’s opposition to atonality. He asked why composers such as Schoenberg, Berg, and Norway’s own Valen insisted on pursuing programmatic music that “overstep[s] the traditional limit of what is musical,” as in A Survivor, which “is surely the most extreme” example of that tendency. “The text is eerie enough per se, but Schoenberg attempts to heighten this effect to some degree by creating ghostly music with scratching and whistling and spooky percussive effects,” but Qvamme never even identified the subject matter of the piece to provide context for this perspective. He opined that “it might be nice to hear the music without recitation,” although “it is highly unlikely that anyone would derive any greater musical enjoyment out of it,” since twelve-tone music has to be read to be understood, and that kind of music is “problematic, let’s face it—to put it nicely.”63 He expressed a clear preference for Milhaud’s musical language in the Sacred Service. (Although he also revealed his ignorance of the Christian debt to Jewish liturgy when he described the work as an attempt “to create something akin to the Catholic Church’s masses.”) Interestingly, he identified Milhaud as a Jew from Provence and attributed the “special character” of the music, “its force and sweetness, its unconventional freshness of harmonies,” to these roots; he did not, however, identify Schoenberg or the theme of A Survivor as Jewish. Qvamme found the synthesis of concert-going ritual with religious ritual to be discomfiting, noting that it felt “a little strange to applaud” after a religious service, particularly since the cantor’s final blessing was “precisely the same as the Apostolic Christian one.” After all, “what would people say if Chinese or Negroes applauded after a Christian church service?”64 Benestad’s and Qvamme’s reviews reveal a certain Nordic isolationism and a Christian-centric orientation that, in the latter, cross into overt racism. Read charitably, Qvamme’s question (“what would people say if Chinese or Negroes applauded after a Christian service?”) reflects the belief that applause after a religious service is disrespectful or ignorant, and he imagined Chinese or Negroes would be ignorant of Christian liturgy. A lessgenerous reading might posit that his discomfort arose from the foreign liturgy’s unexpected similarity to his own. Such casual racism is shocking to a twenty-first-century reader, in a way that it may not have been in the insular and ethnically homogeneous context of Norway in the 1950s.

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If reviewers’ responses can be read as any indication, others in attendance may have experienced the event as an act of commemoration; as an uncomfortable immersion in excessively realistic music, so much so that it seemed coercive in its “purification” effect, followed by a soothing religious service; as an adventure in new music; as confirmation of one’s conviction that dodecaphony is distasteful; as proof that the rituals of concert-going and liturgy should remain separate. Norwegian critics did not shy away from naming the victims or the perpetrators in Warsaw, but they also had the benefit of some considerable distance from the scene of that crime, particularly when compared to actors in the other case studies. When it came to acknowledging the Holocaust in their own backyard, most remained blind to or silent about any connection between the events recounted in A Survivor and events that had occurred locally. Only Hall alluded to the fate of the Jews in Norway (“the wounds have not yet healed from within; they can burst at any time”; “[A Survivor] should be of special interest in our part of the world in particular”). Although the language is unusually understated coming from a critic famed and even feared for her incisive prose, her efforts to program and promote A Survivor constitute a bold, early attempt to bring the Norwegian Holocaust into the public discourse.

East Germany Antifascism and A Survivor from Warsaw

A Survivor from Warsaw officially breached the Iron Curtain in 1958. The relatively late date is not surprising. Certainly it could not have happened much earlier than Khrushchev’s “secret speech” renouncing Stalin’s crimes in 1956. That A Survivor had its Soviet Bloc premiere in East Germany, however, is surprising, since the German Democratic Republic (GDR— Deutsche Demokratische Republik) had a reputation as one of the more Stalinist and culturally conservative of the satellite states. Schoenberg and dodecaphony were highly controversial in East German art-music circles in the 1950s, but generally speaking the state was more concerned about American incursions, whether via popular music or nuclear attack, than about art music. This chapter traces the route of A Survivor’s cultural mobility in East Germany within that larger context, through informal personal networks, the machinations of Soviet-style bureaucracy, and the discourse of the GDR’s foundational myth. At a time when cultural elites in the West had already settled the Schoenberg issue (and many even considered the composer passé), those East Germans hoping to take advantage of the Thaw and engage with his music were outgunned by powerful party ideologues.1 In 1979 Heinz Alfred Brockhaus and Konrad Niemann published an official musical history of the GDR in which they identified Schoenberg as “the sticking point” (der wunde Punkt) for the development of East German art music in the 1950s. Even though his early Romantic and late politically engaged works had gained acceptance, they wrote, and he was “recognized as a tragic victim of circumstances,” his other twelve-tone and expressionist pieces remained unacceptable at that time. Some advocated limited use of dodecaphony only to convey “danger, fear, catastrophe, the bizarre and terrifying,” whereas others endorsed a “free application” of the method, unimpeded by programmatic 87

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requirements. With the benefit of twenty years’ hindsight, Brockhaus and Niemann concluded that the “influx of new design elements” occasioned by these debates had had “an invigorating effect on the sensory quality of the music, its technical level, and its variety of content,” although some bad tendencies had developed in instrumental music as a result.2 What they failed to acknowledge was that Schoenberg himself was not really the issue. Discussants could argue about current issues under the guise of debating his oeuvre, musical styles, and biography (“tragic victim of circumstances”). That Schoenberg was the chosen proxy is proof of the power of his posthumous re-presence in East Germany.

the local scene: leipzig On Tuesday 15 April 1958, conductor Herbert Kegel led the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra (LRSO) and Choir in a concert of Mozart’s Symphony no. 39 in E-flat Major (K. 543), the East German premiere of A Survivor, and, after intermission, the all-German premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11 (subtitled The Year 1905). The performance took place at Congress Hall in Leipzig, the primary concert venue in that city after World War II. It hosted events of all kinds, including performances by the Gewandhaus Orchestra, which played there until its new house was completed in 1981. The narrator for A Survivor was the bass-baritone Rainer Lüdeke (1927–2005), who had been hired by the Leipzig Opera just the previous year. Lüdeke performed canonical roles in opera houses throughout the Eastern Bloc and voiced the title role in Joachim Herz’s film version of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer, produced for East Germany’s state-owned film studio DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) in 1964. He is also featured on the recording Kegel and the LRSO made of Paul Dessau’s opera Die Verurteilung des Lukullus in 1966 and on their recording of A Survivor.3 Kegel’s decision to open with Mozart could have been driven by any number of standard programming dicta: a concert should progress in chronological order, for example, or two new works should be offset with something audiences (and performers) already know. Neither the program annotator nor the critics spilled much ink over Mozart’s Symphony no. 39, presumably because it was familiar, although some reviewers also complained that the violins struggled in the Mozart, suggesting that the work may have been insufficiently prepared due to demands the two new works made on the rehearsal schedule. Coming just two years after worldwide celebrations honoring the composer’s bicentennial, the relative neglect may have reflected a bit of Mozart fatigue as well.

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But then, deciding what to program alongside A Survivor is a perennial challenge. Clocking in at about seven minutes—or, in Kegel’s case, as documented in a commercial recording, a brisk six minutes, thirty seconds—it is not a work to which one would normally devote half a concert. Yet while short, the piece is also heavily fraught, and selecting repertoire to precede or follow it requires consideration of factors beyond time or performing forces. Pairing Mozart with A Survivor meant that the first half was nearly balanced with the second in duration, particularly since A Survivor was played twice. Whether by design or by popular demand, the encore practice began with the very first performance in Albuquerque in 1947 and remained common for a while. Following Schoenberg with an intermission gave the audience an opportunity to contemplate or retreat from that encounter before settling in for the main event: a large new work by a favorite composer, whose musical style was a guaranteed crowd pleaser. Shostakovich’s homage to the first Russian Revolution of 1905 had already been enormously popular in the USSR and would earn its composer the Lenin Prize just a week later; shortly thereafter Shostakovich was officially welcomed back into the Soviet fold with a partial retraction of the 1948 Zhdanov decree. The Leipzig program also minimized the potential for negative reactions to A Survivor, whether to its style or subject matter, by sandwiching it between two pieces whose musical styles were unlikely to offend. Some critics detected a “modern historical events” programming theme. A Survivor and Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony both told historical stories of resistance, one against Nazism (or, in East German parlance, fascism), and the other against czarist tyranny.4 In East Germany in the 1950s, there were two enemies that warranted such defiance. The historical enemy was, of course, the Hitler-Franco-Mussolini fascism of the 1930s and 1940s. The new, Cold War enemy was thought to have taken up the legacy of that earlier fascism: the capitalist, imperialist, Zionist, nuclear-bomb wielding, pop-music spewing United States and its allies, particularly Israel and neighboring West Germany. The concert was broadcast live on national radio, and a commentator spoke about A Survivor during the intermission, but no tape or transcript of those remarks survives.5 Those who attended the concert in person could have read Ludwig Richard Müller’s program notes. Müller, whose own compositional style is described as having “a cheerful, entertaining character” bearing the influence of “French impressionism,”6 devoted two-thirds of the lengthy piece to a critique of what he described as Schoenberg’s “selfimposed isolation” from the public. His opening salvo was a potshot at Hanns Eisler, a maneuver that immediately signaled Müller’s position in

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the cultural-political debate surrounding Schoenberg. Eisler was a former student of Schoenberg’s and his mentor’s most ardent supporter in the GDR, but, the critic wrote, Eisler was more likely to prescribe dodecaphony than to use it. He listed several of Eisler’s popular tonal works (the famous “Solidaritätslied” and the East German national anthem among them), and openly speculated about the ideological camp to which Eisler truly belonged. After a lengthy, relatively commonplace diatribe against musical elitism, including dodecaphony, Müller returned to the topic at hand, writing that Schoenberg had finally changed his isolationist ways in 1933 when circumstances forced him to interact with the outside world. He claimed that the composer did so by “returning” to the Jewish faith, and this engagement manifested itself in the Jewish subjects of compositions such as Kol nidre and A Survivor. (Apparently Müller did not know Schoenberg’s Kol nidre firsthand, as he described it incorrectly as “a modern setting of the most famous of all national Jewish melodies,” which it is not.) He called the Kol nidre a “national Jewish melody” and referred to the composer’s “Jewish patriotism.” These appear to be references to Schoenberg’s Zionism and would have read quite negatively in the GDR in 1958. Nevertheless, he presented Schoenberg’s reclamation of Judaism and his related political activism as the best evidence of the composer’s social engagement (however misguided he believed it to be). In Müller’s words, the text recounted “the barbaric Hitlerfascist police action” that “transformed the ghetto into a mass grave and a smoking heap of rubble.” The printed program contained a German translation of the English-language narration but provided only the title of the Sh’ma. It was described in the notes as “an ancient Jewish prayer” but the prayer text was not printed in either the original Hebrew or in German translation. The critic acknowledged that the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto was a historic fact and identified the perpetrators (“Hitler fascists”) as well as the victims (references to the ghetto and use of the adjective “jüdische”). Word choice was a delicate issue when dealing with culpability and victimhood in the GDR, as we shall see. As for the music, Müller did not endorse dodecaphony, having established his properly class-based opposition to it, but conceded that the score provides “an illustrative, somber film of sound” that “does not hinder the theme of the work.”7 That this was the best a program annotator could muster for the national premiere of a work by a major composer is a good indicator of just how much of a “sticking point” Schoenberg truly was in the GDR in the 1950s. Müller’s attitude must have seemed oddly incongruous with the performance at hand, which, by all accounts, was well executed and well received. This was due in no small part to the maestro on the podium. Herbert Kegel

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(1920–90) was a rising star in a small, beleaguered country that was desperate to cultivate and retain its native conducting talent, and he made the most of his opportunities there.8 He had been a piano major at the Dresden Conservatory, where he also studied cello, took composition lessons with Boris Blacher, learned conducting from Kurt Striegler and Alfred Stier, and idolized Karl Böhm. Conscripted into the German army, he served from 1940 to 1945 and spent considerable time on the eastern front. Kegel later said that his “conscience was stirred by the crimes he witnessed” and that this experience spurred him to perform antiwar works such as Paul Dessau’s VietnamDiskurs, Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, Bohuslav Martinu˚’s Lidice, and Schoenberg’s A Survivor.9 After the war he served as kapellmeister in Pirna and Rostock before taking a job with MDR Leipzig (Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, the Central German Broadcasting Company, Leipzig station). He became choirmaster and director of music for the Radio Choir in August 1949 and was promoted to principal conductor of the LRSO and Choir in 1953. Under Kegel’s tireless perfectionism, the choir was soon awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit (Vaterländische Verdienstorden). In August 1958 he became, at age thirty-eight, the youngest principal music director in either Germany.10 Kegel had risen to a position of some prominence. The LRSO was the oldest radio orchestra in Germany and had been MDR’s primary ensemble since 1924. As of 1956, following the restructuring of the national radio system, it was the house ensemble for Radio DDR, one of three East German radio stations broadcasting nationwide (the others were Berliner Rundfunk and Deutschlandsender). As in West Germany, radio ensembles were more likely than those based in concert halls to promote new music, and Kegel hoped to restore the ensemble’s reputation, established in the 1920s, as a champion of contemporary repertoire. Such programming also set the LRSO well apart from the other more famous and staid ensemble in town, the Gewandhaus Orchestra. It is not clear how Kegel encountered A Survivor. It is likely that he first accessed the score through informal, unofficial networks, which were the standard channels for cultural mobility across the Eastern Bloc.11 His close friendship with the composer Paul Dessau (1894–1979) is a likely point of contact. Dessau was born in Hamburg, the grandson of a cantor. By Kegel’s account they became acquainted no later than 1951, when he conducted Dessau’s Appell in Leipzig.12 The premieres of many works followed, and the conductor appears justified in his claim that “I seem to have given the first performance of most of Dessau’s works.”13 Dessau had taken up dodecaphony as an expression of antifascist resistance while studying with

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figure 4. Herbert Kegel in Poland, October 1958. Courtesy of MDR Chorarchiv (private).

Leibowitz in exile, and the method appears to have retained that significance for him over time.14 He also represented a direct link to Schoenberg: the two had become friendly in California, and Dessau admired the elder composer greatly. He published at least two analyses of Schoenberg’s music, including Kol nidre, but he was too intimidated to show the master his own scores. Dessau’s Nachlass contained numerous works by Schoenberg, including the full orchestral score of A Survivor, copied by Leibowitz in December 1947.15 Although the copy does not show overt signs of study, Dessau’s pattern of engagement with Schoenberg’s music suggests that he would have familiarized himself with it. It was surely a model for Jüdische

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Chronik, the collaborative project Dessau would initiate in 1960 as a response to an alarming surge in anti-Semitic activity in West Germany.16 Dessau was the most obvious personal connection between Kegel and A Survivor, but twelve-tone music was also of interest to many musicians in Leipzig. (Dessau was based in Zeuthen, eighteen miles southeast of Berlin.) Fritz Hennenberg recalls that when he arrived to study musicology there in the early 1950s, he had the impression that “they had always been dealing with Schoenberg and dodecaphony.”17 Hennenberg went on to play a vital role in the new-music scene in Leipzig, facilitating contact with numerous publishers outside the GDR and helping to bring internationally acclaimed composers to the city.18 Dodecaphony was a theme of the second congress of the East German Composers’ Union held in Leipzig in October 1954, and session protocols document lively exchanges on this topic. Harry Goldschmidt argued that it was dangerous to dismiss the destructive force dodecaphony possessed; Wilhelm Neef declared Goldschmidt’s conceptual leap from the emancipation of musical material to dropping atomic bombs to be a stretch; and Siegfried Köhler appeared impatient with the discussion, declaring that he and his colleagues in the Leipzig chapter of the Composers’ Union had already been debating questions of twelve-tone technique for some time.19 By the time the LRSO and Choir performed A Survivor there in 1958, one Leipziger could note, “We have heard three other twelve-tone works in Leipzig recently,” all by East German composers (Hanns Eisler, Arnold Matz, Max Butting).20 The city continued to play host to performances of dodecaphonic repertoire as well as conversations on the topic. After Eisler’s death in 1962, the so-called means or materials debate about twelve-tone music boiled over there and became the biggest cultural-political controversy regarding music in the GDR since the formalism debates in 1951.21 In fact, Leipzig musicians frequently tested their boundaries, through both official and unofficial channels. Hellmuth Christian Wolff (1906–88) of Leipzig University’s Musicology Institute hosted listening parties at his home, featuring new music and repertoire that had been banned under the Third Reich; apparently his sister in Paris sent him the recordings.22 Wolff’s research specialization included both the music of the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries as well as that of the twentieth century, and he connected the two in his inaugural public lecture at the institute in 1953, when he held forth on Palestrina and Schoenberg; Hennenberg remembers Ernst Bloch being in attendance. He also reports that Wolff made it possible for Hennenberg to attend the Darmstadt summer music courses when he was still a student.23 Similarly, Hermann Heyer (1898–1982) taught musicology at the Leipzig

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Hochschule für Musik from 1946 to 1966 and regularly hosted new-music listening parties for students at his home as well. Some who had attended those gatherings thought it entirely possible that A Survivor had been featured at such an event, although they did not have a specific memory of it. Evidently Heyer acquired the recordings from a friend or relative in Switzerland, who mailed such packages on a regular basis.24 In addition to exhibiting an interest in modernist art music, Leipzig also boasted a thriving jazz scene, replete with several ensembles, venues, and university classes. By the mid- to late 1950s, popular music was of great concern to the ruling SED party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands— Socialist Unity Party). Reginald Rudorf, party member and frequent critic of the regime, was at the center of the Leipzig jazz scene and tangled regularly with authorities in the mid-1950s. He was arrested by the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit—secret police) and served two years for espionage before fleeing to the West. (Incidentally, Rudorf knew Müller, the program annotator cited previously, from the jazz debates and dismissed him as “an old communist, an Ulbricht supporter and an enemy of all modern art, especially jazz.”)25 In July 1959 another of Leipzig’s musical leaders defected: conductor Kurt Henkels, who had enjoyed enormous success performing swing standards with the Leipzig Radio Dance Orchestra but evidently tired of state intervention in his repertoire and tours. Such was Leipzig’s musical reputation that the Ministry for Culture’s Central Personnel Department prioritized “gaining control” of the Leipzig Hochschule für Musik in its work plan for 1958.26 Former members of the LRSO Choir nevertheless said they believed that they were able to “get away with” things in Leipzig because they operated outside of the spotlight perpetually trained on Berlin.27 Kegel and his ensemble could not have mounted a performance of A Survivor without assistance from Werner Sander (1902–72). Born in Breslau, Sander studied at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin between 1918 and 1921 (after the departure of Schoenberg, who had taught there from 1902 to 1903 and again in 1911), then returned to Breslau to give private lessons in piano and voice, work as a music critic, and conduct local choirs. After the Nazis came to power, Sander worked for the Jüdischer Kulturkreis and the Jüdischer Kulturbund in his hometown before being sent to camps in Kurzbach and Grünthal. In 1950 he became cantor for the Leipzig IRG (Israelitische Religionsgemeinde—Jewish congregation), and two years later he founded the Oratorio Choir. In the early 1960s he combined that ensemble with his synagogue choir in a group known as the Leipziger Synagogalchor, which is still active today.28 Sander went on to record the collection Kostbarkeiten jüdischer Folklore (Treasures of Jewish Folklore)

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with members of the Synagogalchor and the LRSO in 1969. Historian Steffen Held traces increased visibility of Jews as Jews in the GDR—not just for propaganda, but as part of daily life—to the 1968 commemoration of Kristallnacht.29 According to two members of the choir who sang A Survivor in 1958, there were no Jewish singers in their ensemble, and Kegel brought Sander in to teach them the Hebrew phonetically during rehearsal.30 It is not surprising that there were no Jewish choir members, since the documented population throughout the GDR was no more than a few thousand, mostly concentrated in Berlin. Even if there had been Jewish choir members, there is no reason to assume that they would have been able to read or pronounce Hebrew. There were just a handful of publicly self-identified Jews living in Leipzig in 1958. The Leipzig IRG had had 11,564 registered members in 1933; in May 1945 the community was reestablished by a group of just 15 survivors. Shortly thereafter a few others returned from the camp at Buchenwald, and over the summer some 260 additional survivors arrived from Theresienstadt and elsewhere. Membership peaked in January 1949 at 368 but dwindled over the next decade as Jews emigrated to Israel and the West. By 1956 the membership was down to 177.31 The community was so small that it did not have a rabbi, so Sander and lay leaders were responsible for spiritual leadership. The cantor appears to have been the only link between the IRG and the Leipzig performance of A Survivor.

jewishness and antifascism in the gdr It may be difficult for twenty-first-century readers to imagine a situation in which A Survivor is not understood as a work specifically and obviously about the fate of the Jews, or how a postwar antifascist agenda rooted in the fight against Nazism could ignore the tragedy of the Holocaust. In fact, this de-Semitized antifascism was the defining foundational myth of the GDR. According to sociologist M. Rainer Lepsius, the East German interpretation of National Socialism as an abstract, generalized fascism was a means of universalizing the Nazi past.32 This process alleviated East German culpability for the events of that past, including the Holocaust; it also made it easier to adapt antifascism to the new Cold War enemy, the United States. When the GDR was established in 1949 as the antifascist, socialist German state, the SED used the original definition of fascism first put forth by Georgi Dimitrov for the Comintern in 1935: “The open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most imperialistic elements of monetary capital.”33 According to this definition, fascism was a function

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of capitalist-fueled imperialism, unrelated to the genocidal component of Nazism. Because this version of fascism was effectively de-Semitized— meaning that anti-Semitism was omitted, as were the consequences of that anti-Semitism for Jews—it followed that East German antifascism was also de-Semitized. When the Holocaust was acknowledged in the Eastern Bloc, it was invoked as evidence “of the crisis-ridden end cycle of capitalism,” as just one more strike against the socioeconomic system the communists held responsible for fascism in the first place.34 This extended to the appropriation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising for antifascist purposes. Between 1949 and 1958, the GDR prosecuted nine cases of war crimes committed by soldiers in Warsaw, but only two of them pertained to actions taken in the ghetto, and those were not the only charges brought against the defendants; the other seven cases concerned the destruction of the city in 1944.35 It appears that the GDR prosecuted some perpetrators of German war crimes in the Warsaw Ghetto on antifascist principle—nothing more, nothing less. Bernard Mark, a Polish Jewish communist who spent the war years in the USSR before returning to Poland, published a book on the uprising in Russian in 1944. The first German translation appeared in 1957 in East Berlin courtesy of Dietz Verlag, a publishing house dedicated to the leading lights of communism: the same year it published volumes of the collected works of Luxembourg, Marx and Engels, and recent speeches by Soviet leaders.36 The appearance of Mark’s book on Dietz’s list clearly situated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising within the communist antifascist tradition, and such a model could not accommodate Jews or Jewish suffering. Scholars such as Jeffrey Herf and Jay Howard Geller understand the GDR as inherently anti-Semitic; Herf, Sigrid Meuschel, Mario Kessler, Thomas Haury, and Angelika Timm have all argued persuasively that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism became strongly interconnected in East Germany, as is often the case. The traditional codes of anti-Semitism, which were rooted in European Christian culture, found their way into the discourse of foreign policy, which rejected the legitimacy of the Jewish state (anti-Zionism).37 According to Timm, members of the SED opposed Zionism because they understood it as “upper-class nationalism” inimical to the international labor movement. Once the GDR followed the Soviet example of backing the Arab nations in opposition to Israel, however, it was very easy for “antiSemitic stereotypes and prejudices” to become part of that agenda.38 Dessau’s orientation is a good indication of the complexities of leftist Jewish identities in this context and evidence that opposition to the state of Israel was not necessarily deployed as political cover for anti-Semitism. He

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had been a member of the communist parties in Germany and the United States before joining the SED, and he supported his party’s foreign policy because he believed the establishment of Israel to be imperialist; he was also an outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism in the Germanys. In a 1967 letter to Otto Klemperer, Dessau asserted that although he was a Jew he was not an Israelite.39 If Kegel had opinions on Jews in East Germany or the state of Israel, those positions are unknown now. It is safe to say that the reasons he programmed and performed A Survivor could not have originated in any official state policy of solicitude toward Jewish victims. The legal relationship between Jewry and the state in eastern Germany, first in the form of the SBZ (Sowjetische Besatzungszone, Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany) between 1945 and 1949 and then as East Germany proper, provides essential context. The IRGs served as official points of contact between the state and its Jewish citizens. Therefore Jews who were not registered with an IRG were not known to the state as Jews (unless a person happened to be prominent and out of favor, as we shall see) and are not represented in official statistics. Most Holocaust survivors who had been persecuted because they were Jewish did not join reestablished communities because most of them had not been religiously affiliated before 1933.40 Given the various ways in which Jewishness might be determined, some estimate that only one-tenth of Jews living in the GDR publicly identified themselves as such; some avoided the IRGs altogether so as not to become easy targets of anti-Semitism.41 The GDR’s constitution guaranteed freedom of religion (or, more accurately, freedom from religion), and in the official realm of government administration, “Jewish” was ostensibly just a religious designation like Protestant or Catholic, with the IRGs analogous to those churches.42 The Jewish communities faced particular difficulties, however, because their religious identity was inextricably bound up with two sensitive, secular, legal issues: victim status and restitution. Official victim status (Opfer des Faschismus, or OdF) was no mere formality. The OdF designation was required for meaningful welfare assistance, first in the SBZ and then in the GDR. Initially many communists opposed granting OdF status to Jews at all but compromised with a system in which political resisters were granted the additional designation of “Kämpfer” (fighter) to distinguish them from “mere” victims, who had not resisted and, it was thought, therefore bore some responsibility for their fate.43 Of the eighteen categories of victims eligible for aid established in 1946, “ ‘victims of the Nuremberg Laws,’ including ‘wearers of the [yellow] star,’ ” was the very last one.44 All special-interest OdF committees were brought under a single umbrella organization in 1947 known as the VVN

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(Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime—Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes), whose primary task was to monitor adherence to these standardized criteria and disbursements. The IRGs banded together as the State Association of Jewish Communities in the GDR (Landesverein der Jüdischen Gemeinden in der DDR) hoping to better represent their interests to the VVN and other authorities, but they were unable to get the distinction between political and Jewish victims removed.45 In 1953 the VVN was unceremoniously dissolved, and the Committee for Antifascist Resistance Fighters (Komitee der antifaschistischen Widerstandskämpfer) appeared in its stead. Its negligible interest in Jewish concerns is apparent from its title. Restitution, or Wiedergutmachung, was a separate legal issue and an even more highly charged one. The word literally means “to make good again,” although as Mary Fulbrook has observed, it is a “monstrous understatement or misnomer,” since no amount of money or goods could constitute adequate compensation for such losses.46 Nevertheless a fair amount of communal property was returned to Jews while the region was still under Soviet control as the SBZ, mostly in the form of cemeteries, community buildings, and synagogues.47 Efforts to reclaim private property for individual Jews were far less successful. In 1947 and again in 1948, bills were proposed in all five state parliaments that mandated, among other things, the restitution of personal property to individuals from whom assets had been seized between 30 January 1933 and 8 May 1945 “for reasons of racism, religion, ideology, or political opposition to National Socialism.”48 Even with a proviso that required those requesting restitution to be residents of the SBZ at the time of filing (a clause that would have reduced the number of petitions significantly), these bills never passed, despite the backing of a few powerful SED members, most notably Paul Merker (1894–1969). The climate became increasingly hostile for Jewry as the SED consolidated power and then officially founded the GDR in 1949.49 The SED’s antifascist foundational narrative was that of heroic veteran Communists who had fought the Nazis, suffered for their acts of resistance, and now birthed the socialist state on German soil. Jewishness had no role to play in this myth. Perhaps most importantly, the transition to national sovereignty coincided with party purges emanating from the USSR and spreading throughout the Eastern Bloc. The purges, ostensibly undertaken to remove former members of local communist parties that might regress to a nationalist agenda at the expense of Soviet directives, were also a means of eliminating high-ranking Jewish party members under the guide of rooting out “cosmopolitanism” (even though most did not self-identify as Jewish). In

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East Germany, Gerhart Eisler was removed from his post as director of the GDR Office of Information in December 1952, and there is evidence that the SED was preparing a show-trial case against him.50 As the purge spread from prominent politicians to the IRGs, members began to flee. Between December 1952 and the end of January 1953, 365 of the 3,000 community members in the GDR left for the West.51 Among these was Julius Meyer, member of the SED, president of the Association of Jewish Communities in the GDR, and leader of the Leipzig IRG. It is worth noting that anti-Semitism was not deployed as a political tool in any particularly systematic manner in the realm of cultural politics. Some of the most prominent figures in GDR musical life were Jewish (although they were almost never identified as such in public) and remained ensconced in positions of power throughout this period. The musicologists Nathan Notowicz, Ernst Hermann Meyer, Harry Goldschmidt, Georg Knepler, and Eberhard Rebling were so influential that the group became known as the “mighty handful” or “the Berliner clique.” The first four were Jewish, and Rebling was married to the Dutch-Jewish singer Lin Jaldati, who was wellknown for her interpretations of Yiddish song.52 Party fealty trumped all else. But apparently it was expedient for SED leadership to resort to antiSemitism when disciplining those with Jewish backgrounds, which meant that prominent individuals were always potentially vulnerable even though Jewish heritage alone was not sufficient to keep them out of positions of power. In 1951 Dessau took the fall publicly when cultural officials criticized the opera he wrote with Bertolt Brecht, Die Verurteilung des Lukullus, despite the internal documents that demonstrate that the trouble lay primarily with Brecht’s libretto rather than Dessau’s score; similarly Hanns Eisler, longtime leftist of Jewish descent, was subjected to public humiliation over the libretto he had written for his planned opera Johann Faustus in the spring of 1953.53 After 1949 the generalized discourse of historical antifascism proved adaptable to opposing the new enemy, the United States—which had demonstrated a willingness to deploy its fearsome nuclear arsenal, not to mention its popular music—and its allies, especially West Germany and Israel. The threat of nuclear annihilation ever loomed. In 1946 the United States had put forth the Baruch plan, which the Soviets rejected, to control nuclear weapons through the United Nations. The Soviets’ counterproposal for a ban on all nuclear weapons was then dismissed by the Americans, setting in motion the arms race that would define the Cold War. That sequence of events also fueled Soviet propaganda about the United States’ fascist tendencies. East Germans looked on with growing anxiety in 1955 as West Germany began to rearm,

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certain that sharing a border with an American ally carried the threat of tactical nuclear weaponry. Meanwhile both Germanys began investigating nuclear power. The GDR opened the Rossendorf Research Reactor in Dresden in 1956, and the following year West Germany became an original signatory of the European Atomic Energy Community. On 31 March 1958 the USSR announced that it would halt all nuclear tests if Western powers would do the same. The threat of nuclear war was the backdrop for musical performance and cultural administration as well, as the exchange between Goldschmidt and Neef at the Composers’ Union Congress in 1954 has already suggested. Tensions were considerably higher by 1958, and the topic of a nuclear West Germany arose in a meeting of the central board of the Composers’ Union on 10 April. First Secretary Nathan Notowicz voiced concern about the “crisis” next door and praised the efforts of various union chapters that were engaged in public protests.54 The printed programs for the LRSO in the 1957–58 season—including the concert on which they premiered A Survivor that very week—were emblazoned with the slogan, “The atomic-weaponfree zone ensuring security and peace in Europe!” In the summer of 1958, international experts convened in Geneva to discuss a comprehensive nuclear test ban. The Composers’ Union undertook a letter-writing campaign to their representatives there, expressing support for disarmament.55 The de-Semitized nature of East-German antifascism and the redeployment of that rhetoric in opposition to the new, nuclear enemy were brought sharply into focus in the official discourse surrounding the Buchenwald concentration camp, which was established as a memorial site on 14 September 1958. The Committee for Antifascist Resistance Fighters planned the memorial and its opening ceremony. Herf has analyzed the official statement for that event in some detail: For the “honor of the dead” and for the “sake of the living,” memory admonished “all of us” to action. “German militarism,” it said, was “again a major danger for peace in Europe,” threatening the “security and independence of peoples. Again the militaristic and fascist gang in West Germany presents new aggression against the peace loving peoples.” The statement denounced West German plans to introduce atomic weapons and missiles into the hands of “fascist murderers” and “old Nazi generals.” The statement demanded an immediate halt to nuclear weapons tests, the creation of a nuclear weapons-free zone in Central Europe, negotiations for disarmament and détente, and peace.56

In other words, Herf concludes, “at Buchenwald, ‘resistance’ to war and fascism now meant opposition to West German rearmament, while fighting

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the Cold War was equated with Vergangenheitsbewältigung [coming to terms with the past].” While opening a memorial at a concentration camp, the state honored its political ancestors but, remarkably, managed to avoid acknowledging the Jewish catastrophe. Instead, the committee took the opportunity to “signal East German support for the Arabs in the Middle East conflict” with Israel.57 The Buchenwald memorial statement captures the precise tone of East German antifascist rhetoric in 1958: de-Semitized, even in the context of memorializing prisoners of a concentration camp, and freely adapted to combat the Zionist and nuclear threat of the Cold War enemy. Even the story of Anne Frank received this treatment. The thirteenminute DEFA documentary Eine Tagebuch für Anne Frank (1958) had little to do with her or with the Holocaust; instead, Frank’s story served as mere pretext for focusing on former Nazis living out their lives without consequence in West Germany, reinforcing the message that the GDR was the only Germany committed to combatting fascism.58 This is the larger context in which A Survivor was performed, heard, and reviewed in East Germany in 1958.

federal bureaucracy Kegel may have encountered A Survivor through informal local networks, but performing it in concert, broadcasting that concert on national radio, and producing a commercial recording required official channels, and that meant navigating bureaucracy.59 There were layers of radio oversight, reaching all the way to the Central Committee; the Ministry of Culture (Ministerium für Kultur—MfK); and, of course, the Stasi. It was not simply a matter of choosing a piece, renting the parts, and rehearsing and performing it; the music had to support the SED’s agenda for the medium of radio, which was viewed primarily as a tool of propaganda. The process is recounted here to demonstrate that programming A Survivor was approved at multiple, often overlapping levels of government, any one of which could have intervened to prevent the performance from occurring. By 1958 the three national radio stations had distinct roles to play in the ruling party’s agenda, and issues of national relevance were assigned to Radio DDR. Its intendant, Wolfgang Kleinert, declared his station to be the station of GDR citizens.60 The primary task of radio ensembles was not to concertize but to produce recordings so that there would always be sufficient acceptable content available for broadcasting. Typically an ensemble recorded a work and then played it in concert (although in this case the LRSO performed the concert first and then recorded A Survivor on 17 April, followed

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by Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11 on 24 April). The work of radio ensembles also fell under the purview of the Ministry of Culture in a way that other radio programming did not, and overlapping jurisdiction could be problematic. Procedurally speaking, a radio ensemble’s repertoire was selected by the station’s chief music director, and in the case of Radio DDR, that person was Max Spielhaus. The conductor could make suggestions, and Kegel and Spielhaus seem to have shared a vision of the LRSO as champion of new music, but the chief music director was accountable for the repertoire.61 He made decisions in consultation with his counterparts at the other two stations, further informed by considerations such as political events, composers’ birth or death years, the political orientation of living composers, and the need to showcase music from the Eastern Bloc. Before parts could be rented or a note rehearsed, however, Spielhaus had to run his selections through the bureaucracy, which began with the radio’s Committee for Music Affairs (Komitee für Musikfragen), chaired by Franz Spielhagen. When that committee convened on 27 January 1958 to coordinate the schedule of radioensemble recordings to be produced by VEB Deutsche Schallplatten (the East German national record company) for the year, Spielhaus made a successful pitch for Kegel and the LRSO to produce A Survivor.62 His case was supported by Helmut Koch, Spielhagen’s second-in-command and a powerful figure thought to have very close ties to the SED Central Committee.63 Spielhagen subsequently represented Music Affairs to the next layer of bureaucracy: the State Radio Committee (Staatliches Rundfunkkomitee or Staatliches Komitee für Rundfunk—SRK), which was responsible for all radio programming, musical and otherwise. The SRK reported to the Press Office of the Ministerrat but answered to Albert Norden, the SED Central Committee’s secretary of agitation and chair of the Politburo’s Agitation Committee.64 Norden’s dual role confirms that radio’s primary purpose in the GDR was to exert influence; providing entertainment was supposed to be a distant second. Radio’s omnipresence was thought to be an ideal medium for informing, educating, and otherwise shaping citizens, and most listened to the radio quite a bit. According to a report from the Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst (East German News Service) released on 24 March 1958, approximately 5.15 million East German households owned radios, and 95 percent of all citizens over the age of fifteen were listeners.65 Unfortunately for the SED, however, they were not always listening to East German programming. A survey conducted in 1956 by the East Berlin newspaper BZ am Abend found that 70 percent listened regularly to West German radio.

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A 1958 study of 1,075 East German refugees in Munich found that 93 percent of them claimed to have been able to pick up Western radio in the GDR. Most said they listened primarily for news and reporting from the West.66 East German radio could not change its fundamental political orientation to retain listeners, so functionaries addressed the problem obliquely by focusing on music instead. By 1959 approximately 70 percent of East German airtime was devoted to music, and the three stations combined to broadcast about sixty hours of music daily; this meant that radio had the largest audience for music in the GDR, reaching far more listeners than ensembles based in concert halls. The ever-increasing preponderance of music, as well as the style of that music, represented an effort to appease and retain listeners based on feedback from SRK questionnaires and letters from listeners who wrote to register their approval or (more often) disapproval of current programming. The SRK was willing to accommodate listener demands for more popular music (Unterhaltungs- und Tanzmuzik) but was uneasy about the amount of American repertoire included in that programming. So was the Ministry of Culture. As of 1 February 1958, the MfK mandated that 60 percent of the popular music broadcast in the GDR had to originate in the Soviet Bloc. It also invested heavily in the state recording company, VEB Deutsche Schallplatten Berlin, which increased production on both of its labels, Eterna (mostly art, some political) and Amiga (popular); Eterna put out nearly twice as many recordings in 1958 as it had in 1957. Almost 50 percent of the minutes of recorded music released by VEB Deutsche Schallplatten in 1958 appeared on the Eterna label, suggesting that one way the MfK hoped to combat the onslaught of American popular culture was to offer more art music.67 If the Stasi took a particular interest in Kegel or the LRSO during this period, no records of that survive (although the absence of proof is not necessarily proof of absence, given the number of documents the Stasi destroyed in late 1989 and early 1990). The Stasi most assuredly did monitor the employees of Radio DDR, both officially and unofficially. And as Gary Bruce notes in his history of the Stasi, “Daily life in East Germany cannot be reduced to the Stasi, but daily life in East Germany cannot be understood without taking it into account.”68 The Stasi’s official liaison at Radio DDR was Elly Pippig, the Kaderleiterin—a position akin to that of human resources or personnel manager. Individuals holding such posts had to be members of the SED, and the position entailed regular reports to the Stasi. East Germany may have lacked the physical brutality that typified other totalitarian states, but the regime was still a monopoly, prompting

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some scholars to emphasize “the Stasi’s power to control life opportunities, rather than to control through terror.” Manipulative rather than terroristic, the Stasi achieved its ends through its authority to withhold and dispense benefits.69 Personnel managers were well positioned to effectively exercise this power. Far more numerous and insidious than the personnel managers were the civilian informants known as IMs (inoffizielle Mitarbeiter), who permeated East German society to such an unprecedented degree that citizens lived in the belief that they were constantly under surveillance.70 It is difficult to assess the toll of living in such a society. Perpetual selfcensorship to avoid becoming “ensnared in the repression apparatus” and lose opportunities for oneself or one’s family, a loss of trust and spontaneity, the impulse to “lead as inconspicuous a life as possible”—these are descriptions of that experience given by former citizens.71 It is important to note, however, that in the absence of proof, that some, such as Kegel, chose not to live inconspicuously and still managed to thrive does not necessarily connote collaboration with the Stasi. A talented young conductor was a precious commodity in the GDR, and the state could give its valued cultural elites considerable latitude. Apparently Kegel had not run afoul of the Stasi or any other power brokers at this point, although that would change.72 American popular music was perceived to be the most urgent musical threat, but art music was still taken seriously. Repertoire had to be approved, and there is no documented opposition to or censorship of A Survivor at any stage in the bureaucratic process. Spielhaus programmed it, and Kegel and the LRSO and Choir performed, encored, broadcasted, and recorded it in its original languages, unedited and in its entirety (and took it to Poland later that year, as we will see). A Survivor’s presence—and Schoenberg’s symbolic re-presence—required at the very least the noninterference of countless functionaries who did not impede its mobility in concert, on the radio, or on LP. Such noninterference might mean that the piece suited the SED’s antifascist agenda while burnishing the state’s modernist music credentials or it might just mean that those in power were focused on bigger issues. It may also be evidence of the haphazard nature of East German cultural politics, in which some artworks were inexplicably promoted while similar works were just as inexplicably blackballed.

jewishness and antifascism in concert reviews Despite the perceived threat posed by American popular music, the very real nuclear threat, and a discourse of antifascism refurbished for Cold War purposes, critics did not avail themselves of anti-American rhetoric when

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writing about Schoenberg. It would not have been difficult to do so, and, given the composer’s divisive reputation, one might expect nothing to be off-limits, yet all situated A Survivor within the traditional, historical antifascism of the Nazi era, presumably due to the compelling relationship of its subject matter to the composer’s history and identity. If the United States was mentioned, it was to note that Schoenberg wrote more socially engaged music there than he had in Europe (a positive development by GDR standards). Nevertheless, the larger anti-American, antifascist environment was the context in which readers would have encountered the performance and the following reviews. Analysis of the six reviews published of the LRSO concert on 15 April 1958 is one way of getting at the fundamental question posed by Greenblatt’s theory of cultural mobility (“What happens to cultural products that travel through time and space to emerge and be enshrined in new contexts and configurations?”). In this case, the new contexts and configurations concern the relationship between Jewishness and Cold War–era antifascism in East Germany. Five reviews appeared in newspapers representing four different political parties; the sixth was submitted by an East German reviewer to a West German periodical and was therefore intended for a Western audience; it will be treated separately. The event was not covered in Mitteilungsblatt des Verbandes der Jüdischen Gemeinden in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (also known as Nachrichtenblatt), the Jewish quarterly published in East Berlin and Dresden from 1953 to 1990. Schoenberg’s first appearance in that publication appears to have come in September 1974, with Gottfried Schmiedel’s recognition of his one hundredth birthday.73 Although the SED was without question the ruling political party, five additional parties participated in the political process, however token their representation may have been. The SED controlled all of them through the National Front, which had been formed from a large alliance of parties and numerous mass organizations for election purposes. The other five parties’ newspapers could present distinctive (although not oppositional) voices, and the differences in their published reviews of the concert on which Kegel programmed A Survivor demonstrate this at the level of music criticism. It may be recalled that the notes Müller wrote for the concert program on 15 April 1958 explicitly identified the Jewishness of both the composer and the work’s subject. Reviews published by the National Democratic Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, and the Christian Democratic Union Party did so as well, but those published by the SED did not. The degree of variance should not be overstated, of course, nor should the extent of these parties’

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support of Jewish causes. The small parties all functioned as SED puppets when it came to voting in the East German parliament, and only the CDU maintained generally positive relations with Jews in the GDR. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that they acknowledged the Jewishness of the composer and the subject matter. The work itself was not de-Semitized: it was performed in its original form and in its entirety, with its text intact. But its official reception by the ruling political party treated Jewishness with studied neglect, even if other, lesser parties did not follow suit. Relying solely on SED sources, it follows, does not provide an accurate representation of what East Germans knew or read about the work and its subject, even in official, state-sponsored media. The review by Martin Wehnert, a regular Leipzig contributor to the West German periodical Musica: Monatsschrift für alle Gebiete des Musiklebens (Monthly journal for all areas of musical life), demonstrates how an East German presented the event to the outside world, specifically to West Germans. Musica was published by Bärenreiter in Kassel and had a circulation of about five thousand, 90 percent of which were subscriptions. Naturally Wehnert focused on the importance of an all-German Shostakovich premiere. He did not need to explain A Survivor to this readership and kept his remarks brief, describing it as a “shocking artwork of indictment.” A reference to the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 is the only indicator of Jewish content, and he did not identify the perpetrators, perhaps because specificity could have been perceived as inflammatory in this forum. Otherwise, what he wrote about A Survivor was intended to reflect favorably on the East Germans. The audience responded to the “high intensity of the experience” with such approval that they “forced a repeat of the cantata. What a rare occurrence in the first performance of a modern work! This surprising success is surely due to a large extent to Kegel’s interpretation. In his hands, the orchestra and chorus were not only instruments of great precision; they also exhibited the highest dedication to the work.”74 Wehnert presents Leipzig in the best possible light, as if debunking every Western stereotype about “backward” East German society: contrary to popular opinion the programming is innovative, the musicians are highly skilled, and the audience is sophisticated and open-minded. The reviews published in East German papers, on the other hand, were clearly calibrated for a domestic readership. The National Democratic Party of Germany (National Demokratische Partei Deutschlands, or NDPD) advocated on behalf of the middle class but was primarily known as the party of former Nazis. The party’s agenda was to integrate former members into mainstream party politics so that they would not be drawn to right-wing extremism. The

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NDPD published the party’s regional newspaper, Mitteldeutsche Neueste Nachrichten, for Halle, Leipzig, and Magdeburg. On 17 April that paper published a concert review by “rg,” who noted the importance of a concert featuring two major premieres and stated that Kegel and his ensembles had thus earned the special thanks of all lovers of contemporary music. Rg criticized Schoenberg’s tendency to devolve into formalist games but noted approvingly that in his American exile, the composer had begun writing works that were expressive and humanist once again, such as A Survivor. The critic opined that Schoenberg used his twelve-tone method in “a freer way” in this work. He or she did not identify Schoenberg as Jewish but did note that the work describes a “Jewish victim,” the “terrible Nazi barbarism in Warsaw,” and “Nazi terror” and reported that Kegel repeated the piece, “further deepening the experience.”75 Given the newspaper’s party affiliation, the critic’s use of the term “Nazi” to describe the perpetrators rather than the more common and generalized “fascist” is conspicuous in light of the makeup of the NDPD’s membership. There were two reviews published in Dresden, both in newspapers with reputations for relatively independent reporting and a focus on cultural news. One appeared in the Sächsisches Tageblatt, the regional paper of the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (Liberal-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands, or LDPD). The LDPD had begun as the least communist of the postwar parties in the SBZ, but by this time had become virtually indistinguishable from the SED; nevertheless the paper was known for its occasional willingness to skirt the party line. This review, attributed to “Go.,” drew a direct connection between the program’s two premieres: “[The concert] raised listener awareness of two historical events from this century through the language of music.” It then provided explicit descriptions of the content of A Survivor (“Schoenberg conjures the horror of the bestial drive to destruction with which the Hitler fascists perpetrated an organized mass murder in the ghetto of the Polish capital”) and Shostakovich’s symphony (“gloomy images of the revolutionary movement that shook the walls of the declining Russian Empire, twelve years before the Great Socialist October Revolution”). Go. gave considerably more detail than rg, noting that the speaker in A Survivor provides an English-language account of a person who survived after a long period of unconsciousness in the mass grave in Warsaw. The critic reported that “the brutal commands of a demented fascist sergeant” are given in German and that the narration is followed by a male chorus singing “the ancient Jewish prayer” as they were led to the gas chambers, “despite their fear.” A Survivor bears “the mark of Cain” (Kainszeichen) that is the twelve-tone method, but the fusion of

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words and music in this case created “a deeply moving action against inhumanity.” “The mark of Cain” is an expression indicating stigma, but in this case the Old Testament reference seems to allude to the composer’s identity using a bit of detritus from the 1930s when labeling dodecaphony as Jewish was a standard means of discrediting it. (In fact it is not clear that Schoenberg was widely known to be Jewish.) According to Go., A Survivor was encored because of “persistent applause” from the audience.76 He or she refers to Hitler but uses “fascism” instead of “Nazism.” The other Dresden review was published in Die Union, the regional paper of the Christian Democratic Union (Christlich-Demokratische Union Deutschlands, or CDU). This party catered primarily to middle-class Christians and endorsed a theory of “Christian realism” that brought it sufficiently into alignment with the SED. Under the guidance of party chairman Otto Nuschke, the CDU also had consistently good relations with Jews in the GDR. Nuschke was head of the government office that oversaw religious communities, the Main Division for Ties to the Churches (Hauptabteilung Verbindung zu den Kirchen), where he took seriously the needs of the IRGs: “Nuschke and his staff became the East German Jewish community’s leading patrons” in the early 1950s.77 The CDU critic “ich” linked Schoenberg to Shostakovich, despite their “different ways of dealing with the events of our times and their problems. They come from completely different worlds, separated by artistic and philosophical positions, yet they still push forward the same issues.” A Survivor is described as being based on “eyewitness reports of the horrific crimes of fascism in the Warsaw Ghetto that occurred exactly fifteen years ago this week.” A CDU critic might be more likely to ascribe significance to the final stand having occurred during Holy Week in 1943, when Passover began on 19 April and Easter fell on the 25th; no one else mentioned the timing of the event or the concert, and there is no evidence that the performance was meant to mark the anniversary. Ich notes that Schoenberg wrote the work after hearing about “fellow believers [Glaubensgenossen] suffering fascist atrocities.” The expressive power of the piece culminates in the final climax, “when a men’s chorus sings part of the Jewish liturgy in unison, the voice of prayer and unwavering faith rising over all the horror and suffering of this world.” Ich uses the generic term “fascist” instead of the more specific “Nazi” and the word israelitische instead of jüdische, perhaps because of its racist connotations; this reflects a gradual linguistic shift in German toward the preferred designation of israelitische instead. Ich focuses on the descriptor as a marker of faith rather than of race, both for the composer and for those represented by the choir. The author also appears to have been quite knowledgeable

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about Schoenberg’s music generally, connecting the use of Sprechstimme here with its appearance in Pierrot lunaire (1912) and identifying A Survivor and the String Trio as the masterpieces of the composer’s late style. A Survivor “is music of accusation. But it is also, like the String Trio, profoundly, desperately tragic, haunting, torn, frayed, all but neurotic.”78 The two reviews in SED publications were both by Werner Wolf, and they stand apart from the others. Wolf was music critic for the Leipziger Volkszeitung, the party’s district paper, and his review appeared on 17 April 1958. He launched immediately into an account of the main event, the Shostakovich premiere, and that accounts for two-thirds of the review; A Survivor and the Mozart symphony then received one paragraph each. Wolf complained that Schoenberg remained “trapped in the self-imposed shackles [of dodecaphony], even in this deeply moving late work,” and attributed any efficacy to A Survivor’s text rather than to its music. He summarized the work only briefly (“The work is a harrowing indictment of the bestial atrocities of the German fascists”) but made no mention of Jews or of the ghetto. He used similar language to describe the second movement of Shostakovich’s symphony, which portrays “the barbarous fury of tsarism.”79 When Wolf revised the review for a larger report on Leipzig concert life for the national journal Musik und Gesellschaft, he expanded the portion on Shostakovich and recycled the section on Schoenberg nearly verbatim. He added the statement cited previously (“we have heard three other twelve-tone works in Leipzig recently”) and noted that these were all by East German composers (Hanns Eisler, Arnold Matz, Max Butting). All of these use “a freer, more personal type of twelve-tone technique that bears almost no similarity to that of Schoenberg.”80 For the SED critic, it appears that dodecaphony was not the issue; the problem was Schoenberg’s dodecaphony and his musical re-presence in the form of this work. Wolf highlighted twelve-tone music by East German composers as well as Leipzig’s openness to hearing it but justified this endorsement by asserting that their music was nothing like Schoenberg’s. (Apparently this perspective was not foisted upon him; according to Wolf, the SED never censored or otherwise interfered with his column for the Leipziger Volkszeitung.)81 The need to separate the East German composers from Schoenberg is particularly striking considering that the point of comparison is A Survivor—a tonally inflected example of dodecaphony, rife with descriptive and mimetic gestures and relatively accessible to audiences. This suggests that the problem had less to do with the particular musical technique used in A Survivor than with Schoenberg’s symbolic significance, further complicated by the subject of this piece. As Brockhaus and

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Niemann noted in the 1979 history of East German musical life cited at the beginning of this chapter, Schoenberg was “der wunde Punkt” (the sticking point) for the development of modernist music there in the 1950s: Even after his compositional method began to gain acceptance, the composer himself remained problematic. Wolf was the only critic writing for an East German audience who did not note the Jewish identity of the composer or the subject matter; he did not even use the word “ghetto.” A reader could interpret the “harrowing indictment of the bestial atrocities of the German fascists” as a reference to the German demolition of the city of Warsaw in 1944 rather than to the destruction of the ghetto there in 1943. (After all, Central Europe was full of survivors of one kind or another in the postwar period; “survivor” did not carry the specific connotations it has now.) Of course, the story of A Survivor is about what Germans did to Jews in Poland; it is not about what Germans did to their Jewish neighbors at home. Perhaps that degree of separation was a factor, for reviewers who were so inclined, in identifying the victims as Jews and the perpetrators as Nazis or fascists. Only Wolf, the SED critic, wrote that the perpetrators were German, and in that regard his prose comes closest to the uncomfortable truth of acknowledging broad culpability, even if he did not name the victims. That omission was quite consistent with SED policy on antifascism (consider the Buchenwald memorial), which is to say, de-Semitized, even in the context of the Holocaust. The debate over Schoenberg and twelve-tone composition ran into the 1960s, although A Survivor continued to enjoy a certain privileged status because its theme lent itself to appropriation for antifascist purposes. GDR publications throughout the decade considered the East German premiere of A Survivor to be a noteworthy event. Schoenberg’s name is mentioned just six times in Karl Laux’s Das Musikleben in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, published in 1963, but two of those citations are in reference to this performance; Kegel’s entry in Horst Seeger’s Musiklexikon of 1966 lists this performance among the conductor’s major achievements but does not mention the all-German premiere of Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 11 on the same concert.82 The recording Kegel and the LRSO and Choir made on 17 April 1958 was finally released commercially in 1961, when Eterna put out an LP of Schoenberg works recorded by ensembles from the three radio stations. Radio DDR was represented by Kegel’s ensemble; Berliner Rundfunk was represented by the Kammerorchester Berlin performing Chamber Symphony, op. 9, under Schoenberg’s former student conductor Walter Goehr; and Deutschlandsender was represented by its chamber choir singing “Friede auf Erden” under conductor Helmut Koch. The carefully chosen rep-

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ertoire is indicative of Schoenberg’s still-tenuous status. So is the fact that musicologist Eberhardt Klemm suffered devastating career setbacks after he drew parallels between Eisler’s and Schoenberg’s use of dodecaphony in 1964. (Eisler had died in 1962 and was now untouchable; the connection to Schoenberg was deemed an affront to his legacy.)83 The recording was rereleased in 1974, when the composer’s centennial finally, and at long last, occasioned a reconsideration and acceptance of his music in East Germany.84 By 1979, when Brockhaus and Niemann published their history of musical life in the GDR, A Survivor no longer warranted special mention.

Poland Cultural Diplomacy through A Survivor from Warsaw I have had several talks with Mr. Kassern of the Polish Embassy on your A Survivor from Warsaw. There are good prospects that the Warsaw Philharmonic might give the world premiere either under [Grzegorz] Fitelberg or one of their younger conductors. I made it clear to Mr. Kassern that this would cost money to the Polish State, but apparently this seems, if you keep within certain limits, to be no obstacle. Yet, I would not dare to be too optimistic about the whole matter. However, their plans are very ambitious and there was even talk of inviting you to be present at the premiere. —Letter from Felix Greissle to Arnold Schoenberg, 5 October 1948

We know now that this did not come to pass. Felix Greissle, Schoenberg’s son-in-law, then working at the music publishing company E. B. Marks, described the prospect of “a world premiere,” apparently unaware that Kurt Frederick would do the honors in Albuquerque just a month later, followed shortly thereafter by the European premiere in Paris under René Leibowitz. Yet even the suggestion that A Survivor from Warsaw might have been performed in Warsaw just five years after the destruction of the ghetto and four years after much of the city had been leveled as well is noteworthy, world premiere or not, and provides the point of departure for considering the work’s performance and reception there. Tadeusz Kassern (1904–57) was a Polish composer of Jewish descent working as Polish consul in New York, and he hoped to facilitate a Warsaw performance of A Survivor in conjunction with one of his own projects. In November Greissle informed Schoenberg that the consul was traveling to Poland and would make arrangements for the performance while he was there.1 When Kassern arrived on 20 November 1948, he found the mood in Warsaw highly charged, as preparations were underway for a convention to be held on 15–21 December at which the communists would finalize their consolidation of power. At that time the Polish Socialist Party and the Polish Workers’ Party formally merged into the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza—PZPR), the communist 112

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party that would control the country for the next forty years. The primary purpose for Kassern’s trip was a meeting at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 2 December, at which he was appointed general consul to London; on 6 December he also met with the Ministry of Culture to discuss an opera commission. He proposed a treatment of Jerzy Z˙uławski’s 1906 Koniec Mesjasza (End of the Messiah), based on the life of Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenth-century Sephardic rabbi who claimed to be the Jewish messiah. The opera was entitled The Anointed and was meant to be a homage to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. According to Violetta Kostka, Kassern had begun and abandoned the work some years earlier but returned to it with renewed fervor once he began planning the performance of A Survivor. His proposal was not well received by the Ministry of Culture, however: “I suggested The Anointed as a ghetto-uprising memorial, but I was severely rebuked and forbidden to write this opera because the Communist Government considered it as favoring Jewish ‘nationalistic’ tendencies and this the Communists strongly opposed.”2 He wisely agreed to write a children’s puppet opera instead but evidently did so only to appease the authorities. As soon as he returned to New York, he resigned his post at the consulate and would later apply for American citizenship. In 1949 Kassern received a grant from the Koussevitzky Foundation, the same organization that had commissioned A Survivor, to complete his opera.3 Clearly conditions in Poland in December 1948 were not conducive to the performance of a musical memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, be it Kassern’s The Anointed or Schoenberg’s A Survivor. That Kassern did not anticipate the ministry’s negative reaction may suggest naivety, but as a diplomat stationed in New York, he had been observing Eastern Europe at some remove and may have misinterpreted certain recent events, such as the Eastern Bloc’s support of the newly founded state of Israel. Foremost among these events was surely the construction of Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument amid the rubble of the ghetto. The state had permitted the permanent installation of a large monument in a public space and unveiled it at a ceremony on 19 April 1948, on the fifth anniversary of the uprising. The unveiling was attended by thousands of survivors, religious leaders, Jewish dignitaries from twenty nations, and a sizable contingent of international press.4 Within that context, Kassern could be forgiven for expecting the Ministry of Culture to accept his proposal for musical commemoration of the same event just seven months later. The manner in which A Survivor finally did come to the PRP (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa—People’s Republic of Poland) a decade later is scarcely less extraordinary than what Kassern had proposed.5 On 28

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September 1958, East Germany made its first appearance at the Warsaw Autumn festival (Warszawska Jesien´) with a concert by the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra (LRSO) and Choir under the direction of conductor Herbert Kegel. The ensemble was allotted a prime-time slot—7:30 p.m. on Sunday evening, the second day of the festival—and the concert was broadcast live on Polskie Radio, an honor usually reserved only for the festival’s opening and closing events.6 The program consisted of A Survivor and works by East German composers Johann Cilenšek and Paul Dessau. Kegel’s ensemble had given A Survivor’s Soviet Bloc premiere just five months earlier in the GDR (German Democratic Republic, or East Germany), but the Warsaw concert was surely more significant. Warsaw Autumn was the international new-music festival in the Soviet Bloc, so the concert was better attended and far better covered by the press than a freestanding concert by the same ensemble would have been. There, before an audience of several hundred Poles and international music figures, Germans narrated and sang the roles of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, in a work written by a Jewish composer about the German annihilation of those Jews, in the same city in which that annihilation had occurred fifteen years earlier.7 Add to that volatile mix the age-old Polish-German tensions that had recently escalated into “the Cold War within the Soviet Bloc,” heightened at this particular moment by conflicting interpretations of the Thaw emanating from Moscow.8 Subject matter, performers, audience, location, and timing: the concert hall was a powder keg ready to blow. Except that it didn’t. In fact, A Survivor proved to be the only aspect of East Germany’s participation in the 1958 Warsaw Autumn that was not problematic. Reviews of the piece and of the performance were overwhelmingly enthusiastic, and the ruling parties’ official newspapers spun the East German performance of A Survivor in Warsaw as a gesture of atonement. In the GDR the ruling party was the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands—Socialist Unity Party), and its newspaper described the performance with the word Wiedergutmachung (literally, “make good again,” a legal term for postwar reparations): “At the international press conference in Warsaw Herbert Kegel asked that they accept the performance of A Survivor from Warsaw, which is dedicated to the fighters of the Warsaw Uprising, as an act of atonement to the Polish people who were mistreated so badly by the German fascists during the Second World War.”9 In Poland, the ruling party was the PZPR, and in a final overview of the festival its newspaper used the term ekspiacja (expiation): “Let us mention the elegant and inspired Modern Psalm of Arnold Schoenberg—the last work of the great composer—as well as A Survivor

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from Warsaw, a passionate musical image filled with pain and protest. There was something symbolic about the performance of this work by Germans in Warsaw, an expiation of sorts.”10 Even more significantly, both newspapers managed to do so without a single reference to Jews, leaving open the possibility that the “atonement” could be penance for German atrocities in general, the razing of the city of Warsaw in 1944, the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, or all of these. This case study traces the cultural mobility of A Survivor internationally, across borders in the Eastern Bloc, through the channels of cultural diplomacy. I will consider the work of cultural diplomacy on three interrelated levels: the negotiations that facilitated the GDR’s participation in the festival; the Cold War politics of musical style and Schoenberg’s symbolic significance therein; and the reception of A Survivor within communist Poland’s managed culture of commemoration.

cultural diplomacy during the thaw The East German concert at Warsaw Autumn was an act of cultural diplomacy at a time when traditional channels of international high politics between the two countries were ineffectual. The negotiations that preceded that concert were exceedingly fraught, as the GDR-PRP relationship was plagued by numerous “persistently contentious” issues: the dispute over the Oder-Neisse border, the inability to agree on a policy toward the West (particularly West Germany), conflicting interpretations of socialism and trade agreements, and disagreement over repatriation of Germans living in Poland.11 The “Cold War within the Soviet Bloc” was frostiest during the Thaw, that period of de-Stalinization in which the effects of Khrushchev’s so-called secret speech in February 1956 were “immediate and seismic,” and nowhere more so than in Poland.12 After a period of disfavor, the politician Władysław Gomułka found himself rehabilitated and returned to power on a wave of popular support for his agenda to carve out “a Polish road to socialism” that would be less beholden to the Soviet model and to Soviet rule. The Soviets did not approve. In October 1956 the Eighth Plenum of the PZPR Central Committee in Warsaw was interrupted by a visit from Khrushchev and an intimidating entourage of political and military leaders from Moscow, to say nothing of the Soviet forward military unit in the Warsaw suburbs. Gomułka defused the situation, and the Soviets redirected their attention to the Hungarian Uprising; the Central Committee named Gomułka first secretary, and liberalization took its course.13 Meanwhile, to the west, the GDR’s leadership was scarcely less alarmed by these developments than the Soviets. Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973), first

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secretary of the SED, thought the “Polish road to socialism” smacked of Titoism, and he minimized engagement with the Poles in hopes of staving off the contagion. Gomułka dismissed his East German counterpart as an unrepentant Stalinist and bypassed Ulbricht entirely to pursue relations with the West Germans. Between 1956 and 1959 the GDR and the PRP conducted only twelve government-sponsored exchanges, all in areas of technology, science, and agriculture. (In the same three-year period, Poland had 189 exchanges with France and 97 with Great Britain—non–Warsaw Pact countries—and these included collaborations to study language, the humanities, and the arts as well as industry.)14 GDR officials were keen to keep the culture of the Polish Thaw from crossing the border. This is apparent in the language used to describe developments in Polish music in the GDR journal Musik und Gesellschaft. In 1956 Johannes Thilman dismissed the Polish students’ enthusiasm for Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto at the first Warsaw Autumn as mere reactionary politics and belittled the atonal works by Tadeusz Baird, Artur Malawski, and Bolesław Szabelski as “something that was already surpassed long ago in Western Europe”—proof that “some Poles lag behind the general trend.”15 Evidently Thilman hoped to thwart the attraction of a hitherto taboo musical style by dismissing it as passé before most East Germans had even had a chance to hear it. The governments of the GDR and the PRP had signed an Agreement of Cultural Cooperation in 1952, and this framework provided a modicum of engagement, even when standard diplomacy stalled. In East Germany, cultural organizations at all levels were accustomed to such initiatives since most countries did not acknowledge the GDR as a legitimate state until the 1970s, and that meant that alternative, less-formal channels of communication were often required.16 The Composers’ Unions complied, although the East Germans did so with more enthusiasm than their Polish colleagues. The East German VKM (Verband der Komponisten und Musikwissenschaftler) and the Polish ZKP (Zwia˛zek Kompozytorów Polskich) exchanged recordings and scores by their respective members,17 and in May 1956 they codified this practice with a Friendship Agreement in which both unions committed to host member exchanges, promote the performance of music by composers from the other country, and swap information and materials.18 The East Germans regularly informed their counterparts about performances of Polish music in the GDR; it appears that the Poles were less diligent about reciprocating.19 Given the general tenor of relations between the two states, it is no surprise that some of these initiatives were unsuccessful. Polish composer Tadeusz Marek visited the GDR in late 1956 and found East German hospitality wanting, claiming

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that he had been left to fend for himself on the Christmas holiday and accusing the Stasi of stealing his diary. Nathan Notowicz, first secretary of the VKM, scoffed at Marek’s contention that the Stasi had stolen from him (“as if our state security has no bigger concern than Marek’s diary”) and dismissed him as a whiner: “Even the Poles describe him as a ‘glory-hound hysteric’ [ehrsüchtiger Hysteriker].” He concluded that “we must treat all our guests well, but a visit to the sanatorium is not part of the deal.”20 The Agreement of Cultural Cooperation may have been signed in 1952 as an effort to improve relations among socialist neighbors in the Stalinist era, but after the Poles embraced the Thaw, the East Germans’ “cooperation” had a different agenda: cultural diplomacy was a means of helping the Poles stave off Western influences by modeling an appropriately socialistrealist aesthetic. Of course, this was at least as much self-defense as ostensible altruism, since the GDR was already fighting the onslaught of Western culture on the border it shared with West Germany and did not relish having to do so to the east as well. In a 1957 report to the MfAA (Ministerium für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten—Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Manfred Schmidt of the GDR Embassy in Warsaw fretted that the Cleveland Orchestra, the Comédie française, and the Shakespeare Company had thrilled Polish audiences on recent tours: “Our best ensembles can certainly compete with these. However, if our side does not quickly revive the cultural work plan as well as other cultural relations with Poland, there is a serious danger that the great cultural achievements of Poland’s socialist neighbor to the west will be forgotten because of cultural exchanges with capitalist countries. I need not emphasize the political implications of this development. For these reasons we should review our position in the field of cultural relations with Poland and the ways in which we should influence international cultural life in the PRP.” Schmidt expressed frustration that the East German MfK (Ministerium für Kultur—Ministry of Culture) had not heeded his advice on this matter and now asked the MfAA to “pay special attention in the near future to developing good cultural relations with the PRP.” He believed that “the restraint we have shown toward Poland in recent months has harmed our reputation here.” Sending art and culture “that are tightly bound to Marxism-Leninism would have proved a greater service to the progressive forces in the PRP than our restraint.”21 The sense that cultural diplomacy could be used to “help” the Poles stay true to Marxist-Leninist values is also apparent in a travel report filed by musicologist Hella Brock after she visited the PRP in October 1957. “Almost every person we spoke to had traveled to West Germany many times but never to the GDR, and they advocated political and aesthetic views that are

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worthless for the construction of socialism in their country. Some are outright resistant.” Evidently she met just one person on the entire trip whom she judged to have the appropriate attitude toward the government and the working class. She urged Notowicz to invite members of the ZKP to come work with the VKM so the East Germans could provide a positive model.22 Socialist evangelism under the guise of cultural diplomacy became a recurring theme on the East German side. As is so often the case, however, the proselytized were not as receptive as the proselytizers might have hoped. A Joint German-Polish Planning Commission convened in November 1957 to determine how to meet the terms of the Agreement of Cultural Cooperation for calendar year 1958. In attendance were representatives from the two countries’ respective Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Culture, and Education, and the East German Embassy. There were numerous recommendations regarding music, but the most important for our purposes was point 26 (“both sides will consider the possibility of exchanging performing ensembles”), because it would recur frequently in subsequent discussions about East Germany’s participation in the Warsaw Autumn. In the margin next to point 26 someone scrawled “Warschauer Herbst” (Warsaw Autumn), indicating that this obligation would be fulfilled by deploying an ensemble to perform at the festival.23

negotiating cultural diplomacy behind the scenes Execution of the agreement did not go as planned. Over the course of the year, the Poles came to believe that the East Germans were deliberately obstructionist at every level, from the Composers’ Union to the ZK (Central Committee) of the SED, but in fact the internal paper trail suggests that the East Germans were plagued mostly by poor communication, both amongst themselves and with their Polish counterparts. It was not entirely their fault. The Poles did not establish a standing organizing committee for the festival until late April and had communicated no standardized procedure or apparent chain of command through which international participants should negotiate. In fact, the 1958 festival appears to have been the most disorganized on record, and the planners had difficulty negotiating appearances with performers from “all three pertinent geopolitical regions”: Poland itself, the Eastern Bloc, and the West (Western Europe and the United States).24 Even within that chaotic context, the GDR case stood out as the most contentious. The two countries’ Ministries of Culture and

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Foreign Affairs continually worked at cross-purposes, partly because they used the GDR Embassy in Warsaw as intercessor but not in a consistent manner. I outline this bureaucratic morass to demonstrate how many parties were involved and just how extraordinary it was that the GDR came to participate in the 1958 Warsaw Autumn at all, let alone that they did so with the Polish premiere of A Survivor. If the reconstructed process appears as a welter of acronymic alphabet soup and miscommunication now, it could hardly have been any less confusing for the participants at the time.25 In January 1958 the MfAA sent the East Germans’ plan for the Agreement of Cultural Cooperation to Manfred Schmidt of the GDR Embassy in Warsaw, who passed it on to MKiS (Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki— Ministry of Culture and Art).26 In February the embassy asked the deputy secretary of the MfK to quickly recommend an ensemble to participate in that year’s Warsaw Autumn. Should Polish authorities resist, Schmidt wrote, we will “remind them of Point 26 in the plan for cultural exchange.” He asserted that “the performance of a program consistent with socialist cultural policies would not only testify to the developments of musical culture in the GDR but also have political consequences for those forces in the PRP who support a socialist culture. Please consider if it is possible for us to take part and thereby influence the complexion of the festival.”27 The MfK’s Department of Cultural Relations (Hauptabteilung Kulturelle Beziehungen) confirmed that an ensemble would indeed go to Warsaw Autumn, and on 25 February the SRK (Staatliches Rundfunkkomitee—State Radio Committee) of the Central Committee’s Department of Agitation recommended that the LRSO and Choir do so.28 The East Germans reached the decision to send Kegel and the Leipzig ensemble to Warsaw Autumn quickly but did not inform the Poles until 26 March, when the MfK alerted the GDR Embassy in Warsaw that the LRSO and Choir would present a program of “important new socialist works,” in accordance with point 26, which “mandates that we send a large choir and orchestra.”29 (In fact, point 26 made no stipulations regarding the size or medium, but this assertion was repeated frequently.) In the meantime the Warsaw Autumn committee had already discussed inviting the (East) Berlin Staatsoper to perform Wozzeck, and on 29 March they communicated this preference to MKiS.30 Three weeks later, on 17 April, MKiS notified the GDR Embassy that they had received the MfK’s offer but would prefer to have the Staatsoper instead.31 The festival planning committee discussed the prospect of the LRSO and Choir for the first time on 19 and 26 April. The consensus was that the musical quality of the Leipzig group was not high enough to include them, and they held out hope for the

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Staatsoper.32 In the meantime, the embassy reiterated to MKiS that the Staatsoper was not an option.33 On 30 April an internal MfAA memo to its own Division of Neighboring Countries (Abteilung Benachbarte Länder) relayed a message from the embassy that the Poles had requested a meeting to discuss Warsaw Autumn. Eugeniusz Markowski, director of MKiS’s Bureau of International Cultural Relations (Biuro Współpracy Kulturalnej z Zagranica˛—BWKZ), and Andrzej Dobrowolski, general secretary of the ZKP and member of the festival planning committee, wanted to meet with their East German counterparts.34 When all parties were finally in the same room together at the end of May, Markowski and Dobrowolski rejected the offer of the LRSO and Choir on the grounds that the festival that year already had too much orchestral music on the program. The MfK countered with a compromise— later described by the East Germans as “a nonbinding suggestion”—to send the Leipzig Opera instead, and the Poles agreed.35 The festival planning committee was amenable to this, and when they met on 6 June they drafted a schedule that included the Leipzig Opera in three performances of Paul Dessau’s Die Verurteilung des Lukullus and three performances of Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery.36 Everything appeared to be in order. Trouble surfaced within days, however, when an internal MfAA memo reported that even though the Poles “had been promised” a visit from the Leipzig Opera in that May meeting, “we are told that the Dresden Opera should go instead.”37 Evidently the East Germans could not decide who had final authority in this matter, the MfAA or the MfK. The MfAA would come to blame the MfK for most of the problems from this point onward, accusing them of overstepping with their so-called nonbinding suggestion, which the Poles took to be a firm offer.38 It is not clear who overruled that offer or why. What is clear, however, is that the Poles were not made aware of this change in a timely manner. In late June the BWKZ informed the music division of the MKiS that the MfK had retracted the Leipzig Opera offer and proposed two other options instead: either the Dresden Opera performing Khrennikov’s Der Sturm and Orff’s Die Kluge or the LRSO and Choir performing a program of contemporary works.39 A review of the Agreement of Cultural Cooperation conducted by the MfAA on 30 June noted that point 26 was supposed to have been fulfilled by sending an ensemble to Warsaw Autumn, but the Leipzig Opera had been cancelled and no replacement found. The Polish side had not yet decided which ensemble to send to the GDR for their part of the exchange.40 The East Germans decided to change tack and approach the Poles through the Composers’ Union rather than through ministries and embassies. On

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1 July the VKM wrote the ZKP that even though it was not possible to send an opera company, it hoped the festival would program music by East German composers and recommended Dessau’s melodrama Lilo Hermann. Apparently receiving no response, Notowicz followed up with the same offer in a personal letter to Dobrowolski on 18 July.41 Perhaps the ZKP was not responding because members had read the most recent issue of the VKM journal Musik und Gesellschaft. As yet further evidence that East German agencies needed to communicate amongst themselves before engaging the public, the July issue led with an inflammatory article by Eberhard Rebling, entitled, “An Open Letter to Our Polish Friends.” Rebling lambasted the ZKP’s newly resuscitated journal Ruch Muzyczny for a litany of sins: extolling the virtues of bourgeois modernism, referring to socialist realism as Sozrealismus (his transliteration of the Polish abbreviation Socrealizm), acting as “the mouthpiece” of the West German journal Melos, and taking a generally antisocialist, even apolitical position in a people’s republic.42 This screed could not have been helpful for negotiations. On 18 September, less than ten days before the festival was to begin, Zygmunt Mycielski would take up Rebling’s gauntlet in his column for the weekly Przegla˛d Kulturalny (Cultural Review). In a feuilleton laden with colorful references to mythology and Christianity, he said that Polish musicians might be guilty of an “unhealthy curiosity” where dodecaphony was concerned, but not revisionism and antisocialism. He defended that curiosity and reminded Rebling that “not that long ago the idea of ‘Entartete Kunst’ existed” (the Nazis’ concept of degenerate art), and “its effect was not only fatal but degrading, and cast a shadow over our entire epoch.” Mycielski was no particular fan of dodecaphony but endorsed its investigation: “I think it is better to give Eve the apple. Then there would be none of the adventure with the fig leaves and the archangel who guards the entrance to heaven.”43 In the meantime, on 4 July the MfAA notified the GDR embassy that MKiS had not accepted the Dresden Opera offer because its repertoire was not contemporary enough for Warsaw Autumn, and plans were already underway to host the Leipzig company. At some point in the next ten days the planning committee was brought up to speed on the matter. Kazimierz Sikorski, ZKP president and chair of the festival planning committee, assured the MfK’s Department of Cultural Relations on 16 July that the Poles valued the East German’s participation in the festival, which is why they had sent the delegation to Berlin and accepted the MfK’s formal proposal to send the Leipzig Opera performing Dessau and Prokofiev. He asked

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them to reconsider reneging on that offer because it was too late to make changes to the program. (A statement that turned out to be wishful thinking, as the program remained in a constant state of flux until the week the festival began.)44 The MfK stood its ground, asserting that if the Dresden Opera was unacceptable, then the GDR would not participate in 1958 but would like to commit to the 1959 festival.45 Not surprisingly, talks appeared to reach an impasse at the level of the Composers’ Unions as well. In a letter dated 24 July, Dobrowolski wrote, “It is not our fault that the MfK notified us officially that the Leipzig Opera would come and then a month and a half later, after we’ve already advertised it, they came back with a different proposition that does not interest us.” In sum, “If the music of the GDR is not represented at this festival, it will not be our fault.”46 At the end of July, then, about eight weeks before the festival was scheduled to begin, it appeared that the East Germans would not participate. The MfAA and the embassy asked Notowicz for what amounted to an intelligence briefing on the ZKP members he knew personally, categorizing each one as reactionary, opportunistic, or “someone we could work with,” politically speaking. In the report, marked “strictly confidential,” Notowicz observed that most members of the ZKP were not party members and that “pro-western beliefs play a big role with them” because “the state has not presented a consolidated political-ideological position.” He recommended contacting the musicologist Zofia Lissa for information, since she had been forced out of the ZKP leadership only recently for her hardline views and was thought to be sympathetic to the East German position. He described Sikorski as a good craftsman but an outspoken reactionary and noted that Dobrowolski had expressed an opinion in opposition to socialist realism at the meeting in May. Notowicz considered Witold Lutosławski to be the best composer in Poland (although he believed the “exiled” Andrzej Panufnik was better), “one who appears to be earnest and above board,” but cautioned, accurately enough, that Panufnik had many contacts with composers in capitalist countries and “has never given the impression of being a socialist.” (Since Panufnik had defected to the West in 1954, it is unclear how he could have been helpful in this situation.) Notowicz also called the publication of Rebling’s incendiary essay an error, saying it occurred because Rebling had not followed the editorial protocol of discussing it with him first.47 On 30 August the festival planning committee was still trying to figure out how to get some music by an East German composer on the program, even if a Polish ensemble had to play it. Marek and Dobrowolski expressed reluctance to negotiate with a chamber group from the GDR, lest the East

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Germans “trick us again.”48 Even as they spoke, however, the cultural attaché at the GDR embassy was making one last pitch for the Leipzig ensemble to the BWKZ, in which he specified the repertoire for the first time: A Survivor (“the theme is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”) and Dessau’s Die Erziehung der Hirse. The planning committee was informed immediately, “with a request that they accommodate the German proposal.”49 The festival organizers were exasperated. Dobrowolski registered their objections with the CZIM (Centralny Zarza˛d Instytucji Muzycnych— Central Administration of Musical Institutions): The logistical burden was unreasonable (“announcing this proposition three weeks before the festival begins, when all of the programs have already been finalized, makes it impossible”), the enormous entourage would wreak havoc with the budget (“the visit of an ensemble numbering 175 people for six days would be very expensive”), and finding hotel rooms for so many people at the last minute would be nearly impossible.50 It appears that Dobrowolski’s protests were duly noted and promptly disregarded. By noon on 8 September, the deal was done.51 Cilenšek’s Fourth Symphony was added to the program the next day, and the concert was scheduled for 28 September at 7:30 p.m.52 The next three weeks were a blur of logistics pertaining to visas, train tickets, instrument transport, and the like, most of which were executed through the embassy (although not all, since the embassy was unaware that at one point Polish authorities planned to deny visas to sixty members of the Leipzig group), as well as negotiations about other concerts the LRSO might give while in the PRP.53 On 15 September the MfAA told the embassy that the East Germans were not to visit Wrocław “under any circumstances,” presumably because they did not want to send a large group of Germans into the region the Germans had just ceded to Poland in 1945, but they recanted five days later. On 24 September the same was said about Poznan´ because a large number of ensemble members were thought to be from that area (and it had been part of the Prussian partition of Poland), but when that proved to be untrue, the directive was withdrawn.54 In the end and against all odds, an East German entourage of approximately 177 gave concerts in three Polish cities, including Poznan´, between 28 September and 2 October.

musical style as cultural diplomacy Despite the paper trail documenting this labyrinthine process, the precise point at which the East Germans settled on the concert repertoire and who

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did so is not known, although pragmatism surely played a role in that decision. Given just three weeks’ notice, all the music had to come from repertoire the Leipzig ensemble already knew, and that group had probably been chosen in the first place because it had a reputation for performing new music; Kegel had a particularly close relationship with Dessau and premiered many of his works. The LRSO and Choir first entered the conversation when the RSK recommended them back on 25 February, by which time that committee had known for a month that Kegel’s group was scheduled to perform and record A Survivor that April in Leipzig.55 The short lead time also posed a challenge for the MfAA, which needed to inoculate members of the ensemble against the political liberalization they would encounter in the PRP and ensure their political reliability. A political staff was dispatched to Leipzig to brief them, and the tour was accompanied by a party of five from the political leadership whose job was to make sure everyone toed the party line.56 The program the East Germans brought to Warsaw Autumn was calculated to perform cultural diplomacy primarily for the Poles (who needed their “help”) as well as for an international audience from both sides of the Cold War divide. The concert showcased two works by East German composers (important since there had been no music or performers from the GDR in the first festival) and a third by a composer representative of the theme of that year’s festival: the Second Viennese School.57 All three pieces had been written in the last ten years. The concert began with Symphony no. 4 for String Orchestra (1958) by Johann Cilenšek (1913–98) and A Survivor, which was encored due to audience demand; the second half was given over to Die Erziehung der Hirse (The Cultivation of the Millet, 1952–54) by Dessau. Cilenšek’s string symphony was a diatonic piece for conventional forces in familiar form; A Survivor was, from the East German perspective, an acceptable use of dodecaphony because it served an antifascist political message; and Dessau’s piece was a “musical epic” for narrator, solo voice, mixed choir, and large orchestra with a text by Brecht, the GDR’s favorite playwright and poet, recently deceased. Dessau had bona fide credentials as a modernist: The opera he wrote with Brecht in 1951 entitled Die Verurteilung des Lukullus had occasioned the first big cultural-political firestorm in the GDR, but by all accounts Die Erziehung did not rise to that standard. It is a declamatory, syllabic setting of a ballad “in praise of a nomad hero of Kazakhstan who turns to the cultivation of millet and manages to grow enough to support the Red Army against Hitler.”58 It is also fifty-two verses long. Understanding the Polish reaction to this gesture of East German cultural diplomacy requires some knowledge of Warsaw Autumn. It was

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figure 5. Herbert Kegel rehearsing the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir in the Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall, 28 September 1958. Courtesy of MDR Chorarchiv (private).

the most visible cultural manifestation of the Thaw. Its symbolic significance was enhanced because the final concerts of the first festival went on even as Khrushchev interrupted the VIII Plenum across town and Soviet troops appeared in the Warsaw suburbs on 19–21 October 1956. And even though Gomułka’s initial liberalization did not continue unabated, Warsaw Autumn did. Excepting the years 1957 and 1982, it was an annual event during the communist era at which Polish artists could initiate and renew contact with colleagues in other countries, Poles could learn about musical developments they had missed while in isolation, and new Polish music could reach an international audience. The 1958 iteration met all of these goals: performers from the PRP and four other countries (France and the United States from the West, the GDR and the Soviet Union from the

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Eastern Bloc) showcased new repertoire, mostly from their own composers, as well as music from the Second Viennese School. It boasted a staggering forty-one Polish premieres, six world premieres, and at least one event guaranteed to catapult Warsaw Autumn to the upper echelon of the festival circuit: a concert of electronic music by Herbert Eimert, Luciano Berio, Henri Pousseur, Bruno Maderna, Györgi Ligeti, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, with a lecture by the latter, followed by David Tudor performing piano works of Bo Nilsson, Christian Wolff, John Cage, and Stockhausen.59 This, then, was the environment in which the East Germans undertook their mission of cultural diplomacy. The Leipzig ensemble’s concert was carefully crafted to present the GDR’s cultural-political ideology to the Poles and the international music community (including West Germans, a point of particular interest for the GDR)—and it featured twenty-five minutes of diatonic string music, forty-five minutes of unabashed MarxistLeninist art, and A Survivor. With the exception of the Schoenberg piece, bringing such a program to Warsaw Autumn was the cultural-political equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight. Despite some recent, internal discussions about dodecaphony and other modernist compositional techniques, when it came to its international reputation, the GDR strove to project a staunch commitment to the tenets of socialist realism: accessibility, didacticism, and antifascism. The works by Cilenšek and especially Dessau were skewered by the Polish press. According to Dziennik Polski, “This entire concert will long remain in the listeners’ memory but, unfortunately, only twenty minutes of it positively, as this was the amount of time that was occupied by two performances of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw.” (In actuality it probably took less time than that, as Kegel favored a very brisk tempo.)60 Dziennik Polski savaged Cilenšek’s symphony as “a really lousy work” and called the “unending strophes” of the Dessau-Brecht piece “just embarrassing,” because “the work delivered not so much an artistic impression as material for many amusing jokes.” Tygodnik Zachodni reported that “the double performance of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (for it was reprised as an encore) absolved the Leipzig ensemble for the rest of their programming choices, which were not up to the festival’s standards.” Trybuna Ludu expressed regret that “an ensemble of the quality of the LRSO and choir chose to finish its program with something as musically uninteresting as Dessau’s epic Erziehung”—especially strong words coming from the party organ.61 Even the GDR Embassy had to admit that the performance of Dessau’s work was “a total flop”: “The performance sparked laughter from some in the hall and twenty to thirty members of

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the audience left before the piece was over. The audience disliked the theme as well as the music, saying they were totally out of fashion. Someone from the Polish Ministry of Culture said, ‘In Poland we don’t want any more propaganda in music. We had it for twelve years, but since 1956 we are done with that.’ ” This report speculated that the failure may have been due to Hirse’s forty-five-minute duration, the possibility that the audience did not understand the text, or “the music, which, despite its variety, gets very tiring in the long run,” but ultimately concluded that “the rejection was politically motivated.”62 Compare that to the rapturous Polish reaction to the Schoenberg works performed on the opening weekend of the 1958 festival (the Polish National Philharmonic Symphonic Orchestra having given the world premiere of Modern Psalm, op. 50c, the night before the LRSO and Choir performed A Survivor). In Stolica Jerzy Waldorff wrote that “the unexpected victor of the first two days of the festival was the ‘father of 12-tone serialism’ ” who was “formally a dodecaphonist but actually just an outstanding composer, whose Modern Psalm and A Survivor thrilled the public. Hearing these great works, I did not think about the technique with which they were written. It was great music, and that’s it.” The critic for Głos Szczecin´ski wrote that the success of the first weekend was “above all Schoenberg, cursed, and actually unknown.” Modern Psalm “is a work with great strength (and it has been said that Schoenberg is not music!).” According to Express Wieczorny, “Schoenberg has been, for many, the symbol of speculative modernity to which emotion is foreign. So far we have heard two of his compositions that completely refute this view.” The critic for Z˙ycie Warszawy wrote that Schoenberg was a “momentous experience of the festival. The creator of challenging music, the kind renounced by lovers of classicism, but through which he was capable of arousing admiration and recognition for the simplicity of its means of expression and the great emotion contained” in the psalm and A Survivor. “Both works,” he continued, “written toward the end of an 80-year life, are filled with youthful strength.” Tygodnik Zachodni described both pieces as “music of genius. . . . Nothing of a rigid system remains in this music, and here the consciousness of the creator achieves astonishing fullness, uniformity, and order. It is not surprising that the public demanded an encore” for each piece. It is worth noting that not all the good press was in Warsaw; Głos Szczecin´ski was a regional paper based in Szczecin, and Tygodnik Zachodni served the region around Katowice. The London-based Polish-language Odgłosy exulted in the reception of the composers from the Second Viennese School: “Opponents could only powerlessly gnash their teeth

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while observing the enthusiasm of the hall after the performance of the cantata A Survivor. They encored the serialists? The world is coming to an end!” Finally, the National News Service left no doubt as to the primacy of Schoenberg’s status at the festival when it described him as “the ‘pope’ of twelve-tone serialists.”63 It is hard to imagine that the composer had ever received more positive press. Compared to this, the cringe-worthy reception afforded Cilenšek and Dessau might suggest that the East Germans had misjudged their culturaldiplomatic mission. In fact, the hostility just confirmed their suspicion that the Poles had veered well off the proper socialist course. One report from the GDR Embassy defended the decision to perform the Dessau-Brecht piece, because “it was right to program a work such as Die Erziehung der Hirse with its good political statement and corresponding form,” and had misgivings about the Schoenberg for the same reasons: “Its subject matter is good, but content and form should always agree, and unfortunately that is not true in this case.” The LRSO and Choir went on to give concerts in Poznan´ on 30 September and Kraków on 2 October, where Die Erziehung was best received (“only four to six people left before it was over”).64 That was the only work they performed on all three Polish concerts; away from Warsaw, Cilenšek’s symphony was replaced with Bach’s Orchestral Suite no. 2 in B Minor, and A Survivor with Brahms’s op. 54, Schicksalslied. Performing cultural diplomacy for a major international festival in the Polish capital required repertoire that was substantially different from that for an independent tour through cities in which the audiences would consist only of Poles. A Survivor proved to be the most effective piece for GDR cultural diplomacy, but it was also the piece least representative of East Germany’s official position on music and ideology. So Stalinist was the GDR’s reputation that Everett Helm reported erroneously in the Musical Quarterly that “the chorus and orchestra of Radio Leipzig, which performed Schoenberg with such élan in Warsaw, cannot perform it at home in East Germany, where Schoenberg’s music is still on the ‘index.’ ”65 Of course the ensemble had already given the Soviet Bloc premiere of A Survivor in Leipzig, but Helm’s assumption is a good indication of just how unexpected this performance was from a purely musical perspective. (He didn’t even broach the historical context.) The VKM’s journal was consistently opposed to dodecaphony and serialism. Regular contributor Johannes Thilman wrote that dodecaphonic music “has all the features of unbridled savagery” and conceded that one could compare the academic strictness of the method to that of counterpoint and fugue “if there were not so much dogmatism in it.”66 Elsewhere

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he complained about the “twelve-tone chauvinism” on display at the ISCM in Stockholm, calling it narrow, militant, and intolerant.67 He was not the only one to chafe against this orientation, of course; but coming from the Eastern side of the Cold War divide, his protests sound rote and clichéd, particularly when he failed to make a compelling case for any alternatives. Thilman, who had been a pupil of Hindemith’s, also nurtured a particular, personal animus toward Schoenberg: “Hearing Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto put me in a deep depression that lasted for several days. I wondered what kind of human being Schoenberg must have been who, at the moment he began to compose, negated civilization, denied humanity, quashed order. . . . What despair and hate must have prevailed in him that he would create such works.”68 According to Michael Berg, Thilman’s writings about Warsaw Autumn deploy language and arguments reminiscent of Nazi-era music criticism, and Thilman’s description of Schoenberg appears to warrant consideration of that indictment.69 There was no more polarizing figure in cultural politics, and the presence of Schoenberg’s music behind the Iron Curtain was a powerful symbol of the Thaw. Glenn Gould had played music by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern on concerts in Moscow and Leningrad in May 1957 to sold-out houses and great acclaim. The significance of performing this repertoire in the Eastern Bloc was not lost on the Poles or the East Germans. The Polish press was positively giddy about the freedom augured by the sound of the Second Viennese School in the PRP and what Michael Bristiger hailed as “the public triumph of Schoenberg’s aesthetic.”70 The orthodox among their East German counterparts viewed the presence of this music and its warm welcome as harbingers of bourgeois capitalist decline. Whether any of these critics genuinely loved or loathed the music was beside the point. Their positions were the cultural-political manifestations of the Cold War in the Eastern Bloc.

a survivor as cultural diplomacy There is no doubt that Schoenberg’s status as “the ‘pope’ of the twelve-tone serialists” contributed to the success of the Leipzig ensemble’s performance of A Survivor at Warsaw Autumn (as did the inefficacy of the works performed before and after it). Stefan Kisielewski fairly gloated about what its reception meant in the battle of socialist realism and the GDR versus serialism and the PRP. Referring to Rebling, the author of the “Open Letter to our Polish Friends,” he wrote “the enthusiasm Schoenberg’s cantata aroused in combination with the weariness caused by Dessau’s cantata may

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have much to teach him.”71 Yet the piece was also of great interest for reasons that had little to do with musical style. One of these was a need to see Germans take responsibility for Polish wartime suffering, even if only at the symbolic level of an East German ensemble performing A Survivor in Warsaw; recall that the SED and the PZPR each spun the performance as an act of atonement. The report from the GDR Embassy recognized that several factors contributed to its positive reception: “The success is easily explained: this subject matter, performed by a German ensemble, was bound to make a big impression in Warsaw. In addition Schoenberg counts in Poland as the saint of modernism. The choice of this work also represented our point of view because it contains a refusal of the barbarism of fascism, and it has a strong emotional force and musical means to match the content, which is not always the case with Schoenberg.”72 Polish listeners did not just hear the work in the hermetically sealed environs of a new-music festival. They encountered it within a broader, extramusical, postwar context, one in which the fifteenth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had been observed that April in elaborate ceremonies attended by delegations from twenty countries—even as the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 remained unmemorialized. The story of the AK (Armia Krajowa—Home Army) and its valiant attempt to save the capital from the Germans could not be told in its entirety because then the party would have to acknowledge the Soviet role in that failure: despite having forces amassed nearby, the Soviets provided no support because the AK was commanded by the Polish government in exile in London and was therefore a threat to Soviet authority. Thirteen leaders of the uprising were convicted of anti-Soviet acts in postwar show trials, and the communists smeared the AK as an extension of its bourgeois handlers in London. The AK, once a source of enormous national pride, disappeared from public discourse until 1956, when small gestures of acknowledgment began to appear.73 Nevertheless, the first monument to the Ghetto Uprising had been built in 1946, when architect Leon Marek Suzin’s raised, circular tablet, meant to resemble the manhole covers of the sewer, marked the event as a part of Jewish and Polish history; Rapoport’s much larger monument had been in place since 1948, while the heroism of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 remained all but unacknowledged. It was as if Rapoport’s sculpture was allowed to stand in for the public commemoration of that “other” uprising, the most famous action undertaken by the largest resistance force in German-occupied Europe, because the AK could not be honored publicly. In her work on commemorating the Holocaust in Poland, Plonowska Ziarek theorizes this apparent paradox as part of the “official regulation of

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the collective work of mourning.” By manipulating the “collective grief, the repression of guilt, and the symbolic equating of Jewish and Polish suffering, the Party hoped to produce national identifications with the communist regime and to minimize anticommunist opposition.” Ziarek recounts the terms of that bargain: “The Party promised to preserve the national myth of innocence and redemptive suffering, and to protect this myth against any charges of anti-Semitism, but only at the price of the repression of anticommunist resistance during and after the war and the erasure of public memory of this.”74 This context is vital to understanding the overwhelming Polish response to A Survivor. The SED and PZPR newspapers printed stories that described the performance as an act of atonement without any reference to Jews, but all other reviewers noted that the protagonists in A Survivor were Jewish, using the terms “Jew(s)” (Z˙yd, Z˙ydzi), “Jewish” (z˙ydowski), and “ghetto” (getto). Anyone who attended the concert would have read the brief but explicit program notes, reproduced here in their entirety: Fleeing from Nazi Germany (1933) as a Jew and composer of “degenerate music,” Schoenberg, for years a Protestant, returned to the religion of his forefathers. With this gesture he voiced his protest against the persecution of humanity, standing side-by-side with the persecuted members of his faith. From this moment on, Biblical themes and subjects related to the history of the Jewish nation appear in Schoenberg’s creative output. The cantata A Survivor from Warsaw, along with his opera Moses und Aron, is one of the composer’s most dramatic works. It was inspired by the tragedy of the Warsaw Ghetto. A shocking image of execution comes to life in the ghetto survivor’s narrative. At the story’s climax, the Jews intone a sorrowful Hebrew hymn-prayer as they are led to their deaths in the gas chambers.75

Three critics note that the chorus was sung in Hebrew. (One critic, Marian Fuks writing for Z˙ołnierz Wolnos´ci, may actually have understood it. Fuks is Jewish and went on to publish prolifically as a scholar of Polish Jewry and culture, particularly music; as of this writing he remains actively affiliated with the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.)76 Most described Schoenberg as Austrian, which was consistent with the Second Viennese School as one of the festival’s themes that year, and one identified Schoenberg as Jewish. In his review for Express Wieczorny, Ludwik Erhardt wrote that it is “a cantata in which Schoenberg as a Jew gave expression to a tragic protest against the torment of the Jewish nation in the Warsaw Ghetto. The cantata was previously unknown in Poland, so it was not

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surprising that the stunned and thrilled audience brought about the repeat of the work with unceasing applause” (emphasis mine).77 But it is surprising. Even accounting for Schoenberg’s vaunted status at Warsaw Autumn, the overwhelming response to A Survivor in Poland is surprising. The PRP was a country with almost no Jews: By war’s end, the prewar population of three and a half million had been reduced to 86,000, and in 1958, in the midst of another mass exodus, best estimates placed the figure at just 41,000.78 It also faced a persistent anti-Semitism, which lingered in the PRP for a variety of reasons, some residual from the interwar period and wartime (attitudes of some in the Catholic Church, certain remnants of the right-wing nationalist movement known as Narodowa Demokracja, the persistence of the pejorative Z˙ydokomuna that blamed Jews for bringing communism to Poland) and some introduced by the Soviets. And while there was no official, institutionalized anti-Semitism in force in Poland in 1958, general conditions for most Jews did not improve much during the Thaw.79 It is true that, immediately after the war, the fate of the Jews in Poland received a lot of attention. This was the small window of opportunity in which film director Aleksander Ford presented the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on screen for the first time in Ulica Graniczna (Border street), and Wanda Jakubowska drew on her own experiences at Auschwitz to direct Ostatni etap (The last stage), widely known as “the mother of all Holocaust films.”80 It was also the moment when the Rapoport monument was approved, funded, and built; in fact, the Warsaw Arts Committee accepted the proposal only on the condition that it be unveiled no later than the fifth anniversary of the uprising, at that point less than a year away, apparently sensing that the political situation could soon become untenable; Kassern’s experience with the advent of Stalinization suggests that they were correct.81 And the standard monolithic narrative of postwar Poland as defined only by anti-Semitism and erasure is now under revision by scholars documenting greater activity among Jewish communities and greater recognition among the general Polish population in the 1950s and 1960s than previously known.82 Nevertheless, there was such a surge in the expression of anti-Jewish sentiment among rank-and-file members of the PZPR that the Central Committee had to issue a formal condemnation of anti-Semitism in April 1957 (especially awkward since Gomułka’s wife was Jewish), although there were isolated efforts to use the Thaw’s reduced censorship to address the problem. The most famous such attempt was Leszek Kołakowski’s essay entitled “Anti-Semitism: Five Old Theses and a Warning,” published in the May 1957 issue of Po prostu.83 (For this and other provocations,

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this weekly paper for students and intellectuals was shut down shortly thereafter.) The tone and the sheer magnitude of the response are incongruous with the place occupied by the Holocaust in the PRP after Stalinization. Perhaps the audience experienced A Survivor as something other than just a protest against Germans murdering Jews. A viable explanation may be found in “the symbolic equating of Jewish and Polish suffering,” identified by Ziarek as a key feature of the managed culture of collective mourning in postwar Poland. Let us consider the experience of those in the concert hall. The narration was performed in English without a translation in the program, although the programmatic music leaves little doubt as to the brutality of its content. The closing prayer in Hebrew would have sounded climactic yet just as unintelligible as the English narration, since ethnic Poles may have heard Jews speak Yiddish but would have had no exposure to the liturgical language. Even though the program notes explicitly identified the protagonists as Jewish, the unintelligibility of the languages, the graphically illustrative music, and enculturation in the equating of Jewish and Polish suffering may have made it possible for ethnic Poles to experience A Survivor as recognition of their own wartime suffering, resistance, and heroism—of the heretofore unmemorialized Warsaw Uprising. The language critics used to describe the historical event in their reviews (“extermination,” “liquidation,” “martyrdom,” “battles,” “the uprising”) could refer to either the Ghetto or the Warsaw Uprising, as could the adjective “shocking” (wstrza˛saja˛cy—also translatable as “horrifying” or “harrowing”), which appeared in the program notes and was invoked by nearly every critic as a descriptor for the story, the work as a whole, its effect on the audience, or some combination thereof. The PZPR had recently revised its position on the AK slightly, conceding that enlisted soldiers had exhibited great valor even if the officers were still considered traitors.84 In 1956 Andrzej Wajda’s film Kanał was released, a chronicle of the horrible fate of a group of AK soldiers attempting to move across Warsaw through the city’s sewers during the 1944 uprising; former AK soldiers had been returning to Poland to a hero’s welcome since October of that year as well.85 This meant that the theme of the Warsaw Uprising was once again in the air, even if there was still no official acknowledgment of it from the PZPR. A charitable reading might interpret the effusive Polish reception of A Survivor as solidarity or empathy; a more cynical reading might see “the symbolic equating of Jewish and Polish suffering” as appropriation. Either way, the magnitude of the Polish reception of A Survivor may be attributed, at least in part, to the communist manipulation

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of the Holocaust narrative and the concomitant suppression of the Warsaw Uprising narrative. Regardless of the particular lens through which that act of cultural diplomacy was viewed, news of the successful performance traveled quickly. On 14 October 1958 Schoenberg’s widow, Gertrud, wrote to Boelke-Bomart, the publisher of A Survivor, saying that she had heard in California that the work was a triumph in Warsaw. Margot Boelke replied that its great success had led the Kraków National Philharmonic to schedule the work for concerts in January 1959, although it does not appear that that concert ever took place.86 A Survivor made another appearance at Warsaw Autumn in 1974, a year that happened to be both Schoenberg’s centennial and the thirtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. This time the performers were Polish: Poland’s National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra and Choir, with Jan Krenz on the podium and Leszek Herdegen as narrator. When festival organizers assessed the 1958 Warsaw Autumn, they found that the concert by the Leipzig ensemble had sold only 60–70 percent of its tickets, and its participation had cost the Poles approximately 600,000– 700,000 złoty—nearly one-third of the entire festival budget. Clearly the festival could only afford to host one foreign orchestra per year from now on, and it needed to do so with adequate planning. But the most important lesson for the CZIM was surely this: “We need to keep away from mistakes that involve the festival in political matters, as was the case with the Leipzig Orchestra.”87 On 16 October MKiS and the GDR Embassy in Warsaw pledged to continue working together on the cultural front, particularly through the Composers’ Unions, and the joint German-Polish commission continued to meet and plan an annual Agreements of Cultural Cooperation.88 These organizations were unable to capitalize on any momentum they might have derived from the success of A Survivor’s cultural diplomacy, however. A 1959 performance by the Leipzig Gewandhaus wind quintet would be the last appearance by a GDR ensemble at Warsaw Autumn for several years. After a delegation from the East German State Radio Committee visited its counterparts in Poland in October 1958, members relayed the following conversation to the Central Committee: A Polish woman “explained with great passion that she hoped a war would come as soon as possible, because then at least the Americans would come. When asked if she feared that would mean her own death or the deaths of her children, she said that that would be no different than it is now.”89 Cultural diplomacy was no more effective in addressing these types of entrenched differences than the machinations of high politics. The Cold War within the Eastern Bloc

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continued until late 1962, when Gomułka and Ulbricht reached an uneasy truce precipitated by the Berlin Wall.90 The GDR returned to Warsaw Autumn in 1963, armed with yet another program of works by East German composers designed to help the Poles resist the modernist siren song of the West: the diatonicism of Ernst Hermann Meyer’s Symphony for Strings and the Shostakovich-ism of Günter Kochan’s Sinfonietta (1960), performed by the Dresden Philharmonic under Heinz Bongartz. In 1967, however, the program organizers finally got what they had asked for in 1958: the Berlin Staatsoper performed Dessau’s Die Verurteilung des Lukullus (1951), under the direction of Herbert Kegel.

Czechoslovakia A Survivor as A Survivor from Warsaw

The story of A Survivor from Warsaw in Czechoslovakia is distinctive because two of the five narrators who performed the title role in the 1960s were Jewish. The first of these, Josef Cˇervinka, survived the Holocaust because he was in exile in England; the second, Karel Berman, survived four Nazi camps and is now best known for his role in Terezín’s musical life. Berman made the only commercial recording of the work that features the narration in Czech, and he performed the role more often in Czechoslovakia than anyone else. Cˇervinka and Berman represented two different modes of Czech Jewish survival. Even if one takes the position that exile does not entitle a person to the mantle of survivor, Berman qualifies by any standard. Furthermore, there were so very few Jews in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s that such casting hardly seems like happenstance. A Survivor’s presence and cultural mobility in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s represents a brief moment in the Thaw when both modernist music and Jewishness could circulate relatively freely in public discourse. Other features unique to the Czech case warrant investigation as well. A Survivor did not reach Czechoslovakia until the 1960s. It was broadcast nationwide on Czech Radio in July 1961, received its first live Czech performance in Brno in February 1963, and was performed live in Prague, the capital, for the first time three years later. Schoenberg’s strongest proponent among Czech musicologists took the unexpected approach of promoting A Survivor because it represented the composer’s superior American oeuvre rather than his problematic European output, despite the United States’ status as enemy superpower. Clearly the Czech context of the 1960s was quite distinct from the Polish and East German environments through which A Survivor circulated in the late 1950s. That unique context comes into focus when viewed through the three distinct if overlapping lenses that 136

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have shaped this study (politics, the Jewish question, and musical modernism). Schoenberg played no role in high politics, although that context provides the essential framework; his relation to Jewishness and to modernist music in the region is directly relevant, as will be shown.

czechoslovak politics The standard subdivisions of twentieth-century Czechoslovak history apply. Before 1918 the region was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and from 1918 to 1938 it was a democratic republic, usually referred to as the First Republic and known as the CˇSR (Cˇeskoslovenská republika). As a result of the 1938 Munich Agreement, and in a vain effort to appease Hitler, the Sudetenland was detached from Bohemia and Moravia and handed over to Germany. The remainder was known as the Second Republic, an entity that lasted only until the Germans occupied Bohemia and Moravia and established the Protectorate in March 1939, at which point Czechoslovakia ceased to exist as a sovereign nation. The immediate postwar period (1945–48) is known as the Third Republic. After the communists seized total control in 1948, it was known once again as the CˇSR, and from 1960 to 1989 it was the CˇSSR (Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, or Cˇeskoslovenská socialistická republika). Each incarnation from 1918 to 1990 may be referred to as Czechoslovakia. Its path after 1945 differed significantly from those taken by its fellow Soviet satellites, and much of that trajectory was determined by its interwar situation. First Republic president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk had been “the very model of the Western-oriented, liberal, and moderate nationalist, quite unusual in the East European context,” and “unlike Poland, Hungary, and Romania, the state over which he presided remained a liberal democracy until the very end of the 1930s.”1 He had strong ties to the West, particularly the United States (having married an American), and oversaw the development of the First Republic as the “Eastern European democracy closest to Western standards,” as prosperous as the West and far more so than its eastern neighbors.2 The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Cˇeskoslovenska, hereafter the KSCˇ) was an active participant in this democracy. Unlike its counterparts in Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia, the KSCˇ had operated as a legitimate, legal, and indigenous political party since 1921. As in Italy and France, the party’s record of Nazi resistance was beyond reproach.3 Vital to its postwar resuscitation and success was that it had played no part in the national humiliation of the Munich Agreement in 1938, which resulted in the

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Nazi occupation of the Czech lands and a government-in-exile in London. In other words, Czechoslovaks had no historical reason to view the Soviets or their communist ideology as the enemy (unlike the Poles, who had reasons aplenty).4 As a result, the KSCˇ was in a far stronger position immediately after the war than its counterparts elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc. Western observers hoped that the “modified pluralism”5 proffered by the National Front coalition government in 1945 meant that Czechoslovakia would resume its position as Central Europe’s most illustrious Westernstyle democracy. They greatly underestimated the deep mistrust the 1938 Munich Agreement had engendered in Czechoslovak citizens, however. Resentment over that betrayal coupled with the horrors of occupation and war meant that by 1945 “the Czech populace had moved dramatically to the left,” and the KSCˇ garnered an impressive 40 percent of the vote in the free and democratic general election of May 1946.6 They promptly squandered that support by forcing a Stalinist agenda, however, and the resulting unrest brought orders from Moscow that Rudolf Slánský, general secretary of the KSCˇ Central Committee, should initiate a coup in February 1948.7 For the Western powers, the coup sounded the death knell for negotiations with the Soviet Union over the fate of Europe. Domestically, the KSCˇ’s actions in 1948 set Czechoslovakia on a course of Sovietization that differed markedly from the paths taken in Poland and East Germany. After the coup, KSCˇ party chairman Klement Gottwald became president, and he oversaw the bloody Stalinist purges until he died, just days after Stalin did, in 1953. After some political maneuvering, Antonín Novotný emerged on top, first as general secretary of the party and then also as president, and remained in power until his ouster during the 1968 Prague Spring. Novotný presided over the glacial pace of de-Stalinization that followed the Soviet leader’s death. In fact, A Survivor came late to Czechoslovakia because the Thaw, the necessary precondition for its public appearance anywhere in the Eastern Bloc, came late. The leaders complicit in domestic Stalinist-era atrocities were still in power there when the Thaw began to radiate across the rest of the region, and renouncing Stalinism would have meant incriminating themselves. De-Stalinization was “deliberately delayed as long as possible” while party leaders waited to see if Khrushchev’s 1956 renunciation of Stalin would hold; they did not even dare to destroy the statue of Stalin in Prague, the world’s largest, until October 1962, a year after his body had been removed from the Lenin mausoleum.8 By the time A Survivor reached Czechoslovakia, Khrushchev’s stance had already facilitated reconsideration of modernist music in Poland (the Soviet satellite

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most hospitable to such music) and even in the GDR (which had a reputation as the most culturally conservative of the lot).

jews and jewishness in czechoslovakia Whereas high politics necessarily provide the scaffolding for this investigation, the Jewish question is directly relevant to both the subject matter of A Survivor and to Schoenberg’s biography, as his parents came from Bohemia and Slovakia. His mother, Pauline Nachod, was descended from a family of observant Czech Jews in Prague (subject to the Austrian half of the AustroHungarian dual monarchy), and his father, Samuel, was born in Szécsény, Hungary (subject to the other half of said monarchy), which is situated on what is now the Slovakian-Hungarian border. Members of Pauline’s family served as cantors at Prague’s Staronová synagoga (Old-New Synagogue), now Europe’s oldest active synagogue and a site of some historical significance. After 1848 Jews enjoyed freedom of movement and settlement throughout the monarchy, and Samuel moved from a German-speaking Jewish community in Pressburg (now Bratislava) to Vienna as a youth in 1852; there he met and married Pauline. The composer typically described as Viennese, who regularly identified himself culturally as German, had deeper roots in Czech, Hungarian, and Slovakian regions than in any other part of the continent. Since the nineteenth century, the most significant factor affecting Jews in the Czech lands had been the Czech-German national conflict, in which “assimilation of the Jews and their gradual adoption of the official and compulsory German language . . . ultimately evolved into a firm attachment to German education and culture.”9 At the turn of the century Jews comprised 1.01 percent of the Bohemian population, half of which was concentrated in Prague. From them, three “more or less mutually irreconcilable movements” emerged, each touting its solution to the Jewish question: allegiance to the Czechs, assimilation into the German-speaking culture, or Zionism.10 Compared to neighboring Poland, Romania, and Hungary, there was relatively little anti-Semitic persecution in the First Republic, and it was the nation most hospitable toward Jews in the region. As early as 1895, Masaryk had publicly sided with the Zionists.11 The political expedience of that position is undeniable. Unlike some leaders in Romania and Poland, however, who used Zionism as a cover for anti-Semitism, Masaryk maintained that his intention was not to rid Europe of Jews by sending them to Palestine but to engender Jewish national pride by helping them claim a homeland.12 At this time Bohemia and Moravia were home to 136 Jewish communities, consisting of some 118,310 individuals.13

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In light of the singular Czech tradition of casting a Jewish survivor in performances of A Survivor, the experience of the Holocaust in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia warrants close investigation.14 In June 1939 the Reich protector took complete control of the Jewish communities, and from that point forward, “Czech authorities ceased to be a responsible factor in decisions regarding the fate of the Jews.”15 Some 27,000 Jews escaped before emigration was outlawed in 1941, and the Czech government-in-exile continued to support the Zionist cause from afar, but the fate of those left behind was grim. Attempts to influence policy by working with the Germans were ultimately futile, as the Jewish Religious Congregation of Prague and its successor, the Jewish Council of Elders, discovered. Under Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich, all remaining Jews were interned at Terezín before transport to the east, where most of them perished. “Between 24 November 1941 and 16 March 1945, a total of 122 trains were dispatched from the Protectorate to Terezín, containing 73,608 persons altogether.”16 Only about 55,000 Jewish citizens resided in the “pseudo-democracy” of 1945–48.17 Nevertheless, by September 1945 those few had reconstituted fifty communities in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia and seventynine in Slovakia. Jews of all kinds (Zionists, assimilationists, Orthodox) banded together under the aegis of the Council of Jewish Religious Communities (Rada židovských náboženských obcí v zemích Cˇeské a Moravskoslezské—RŽNO). The communities were religious and educational, but “rehabilitation and defense” were necessarily their primary concerns.18 Jews also had a certain visibility in the immediate postwar period. The return of prisoners from concentration camps in this period “was widely covered by the national press and radio, arousing compassion and solidarity among the population at large,” and numerous memoirs were published, particularly from Terezín survivors.19 In 1945 the Department of Repatriation under the aegis of the Ministry of Labor and Social Care released a five-hundred-page report on the survivors of the Terezín Ghetto; in 1947 a rabbi published the first book about the treatment of Jews in the Czech lands, and a year later the RŽNO published documentation of the fate of the Slovak Jews; a film about extermination at Auschwitz was subsequently screened in Prague.20 Tánˇa Kulišová’s Terezín: Small Fortress, Cemetery, Ghetto, first published in 1952 and perennially in print, recounted atrocities that occurred throughout the facility. Furthermore, thousands of Jews from Poland, Romania, and Hungary were passing through en route to displaced persons’ camps in the U.S.

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occupation zone in Germany and to Mandate Palestine. The CˇSR government maintained its commitment to Zionism by acting as a way station for Brihah (Hebrew for “flight” or “escape”), the organized and illegal underground movement through which thousands of Holocaust survivors and refugees sought passage out of Europe and into Mandate Palestine. In July 1946 the Czech government granted Brihah “official recognition” as a “rescue agency for survivors,” and “the organization cooperated closely with the Ministry of Social Welfare” from Haganah headquarters in Prague’s Jewish neighborhood.21 All of this received ample coverage in the press. The CˇSR established an early relationship with the Jewish state when it brokered an arms deal in December 1947, just two days after the United Nations’ resolution and six months before David Ben-Gurion declared Israel to be an independent nation. (This did not prevent the CˇSR from selling arms to the Arab states as well, however.) Newly communist Czechoslovakia then followed the Soviet Union’s lead as one of the first countries to officially recognize the state of Israel in May 1948, and many Czech Jews relocated there.22 This was not the only relocation process underway at the crossroads of Central Europe; some three million ethnic Germans were forcibly and often brutally expelled, mostly from the Czech lands, and deported to the American and Soviet Occupied Zones in Germany. But before 1948 most Jews undertook migration of their own volition (even if that volition was motivated by fear of a resurgence of the Holocaust) rather than under government mandate.23 In September 1948, the Soviet Union reversed its position on Israel and endorsed anti-Zionism instead; the CˇSR promptly followed suit. The resources of many Czech Jewish communities were subsequently liquidated, and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the Joint), which operated out of New York, was expelled. In 1950 the state took control of the Jewish Museum and manipulated and suppressed its holdings for the next forty years. By 1951 “there was no Jewish communal life, but there were still a few Jews.”24 Estimates put the population at approximately sixteen thousand.25 Their numbers were about to dwindle yet again. The Soviet purge of national communist parties after the Stalin-Tito split produced a series of horrific show trials that convicted and executed high-ranking party officials, and none was more spectacular than the Slánský trials in the CˇSR. At the end of 1952, General Secretary Slánský, who had orchestrated the coup, was one of fourteen party members, eleven of them Jews, convicted of crimes committed under the broad rubric of Zionism, cosmopolitanism, and espionage. Eleven, including Slánský, were executed. (Slánský was no innocent, to be sure, but he was not guilty of the charges for which

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he was executed.) After that, few Czech citizens of Jewish descent identified themselves as such, and their presence was almost entirely secularized. Jews became all but invisible. Given the climate in the CˇSR, when the overt anti-Semitism of the Slánský show trial was broadcast on the radio and covered extensively in the press, it is not surprising to find a concomitant de-Semitization of the Terezín narrative in favor of antifascist resistance and heroism. Pavel Kypr’s The Small Fortress Terezín: A Czechoslovak Document of the Struggle for Freedom and against Nazi Crimes against Humanity (1950) is the first to make the heroic claim in its title; it also focuses on the “Small Fortress” prison—not a distinctly Jewish experience—and avoids any explicit reference to the ghetto. The study Commemorating Sites of Antifascist Resistance in the Czech Lands (1953) exploits that history to portray U.S. imperialism as a new incarnation of fascism that Czechs must resist.26 The Soviets were quick to propagandize against the American role in the Korean conflict by comparing its agenda to that of the fascists of the 1930s and 1940s. Given the CˇSR’s humiliation in 1938 and subsequent occupation, it sought to cultivate a heroic narrative of its past that was congruent with the Soviet antifascist motto. Furthermore, unlike the flagrant lies required to de-Semitize the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising for antifascist purposes, the historiography of Terezín in the CˇSR-CˇSSR could be de-Semitized through selective focus. The Small Fortress had operated as a concentration camp for over a year before the Main Fortress became the ghetto, with the former housing all manner of prisoners, Jews and non-Jews alike. Such accounts were not untrue, but they produced a narrative that was deliberately deSemitized and therefore incomplete. All the while, the Czechoslovak secret service kept files on organizations and individuals it deemed to be Zionist, and in the 1950s the Interior Ministry maintained “a card file containing approximately 30,000 records, which—given the low number of Jews in postwar Czechoslovakia—must have contained information on a significant proportion of the adult Jewish population.”27 But as the Thaw slowly gained momentum in the 1960s, Jewish communities were granted greater freedoms, and, importantly for our purposes, Jewish topics found their way into the public discourse without the heretofore requisite baggage of anti-Zionism or anti-Semitism. This liberalization came to a halt with the demise of the Prague Spring in August 1968 of course, but the presence of A Survivor on a public concert in 1966 and a commercial recording in 1967 are indicative of just how warm the Thaw had gotten regarding both modernist music and Jewish visibility.

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modernist music in czechoslovakia Schoenberg had had a musical presence in the Czech lands since at least 1912, thanks to his former teacher and brother-in-law, Alexander Zemlinsky, who was conductor at the Deutsches Landestheater in Prague from 1911 to 1927. In 1912 Zemlinsky invited him to conduct his Pelleas und Melisande and deliver a now-famous memorial lecture on Gustav Mahler. The phenomenon known as the Scandal Concert began in Prague with a performance of Pierrot lunaire at the Rudolfinum in February 1913; it occasioned “the greatest concert scandal” that city had ever experienced.28 Schoenberg was not present for that event, but he was at the podium in Vienna a month later for the performance that lent its name to the entire phenomenon, the eponymous Skandalkonzert von 1913. (Audience outrage was very much in the air; the most famous such riot, over Le sacre du printemps, followed two months later in Paris.) Undaunted, Zemlinsky continued to champion Schoenberg’s music in Prague and conducted the world premiere of three of the Six Orchestral Songs, op. 8, in 1914. Schoenberg returned to Prague in 1922 to conduct Pierrot lunaire for the inaugural concert of that city’s chapter of the Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen). The society also acted as the “German-Bohemian contingent of the Czechoslovak ISCM committee” (the International Society for Contemporary Music), reinforcing the link between Prague and Vienna.29 Together with Schoenberg’s former students Heinrich Jalowetz and Viktor Ullmann, Zemlinsky used the society to promote Schoenberg’s music to a far greater extent than had been the case in the original Viennese chapter.30 In 1923 alone the Czech society was responsible for a reading of the text of Jakobsleiter and performances of the following works: Chamber Symphony, op. 9, in Steuermann’s piano transcription; Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16; piano works opp. 23 and 25; songs from op. 6; and the complete Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. The highlight of the following year was the world premiere of Erwartung, composed in 1909 and conducted by Zemlinsky.31 The performances of Erwartung and of Berg’s Drei Bruchstücke aus Wozzeck became “benchmark achievement[s] for new music in Prague.”32 Schoenberg attended a series of concerts in Brno in 1925 that culminated in the Czech premiere of Gurre-Lieder, a performance counted among the most important musical events in the Czech lands during the interwar period.33 Brian S. Locke writes that by 1926 Schoenberg was “a household name” in Prague, “reappearing in Czech critical rhetoric—if only to be compared unfavorably with Berg, whose more accessible modernism was

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deemed necessary for Czech society.”34 Some who dismissed Schoenberg and his circle altogether invoked the easy slander of anti-Semitism, criticizing the Czechoslovak ISCM for its “Austro-Jewish tendency” and even decrying Berg as a “Berlin Jew,” even though Schoenberg was the only Jewish member of the triumvirate of the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern).35 In 1930 the composer delivered a lecture in Prague entitled “New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea,” and in December 1932 the Mánes Group, which ordinarily favored neoclassicists, featured Pierrot lunaire on a concert.36 The last known performance of his music in the Czech lands before the end of the war occurred in 1934, when the Kolisch Quartet premiered the Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra after Handel with the Prague Radio Orchestra. The last significant radio broadcast followed in 1936, when Radio Prague transmitted a performance of op. 27, no. 4, “Der Wunsch des Liebhabers,” on 24 March.37 In sum: Schoenberg had a musical presence in the Czech lands well before WWII, and that would inform his symbolic re-presence in the form of his music, particularly via A Survivor, in the postwar period. After the February 1948 coup, the KSCˇ consolidated its power in musical life as in other facets of society. The Syndicate of Czechoslovak Composers supported and promoted composers, festivals, and international musical relations, organized the Prague Spring Music Festival (an annual event that continues to this day), and hosted academic conferences that ran concurrently with the festival. It was vital for “reestablishing links between musicians after the war and promoting international debate,” and in May 1948 it generated the so-called Prague Manifesto.38 This document’s endorsement of socialist-realist ideals is indebted to Zhdanov’s decree against formalism put forth in the Soviet Union that February, even if the manifesto stopped short of dictating pro-Soviet parameters.39 Nevertheless, by October of that year, the official music journal Hudební rozhledy was founded to replace all others then in circulation, and in May 1949 other musical organizations, including the syndicate, were incorporated into the Soviet-style Union of Czechoslovak Composers (Svaz cˇeskoslovenských skladatelu˚, or SCˇS).40 This maneuver completed the Sovietization of Czech musical life, and so it remained for a decade. Musicologist and critic Zdeneˇk Nejedlý (1878–1962) was appointed the first minister of culture and education, and both spheres of influence bore his indelible imprimatur. In music, his personal preference for Bedrˇich Smetana over Antonín Dvorˇák and Leoš Janácˇek became law. SCˇS leadership viewed the onset of the Thaw across the region with great skepticism and continued to endorse the aesthetic of socialist realism

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off and on into the 1960s. A pre-Thaw baseline for the official position on Schoenberg in Czechoslovakia can be derived from a review of the 1957 Zurich production of Moses und Aron that appeared in Hudební rozhledy. The author was Antonín Sychra, musicologist and powerful party ideologue. According to him, Schoenberg was “one-dimensional in his expressive content”; his music could “only instinctively irritate and lacerate”; he could not “express anything positive about life.” Sychra even felt compelled to “warn in all seriousness against Schoenberg’s style: a school that limits expressive possibilities can hardly be truly productive.”41

a survivor in the cˇsr: harbinger of the thaw An early hint of a musical Thaw appeared in 1958 when Hudební rozhledy published a favorable review of A Survivor, as performed by the Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir at the 1958 Warsaw Autumn Festival. This reconsideration of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music may reflect the ripple effect of the Soviet resolution, made public in the CˇSR that June, in which composers censured by Zhdanov a decade earlier were formally rehabilitated. The CˇSR was represented by a delegation of eleven attendees at Warsaw Autumn, among them prominent composer Alois Hába (1893–1973) and Jaroslav Jiránek (1922–2001), editor of Hudební rozhledy.42 Jiránek published his impressions of the festival in Hudební rozhledy under the title “Warsaw Meditations on Modernity.”43 Just as his East German counterparts had done, he first expressed dutiful concern that Polish comrades were rushing headlong into the “uncritical fetishism” of all things experimental and systematic, especially Schoenberg’s and Webern’s dodecaphony and electronic music. He acknowledged that this might be an overreaction against past unspecified mistakes but cautioned against replacing one dogma with another. Nevertheless, in this, the firstknown reference to A Survivor in a Czechoslovak publication, Jiránek praised the piece, beginning with the assertion that it “belongs with works which can be included without any hesitation among those compositions that have been unjustly omitted even in our country.” He noted that the work was “enriched” by “the musical style of Fibich’s melodrama,” referring to that prolific composer of Czech melodramas, Zdeneˇk Fibich (1850– 1900). Even an apparently offhand remark such as this was not without an agenda, of course. Jiránek was endorsing the interpretation of Czech musical modernism put forth by his mentor, Nejedlý, in which Smetana was “the founding force and supreme model of modern Czech music,” followed closely by Fibich, Otakar Ostrcˇil, and Josef Bohuslav Foerster.44 In what is

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by now a familiar rhetorical gesture, Jiránek conceded that A Survivor’s dodecaphony was problematic but argued that this obstacle was overcome by the powerful antifascist message the piece conveyed: This work, composed to the composer’s own text, is an ardent cry of a deeply humane antifascist protest. As a result, in the final impression, you do not mind at all the illustrative, accompanying role of the music as well as its dodecaphonic expression. Neither do you mind the ideologically one-sided and narrow basis of the composition, of this crushing, expressionistically peculiar testimony of one of those who survived the horrors in the Warsaw ghetto, of this short and terrible story about death, which the composer dramatizes with the final choral prayer of those walking to death. In its resulting, ideologically artistic impact the voice of one of the survivors—his prayer, or, if you will, requiem for the fallen—transforms into an incredibly persuasive and gripping manifestation of an indictment. This indictment and its meaning encompass all of humanity and they consequently also have a significant social reach.45

It is worth remembering that in the de-Semitized environment of the CˇSR, in which actually existing Jews were scarce and accounts of the Holocaust suppressed, the title alone—A Survivor from Warsaw—would not have been a sufficient indication of Jewish subject matter. The term “survivor” did not yet have the connotations it has now. It was also common knowledge that the Germans had destroyed the entire city of Warsaw in 1944 (although naturally the Soviet role in that annihilation could not be mentioned in the Eastern Bloc), and, as victims of German occupation themselves, Czechs may have been inclined to read the title in that light. Jiránek did specify that the location was the Warsaw ghetto, but again, this does not necessarily indicate sympathy for the fate of the Jews there. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had already been de-Semitized and assimilated into the narrative of armed antifascist resistance throughout the Eastern Bloc.46 Jiránek’s reference to the choral prayer of the condemned did not specify that it was Hebrew, and his elegant description of the narration as a requiem honoring the fallen would have had broad resonance in 1958.

the musical thaw and a survivor come to the cˇssr As in the GDR, the antifascist narrative proved useful for those seeking to integrate modernist repertoire into Czechoslovak musical life. Just as the first appearance of Berg’s Wozzeck in Prague’s National Theater in 1926 was a landmark in the initial Czech discourse of musical modernism, that

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opera’s return in 1959 was lauded as the watershed moment for modernist music in postwar Czechoslovakia: “It symbolized the re-establishment of bonds with modern western music, and was followed by the import of Darmstadt aesthetics.”47 Berg was the first of the Second Viennese School to receive a feature-length overview in Hudební rozhledy. The author noted that opposition to Wozzeck in 1926 had exhibited “the first open manifestation of fascist tendencies” in Czechoslovakia and proceeded to align his support for Wozzeck in 1959 with antifascism, as Jiránek had done with A Survivor.48 The “re-established bonds with modern western music” were fragile, however, and ever subject to the vicissitudes of cultural politics. Nevertheless, efforts to bring the music of Schoenberg and his circle to the CˇSSR clearly picked up momentum at this time, as part of the latebreaking Thaw that accompanied the state’s transition from “nationalist Stalinism” to “reform Communism” (de-Stalinization) in 1960–61. The first attempt to introduce A Survivor to Czechoslovak listeners came courtesy of conductor Václav Jirácˇek (1920–66) and the Symfonický orchestr a Peˇvecký sbor Cˇeského rozhlasu v Praze (Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir in Prague). As in East and West Germany, radio ensembles were more likely to cultivate new and modern music than groups reliant on subscription sales and based in brick-and-mortar institutions. The parts were rented by the Cˇeský hudební fond (Czech Music Fund), an organization that acted as musical conduit between the CˇSR– CˇSSR and the rest of the world, procuring foreign scores for Czech performers and renting Czech scores to foreign performers (the Slovaks maintained a separate fund for the same purposes). The fund was financially independent from the state budget, supported instead by performance fees and donations from composers and performers.49 This arrangement was supposed to guarantee their complete independence in procuring foreign scores, although that autonomy was surely relative. The fund rented parts from Ricordi in London, the European representative for A Survivor’s publisher in the United States, Bomart. Jirácˇek had been second conductor at the Radio Symphony Orchestra since 1951, and in 1960 he assumed the artistic directorship of the choir.50 He received the conductor’s score on 29 February 1960, and fifty orchestral parts and sixty choral scores arrived five months later; he recorded the work at Czech Radio studios on 12 September 1960, with Josef Cˇervinka (1915–2003) as narrator.51 It is possible that Cˇervinka also coached the chorus on the Hebrew. Cˇervinka was born Josef Schwarz to a Jewish family in eastern Bohemia and immigrated to England in 1939, where he found work as a translator and announcer for the Czech section of the BBC in 1941.

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When he returned to Czechoslovakia in 1947, he adopted his mother’s maiden name (Cˇervinka)—apparently to distinguish himself from an actor who shared his paternal surname—began working for Czech Radio, and published definitive Czech translations of numerous English texts.52 Cˇervinka translated the English recitation in A Survivor into Czech and rendered the Czech title that would become standard: Ten, který prˇežil Varšavu (although variants continued to circulate). He also performed the recitation, making him the first Czech Jew to survive the Holocaust, return to Czechoslovakia, and embody the role of “a survivor” in A Survivor. (Survival in exile was equally if differently fraught from survival in camps.) This recording was never released commercially, and it was not broadcast for nearly a year. Even so, the piece was known to the Czech musical intelligentsia. When hard-line KSCˇ ideologue Josef Burjanek (1915–2006) invoked A Survivor as a point of comparison in his review of the 1960 Warsaw Autumn Festival for Hudební rozhledy, he described it as “a wellknown composition.”53 Several ensembles devoted to new and modern music emerged at this time as well. Komorní harmonie (Chamber Harmony), Musica viva pragensis, and Sonatori di Praga were based in Prague; Musica Nova came from Brno; and Hudba dneška (Music of Today) filled a similar niche in Bratislava from 1963.54 Performing modern Czech music would have been all but impossible were it not for Panton, a company the SCˇS had established in 1958 to publish scores by its member composers that had grown increasingly modernist in its offerings. Panton provided a valuable counterbalance to the steady diet of music by canonical Czech masters issued by the State Music Publishing House (Státní hudební vydavatelství).55 This was the first concerted effort to promote new, indigenous, non-socialistrealist music in postwar Czechoslovakia. These ensembles also became emissaries for Czechoslovak contemporary music abroad through frequent appearances at international festivals. The Thaw also emboldened musicologists to engage in a robust discourse on dodecaphony, and two scholars promoted Schoenberg in particular. Ivan Vojteˇch (b. 1928) wrote about musical modernism generally and carved out a niche for himself as a specialist in the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern; in 1966 he joined the editorial board of the international Arnold Schönberg Gesamtausgabe. Jirˇí Vysloužil (b. 1924) published the first feature-length profile on Schoenberg in 1961, discussed later, but otherwise wrote mostly on Janácˇek until 1968, when he began linking Schoenberg’s atonality to Hába’s microtonality.56 The nature of their work and their respective functions in the cultural political apparatus until 1968 can be

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deduced from what happened to them afterward, during the period of “normalization” after the Soviet-led invasion put a stop to the Thaw of the Prague Spring in August of that year. Vojteˇch was relieved of his faculty position and had difficulty getting published; Vysloužil remained chair of the Department of Musicology in Masaryk University’s Faculty of Arts in Brno and presided over the prestigious International Musicological Colloquium as a forum for East-West exchange from 1968 until 1990. The colloquium featured scholars from the Eastern Bloc, such as Polish musicologist Zofia Lissa, as well as luminaries from the West, most significantly West Germans Carl Dahlhaus, Kurt von Fischer, and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht.57 Vojteˇch and Vysloužil promoted Schoenberg among the musical elite, and the state gradually deemed some of his music appropriate for the masses. When the Ministry of Education and Culture (Ministerstvo školství a kultury) put forth its five-year plan for 1961–65, two Schoenberg works were among the approved Western pieces scheduled for commercial recording: the evergreen Verklärte Nacht (Zjasneˇná noc) and A Survivor (Ten, který prˇežil Varšavu).58 The weeks surrounding the tenth anniversary of his death on 13 July 1961 also occasioned broadcasts of a handful of pieces on national radio, including two works from his American period (Theme and Variations for Wind Band, op. 43a [1943], and Piano Concerto, op. 42 [1942]) and two pre-dodecaphonic works (Verklärte Nacht [1899] and Sechs kleine Klavierstücke [1911]).59 More importantly, Czech Radio dedicated a full hour of original programming to the composer during prime evening airtime on Monday, 10 July, when Zdeneˇk Nouza (b. 1929) hosted a show entitled Arnold Schoenberg: Portrait of a Composer (Portrét hudebního skladatele). It featured excerpts from numerous compositions: Verklärte Nacht, Gurre-Lieder, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, Five Orchestral Pieces, Erwartung, Pierrot lunaire, String Quartet no. 3, and A Survivor, all identified by Czech titles (the last as Zachráneˇný z Varšavy). Nouza’s radio show marked the first time A Survivor was heard publicly in Czechoslovakia, and he broadcast the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra recording made ten months earlier. Cˇervinka was also a guest on the show, presumably to discuss A Survivor. No recording or transcript survives.60 The tenth anniversary of the composer’s death was further commemorated by the first comprehensive musicological article devoted to Schoenberg in Hudební rozhledy, written by Vysloužil. He provided an overview of Schoenberg’s biography and stylistic development and then focused on his life and work in the United States for two reasons: “because we know very little about it here (we remained indifferent to the tenth anniversary of

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Schoenberg’s death, aside from a Czechoslovak premiere of the cantata A Survivor from Warsaw on the radio in July), but also because its true essence and importance are ignored in the West today.” Vysloužil argued that Schoenberg’s real genius was found in compositions from his American period in which he combined modified, tonally inflected dodecaphony with “humanistic topics,” thus demonstrating a belated yet welcome recognition of “the social function of art.” “With the cantatas Kol nidre, Ode to Napoleon, A Survivor from Warsaw, and choral works, Schoenberg joined the first-rank artists and master humanists who reacted with their work to the tragic events surrounding the second world war.”61 This argument could be construed as an extension of the engagement required of socialist realism, thus representing the best chance of winning official acceptance for Schoenberg. Public acknowledgment that dodecaphony could be appropriate for such a purpose was a relatively recent development in the Eastern Bloc, even if informal discussions presumably had been underway for some time.62 Thus Vysloužil offered the American Schoenberg—a naturalized citizen of the capitalist enemy superpower—as a role model for the socially engaged modernist composer in the CˇSSR. He took pains to present his advocacy as opposition to the Western status quo, observing that Schoenberg’s treatment in Western Europe had ignored these “progressive” traits to focus on pure technique. Furthermore, Vysloužil rebuked a faction in West Germany for displaying “sincere revulsion” at the composer’s work, citing the “scandalous reception” afforded Moses und Aron in Berlin and the “polemical pamphlets of Alois Melichar” as evidence that they failed to recognize his accomplishments.63 To be sure, in 1961 many audiences remained impervious to Schoenberg’s charms, and some of the high modernists of Darmstadt considered him passé, but Vysloužil’s opposition to the FRG had a particular resonance at this moment. East Germany had erected the Berlin Wall just two months earlier, and tensions were elevated throughout the region. The CˇSSR was the only other Eastern Bloc country to share a border with the FRG. Vysloužil’s “us versus them” rhetoric played on heightened awareness of West Germany as the enemy. His mastery of the contortionist elocution of his day is on display here, as he managed to situate his advocacy of the American Schoenberg as a form of opposition to America’s closest European ally. Vysloužil seems to be responding to the Fourteenth Edinburgh International Festival, which he had just attended as a delegate from the CˇSSR.64 That year’s festival showcased Liszt and Schoenberg, the latter represented by fifteen compositions spanning the length of his career (although A Survivor was not among

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them).65 The festival opened on 20 August, just one week after the Berlin Wall had captured world attention, and continued until 9 September; Vysloužil was already back in the CˇSSR and filing his travel report by 31 August. Perhaps his experience in Edinburgh provided fodder for his argument. The musical Thaw of 1960–61 was part of the general liberalization that became official at the Twelfth Congress of the KSCˇ in early December 1962. The first live performance of A Survivor in Czechoslovakia was given just two months later, on 7–8 February 1963, by the Brno State Philharmonic Orchestra (Státní filharmonie Brno), the leading state symphony in Moravia and an ensemble devoted to music by Czech composers such as Janácˇek, Víteˇzslav Novák, and Bohuslav Martinu˚. They had toured West Germany and Switzerland in 1961, becoming the first CˇSSR ensemble to perform in the West. The 1962–63 season brought new artistic leadership under conductors Jirˇí Waldhans and Jirˇí Pinkas, the latter of whom was responsible for the Czechoslovak concert premiere of A Survivor.66 A Survivor opened the program and was followed by Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto; Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony came after intermission. In this instance the title was rendered as Prˇežil jsem Varšavu (I Survived Warsaw). The actor Rudolf Krátký (1919–2009) performed the narration. A Brno native and member of the Brno National Theater company, Krátký does not appear to have been a Holocaust survivor. (His surname is not suggestive of Jewish identity, and biographies do not mention it. He also spent the crucial years of 1941–45 working at a theater in Olomouc.) In the program notes Jirˇí Beneš confirmed that this performance marked the first appearance of Schoenberg’s music on a Brno State Philharmonic concert. He reiterated the antifascist message of the work but did not de-Semitize its Jewish content in the process. Quite the contrary: he identified the final chorus as the Sh’ma Yisroel and defined it as “the Jewish creed—in fact, the hymn of the Jewish people.”67 Vysloužil reviewed the concert for Hudební rozhledy, where he continued to champion Schoenberg and noted that the composer’s music had not been performed in Brno for some twenty-five years. According to him, A Survivor was the first dodecaphonic work played by the Brno ensemble, and this concert marked the first live performance of that work in Czechoslovakia. Vysloužil did not refer to its Jewish content or to an antifascist message. He asserted that the composer “found a musical equivalent corresponding to the tragic nature of the subject matter,” the efficacy of which was enhanced by Schoenberg’s refusal to adhere too slavishly to the rules of dodecaphony. He described the “closing hymn” as “a cleansing

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catharsis one of the few, if not the only one, in Schoenberg’s late works.”68 With this reference to “catharsis” Vysloužil put his finger on one of the most problematic aspects of A Survivor, summed up by Klára Móricz: “To what extent should the relief brought by the Hebrew prayer, or the updated Romantic program of triumph through suffering, or the assurance of rational control ease the knowledge that the unity achieved in the Survivor was in reality not the unity of heroes but that of the exterminated?”69 Audience catharsis in response to artistic commemorations of the Holocaust is an important and ongoing debate, but such discourse would not have been part of Vysloužil’s experience at that time. His primary objective in promoting A Survivor was to gain acceptance for Schoenberg’s oeuvre. He invoked the catharsis to reassure the reader, noting A Survivor’s adherence to familiar conventions of the Romantic narrative arc that might prove reassuring despite the subject matter. Thus far Vysloužil’s writings on Schoenberg had linked his oeuvre composed in the United States to the socialist-realist imperative of socially engaged art, traced the composer’s historical presence in the region, and decried an anti-Semitic strand of Schoenberg reception in West Germany. Now he presented A Survivor as providing a challenging yet accessible audience experience. The lack of antifascist jargon may indicate that the Thaw seemed sufficiently assured that he could endorse Schoenberg and A Survivor in an official publication without recourse to the heretofore requisite terminology.

the thaw in the composers’ union The musical Thaw did not proceed without incident in the CˇSSR. Bureaucrats in the Composers’ Union (SCˇS) continued to take their cues from Moscow rather than from their own musicians. In March 1962 the Third Congress of Soviet Composers had excoriated composers Andrei Volkonsky, Valentin Silvestrov, and Arvo Pärt for “fruitless experimentation” (dodecaphony, serialism, and pointillism). The SCˇS Central Committee discussed this statement at great length and then incorporated a ringing endorsement of socialist realism into its official invitation to the Composers’ Union’s Third Congress.70 Perhaps buoyed by Khrushchev’s denunciation of dodecaphony as “the music of noises” in March 1963, the Third Congress hewed closely to this line when it met the following month, even as Hudební rozhledy published a series of technical articles on everything from serialism to aleatoric music, and such “noisy” music was performed with increasing frequency in Czech venues.71 The recent admonition from the Soviet Composers’ Union had not, in fact, succeeded in reforming its

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“young composers,” although the SCˇS leadership probably could not have known that. Edison Denisov wrote an essay in January 1963 for which he clearly had access to numerous Western scores, recordings, and/or analyses, A Survivor among them. He described the tone row, the efficacy of the pitched narration, and the culmination of plot and dodecaphonic technique in the chorus. Even though the essay was not published for another six years, it confirms that A Survivor had penetrated deep into Soviet territory by 1963.72 The SCˇS was an official Soviet-style bureaucracy, with the cautious and reactionary nature inherent to such organisms, so once a broader range of opinions was tolerated at the level of the central committee, it is likely that such discourse, albeit undocumented, was already well underway outside of official channels. At the SCˇS central committee meeting of 14 October 1964, Václav Kucˇera (b. 1929) delivered an impassioned defense of the full panoply of modern and experimental music. He was uniquely positioned to do so. He had studied at the Moscow Conservatory from 1951 to 1956, during which time he became familiar with the generation of “young composers” emerging on the scene in the Soviet Union; he then worked for Czech Radio and chaired the SCˇS committee on contemporary music. In his speech to the central committee, he recommended experimental works by John Cage, Earle Brown, György Ligeti, Bruno Maderna, and Mauricio Kagel and insisted that the music of Igor Stravinsky, Luigi Dallapiccola, Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, and late Schoenberg had proven that serialism was not a sterile compositional method. (He also included Edgar Varèse and Hans Werner Henze in that list, suggesting that he may not have been equally familiar with the music of all the composers he named.) Kucˇera also endorsed a list of “young composers” from the Soviet Union: Andrei Volkonsky, Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov, Roman Ledenyov, Alexander Pirumov, Sergei Slonimsky, [Alexander?] Blok, Arvo Pärt, and Sofia Gubaidulina.73 As noted previously, the SCˇS had already pored over the tea leaves of the Soviet Composers’ Union’s censure of Volkonsky and Pärt, so Kucˇera’s statement to that body two years later suggests that the Thaw had gotten well underway in the interim, even among the bureaucrats. The date of this meeting—14 October 1964—is noteworthy for another reason: this was the date on which Khrushchev “retired” as first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was replaced by Brezhnev. Khrushchev’s deposition is commonly used to demarcate the end of the Thaw in the Soviet Union, but its effects continued to be felt in musical life for some time, and for four more years in the late-blooming CˇSSR. Kucˇera went on to write the first book about the

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Soviet “young composers” in 1967 (New Trends in Soviet Music), and Panton, the SCˇS press, published it.74

the second performance and a commercial recording The second-known live performance of A Survivor in the CˇSSR, in March 1966, occurred in a much more liberal cultural environment. Václav Neumann (1920–95), second conductor of the Czech Philharmonic, was responsible for the performance. He cultivated a vital career in the GDR as well, first at the Komische Oper in Berlin (1956–64) and then in Leipzig, where he was simultaneously chief conductor of the Gewandhaus Orchestra and general music director of the Leipzig Opera from 1964 to 1968. (In 1968 he resigned from both posts in protest of East Germany’s support for the Soviet-led invasion of the CˇSSR.) Neumann programmed A Survivor for a Czech Philharmonic subscription concert on 3–4 March 1966 that was billed as an evening of “first performances” for this ensemble. The program annotator remarked upon the juxtaposition of music from the Second Viennese School with that of Les Six, as the concert featured Darius Milhaud’s Symphony no. 8 in D (1957), Webern’s Variations for Orchestra, op. 30 (1940), and A Survivor on the first half, followed by Arthur Honegger’s oratorio La danse des morts (1938) after intermission. Milhaud said his Eighth Symphony was inspired by “Vltava” from Smetana’s Má vlast, but the symphony also has a link to A Survivor as it, too, was written by an exiled Jewish composer in California (Milhaud’s symphony having been commissioned for the opening of a new concert hall at the University of California at Berkeley). Pairing Honegger’s oratorio with A Survivor was a pragmatic decision with regard to the performing forces required; La danse des morts is less than thirty minutes long and calls for orchestra, mixed choir, three soloists (SAB), and a speaker. The libretto, by Paul Claudel, is based on biblical texts from Genesis, Ezekiel, and Job and focuses on the resurrection of dry bones as a metaphor for the revival of hope in Israel. In Claudel’s treatment the symbolism shades toward the salvation of the Christian church instead of Israel, but audiences may have been inclined to hear its original Hebrew context, given its juxtaposition with A Survivor.75 Both works were performed in Czech translation, with the exception of the Hebrew Sh’ma Yisroel at the end of A Survivor, which was translated into the vernacular in the program leaflet (the only such instance found in the course of the research for this study). The annotator did not identify Schoenberg as

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Jewish but was explicit about the work’s Jewish content, describing it as based on the eyewitness account of “one who survived the horrific defeat of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by the Nazis” and concluding with a “paraphrase of the old Jewish song” as a kind of requiem. Milan Friedl (1931–2009), a dramaturge, actor, and reciter for television and radio, performed the recitation for both pieces. The ensembles also recorded A Survivor for Supraphon the same weekend but, curiously, Friedl was not the narrator; instead, bass-baritone Karel Berman recited his own Czech translation of the English prose. (Neumann recorded the work yet again in 1967, with BBC newsreader Richard Baker performing the narration in the original English.) Berman’s performance was released in late 1967 on an album designed as a primer on dodecaphony, and it remains the only known recording in the Czech language.76 A Survivor is a conspicuous presence on this record, as the other four pieces are early twelve-tone chamber works: Schoenberg’s Suite for Two Clarinets, Bass Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano, op. 29; Berg’s Chamber Concerto for Piano and Violin with Thirteen Wind Instruments; and Webern’s String Trio, op. 20, as well as his Quartet for Violin, Clarinet, Tenor Saxophone, and Piano, op. 22.77 The album was also a showcase for the groups Musica viva pragensis and Chamber Harmony, two of the aforementioned ensembles based in Prague and dedicated to new and modern music. Jaroslav Bužga’s extensive, educational liner notes informed the listener about the composers and their uses of dodecaphony and were replete with numerous quotations from the composers themselves, a (mostly German) bibliography for future reading, and a list of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern recordings said to be forthcoming from Supraphon.78 His rhetoric is refreshingly forthright, conspicuous for its lack of bureaucratic jargon and political justification, and as indicative of the Thaw as the existence of the recording itself. According to the application he filed when he auditioned for the National Theater in Prague in 1953, Berman (1919–95) had studied at the Prague Conservatory, 1938–40, at which point his studies were interrupted by imprisonment in concentration camps because he was Jewish.79 He survived an early stint in the labor camp at Lípa, followed by time in Terezín, Auschwitz, and Dachau (Kaufering camps II and IV, Allach). At Terezín he performed regularly, organized concerts, conducted a girls’ choir, and composed; he honed his compositional skills there under the tutelage of Viktor Ullmann, who created the role of Death in the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis for him. Berman completed his training in 1945–46 and then sang with opera companies in Opava and Plzenˇ before joining the prestigious National Theater, where he sang the Doctor in the 1959 production of

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figure 6. Karel Berman (civilní fotografie). Courtesy of the Archives of the National Theatre, Prague, Czech Republic.

Wozzeck to great acclaim. He was in high demand as a guest artist, particularly in East Berlin and Leipzig, and performed in the West as well. The symbolic significance of the Warsaw Ghetto in the Eastern Bloc has been established, but it is also useful to consider that of Terezín, since it was the best-known camp in the Czech lands and Berman had been held there. As noted earlier, a great deal of information about ghettos and camps had circulated in the immediate postwar period, after which time those accounts were superseded by a heroic narrative of de-Semitized antifascist resistance. The conspicuous exception to this general rule was the publication of children’s art and writings produced in Terezín, which the state-controlled Jewish Museum and Terezín Memorial began to publish in the late 1950s (but these were de-Semitized too; they did not explicitly identify children as

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Jewish). The focus on culture gradually expanded to include a series of exhibitions and monographs devoted to the so-called artists’ affair involving Ota Matušek, Leo Haas, and Otto Ungar, and in 1965 the Council of Jewish Communities in the Czech Lands published a collection of essays, mostly by survivors, that showcased the performing arts at Terezín. It was published only in English, however, which surely limited its impact in the CˇSSR.80 The first monograph on Terezín’s musical life did not appear until 1981, and it was published outside of the usual state-controlled, de-Semitized channels of the Jewish Museum and the Memorial: Ludmila Vrkocˇová’s Hudba terezínského ghetta was published in Prague by Jazzová sekce (Jazz Section), something of a rogue unit that was under considerable scrutiny in the early 1980s. The Terezín Ghetto has since become infamous as the site of a cruel farce perpetrated by the Germans in which prisoners were forced to put on a show to “prove” to the Red Cross that they were being treated well. This charade is preserved in the remnants of a propaganda film that was never released, entitled Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet. Scholarship on music in Terezín has since grown exponentially, and Berman’s reputation with it, but because Terezín’s musical life was not a subject of research in the CˇSSR until the 1980s, it is unlikely that this was the primary filter through which Czechoslovak audiences in the 1960s and 1970s would have experienced Berman’s performances.81 The liner notes for the 1967 recording merely stated that he and the conductor had “close personal relationships with the music of the Second Viennese School.” A survivor in the role of A Survivor (first Cˇervinka but especially Berman, who performed the part on vinyl in the 1960s and in concert at home and abroad in the 1970s) is a phenomenon unique to the CˇSSR among the case studies examined. There may have been a certain pragmatism to it: Berman, like Cˇervinka before him, was able to make his own translation of the English narration and may have been able to coach the chorus on Hebrew pronunciation as well. And, as we have seen, A Survivor was the Schoenberg work most likely to find favor in the Eastern Bloc because it could be appropriated to serve the antifascist narrative of heroic resistance, so those promoting his music emphasized the aspect most likely to curry official favor. That appropriation had required de-Semitization, though, and casting a Holocaust survivor in the title role would seem to undermine such an agenda. In fact, it appears that performing A Survivor in the CˇSSR did not require de-Semitization in 1966–67. This late in the Thaw, with the Prague Spring just around the corner, this was no longer necessary where art and culture were concerned. In 1965 Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos directed a film

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about the inhumanity of Slovak Aryanization in 1942 entitled The Shop on Main Street. It was widely distributed in Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, and the United States and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film Dita Saxová (1968) focuses on the theme of Jewish invisibility and is based on the 1962 novel by Arnošt Lustig, a Czech Jew whose tour of wartime concentration camps rivaled Berman’s. The story takes place in Prague in 1947–48 and follows eighteen-year-old Jewish camp survivor Dita as she attempts to make sense of her survival and build a life as the sole survivor of her family. The film gave the theme of Jewish invisibility unprecedentedly high visibility on the big screen. It is not clear if Berman’s status as a Holocaust survivor was common knowledge, and I do not know if Czechs who bought the album in 1968 know that he was Jewish. His surname might suggest that they did, although “Berman” did not necessarily signify as Jewish in Central Europe at this time. Nor do I know if his wartime internment was common knowledge. It is not mentioned in the liner notes, and Czech concert and opera programs did not typically include biographies of performers until the 1990s. Given the multipurpose nature of the Terezín facility and the de-Semitization in the literature to this point, imprisonment there would not necessarily have signified “Jewish,” either. I have not found evidence that critics, audiences, or other performers reflected upon a survivor performing the role of A Survivor. It is possible that that fact was deemed too obvious, intimate, or irrelevant to warrant commentary; it is also possible that they did not know. But if listeners did know that Berman was a Holocaust survivor, what did it mean for them to hear him perform this role? A survivor portraying A Survivor can hardly be read as inconsequential now, although I am aware that mine may be a distinctly American, twenty-first-century perspective on the matter. The question is one of witness. In her powerful analysis of Steve Reich’s Different Trains, Amy Lynn Wlodarski traces the layers of witness at work when Reich manipulates recordings of Holocaust survivors’ recollections and combines them with a string quartet to “create a narrative of Jewish suffering during World War II.”82 The taped testimonies are given by primary witnesses, and, building on the work of Ernst van Alphen and others, she positions Reich’s piece as the work of a secondary or intellectual witness, an individual who “make[s] us feel like close and empathic observers” but whose “imaginative discourses of art and language” are necessarily secondary and “can only work upon the historical discourse, which is primary.”83 A Survivor also operates at the level of a secondary witness, as the narrative is an artistic synthesis Schoenberg assembled from different

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sources. That identity as a secondary witness is blurred, however, by Schoenberg’s rendering of that synthesis into a first-person narrative delivered by a single performer, a mode of delivery that aspires to verisimilitude. And although we know now that the narration does not represent a particular historical event or the experience of a specific individual, it was widely believed at the time that the story was the eyewitness account of a single survivor. Hearing the role performed in the vernacular (Czech) and in a translation known to be by the performer would surely enhance the verisimilitude. If Berman’s status as a primary witness was known, his performance of this role could have been seen to legitimate the Holocaust as historical fact; to endorse Schoenberg’s account of it; or, more abstractly, to endorse his music for those seeking approval for modernist music in this environment. But this illusion of an “encounter with the real” is problematized by Berman’s own testimony: he was a survivor, not from Warsaw, but from Terezín, Auschwitz, and Dachau.84 And although an actor with no direct experience of the Holocaust can deliver the fictional testimony simply as a performer, as a primary witness, Berman’s identity in the role of A Survivor was a doubled one. As a twenty-first-century American listener who knows Berman’s history, I cannot not hear his performance in layers of primary and secondary witness. The questions I am left with and cannot answer are whether Czech listeners were cognizant of that doubleness in 1968, and if so, what it meant. It is certainly possible that hearing a survivor as A Survivor meant nothing at all, even if listeners could make the connection. Claude Schumacher has written about the ability to “listen to survivors but still not hear anything” because of a tendency to “ritualize the very act, even the very idea, of survivors’ testimony,” and that tendency might be exacerbated when listening to a piece of art music.85 Even the Hebrew language, which seems like a conspicuous marker of Jewishness, might not have been so without context. Hebrew, like Latin, was strictly a liturgical language. It was resurrected as a spoken language in the form of modern Hebrew with the founding of the state of Israel, but it is unlikely that non-Jews living in Czechoslovakia would have had any exposure to it. The choral part moves quickly, and choral diction is notoriously difficult to comprehend. In the context of an album meant to demonstrate varietals of dodecaphony, perhaps one could listen to the Jewish prayer “but still not hear anything,” cognizant only of what may have sounded like incomprehensibly bad choral diction. The only Jewish newspaper published in communist Czechoslovakia was Veˇstník ŽNO, a vital source of religious and political news pertinent to

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Jewish readers but not given to cultural coverage, and it did not advertise or review the broadcast, the concerts, or the recording.86 This moment of visibility for Jews in the public discourse of Czech culture ended when the Prague Spring did. Alexander Dubcˇek’s Action Program of April 1968 proposed reforms so sweeping that “it is difficult to overestimate how alarmed the Soviets were” by its agenda, and that August the Soviets led an invasion of Czechoslovakia that put a violent end to the Thaw.87 Jews returned to invisible status in the subsequent period of “normalization,” and on occasion the regime even resorted to anti-Semitism in its denunciation of the reformers, describing them as “Jews with ‘Zionist’ connections” and paralleling the Polish anti-Semitic campaign launched in the same year. State media took to “labeling Israel as an imperialist and racist state.”88 Even once the immediate frenzy died down, the long-term repercussions of this agenda can be gleaned from conversations with several Czechs who grew up there between the late 1960s and the 1990s. One who came of age in the 1970s said that she did not realize Jews still existed outside of Israel until she moved to Prague to attend university. She remembered having studied A Survivor as an example of antifascism without any reference to Jews or the Holocaust. When asked how her teacher accounted for the Hebrew prayer, she said that it had never come up. Another who attended an American university in the 2000s did not recall ever having knowingly met a Jew in his hometown of Prague and remembered his initial surprise at their visibility in the United States. Berman would go on to reprise the role when the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra programmed the piece again a decade later under conductor Zdeneˇk Košler. It was the first piece on a subscription concert in Prague in March 1976, followed by Jindrˇich Feld’s Piano Concerto (1973) and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. Berman toured with the philharmonic that year when it performed concerts in Salzburg and Interlaken, in which it followed up A Survivor with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.89 Although these concerts fall outside the chronological scope of this study, such a touring program during the period of normalization is noteworthy for its participation in what became an internationally favored concert program of catharsis. This lineup creates an experience in which an audience is rewarded for sitting through seven uncomfortable minutes of A Survivor with ninety minutes of familiar Teutonic triumphalism, culminating in the reassurance that “all men become brothers.”

Afterword

Viewing the cultural history of postwar Europe through the lens of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, its early performances, and its reception can illuminate some of the fissures in the continental cultural and political landscape. Schoenberg’s biography and reputation, the subject matter of the work, and the dodecaphonic method according to which it was composed all attracted considerable attention in their own right, but they also functioned as metonymies, standing in for social, political, ethical, and aesthetic issues that ranged far beyond the particular composer and work. What this survey has not yet accounted for is why so many considered A Survivor capable of bearing the weight of so much meaning in the first place. Opinions about its aesthetic and ethical value remain divided, in a manner that often attends the reception of memorial works in genres that place a high premium on intelligibility. Paradoxically, it is precisely the striving for intelligibility—in text, but especially in music—that has given rise to a Babel of multiple interpretations. Compare Schoenberg’s description of A Survivor, composed in 1947, with Nathan Rapoport’s defense of his Warsaw Ghetto Monument, which was installed in 1948: Now, what the text of the Survivor means to me: it means at first a warning to all Jews, never to forget what has been done to us—never to forget that even people who did not do it themselves, agreed with them and many of them found it necessary to treat us this way. We should never forget this, even if such things have not been done in the manner in which I describe in the Survivor. This does not matter. The main thing is, that I saw it in my imagination. The Sh’ma Jisroel at the end has a special meaning to me. I think, the Sh’ma Jisroel is the \”Glaubensbekenntnis\”, the confession of the Jew. It is our thinking of the one, eternal, God who is invisible, who forbids imitations, who

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forbids to make a picture and all these things, which you perhaps have realised when you read my Moses und Aron and Der biblische Weg. The miracle is, to me, that all these people who might have forgotten, for years, that they are Jews, suddenly facing death, remember who they are. And this seems to me a great thing.1 Could I have made a stone with a hole in it, and said, “Voila! The Greatness of the Jewish People”? No, I needed to show the heroism, to illustrate it literally in figures everyone, not just artists would respond to. This was to be a public monument after all. And what do human beings respond to? Faces, figures, the human form. I did not want to represent resistance in the abstract: it was not an abstract uprising. It was real.2

Schoenberg portrays A Survivor as a memorial designed to keep Jews from forgetting what had been done to them and to honor those who kept or rediscovered their faith, even in the face of death. Presumably it would also remind non-Jewish listeners to remember and be vigilant. Rapoport focuses less on what was done to the Jews than on their response to it. In both cases, however, the artist insists that his work be intelligible so that viewers and listeners may understand who is being commemorated and why. In sculpture this is typically achieved through the use of text (names, dates, quotations, explanatory placards) and representation (recognizable individuals or groups, situated in a significant setting or event). Such structures are typically sitespecific as well, the location itself providing information essential to the meaning of the structure. Rapoport’s monument is a granite wall thirty-six feet tall. The inscription states that it is dedicated “To the Jewish People—Its Heroes and Its Martyrs” in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish. The western side of the wall features a bronze group sculpture of heroic figures rising up in armed resistance, with leader Mordechai Anielewicz at the center and a fallen comrade lying prone on the ground. The eastern side honors the martyrs in a stone bas-relief showing twelve huddled figures representing the tribes of Israel, eyes cast downward and walking in single file. Only the rabbi, clutching the Torah, looks upward. The memorial, moreover, is installed at the site of the former ghetto, the very site where the uprising took place. Schoenberg’s Holocaust memorial does not exist in a single location that might help fix its meaning, but otherwise the composer sought intelligibility in ways similar to Rapoport. He provided a text in the language of the country for which the work was commissioned and where it was first performed, and even if American audiences did not understand the snippets in German, the surrounding narration and underscoring conveyed their gist. The text is delivered in heightened speech, a mode of delivery generally

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thought to ensure greater comprehensibility than singing, and although its diction may be unidiomatic, it communicates by dint of a simple vocabulary and graphic imagery. The narrator prepares the listener to understand the significance of the Hebrew Sh’ma, if not its literal meaning, by stating that “they” will sing “the old prayer,” “the forgotten creed,” so that one is not surprised to hear it issue forth in what to many listeners would be an unfamiliar liturgical language. The group of singing, praying men is immediately legible to the listener as the “they” to whom the narrator has just referred. Both A Survivor and the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial rely on representation for intelligibility as well, but for Schoenberg, far more than for Rapoport, that intelligibility required depiction of the evil done to those who are memorialized. On the eastern side of Rapoport’s wall, three recognizably German helmets, vintage WWII, and two bayonets are barely detectable behind the line of martyrs, those being the only references to the perpetrators. By contrast, Schoenberg provides German quotations, an explicit narrative of abuse and fear, and equally graphic musical mimesis ranging from conventional gestures associated with extreme emotional duress to the onomatopoeic effect of the trumpet call for reveille, all to represent what might seem unrepresentable so that the listener can understand the miraculous appearance of the Sh’ma at the end. In that regard A Survivor participates in a philosophical tradition identified by Susan Neiman that stretches from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Hannah Arendt and whose advocates believe that “morality demands that we make evil intelligible.”3 For Schoenberg, communicating the evil that had been done to the Jews was necessary to ensure that it would be remembered and not repeated. Such dogged and even literalistic measures respond to a real need. Insufficiently intelligible memorials run a risk of miscommunication or even noncommunication, with the attendant ethical and aesthetic consequences. Michael P. Steinberg has faulted the Places of Remembrance Memorial in Berlin’s Schöneberg district for miscommunication. Artists Renate Stih and Frieder Schnock describe their decentralized memorial as follows: “80 brightly printed signs are put up on lampposts, depicting colorful images on the one side and condensed versions of anti-Jewish Nazi rules and regulations passed between 1933 and 1945 in black and white on the reverse side.”4 At first the signs caused confusion because some of them were posted before the official dedication, but in Steinberg’s opinion the memorial remains a problem some twenty years later. Residents are presumably accustomed to them, but the unwitting visitor may be alarmed to encounter such messages, without explanation, on signs that look just like

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the city’s current official signage. In Steinberg’s judgment, “The political and commemorative intentions of the memorial notwithstanding, the memorial founders at the level of the functional.”5 He charges Peter Eisenman’s austere Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin with noncommunication because, in his words, it declines to signify: “The site offers an open metaphor of construction and destruction, maintaining an abstraction both of signification and emotion.” Having abdicated its commemorative obligations of “instruction, information, enlightenment,” it is reduced to a blank screen on which an uneducated visitor can project at will. It consists of 2,711 unmarked concrete slabs of varying heights arranged in a grid across 4.7 acres in the very heart of Berlin, one block south of the Brandenburg Gate. There is no mistaking the monumentality of its scale, but one must know in advance that it is a Holocaust memorial to experience it as such.6 Steinberg’s objections arise out of what Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi has described, after Ernst van Alphen, as “the ‘ban’ on imaginative representations of the Holocaust.” “Particularly where commemorative art is concerned, abstract art is acceptable because it respects, at least implicitly, the ‘sublime unrepresentability’ of the Holocaust; it does not presume to enter into the mimetic space, which must be, by these lights, inhabited primarily by a documentary, historically-accountable, idiom.”7 This perspective appears to emanate, in part, from an opposing philosophical tradition regarding evil that Neiman traces from Voltaire to Jean Améry, in which morality demands that evil not be made intelligible.8 There is no need to rehearse here the long history of the debate over the nonrepresentability of the Holocaust.9 Suffice it to say that legitimate objections to representation may be raised on both ethical and aesthetic grounds. Still, Schoenberg and Rapoport both considered it necessary. A decisive moment of representation occurs at the choral entry in A Survivor. Here Schoenberg strives to make intelligible not the evil, but rather the realization of those who are memorialized for remembering that they are Jews. He uses conventional rhetorical gestures to prepare the listener for this moment of truth. The audience may not be able to tell that the eight measures preceding the prayer (mm. 72–79) contain all twelve transpositions of the tone row plus their inversions, ascending by half-steps and presented in ever-shorter durations, but listeners certainly do recognize the buildup of ostinato patterns, driven by steady, incremental increases in tempo and dynamics, as an indicator that a major event is imminent. When the choir enters (m. 80), its arrival is signaled not only by the move from accompanied solo speech to choral song, but also by a

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sudden switch from English to Hebrew and thus from the secular to the sacred. The contrast is further enhanced by a melodic-rhythmic configuration in the pickups to downbeats on “Yisroel” and “Adonai” that implies ersatz cadences in E minor. And although the Sh’ma is based on the same tone row as the rest of the piece, here it is uniquely foregrounded as a melody and doubled by the trombones so that the row’s inbuilt tonal implications emerge most conspicuously in the prayer. The motif for “Adonoi Elohenu” is built on an augmented triad, and the melody reiterates the pitch C five times in three measures, as if attempting to establish a tonal center. A listener’s response to the choral finale often determines whether A Survivor will be perceived as profound or kitschy and whether its narrative trajectory is seen as catastrophic or redemptive.10 Schoenberg’s statement indicates that he clearly meant for it to be experienced as redemptive, but the musical strategies he used to prepare the entrance and set the prayer permit other interpretations, in part because they revert to the rhetoric of nineteenth-century musical monumentality. Alexander Rehding, in his study of musical monuments, identifies several defining characteristics that fit A Survivor: nineteenth-century monumentality is “immediately intelligible to anyone”; it is achieved “by a combination of straightforward musical content and sheer overwhelming sonic force”; it exhibits “a pronounced theatricality”; “it is not just about big musical effects per se but also about what they stand for and how they are used” as they forge an “imaginary link between musical bigness and greatness”; and it serves a commemorative function.11 A Survivor may be brief, but it marshals large forces, makes a direct emotional appeal, presents unambiguous content, and deploys an undeniable theatricality in the service of commemoration. Such attributes are not without a downside: they lead inexorably to those questions of aesthetic and ethical value that have dogged A Survivor from the beginning. The “big gestures and grand effects” of musical monumentality have historically evoked ambivalence in listeners, a queasy sense that “alongside its sweeping grandeur goes a certain perceived superficiality,” the uplifting verging on the overblown, with what is meant to be awe inspiring coming across as hackneyed.12 Rehding’s study of musical monumentality concerns nineteenth-century repertoire and aesthetics, and for that very reason is relevant to this piece. Dodecaphony may be thought a quintessentially modernist compositional method, but what the listener confronts, the big gestures and effects, the very explicit modes of communication, is rooted in popular Romanticism.

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Rendering the sacred intelligible through representation compounds the susceptibility to sensationalism and abuse, as does representation of the victims. The Third Reich exploited images of Jews to spread misinformation about them and mask their mistreatment, nowhere more infamously than at Terezín. A recent documentary entitled A Film Unfinished (2010, directed by Yael Heronski) features footage the Nazis shot in the Warsaw Ghetto as well, presumably for propaganda purposes. (The same pitfalls, I note with misgiving, attend the selection of cover art for the dust jacket of this book.) Both sides of Rapoport’s monument have been criticized, one for looking too much like the official socialist-realist art mandated by the Soviets at the time it was built, and the other for exploiting stereotypes of the wandering Jew in perpetual exile. At the moment of its unveiling in 1948 (the year in which A Survivor had its premiere in Albuquerque), Rapoport’s piece was universally hailed by “war-scarred” critics, but that short-lived critical consensus soon gave way to dismissal for reasons both aesthetic (“kitsch figuration”) and political (“proletarian pap”).13 Such has been the fate of A Survivor as well. This is partly because, for all that they aspire to universality and timelessness, memorials are inevitably if invisibly interventionist and contingent: “They juxtapose, narrate, and remember events according to the taste of their curators, the political needs and interests of their community, the temper of the times.”14 No memorial will meet the taste, needs, interests, or temper of all times or audiences. A Survivor and the Warsaw Ghetto Monument are iconic examples from early memorial cultures that favored direct, representational, even urgent modes of intelligibility that may seem incongruent with the Western modernism of the late 1940s. This is not surprising in the case of Rapoport, who had lived and worked in the Soviet Union after the Germans invaded Poland and learned socialist realism at its source. It was an aesthetic well suited to commemoration: Accessible, large-scale, and didactic, it reveled in monumentality. The immediacy of Schoenberg’s memorial is also at odds with the modernist wisdom of the immediate postwar period, in which some composers, eschewing intelligibility, withdrew into dodecaphony for what was touted as the purely objective exploration of sonic organization. No one would mistake Schoenberg for a proponent of socialist realism, but I would argue that his advocates in the Soviet Bloc were not wrong to detect a familiar resonance in A Survivor, and not just because it proved susceptible to reappropriation for antifascist purposes. A Survivor was one of the first dodecaphonic works to breach the Iron Curtain for the same reason some still find it aesthetically and ethically challengeable: namely, its grounding in the familiar discourse of nineteenth-century musical

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monumentality. The same musical strategies that can drive home the other modes of intelligibility built into A Survivor can also overwhelm or undermine them, allowing listeners in postwar Europe, as now, to impose upon it their own narratives of catastrophe, redemption, kitsch, remembering, and forgetting.

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Notes

Translations from the German are by the author unless otherwise indicated. Translations from the Czech are by Jan Straka, from the Polish by Kasia Bugaj, and from the Norwegian by Tim Davies.

introduction 1. Sophie Fetthauer, “Eine Liste mit Musikwerken der Holocaustrezeption,” www.sophie.fetthauer.de/MusikundHolocaust06–05–20.pdf, accessed 10 May 2013. 2. Klára Móricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 256. 3. Celia Applegate, “Saving Music: Enduring Experiences of Culture,” History and Memory 17, nos. 1–2 (2005): 226. 4. Ivan Hewitt, “LPO/Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall, London, Review,” Telegraph, 29 November 2012. 5. Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 45. 6. Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 9–10. 7. Ibid., 1. 8. Ibid., 11. 9. Brigid Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 24. 10. The connection to Chochem was first made by Michael Strasser in his assiduously documented article “A Survivor from Warsaw as Personal Parable,” Music and Letters 76 (1995): 52–63. Strasser’s article is also the best source of information concerning the Albuquerque premiere. An excellent summary of the history and analysis of the work is found in Therese Muxeneder, “A Survivor from Warsaw Op. 46,” in Arnold Schönberg: Interpretationen seiner

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Werke, ed. Gerold Wolfgang Gruber and Manfred Wagner (Laaber, Germany: Laaber-Verlag, 2002), 132–49. 11. Detailed analyses of the text are found in Amy Lynn Wlodarski, “ ‘An Idea Can Never Perish’: Memory, the Musical Idea, and Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947),” Journal of Musicology 24 (2007): 581–608; Wlodarski, “The Sounds of Memory: German Musical Representations of the Holocaust, 1945–1965” (PhD diss., Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, 2006), esp. 42–58; Camille Crittenden, “The Texts and Contexts of A Survivor from Warsaw, Opus 46,” in Political and Religious Ideas in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Charlotte Marie Cross and Russell A. Berman (New York: Garland, 2000), 231–58; and Beat A. Föllmi, “ ‘I Cannot Remember Ev’rything’: Eine narratologische Analyse von Arnold Schönbergs Kantate A Survivor from Warsaw op. 46,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 55 (1998): 28–56. See also Móricz, Jewish Identities, 293–94. 12. The text of A Survivor from Warsaw used by permission of Belmont Music Publishers. 13. Crittenden, “Texts and Contexts,” 233. The Schoenberg quotation introduces the text printed in the preface of the revised edition of the Philharmonia score of Survivor, ed. Jacques-Louis Monod (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1979), iii; also cited in Josef Rufer, ed., The Works of Arnold Schoenberg, trans. Dika Newlin (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 73. Schoenberg to Kurt List, 1 November 1948, in Arnold Schoenberg Self-Portrait: A Collection of Articles, Program Notes, and Letters by the Composer about His Own Works, ed. Nuria Schoenberg Nono (Pacific Palisades, CA: Belmont Music Publishers, 1988), 105. 14. The uprising has been attributed almost exclusively to the Z˙OB (Z˙ydowska Organizacja Bojowa—Jewish Fighting Organization) under the leadership of Mordechai Anielewicz, although recent work attempts to reintegrate the role of the Z˙ZW (Z˙ydowski Zwia˛zek Wojskowy—Jewish Military Union) led by Pawel Frenkel into the historical record. See Moshe Arens, Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto: The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2011). 15. Quoted in Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love, 25. 16. Ibid., 18. 17. Letter from Schoenberg to Kurt List, 18 February 1949, ASC. 18. Statistics from Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 50. 19. Letter from Schoenberg to Kurt List, 1 November 1948, ASC. 20. Hillel Kieval, email to the author, 16 August 2012. 21. Steven J. Cahn, “Schoenberg, the Viennese Jewish Experience, and Its Aftermath,” in The Cambridge Companion to Schoenberg, ed. Jennifer Shaw and Joseph Auner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 200. 22. David M. Schiller, Bloch, Schoenberg, Bernstein: Assimilating Jewish Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 103–104. I have used Schiller’s

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row designations here, although other analyses demarcate his P0 as P6 because it begins on the sixth scale degree (F#) and continues accordingly. 23. Joe R. Argentino, “Tripartite Structures in Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw,” Music Theory Online 19, no. 1 (2013): 12–13. 24. Wlodarski, “ ‘An Idea Can Never Perish,’ ” 607. 25. Móricz, Jewish Identities, 256. Wlodarski analyzes both aspects in “The Sounds of Memory,” esp. 59–87. 26. Typescript of a lecture Frederick gave at the Barbican Library for the opening of the exhibition Salomon Sulzer: Cantor, Composer, Innovator at the Barbican Library in London on 21 October 1991 and program from the same event. Kurt Frederick Papers 99M-18, Houghton Library, Harvard University. At the time I consulted the Frederick collection it was uncataloged. 27. “Civic Symphony Gives First Playing of Exciting New Schoenberg Work,” Albuquerque Journal, 5 November 1948. 28. Uncredited and curiously titled, the report includes quotations from interviews with Frederick and Schoenberg and a brief description of the music as well as the audience’s reaction to it. The reporter does not appear to have attended the performance. “Destiny and Digestion,” Time, 15 November 1948. 29. Kurt List, “Schoenberg’s New Cantata,” Commentary 6, no. 5 (1948): 471–72. See also Móricz, Jewish Identities, 292–95, and Schiller, Bloch, Schoenberg, Bernstein, 121–23. Richard Taruskin makes the connection to Hollywood as follows: “Were the name of its composer not surrounded by a historiographical aureole, were its musical idiom not safeguarded by its inscrutability, its B-movie clichés—the Erich von Stroheim Nazi barking ‘Achtung,’ the kitsch-triumphalism of the climactic, suddenly tonal singing of the Jewish credo—would be painfully obvious, and no one would ever think to program such banality alongside Beethoven’s Ninth as has become fashionable. That kind of post-Auschwitz poetry is indeed a confession of art’s impotence.” Taruskin, “A Sturdy Musical Bridge to the 21st Century,” New York Times, 24 August 1997. 30. A copy of the concert program for the Israeli premiere is in Dr. Uri Einstein’s Collection of Concert Programs at the National Library of Israel. I am indebted to Inbal Prag for her assistance in this matter. 31. Claude Rostand and Noël Boyer, “Si vous aimez la Musique,” Radio, 17 December 1948. The broadcast was also announced in Le Guide 29, 10 December 1948. Le Guide was primarily a comprehensive listing of live performances although it also provided broadcast schedules, including the Radio France concert broadcast of 20 December 1948. 32. Letter from Schoenberg to Leibowitz, 12 November 1948, reprinted in Arnold Schoenberg Letters, ed. Erwin Stein (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 257. 33. Leibowitz wrote to Schoenberg on 14 December 1948 to report the success of the recent Survivor performance but did not provide the precise date. The Radio France broadcast grids, scheduled and corrected each day, indicate

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that the concert Leibowitz described to Schoenberg was broadcast on 20 December 1948. Inathèque de France, Biobliothèque Nationale de France Site François-Mitterrand AR E ORI 00012852 INA 024 Fonds Radio France: grilles de programmes, rectificatifs d’antenne (radio et television). 34. Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7 and 109. Carroll treats the subject of A Survivor in the French discourse of committed art at great length. See also Achilles Ziakris, “In Search of Certitude: René Leibowitz and the Schoenbergian Legacy” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2005). 35. Olin Downes, “Schoenberg Work Is Presented Here: Mitropoulos and Philharmonic Offer Cantata, ‘Survivor from Warsaw’ at Carnegie Hall,” New York Times, 14 April 1950. See also two letters from Schoenberg to Mitropoulos regarding Downes’s report that the performance had included some choreography, dated 26 April 1950 and 4 July 1950. Reprinted in A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life, ed. Joseph Auner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 346. 36. Louis Stanley, “The Warsaw Ghetto: Schoenberg Score Recalls Survivors of Battle,” New York Times, 9 April 1950. 37. “Orchestra Concerts: A Survivor from Warsaw given New York Premiere,” Musical America (May 1950): 10. 38. Móricz, Jewish Identities, 255. Henry Cowell, “Current Chronicle,” Musical Quarterly 36 (1950): 450–51. To the analyses focused on the twelvetone row, Cowell might also have added Richard S. Hill’s review of the score in Notes 7 (1949): 133–35. 39. For a sweeping survey of the scale of displacement and mobility, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 22–31. Jan Gross cited in Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (New York: Doubleday, 2012), 10. 40. Abraham S. Hyman, “Central Europe: Displaced Persons,” American Jewish Year Book (1951): 305. Regarding cultural life in one displaced persons camp, see Sophie Fetthauer, Musik und Theater im DP-Camp Bergen-Belsen: Zum Kulturleben der jüdischen Displaced Persons, 1945–1950 (Neumünster, Germany: Bockel Verlag, 2012). 41. For a representative summary of work in this field, see Irmela von der Lühe and Claus-Dieter Krohn, eds., Fremdes Heimatland: Remigration und literarisches Leben nach 1945 (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein, 2005). 42. Phil Bohlman used “re-presence” to describe this phenomenon in his keynote address at the conference Jewish Music and Germany after the Holocaust at Dickinson College in February 2011. 43. Cohen critiques these agendas in Stefan Wolpe, 14–16. 44. Cited in Dörte Schmidt, “Über die Voraussetzungen unserer Musikkultur: Die Aktualität der Remigration als Gegenstand der Musikgeschichtsschreibung,” in “Man kehrt nie zurück, man geht immer nur fort”: Remigration und Musikkultur, ed. Maren Köster and Dörte Schmidt (Munich: Edition text + kritik, 2005), 12.

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45. Ibid., 11. Marita Krauss, Heimkehr in ein fremdes Land: Geschichte der Remigration nach 1945 (Munich: Beck, 2001), 157. Krauss discusses the notion of remigrating ideas as it pertains to Jews in particular in “Jewish Remigration: An Overview of an Emerging Discipline,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 49, no. 1 (2004): 108. 46. Hans Mommsen, “Rückkehr in eine verwandelte Heimat. Zur Rolle der Emigration in der Deutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft,” in “Man kehrt nie zurück,” 33. Mommsen is referring to Krauss, Heimkehr in ein Fremdes Land, 17 and 54. 47. Stephen Greenblatt, “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction,” in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 19. 48. Anne C. Shreffler, “Ideologies of Serialism: Stravinsky’s Threni and the Congress of Cultural Freedom,” in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity: Essays, ed. Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 217–45. 49. Klára Móricz and Ronit Seter, introduction to “Colloquy: Jewish Studies and Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 2 (2012): 558. 50. Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (London: Routledge, 2009), 3. 51. Lisa Jakelski, “Pushing Boundaries: Musical Exchanges at the Warsaw Autumn Festival,” unpublished paper delivered at the 2012 national meeting of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in New Orleans. 52. See Lisa Jakelski, “The Changing Seasons of the Warsaw Autumn: Contemporary Music in Poland, 1960–1990” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2009). 53. Sabine Feisst identifies these Western European tropes in Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. 3–6. 54. György Péteri, ed., Nylon Curtains: Transnational and Trans-systemic Tendencies in the Cultural Life of State-Socialist Russia and East-Central Europe (Trondheim, Norway: Program on East European Culture and Societies, 2006).

west germany: retrenchment versus a survivor from warsaw 1. See particularly Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification and the Americans, 1945–1953 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and Elizabeth Janik, Recomposing Music: Politics and Tradition in Cold War Berlin (Boston: Brill, 2005). 2. See Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 19451955 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007); and the conclusion, “Composers in the Postwar Era until the

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1960s,” in Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 264–84. For musicological essays that consider the tensions of the postwar period in former Nazi territories, see Albrecht Riethmüller, ed., Deutsche Leitkultur Musik? Zur Musikgeschichte nach dem Holocaust (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006). 3. “Retrenchment” is the term Kater uses to describe the dominant musical culture in West Germany up to the 1960s; Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 264–84. The quotation is from Thacker, Music after Hitler, 118. 4. Maren Köster and Dörte Schmidt, eds., “Man kehrt nie zurück, man geht immer nur fort”: Remigration und Musikkultur (Munich: Edition text + kritik, 2005). 5. Rainer Münz and Ralf E. Ulrich, http://migration.ucdavis.edu/rs/more. php?id+69_0_3_0, accessed 25 November 2008. 6. Köster, “Musik-Remigration nach 1945: Konturen eines neuen Forschungsfelds,” in “Man kehrt nie zurück,” 20. For lists of prominent musicians who returned and those who did not, see pp. 200–201 in that volume. 7. Marita Krauss, “Jewish Remigration: An Overview of an Emerging Discipline,” in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 49 (2004): 1:113–14. Krauss’s essay is one of seven in this volume on the subject of remigration. 8. Cited in Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 283; sources in nn. 95 and 96, p. 377. The first major project of the reconstituted Frankfurt School in Germany, the so-called Gruppenexperiment, conducted in 1950–51, concluded that “the social conditions for manipulative mass psychology and the potential for totalitarian allegiance persisted in Germany.” Jeffrey K. Olick, “Collective Memory and Nonpublic Opinion: A Historical Note on a Methodological Controversy about a Political Problem,” Symbolic Interaction 30, no. 1 (2007): 48. 9. See Beal, New Music, especially 36–41. After the FRG was established in 1949, the Office of Military Government, United States, was succeeded by the US High Commissioner for Germany, which was subsequently abolished in 1955 by proclamation of the Allied High Commission for Germany. 10. René Leibowitz, Introduction à la musique de douze sons (Paris: L’Arche, 1949), 322–35; and “Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, or the Possibility of Committed Art,” Horizon 20, no. 116 (1949): 122–31; see also Paul Hamburger’s response to this article, published under the same title, in Music Survey 2, no. 3 (1950): 183, and Christina Thoresby, “Schoenberg: A Survivor from Warsaw, Opus 46,” Music Survey 3, no. 2 (1950): 116–18. Both Horizon and Music Survey were British journals, so the piece was under discussion in the United Kingdom well in advance of its first broadcast or performance there, both in 1951. 11. Leibowitz’s article is cited in translation in Willi Reich, ed., Schoenberg: A Critical Biography, trans. Leo Black (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 222–23. 12. Regarding Strobel’s role in postwar German radio, see Ulf Scharlau, “Remigration von Musikern im deutschen Rundfunk nach 1945,” in “Man kehrt nie zurück,” 159–61.

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13. Beal, New Music, 21. The French selected Strobel because he was a competent, known commodity. See Manuela Schwartz, “ ‘Eine versunkene Welt’: Heinrich Strobel als Kritiker, Musikpolitiker, Essayist und Redner in Frankreich (1939–1944),” in Musikforschung Faschismus Nationalsozialismus: Referate der Tagung Schloss Engers (8. bis 11. März 2000), ed. Isolde von Foerster, Christoph Hust, and Christoph-Hellmut Mahling (Mainz: Are Edition, 2001), 291317. Regarding Strobel’s role in Donaueschingen, see Josef Häusler, Spiegel der neuen Musik, Donaueschingen: Chronik, Tendenzen, Werkbesprechungen (Kassel, Germany: Bärenreiter, 1996). 14. Steinecke wrote for his hometown paper, Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung (Essen), as well as Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (Berlin) and Der Mittag (Düsseldorf). An account of his wartime activities can be found in Michael Custodis, “ ‘Unter Auswertung meiner Erfahrungen aktiv mitgestaltend’: Zum Wirken von Wolfgang Steineke bis 1950,” in Deutsche Leitkultur Musik, 145–62. For primary sources concerning the founding and early years of the IFNM, see Musik-Konzepte. Special issue (January 1999): DarmstadtDokumente. I (Munich: Edition text + kritik 1999). Excellent studies in addition to those previously mentioned include Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, Im Zenit der Moderne: Geschichte und Dokumentation in vier Bänden—Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, 1946–1966 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1997); and Rudolf Stephan et al., Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart: 50 Jahre Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Stuttgart: DACO Verlag, 1996). 15. See for example Edwin Kuntz, “Zeitgenössische Musik,” Rhein-NeckarZeitung, 3 October 1946. “Schönbergs Schaffen . . . wird heute als fruchtlos und völlig überwunden angesehen.” Cited in Siegfried Mauser, “Emigranten bei den Internationalen Ferienkursen für Neue Musik in Darmstadt (1946–1951),” in Musik in der Emigration, 1933–1945: Verfolgung, Vertreibung, Rückwirkung, ed. Horst Weber (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1994), 243. There was a shift in 1947 and 1948, however, when some critics began to pit Hindemith against Schoenberg as conservative against progressive; see Mauser, “Emigranten bei den Internationalen Ferienkursen,” 244–46. 16. Cited in Mauser, “Emigranten bei den Internationalen Ferienkursen,” 247. 17. Wolfgang Steinecke to Gertrud Schoenberg, 26 March 1957, ASC GSC. By 1963, two years after Steinecke’s death, there was a conspicuous shift in programming patterns at the IFNM away from Schoenberg. Borio and Danuser, Im Zenit der Moderne, 522–621. See also Achim Heidenreich, “Arnold Schönberg und das Kranichsteiner Musikinstitut,” Musik & Ästhetik 3, no. 11 (1999): 80–88. 18. Summary culled from Beal, New Music, 18–19, 25–26, and 53–54; quotation from p. 54. ARD was the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Member stations were NWDR in Hamburg and Cologne, which split in 1956 into NDR and WDR (British zone); Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden (French zone); Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich; Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt; Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart; Radio Bremen (American zone).

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19. Regarding the remigration of music via West German radio, see Ulf Scharlau, “Remigration von Musikern im Deutschen Rundfunk nach 1945,” in “Man kehrt nie zurück,” 167–71. 20. A recording of this performance from Radio Bremen is available on RCA’s six-disc set Musik in Deutschland, 19502000. A Survivor is the first track on volume 1, Rückkehr aus dem Exil. Fortner’s ballet Die weiße Rose is based upon Oscar Wilde’s play The Birthday of the Infanta, but it is possible that the title also prompted associations with the anti-Nazi resistance movement of the same name. 21. Letter from Scherchen to Schoenberg, 13 July 1950, ASC. 22. Tagebuch August–September 1950, 22v22r. 999 Hermann-ScherchenArchiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. 23. Sabine Feisst first alerted me to this change in the text. The Viennese premiere, which Scherchen also conducted, featured a similar adjustment; see chapter 2. 24. Scherchen, “Ein lebendiges Stück Musikgeschichte,” in Sieben Jahre Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (special issue of the Darmstädter Theaterzeitschrift Neues Forum 195152), no. 3. Cited in Heidenreich, “Arnold Schönberg,” 84. 25. Review by Holger Hagen from Die Neue Zeitung, 23 August 1950, cited in Kerstin Sicking, Holocaust-Kompositionen als Medien der Erinnerung: Die Entwicklung eines musikwissenschaftlichen Gedächtniskonzepts (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008), 276–77. Sicking’s published dissertation contains Foucaultian analysis of the discourse in German reviews of works about the Holocaust, including A Survivor. 26. Review by Willy Werner Göttig from Abendpost, 25 August 1950, cited in Sicking, Holocaust-Kompositionen, 278. 27. Review by K. published in Aachener Nachrichten, 29 August 1950, cited in Sicking, Holocaust-Kompositionen, 278. 28. Klaus Wagner, “Aus dem Musikleben: Musica-Bericht: Im Zeichen der Dissonanz,” Musica 4 (1950): 389. 29. I am grateful to Anne C. Shreffler for permission to quote from notes she took in an interview conducted in August 2004. A similar account from Heinz-Klaus Metzger is cited in Bernd Leukert, “Musik aus Trümmern, Darmstadt um 1949,” Musik-Texte: Zeitschrift für Neue Musik 45 (1992): 25. 30. Antoine Goléa, “Hermann Scherchen dirigierte in Darmstadt,” Der Mittag, 24 August 1950; Amy Lynn Wlodarski, “The Sounds of Memory: German Musical Representations of the Holocaust, 1945–1965” (PhD diss., Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, 2006), 101. See also “Neue Musik auf neuen Wegen,” Darmstädter Tagblatt, 22 August 1950, in which the critic notes that A Survivor is dodecaphonic and focuses on the music but does not dwell on the text. 31. Alfons Giordano, “Arnold Schönberg im NWDR,” Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, 19 June 1951; “ ‘Moses und Aaron’

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Schönberg-Uraufführung in Darmstadt,” Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, 13 July 1951; “Zwei jüdische Künstler gestorben,” Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, 20 July 1951; and Konrad Latte, “Arnold Schönberg zu seinem 75. Geburtstag,” Der Weg, 9 September 1949. I am grateful to Tina Frühauf for her assistance with these sources. 32. Boris Sapir, “Central Europe: Germany,” American Jewish Year Book (1951): 316. 33. Abraham S. Hyman, “Central Europe: Displaced Persons,” American Jewish Year Book (1951): 306. 34. “ ‘Moses und Aaron’: Schönberg-Uraufführung in Darmstadt,” Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, 13 July 1951; “Zwei jüdische Künstler gestorben,” Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, 20 July 1951. 35. Data culled from the records kept by Boelke-Bomart, which published A Survivor, as preserved in its correspondence with the composer’s widow, Gertrud Schoenberg, at the ASC; Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv; Deutsches Musikarchiv Berlin; and GEMA (Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungsund mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte). The publisher’s records are incomplete at best. Either Ricordi, Boelke-Bomart’s representative in Europe, did not collect royalties for all European performances in a timely fashion or some performances were illegal. 36. Klára Móricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 293. Also Schiller, Bloch, Schoenberg, Bernstein, 117–23. The two essays Adorno wrote during this period are “On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music” (written in 1952 and published in 1953); and “Toward an Understanding of Schoenberg” (1955). 37. “Commitment” quotation and observation in Móricz, Jewish Identities, 295. 38. NARA BDC NSDAP records, Ortsgruppenkartei, microfilm publication A3340-MFOK. Schnoor’s thirty-page RSK RKK file is also here. 39. I have been unable to locate his denazification documents at the Landesarchiv Berlin or at the Sächsisches Staatsarchiv, Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden but am grateful nevertheless to the following scholars for guidance regarding denazification procedures in the Soviet-Occupied Zone (SBZ): Michael Albrecht, Robin Cookson, Alan Steinweis, Norman Naimark, and David Pike. Concerning denazification, see Clemens Vollnhals and Thomas Schlemmer, Entnazifizierung: Politische Säuberung und Rehabilitierung in den vier Besatzungszonen 1945–1949 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), and Olaf Kappelt, Die Entnazifizierung in der SBZ sowie die Rolle und der Einfluß ehemaliger Nationalsozialisten in der DDR als ein soziologisches Phänomen (Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovacˇ, 1997). Biographical information culled from John Warrack’s entry for Schnoor in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; Eveline Barlitz, “Der Nachlaß Hans Schnoor,” Weberiana 2

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(1993): 6–7; and Fred Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982), 167. 40. Hans Schnoor, “Wir und der Funk,” Westfalen-Blatt, 16 June 1956. Monika Boll considers the Schnoor affair to be a significant event in the intellectual history of radio in the early FRG. Monika Boll, Nachtprogramm: Intellektuelle Gründungsdebatten in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Münster: Lit., 2004), 213–21. 41. I am indebted to Rachel Cowgill for this insight. Quotation from Brian Murdoch, Fighting Songs and Warring Words: Popular Lyrics of Two World Wars (London: Routledge, 1990), 34. Cowgill also notes Stefan Zweig’s recollection of the effect of the “Hymn of Hate”: “Lissauer’s poem had ‘exploded like a bomb in a munitions factory.’ ” Cowgill, “Elgar’s War Requiem,” in Elgar and His World, ed. Byron Adams (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 317–62. Cowgill quotes Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography, trans. Cedar Paul and Eden Paul (London: Cassell, 1987), 180. 42. Data about FRG newspapers are available for 1953 and 1960. In 1953 Westfalen-Blatt was a regional newspaper with a circulation of 80,000 that included its eleven additional affiliated newspapers; in 1960 its circulation had increased to 107,999 including its sixteen affiliates. In 1953 FAZ had an international circulation of 93,000 with five foreign desks; in 1960 circulation had increased to 258,554 with correspondents in eleven foreign cities. Both were politically independent. Die Deutsche Presse: Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, ed. Institut für Publizistik an der Freien Universität Berlin (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1954 and 1961). 43. It is not unusual for accounts of Zillig’s career to foreground his opposition to the Nazi regime while minimizing his professional successes therein. See for example Peter Gradenwitz, Arnold Schönberg und seine Meisterschüler: Berlin 1925–1933 (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1998), 49–55. 44. See the transcript of his lecture that Zillig sent to Gertrud Schoenberg, preserved at the ASC GSC; see also the letter he sent her on the same topic dated 31 July 1956, ASC GSC. 45. Boll, Nachtprogramm, 215. 46. Walter Dirks, “Bericht über ein Scherbengericht,” Melos 23, no. 8 (July–August 1956): 233–34. Preceding quotations are taken from this. 47. P. H., “Wer hat Herrn Schnoor bestellt?” Die Zeit, 12 July 1956. 48. Schnoor’s Berichtigung appeared in the “Blick in die Zeit” column in Melos 23, no. 9 (September 1956): 263. Jüdische Nachrichten was edited by Moses Lustig, an advocate of the complete emigration of all Jews from Germany who hoped to have achieved that goal by 1952. Anthony D. Kauders, Democratization and the Jews: Munich, 1945–1965 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 51. 49. The proceedings published that October do not list those in attendance, make no mention of the Schnoor affair, and do not include Zillig’s lecture; instead, the preface focuses on the ostensible task of the conference, which was

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the development of a third program in German radio modeled after that of the BBC. Evangelische Akademie für Rundfunk und Fernsehen, Der kluge Mann und das Radio: Referate und Diskussionen einer Tagung der Evangelischen Akademie für Rundfunk und Fernsehen in Arnoldshain im Taunus (Munich: Evangelischer Presseverband für Bayern, 1956). 50. Boll, Nachtprogramm, 216–17. 51. Alois Melichar, Schönberg und die Folgen: Eine notwendige kulturpolitische Auseinandersetzung (Vienna: Eduard Wancura Verlag, 1960), 6; Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 283. 52. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era, 277. 53. Jens Malte Fischer, “Das Judentum in der Musik: Kontinuität einer Debatte,” in Conditio Judaica: Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom Ersten Weltkrieg bis 1933/38, ed. Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler (Tübingen, Germany: De Gruyter, 1993), 3:249–50. 54. Letter from Winfried Zillig to Gertrud Schoenberg, 31 July 1956, ASC GSC. 55. Letter from Winfried Zillig to Gertrud Schoenberg, 22 September 1956, ASC GSC. His references to Schwarze Korps and “the toadstool” appear to have come from the article published by Erich Kuby, “Rundfunk auf Höhenwegen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2 July 1956. 56. Letter from Heinrich Strobel to Gertrud Schoenberg, 5 October 1956, ASC GSC. I am indebted to Steffi Kandzia for clarification on this point. 57. Letter from Gertrud Schoenberg to Strobel, 10 October 1956, ASC GSC. She reiterates the same point in her letter to District Attorney Arnold Buchthal, 5 December 1956, ASC GSC. Buchthal had been removed from the district court of Dortmund in 1933 on the basis of his Jewish heritage. 58. Correspondence with Margot Boelke of Boelke-Bomart, 25 October 1956; letter from Boelke to Gertrud Schoenberg, 19 November 1956; letter from Boelke to Gertrud Schoenberg, 23 January 1957; undated letter from Gertrud Schoenberg to Boelke, ASC GSC. 59. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, 22. Also email from Prieberg to the author, 2 August 2005. 60. Schnoor, “Peinliche Ehrenrettung des ‘Riemann’: ‘Deutsche’ Juden im neuen Musiklexikon,” Dresdner Anzeiger, 14 March 1939. 61. “Private plaintiff” (Privatkläger) refers to Schnoor and his publisher; “accused” (Beschuldigte) refers to Prieberg. “First district court 8 BS 139/56 in matters of the private suit of the publishing house ‘Vereinigte WestfalenZeitungen G. m. b. H.’ in Bielefeld, Sudbrackstraße 16, represented by the managing director, the publisher Karl-Wilhelm Busse himself and the music critic Dr. Hans Schnoor in Bielefeld, Niederwall 9, private plaintiff, attorney of record: Erich Neumann in Bielefeld; versus Mr. Fred K. Prieberg in Baden-Baden, Fremersberger Straße 60a, respondent, attorney of record: Dr. Adolf Arndt in Bonn, Drachenfelsstraße 18—the county court in Bielefeld has decreed on 27 June 1957: The private suits are dismissed. The private plaintiffs will bear the costs of the proceedings as well as the expenses incurred by the respondent.”

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Court rulings reprinted as “Scherbengericht Nr. 3,” Melos 25, no. 3 (March 1957): 105–106. I am indebted to Steffi Kandzia and Beatrix Brockman for their assistance with the legal documents. 62. Ann Goldberg, Honor, Politics, and the Law in Imperial Germany, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 208. In a similar case in Switzerland a lawsuit brought by Alois Melichar was successful, suggesting that the Swiss court was more inclined to protect the dignity and privacy of the plaintiff than the public’s right to know. Heidy Zimmermann, “Neue Musik vor den Schranken des Gerichts: Alois Melichar und seine ‘tausendjährige Vergangenheit,’ ” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 9 November 1996. 63. Goldberg, Honor, Politics, and the Law, 207. Goldberg further observes that such laws had historically protected only the upper classes, and “ironically, it was not until the Nazi era that honor, in the egalitarian form of the national Volksgemeinschaft, was fully democratized and inclusive of the entire population, a process continued in an altered, liberal-democratic key after World War Two” (p. 209). 64. James Q. Whitman, “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty,” Yale Law Journal 113, no. 6 (2004): 1161. There were several famous such cases in the postwar period. See also Stefan Gottwald, Das allgemeine Persönlichkeitsrecht: Ein zeitgeschichtliches Erklärungsmodell (Berlin: Verlag Arno Spitz, 1996). 65. The decision of the appellate court reiterates much of the language used in the original verdict. It is reprinted in Melos 25, no. 3 (1957): 105–106. 66. Schnoor, Harmonie und Chaos (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1962), 236–37. 67. Ibid., 174. 68. Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat, 22. 69. In a review of Gary Stark’s Entrepreneurs of Ideology: Neoconservative Publishers in Germany, 1890–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1981), Ian Kershaw described J. F. Lehmann as “the archetypal pan-German racial imperialist, convinced of the need to eradicate ‘foreign’ elements from German culture and looking to a future determined by eugenics and racial biology.” Journal of Modern History 55, no. 2 (1983): 373. Lehmann joined the Nazi party in 1931, and under his leadership the press published extensively on eugenics. See also this anthology, published by the press itself: Sigrid Stäckel, ed., Die “rechte Nation” und ihr Verleger: Politik und Popularisierung im J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1890–1979 (Berlin: Lehmanns, 2002). 70. There is considerably more scholarship dedicated to the phenomenon of literary remigration, such as Stephen Parker, Peter Davies, and Matthews Philpotts, The Modern Restoration: Re-thinking German Literary History, 1930–1960 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004), and Irmela von der Lühe and ClausDieter Krohn, eds., Fremdes Heimatland: Remigration und literarisches Leben nach 1945 (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein, 2005).

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71. Ruth R. Wisse, The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Language and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 5. I am indebted to Allison Schachter on this point.

austria: homecoming via a survivor from warsaw 1. Letter from Schoenberg to Scherchen, 24 February 1951, ASC. 2. Stephen Greenblatt, “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction,” in Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 19. 3. Marita Krauss, Heimkehr in ein fremdes Land: Geschichte der Remigration nach 1945 (Munich: Beck, 2001), 157. 4. Geraldine Rosenfield, “Central Europe: Austria,” American Jewish Year Book (1946–47), 318. 5. Ibid., 319. 6. Moshe Lazar, “Arnold Schoenberg and His Doubles: A Psychodramatic Journey to His Roots,” Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 17, no. 1–2 (1994): 48–54. 7. Cited in ibid., 48. 8. Ibid., 49–50. 9. Letter from Schoenberg to Berg, 16 July 1921, cited in translation in Joseph Auner, ed. A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 159. 10. Cited in Lazar, “Arnold Schoenberg and His Doubles,” 50. 11. Cited in translation in Auner, A Schoenberg Reader, 159. 12. Letter from Schoenberg to Kandinsky, 19 April 1923, cited in translation in ibid., 168. 13. Letter from Schoenberg to Kandinsky, 4 May 1923, cited in translation in ibid., 169. 14. Bruce F. Pauley, “From Splinter Party to Mass Movement: The Austrian Nazi Breakthrough,” German Studies Review 2, no. 1 (1979): 22. 15. Robert S. Wistrich, Austria and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1999), 2. 16. David Art, The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 43. 17. Klaus Eisterer, “Austria under Allied Occupation,” in Austria in the Twentieth Century, ed. Rolf Steininger, Günter Bischof, and Michael Gehler (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 209–10. 18. Oliver Rathkolb, The Paradoxical Republic: Austria, 1945–2005, trans. Otmar Binder et al. (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 3. 19. Wistrich, Austria and the Legacy of the Holocaust, 12. Heidemarie Uhl, “From Victim Myth to Co-responsibility Thesis: Nazi Rule, World War II, and the Holocaust in Austrian Memory,” in The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe, ed. Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 42.

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20. Wistrich, Austria and the Legacy of the Holocaust, 16. 21. For an extraordinary account that traces the phenomenon well into the 1990s, see Heinz P. Wassermann, Naziland Österreich!? Studien zu Antisemitismus, Nation und Nationalsozialismus im öffentlichen Meinungsbild (Innsbruck, Austria: Studien Verlag, 2002). 22. Uncredited, “Central Europe: Austria,” American Jewish Year Book (1953), 324. Regarding the anti-Semitic press, see also Evelyn Adunka, “Antisemitismus in der Zweiten Republik: Ein Überblick anhand einiger ausgewählter Beispiele,” in Antisemitismus in Österreich nach 1945, ed. Heinz P. Wassermann (Innsbruck, Austria: Studien Verlag, 2002), especially 15–16. 23. “Salzburg Nazis Attack Jews, Shout ‘Jews and Americans Get Out’; 30 Jews Injured,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 6 April 1951. 24. The Soviet paper in Vienna reported that antifascist groups had prevented the film from being screened in numerous cities, and Salzburg was the only city in which protests were met with police violence. In standard Soviet parlance this account describes the protesters only as antifascists; there is no mention of Jews. “Harlan-Film in Salzburg unter Polizeischutz aufgeführt,” Österreichische Zeitung, 4 April 1951. For a sophisticated analysis of the sonic element in this film, see Ruth HaCohen, The Music Libel against the Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 343–58. 25. Adunka, “Antisemitismus in der Zweiten Republik,” 20. 26. Uncredited, “Central Europe: Austria,” American Jewish Year Book (1953), 327. 27. On the importance of state culture for jumpstarting postwar life, see chapter 7, “ ‘Alles Walzer . . . ’ The Politics of Art and Culture as the Early Second Republic’s Elixir of Life,” in Rathkolb, Paradoxical Republic, 190–216. 28. The description of the event and some statistics are in Otto Karner, “Kulturpolitische Rahmenbedingungen in Österreich am Beginn der Zweiten Republik,” in Österreichs Neue Musik nach 1945: Karl Schiske, ed. Markus Grassl, Reinhard Kapp, and Eike Rathgeber (Vienna: Böhlau, 2008), 31–32. In March 2013 the Vienna Philharmonic released new findings about its Nazi past that shed considerable light on the denazification process. Oliver Rathkolb, “Notes on the Denazification,” www.wienerphilharmoniker.at/orchestra/history/national-sozialism, consulted 20 October 2013. 29. “Die Wiedergeburt der österreichischen Kultur,” Österreichische Zeitung, 30 April 1945; untitled announcement, Österreichische Zeitung, 20 May 1945. I am grateful to Tim Frieze for his assistance regarding Mahler’s reception in postwar Vienna. 30. Gerhart Scheit and Wilhelm Svoboda, Feindbild Gustav Mahler: Zur antisemitischen Abwehr der Moderne in Österreich (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2002), 128–29. 31. Reinhard Kapp, “Folgen der Emigration, Voraussetzungen der Remigration—Aufführungsgeschichtlich betrachtet,” in “Man kehrt nie zurück, man geht immer nur fort”: Remigration und Musikkultur, ed. Maren Köster and Dörte Schmidt (Munich: Edition text + kritik, 2005), 210.

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32. Scheit and Svoboda, Feindbild Gustav Mahler, 133. 33. I am indebted to Mag. Dr. Irene Suchy of ORF (Austrian Broadcasting), who is organizing the papers of the Austrian Section of the ISCM. She graciously provided copies of uncataloged concert programs, meeting protocols, and other documents pertaining to the role Schoenberg played in that organization. 34. For Seefehlner’s approach to de-Nazification, see his autobiography: Egon Seefehlner, Die Musik meines Lebens: Vom Rechtspraktikanten zum Opernchef in Berlin und Wien (Vienna: Paul Neff Verlag, 1983), 88–89. Some scholars believe he was too quick to absolve performers for their participation in the Nazi apparatus; see Ernst Bruckmüller, Wiederaufbau in Österreich, 1945–1955: Rekonstruktion oder Neubeginn? (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 2006), 152. 35. Letter from Seefehlner to Schoenberg, 2 December 1947, ASC. 36. Letter from Schoenberg to Seefehlner, 10 January 1948, ASC. 37. Letter from Schoenberg to Peter Lafite, 27 March 1946, ASC. 38. Letter from Friedrich Wildgans to Schoenberg, 12 October 1948, ASC. 39. “Schönberg-Uraufführung in Neu-Mexiko,” Die Presse, 4 December 1948. Frederick may have submitted this report himself. The clipping was found in the Kurt Frederick Papers along with a longer account written on Frederick’s personal stationery and using very similar language. Kurt Frederick Papers 99M-18, Houghton Library, Harvard University. At the time I consulted the Frederick collection it was uncataloged. 40. Recounted in Karner, “Kulturpolitische Rahmenbedingungen in Österreich am Beginn der Zweiten Republik,” in Österreichs Neue Musik, 36. Karner is working from Matejka’s memoirs. Viktor Matejka, Widerstand ist alles: Notizen eines Unorthodoxen (Vienna: Löcker, 1984), 189–200. The text of an acceptance speech Schoenberg delivered in Los Angeles to mark this occasion, entitled “Honorary Citizenship of Vienna,” is reprinted in Style and Idea, 29–30. 41. Karner, “Kulturpolitische Rahmenbedingungen,” in Österreichs Neue Musik, 36. 42. Letter from Apostel to Schoenberg, 6 November 1949, ASC. 43. Ibid., 3 May 1950, ASC. 44. Ibid. 45. Gottfried Scholz, ed., Dodekaphonie in Österreich nach 1945 (Vienna: VWGÖ, 1988). 46. Letter from Apostel to Schoenberg, 26 February 1950, ASC; letter from Apostel to Schoenberg, 3 May 1950, ASC. I am grateful to Stephen Hinton, Michael Stoeltzner, and Nicholas Vazsonyi for their help with the “Blockflöte” reference. 47. Ernst Krenek, Über neue Musik (Vienna: Verlag der Ringbuchhandlung, 1937); Theodor Adorno, “What National Socialism Has Done to the Arts (1945),” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 382.

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Notes for Pages 53 – 55

48. Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 54. 49. Letter from Schoenberg to Apostel, 19 April 1950, ASC; letter from Schoenberg to Hans Rosbaud, 22 September 1948, ASC. I am indebted to Danny Jenkins for the latter. 50. Seefehlner, Die Musik meines Lebens, 98. The inside cover of Seefehlner’s memoir is an autographed copy of the first page of Hindemith’s Sonata for Double Bass and Piano, inscribed to him. 51. Erwin Barta, Das Wiener Konzerthaus zwischen 1945 und 1961: Eine Vereinsgeschichtliche und musikwirtschaftliche Studie (Tutzing, Germany: Hans Schneider, 2001), 219. 52. Cited in Claudia Maurer-Zenck, Ernst Krenek—Ein Komponist im Exil (Vienna: Lafite, 1980), 264. 53. Gertraud Cerha, “Zur Musikszene nach 1945,” in Wiener Musikgeschichte: Annäherungen-Analyse-Ausblicke: Festschrift für Hartmut Krones, ed. Julia Bungardt and Hartmut Krones (Vienna: Böhlau, 2009), 673. Regarding the general state of dodecaphony in Vienna at this time, see Scholz, Dodekaphonie in Österreich nach 1945; Grassl, Kapp, and Rathgeber, eds., Österreichs Neue Musik nach 1945. 54. H. R., “Aus der Zeit: Zum Programm des IV: Internationalen Musikfestes in Wien,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 1 (1951): 27–28. Seefehlner expressed similar opinions in other festival publicity as well. See “Wien lädt zu neuer Musik: Gespräch mit Dr. Egon Seefehlner, dem Organisator des 4. Internationalen Musikfestes,” Neue Wiener Tageszeitung, 31 January 1951. 55. Friedrich Saathen, “Arnold Schönberg, ein Buch und Mr. Dean,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 3 (1951): 83–88; Josef Rufer, “Die Zwölftonreihe: Träger einer neuen Tonalität,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 6–7 (1951): 178–82. 56. Letter from Apostel to Schoenberg, 14 January 1951, ASC. 57. Letter from Schoenberg to Scherchen, 30 January 1951, ASC. 58. Letter from Scherchen to Schoenberg, 10 February 1951, ASC. 59. Letter from Seefehlner to Schoenberg, 2 March 1951, ASC. 60. Scherchen referred to three separate Italian performances in his letters to Schoenberg: Venice (letter of 30 September 1950); Genoa (letter of 2 March 1951); and Rome (letter of 4 April 1951). 61. Letter from Schoenberg to Margaret Tietz, 3 January 1949, ASC. 62. Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw (Long Island City, NY: Bomart Music Publications, 1949). 63. Letter from Schoenberg to Margaret Tietz, 22 October 1949, ASC. 64. Skoda (1909–61) was a beloved star of stage and screen well-known for “The Famous Voice,” evenings at which he recited beloved German ballads. He was also active in the theater division of the Österreich-Sowjetische Gesellschaft (Austrian-Soviet Society), responsible for promoting pro-Soviet cultural politics during the occupation. I am indebted to Dr. Lydia Gröbl of the Österreichisches Theatermuseum for her assistance.

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65. Letter from Winter to Schoenberg, 30 April 1951, ASC. 66. Hanns von Winter, “Man spricht wieder von der ‘Wiener Schule,’ ” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift (July-August 1950), 157. 67. I am indebted to Andrea Weatherman for her astute analysis and comparison of these texts and to Dietmar Friesenegger and Gregory Weeks for their insights into Winter’s translation. 68. A recording of this performance from Radio Bremen is available on RCA’s six-disc set Musik in Deutschland, 1950–2000, vol. 1, track 1. 69. I am indebted to Gregory Weeks for his assistance with German and Austrian military terminology. 70. Enclosure in a letter from Winter to Schoenberg, dated 30 April 1951, ASC. This version does not include the word Gaskammer either. There are several other, mostly minor differences between the version printed in the program and the one Winter sent the composer. 71. Bundesarchiv, Sammlung BDC, NSDAP-Mitgliederkarteikarte Winter, Hanns von, geb. 18.07.1897. I am greatly indebted to Gregory Weeks and Evan Burr Burkey for assistance with the Hanns von Winter matter. 72. Winter’s RuSHA file, NARA BDC microfilm A3343-RS-G5272, frames 1336–62. 73. Michael Beddow, Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 103. 74. This anecdote is recounted in Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 36. 75. As quoted in Beddow, Thomas Mann, 99. 76. Winter, “Man spricht wieder.” 77. Ernst Fischer, Kunst und Menschheit: Essays (Vienna: Globus-Verlag, 1949), 37–97. The connection between Faust and the German Misere, or catastrophe, was a favorite trope among communist writers. In it, Germany’s traditional Sonderweg (special path) is recast in a negative light, tracing the rise of fascism to the fact that Germany never experienced a genuine social revolution. Fischer also wrote on this theme in “Goethe und die deutsche Misere,” Aufbau 5, no. 8 (1949): 676–90; and in “Doktor Faustus und der deutsche Bauernkrieg,” Sinn und Form 4, no. 6 (1952): 59–73. The latter was a review of a libretto Hanns Eisler had written about Faust. Fischer’s analysis had dire consequences for Eisler when it triggered a firestorm of controversy among GDR cultural apparatchiks. Fischer married Eisler’s second ex-wife, Louise, in 1955. 78. Beddow, Thomas Mann, 102. 79. These examples are cited in Björn Laser, Kulturbolschewismus! Zur Diskurssemantik der “totalen Krise” 1929–1933 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010), 82. His analysis is primarily based on Eckhard John, Musikbolschewismus: die Politisierung der Musik in Deutschland, 1918–1938 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1994). 80. HaCohen, Music Libel against the Jews, 127–28. 81. Scheit and Svoboda, Feindbild Gustav Mahler, 163–65. Examples of those who did not even attempt to code their language include Erhard Preussner,

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Notes for Pages 60 – 64

Musikgeschichte des Abendlandes (1951) and Max Graf, Geschichte und Geist der modernen Musik (1953). Others adapted the new politically correct language to the same anti-Semitic content; see Hans Joachim Moser, Musikgeschichte in hundert Lebensbildern (1952). 82. P. L., “Gestern beim Musikfest: Pioniere von gestern—heute Meister: Hermann Scherchen dirigerte die Wiener Symphoniker,” Wiener Kurier, 11 April 1951. 83. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe: With Plain Prose Translations of Each Poem, ed. David Luke (New York: Penguin Books, 1964), 355. 84. Arnold Schoenberg, “Gustav Mahler,” in Style and Idea, ed. Dika Newlin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 33. Ruth HaCohen argues that Schoenberg attempted to transcend sexual categories, including that of the eternal feminine, in Die Jakobsleiter. HaCohen, Music Libel against the Jews, 295. 85. N. B., “I. V. Internationales Musikfest: Zwölftonwerke beim Musikfest,” Weltpresse Wien, 11 April 1951. 86. Sabine Feisst, Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 87. Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War, trans. Diana M. Wolf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 1994). Regarding the deployment of American music of all types in this agenda, see especially 193–221. 88. Hans E. Wind, Die Endkrise der bürgerlichen Musik und die Rolle Arnold Schönbergs (Vienna: Krystall-Verlag, 1935). Blaukopf published under both names in the postwar period, sometimes in the same publication. See for example the first three issues of Erbe und Zukunft (1946–47), a cultural journal published in Vienna between 1946 and 1948. I am grateful to Michael Stoeltzner and Anne Searcy for assistance pertaining to Blaukopf. 89. Kurt Blaukopf, “Ein Überlebender von Warschau: Scherchen leitete Schönbergs Werk für Sprecher, Chor und Orchester,” Der Abend, 11 April 1951. 90. Marcel Rubin, “Ein Überlebender von Warschau,” Österreichische Volksstimme, 14 April 1951. 91. Roland Tenschert, “Im IV: Internationalen Musikfest hörten wir: Zwölftonmusik unter Scherchen,” Wiener Tageszeitung, 12 April 1951. Tenschert was the only critic to note the effect of following A Survivor with four sacred choral pieces. The Norwegian case study in 1954 is the only known instance in which A Survivor is featured on a concert designed to serve an overtly quasi-religious, liturgical function. 92. H. K. L., “Internationales Musikfest—Viertes Chor-Orchesterkonzert,” Neues Österreich, 13 April 1951. 93. H. A. Feichtner, “Ausklang des IV. Internationalen Musikfest,” Die Furche, 14 April 1951. 94. L. N., “Weder international noch festlich . . . Schlußbilanz des Wiener Internationalen Musikfestes,” Österreichische Zeitung, 21 April 1951. I am grateful to Dietmar Friesenegger for research assistance with this newspaper.

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95. I am grateful to Katie Strobel for research assistance in Vienna regarding the Jewish press. 96. This operation was such a spectacular failure that Sammern-Frankenegg was court-martialed for “defending Jews” and replaced with Jürgen Stroop, the man who would complete the mission.

norway: performing remembrance with a survivor from warsaw 1. Jan Maegaard, “Schönberg in Kopenhagen: Schönberg-Rezeption in Dänemark bis zum II. Weltkrieg,” Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 51, nos. 6–7 (1996): 411–24. Danish music took a turn for the conservative in the mid-1930s, however, and Schoenberg was not performed in Copenhagen again until after the war. Michael Fjeldsøe, “Mellemkrigstidens fortrængte modernisme,” Dansk musik tidsskrift 73, no. 7 (1998–99): 218–27. 2. J. Chr. Bisgaard, Fra musikkens verden: nogen moderne kunstnerportretter (Oslo: n.p., 1929). 3. Nils Grinde, “Olav Gurvin—Elaboration” Norsk biografisk leksikon. http://snl.no/.nbl_biografi/Olav_Gurvin/utdypning, accessed 20 July 2012. I am grateful to Astrid Kvalbein for alerting me to Gurvin’s dissertation. 4. I am grateful to Arnulf Mattes for his guidance concerning Schoenberg’s reputation and reception in Norway and for information regarding Fartein Valen. 5. Arvid O. Vollsnes, Norges Musikkhistorie 5. Modernisme og mangfold: 1950–2000 (Oslo: Aschehoug, 2001), 109. 6. Harald Herresthal and Morten Eide Pedersen, “New Music in Norway,” in New Music of the Nordic Countries, ed. John D. White (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2002), 392. 7. Nils Grinde, A History of Norwegian Music (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 288. 8. Kjell Müller Skyllstad, “Der Komponist als Bürgerschreck: Der Anbruch der Moderne als Provokation: Beispiel Norwegen,” in Provokacija v glasbi/ Provokation in der Musik, ed. Primož Kuret (Ljubljana: Festival Ljubljana, 1994), 163–67. 9. Daniel J. Elazar, Adina Weiss Liberles, and Simcha Werner, The Jewish Communities of Scandinavia: Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 118. 10. Statistics from www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/ killedtable.html, accessed 1 April 2012. 11. Bjarte Bruland, “Norway’s Role in the Holocaust: The Destruction of Norway’s Jews,” in The Routledge History of the Holocaust, ed. Jonathan C. Friedman (Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2011), 232. Similar statistics are cited in Bob Moore, Survivors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 71. 12. Bruland, “Norway’s Role in the Holocaust,” 243.

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Notes for Pages 69 – 73

13. Samuel Abrahamsen, Norway’s Response to the Holocaust: A Historical Perspective (New York: Holocaust Library, 1990), 153. The program is at the Oslo Jewish Museum, ref. nr. JMO D00086. I am indebted to Sidsel Levin, director of the Oslo Jewish Museum, for her assistance. 14. Photographs of the 1947 dedication service and of the memorial itself accessed 1 August 2012, http://memorialmuseums.eu/eng/staettens/view/141/ memorial-to-the-murdered-jews-of-trondheim-and-northern-norway. 15. Photographs of the 1948 dedication service and of the memorial itself accessed 1 August 2012, http://memorialmuseums.eu/denkmaeler/view/638/ Memorial-to-the-Victims-of-the-Holocaust-in-Norway,-Helsfyr-JewishCemetery. 16. Www.holocausttaskforce.org/membercountries/member-norway.html, accessed 1 August 2012. 17. Bruland’s most important works in English are the previously cited “Norway’s Role in the Holocaust”; “Collaboration in the Deportation of Norway’s Jews: Changing Views and Representations,” in Collaboration with the Nazis: Public Discourse after the Holocaust, ed. Roni Stauber (Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2011), 125–37; and, with Mats Tangestuen, “The Norwegian Holocaust: Changing Views and Representations,” Scandinavian Journal of History 36, no. 5 (2011): 587–604. 18. Samuel Abrahamsen, “The Relationship of Church and State”; Abrahamsen, Norway’s Response to the Holocaust; Abrahamsen, “The Holocaust in Norway”; Oskar Mendelsohn, The Persecution of the Norwegian Jews in WWII (Oslo: Norges Hjemmefrontmuseum, 1991). 19. Moore, Survivors, 79. 20. I am enormously grateful to Astrid Kvalbein for her help and guidance regarding Pauline Hall and Caro Olden. Her published dissertation is the first book-length study of Hall. Astrid Kvalbein, Musikalsk modernisering: Pauline Hall (1890–1969) som komponist, teatermenneske og Ny Musikk-leiar (Oslo: Norges Musikkhøgskole, 2013). 21. Http://snl.no/.nbl_biografi/Pauline_Hall/utdypning, accessed 20 August 2012. 22. Pauline Hall, “Operabrev fra Berlin,” Dagbladet, 8 January 1927. 23. Pauline Hall, “Nazi-terror mot Berlins jøder,” Dagbladet, 15 October 1930. 24. Elef Nesheim, Et musikkliv i krig: konserten som politisk arena, Norge 1940–1945 (Oslo: Norsk Musikforlag, 2007), 73. 25. Ibid., 75. The Germans removed other music critics during the occupation as well, including Reidar Mjøen of Aftenposten. Hans Jørgen Hurum was music critic for Norges Handels- og Sjøfartstidende from 1932 to 1939 and then resumed that work for Aftenposten in 1946. It is not clear if he left the first position under pressure from the NS, although the timing of his return to the profession suggests political factors. 26. Pauline Hall, “Norsk musikliv under okkupasjonen,” Dansk Musik Tidsskrift 20, no. 7 (1945). http://dvm.nu/periodical/dmt/dmt_1945/

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dmt_1945_07/norsk-musikliv-under-okkupasjonen/, accessed 7 September 2012. 27. Olden was arrested on 12 May 1943, taken to Grini the next day, and released a year later, on 15 May 1944. She was prisoner 7664. Børre R. Giertsen, ed., Norsk Fangeleksikon: Grinifangene (Oslo: J. W. Cappelens Forlag, 1946), 277. I am grateful to Else-Beth Roalsø for her help with Olden, and to Astrid Kvalbein for identifying Olden’s Grini records. 28. Hall, “Norsk musikliv under okkupasjonen,” 119–21, http://dvm.nu/ periodical/dmt/dmt_1945/dmt_1945_07/norsk-musikliv-under-okkupasjonen/, accessed 7 September 2012. 29. The first book published about Norwegian musical life during wartime mistakenly gives the date of the concert as February rather than January 1941; Hans Jørgen Hurum, Musikken under okkupasjonen 1940–1945 (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1946), 60–63. The account given by Fasting in his history of the Bergen ensemble provides more detail and asserts that most audience members were opposed to the demonstration; Kåre Fasting, Musikselskabet “Harmonien” gejnnom to hundre år 1765–1965. (Bergen: J. Griegs boktrykkei, 1965), 15–17. This event is also recounted in Samuel Abrahamsen, Norway’s Response to the Holocaust: A Historical Perspective (New York: Holocaust Library, 1990), 82; Samuel Abrahamsen, “The Holocaust in Norway,” in Contemporary Views on the Holocaust, ed. Randolph L. Braham (Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff, 1983), 121–22. 30. Http://snl.no/.nbl_biografi/Pauline_Hall/utdypning, accessed 20 August 2012. 31. For more on this event, see the chapter on Austria. 32. Pauline Hall, “Fra Schønberg til Verdi: Fra vår utsendte medarbeider Pauline Hall,” Dagbladet, 28 April 1951. 33. Letter from Benjamin Frankel to the International Jury on behalf of the Committee of Direction, 17 December 1952. Riksarkivet (National Archives of Norway; hereafter RA) Arkivskaper PA—1445 Ny Musik. Da—Korrespondence, Kronologisk L0001 ASTA/001/1/1, 0001 (1938–1952). 34. Letter from Elliott Carter to Hall dated 10 December 1952. RA Arkivskaper PA—1445 Ny Musik. Da—Korrespondence, Kronologisk L0001 ASTA/001/1/1, 0001 (1938–1952). 35. RA Arkivskaper PA—1445 Ny Musik. Da—Korrespondence, Kronologisk L0001 ASTA/001/1/1, 0002 (1953–54). 36. Pauline Hall, 25 år Ny Musikk (Oslo: Ny Musikk, 1963), 37. 37. RA Arkivskaper PA—1445 Ny Musik. Ad—Arbeidsutvalg/-styre/ Landsstyreutvalget L0001 ASTA/001/1/2, 001 (1955). 38. Pauline Hall, “Praktfull konsert i Filharmonien: Heinz Freudenthal som gjest,” Dagbladet, 21 March 1953. 39. Heinz Freudenthal, “Dichtheit und Wahrung: Mein Lauf durchs Leben” (Center for Jewish History, 1975–78), 80. 40. Ibid., 159. 41. E. G. Lowenthal, “Jüdische Musik—‘verkleinerte Ausgabe’? Notwendige Ergänzung einer Rundfunksendung,” Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in

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Notes for Pages 78 – 80

Deutschland, 6 July 1956. The paper reported on his guest conducting appearances in Germany as well; see Claus-Henning Bachmann, “Ein Dirigent der alten Schule: Heinz Freudenthal in Deutschland—Haydn-Neuerwerbung durch israelitischen Bearbeiter,” Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, 14 February 1958. 42. I thank research assistant Inbal Prag for information about the concerts in Israel. Prag produced a list of Freudenthal’s repertoire based on the program collections for the Kol Israel Symphony Orchestra and the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra held at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. 43. Freudenthal, “Dichtheit und Wahrung,” 202–203. 44. Ibid., 160. 45. W. Z. Laqueur, “Israel,” American Jewish Year Book 56 (1955): 485. Performers included the Kol Israel Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble of Israel’s national radio, and the choir from radio station Kol Zion Lagola (“The Voice of Zion to the Diaspora”). 46. In an interview published in advance of the March 1954 concert, the conductor stated that this would be his first time performing the work. Erle Bryn, “Freudenthal dirigerer Schönbergs siste komposisjon—og Milhauds kjæreste,” Dagbladet, 16 March 1954. I am grateful to Else-Beth Roalsø for her help navigating the Norwegian press scene generally and for identifying the abbreviated byline “Erle” as belonging to Erle Bryn. 47. Email from Peter Freudenthal to the author, 18 July 2008. He thought some of them may have survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In an email to the author on 13 August 2012, Rolf Jonsson of the Norköpings stadsarkiv confirmed that Polish Jews from Łódz´, Warsaw, and Be˛dzin settled in Norrköping; some records give only country, not city, of origin. There is no way to tell from extant records if any of them had survived the Warsaw Ghetto. 48. Freudenthal, “Dichtheit und Wahrung,” 194–96. His agency assisted many refugees during the war and DPs afterward. This passage probably refers to a camp in nearby Doverstorp, Finspång, where over two thousand Polish women stayed until February 1946. Email from Rolf Jonsson of the Norköpings stadsarkiv to the author, dated 13 August 2012. 49. Email from Peter Freudenthal to the author, 18 July 2008. 50. ASC GSC, correspondence with Bomart Music Publications. A statement from Boelke-Bomart dated 19 November 1956 includes a list entitled “Royalties for rental fees collected from German [sic] performances.” The Filharmonisk Selskaps Orkester in Oslo is the only rental of A Survivor listed for the year 1953. 51. Bryn, “Freudenthal dirigerer Schönbergs siste komposisjon—og Milhauds kjæreste,” Dagbladet, 16 March 1954. The article contains some errors beginning with the title, which identifies A Survivor as Schoenberg’s last work; Freudenthal is also quoted as saying that the Oslo performance would be the European premiere. 52. Account received via email from Sidsel Levin, Solveig Levin’s daughter and director of the Oslo Jewish Museum, to the author, 29 April 2012.

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53. Pauline Hall, “En overlevende fra Warszawa: Arnold Schönberg. Oversatt av Pauline Hall,” Dagbladet, 20 March 1954. 54. Klára Móricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 170–71. 55. Darius Milhaud, Centenaire de Darius Milhaud: Service Sacré pour le Samedi Matin (chanté en Hebreu) (Accord AAD 201892, [1958] 1991). 56. Sabine Feisst, Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 106–107. Feisst cites David M. Schiller, Bloch, Schoenberg, Bernstein: Assimilating Jewish Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 125. 57. Letter from Schoenberg to Kurt List, 1 November 1948, published in Nuria Schoenberg Nono, ed., Arnold Schoenberg Self-Portrait: A Collection of Articles, Program Notes, and Letters by the Composer about His Own Works (Pacific Palisades, CA: Belmont Music Publishers, 1988), 105. 58. David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (London: Harvard University Press, 1984), 48. Cited in Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 68. 59. Pauline Hall, “Heinz Freudenthal i Filharmonien: Schönberg— Milhaud,” Dagbladet, 22 March 1954. 60. Klaus Egge, “Arnold Schønberg og Darius Milhaud,” Arbeiderbladet, 22 March 1954. 61. Finn Benestad, “Schønberg og Milhaud i Filharmonien,” Verdens Gang, 22 March 1954. 62. Dag Winding Sørensen, “Schønberg og Milhaud,” Aftenposten, 22 March 1954. 63. Børre Qvamme, “Jødisk musikk i Aulaen,” Morgenbladet, 23 March 1954. 64. Ibid.

east germany: antifascism and a survivor from warsaw 1. Wes Blomster, “The Reception of Arnold Schoenberg in the German Democratic Republic,” Perspectives of New Music 21, nos. 1–2 (1982–83): 124. For a study of how the controversy surrounding Schoenberg, dodecaphony, and modernist compositional techniques played out for East German composers, albeit mostly in the 1960s, see Laura Silverberg, “Between Dissonance and Dissidence: Socialist Modernism in the German Democratic Republic,” Journal of Musicology 26, no. 1 (2009): 44–84. 2. Heinz Alfred Brockhaus and Konrad Niemann, Musikgeschichte der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1946–1976 (Berlin: Verlag Neue Musik, 1979), 145–46. 3. Biography in K. J. Kutsch and Leo Riemens, ed., Großes Sängerlexikon 1: Band A-L (Berlin: K. G. Sauer Verlag, 1993), column 1777. Paul Dessau et al.,

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Die Verurteilung des Lukullus: Oper in 12 Szenen, (n.p.: Telefunken 6.48104., 1966). 4. What is not obvious from the program notes or the reviews, however, is that both works have endings that could be construed ambiguously. A Survivor ends with men defiantly singing the Sh’ma, yet they are about to be executed. The last movement of Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony is a raucous march in competing keys of G major and G minor that ends in a unison G—not as if the forces have come together in peace, but as though neither side has emerged victorious, as was the case in the 1905 revolution. 5. Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv (hereafter DRA) E 085–00–05/0003. I am grateful to Dr. Jörg-Uwe Fischer of the DRA for his assistance. 6. Horst Seeger, Musiklexikon in zwei Bänden (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1966), 2:129. Müller was subjected to the Berufsverbot in 1933 (ban on employment), but it is not clear if this was because he was Jewish or because he was politically unreliable. 7. Program from the MDR Chor-Archiv. I am grateful to Rüdiger Koch, choir historian and member of the MDR Radio Choir, for his assistance. 8. A report to the secretariat of the Central Committee dated 20 July 1956 indicated that “despite all efforts the conductor situation in the GDR remains very difficult,” and several large ensembles were without permanent conductors at that time. Officials needed to develop domestic talent because they had been stung by “the Kleiber case” and were reluctant to court any more conductors abroad. Erich Kleiber had resumed his former post at the Berliner Staatsoper in 1954 but resigned a year later without having conducted any performances. Bundesarchiv (hereafter BArch) DY 30—IV 2/2.026/107 (SAPMO SED ZK Büro Alfred Kurella), 4. 9. Helga Kuschmitz, Herbert Kegel: Legende ohne Tabu. Ein Dirigentenleben im 20. Jahrhundert (Altenburg, Germany: Verlag Klaus-Jürgen Kamprad, 2003), 23. Details about Kegel’s military service are scarce. 10. “Deutschlands jüngster Generalmusikdirektor,” Unser Rundfunk 13, no. 51 (1958): 7. Kegel’s first son, Uwe Hassbecker (b. 1960), is a member of the East German rock band Silly; his second, Björn Casapietra (b. 1970), is a pop singer and entertainer. 11. Peter J. Schmelz demonstrates the significance of these networks for the Soviet Union in his book Such Freedom, if Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 12. Kegel interview with Gitta Nickel on 18 June 1974. Paul-Dessau-Archiv of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin (hereafter PDA) 31.74.245. I am grateful to archivist Daniela Reinhold for her help in identifying this source. 13. Quoted in Kuschmitz, Herbert Kegel, 54. 14. Peter Petersen, “In Paris begonnen, in New York vollendet, in Berlin verlegt: ‘Les Voix’ von Paul Dessau,” in Musik im Exil: Folgen des Nazismus für die internationale Musikkultur, ed. Hanns-Werner Heister, Claudia Maurer Zenck, and Peter Petersen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993), 438.

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15. PDA 1.74.1421. Arnold Schönberg, A Survivor of Warsaw [sic] Lichtdr. (d. Abschr.v. R. Leibowitz). 16. Jüdische Chronik is a cantata with libretto by Jens Gerlach and musical contributions from GDR composers Dessau and Rudolf Wagner-Règeny as well as West Germans Boris Blacher, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, and Hans Werner Henze. Regarding its connection to A Survivor, see Joy H. Calico, “Jüdische Chronik: The Third Space of Commemoration between East and West Germany,” Musical Quarterly 88, no. 1 (2005): 95–122. 17. Email from Fritz Hennenberg to the author, 20 May 2009. 18. Kuschmitz, Legende ohne Tabu, 59. 19. Cited in Peggy Klemke, Taktgeber oder Tabuisierte—Komponisten in der DDR: Staatliche Kulturpolitik in den fünfziger Jahren (Marburg, Germany: Tectum Verlag, 2007), 192–93. SAPMO-BArch DY 30/IV 2/9.06/282 (Akte), S. 233–71. Kongress des VDK vom 23.-31.10.1954 in Leipzig. 20. Werner Wolf, “Aus dem Musikleben von Leipzig,” Musik und Gesellschaft 8, no. 5 (1958): 51–52. 21. Lars Klingberg, “Die Debatte um Eisler und die Zwölftontechnik in der DDR in den 1960er Jahren,” in Zwischen Macht und Freiheit: Neue Musik in der DDR, ed. Michael Berg, Albrecht von Massow, and Nina Noeske (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), 39–61. 22. Email from Werner Wolf, former student of Hellmuth Wolff’s, to the author, 17 May 2009. 23. Email from Fritz Hennenberg to the author, 20 May 2009. Hellmuth Christian Wolff was relieved of his professorship in 1967 for attempting to publish criticism of the regime. Lars Klingberg, “Internationale Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft und DDR,” Acta Musicologica 58, no. 2 (1996): 136. 24. This account emerged in an interview conducted in Leipzig on 14 May 2009 with Werner Wolf, former music critic of the Leipziger Volkszeitung; current and former members of the MDR Choir Horst-Dieter Knorrn, Siegfried Müller and Bettina Reinke-Welsh; and Helga Kuschmitz, producer and program director. I am grateful to them and to Bernd-Michael Gräfe for his generosity in arranging the interview—just one of the many kind ways he assisted me in Leipzig. Heyer’s Nachlass is housed at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Leipzig. I thank Dr. Barbara Wiermann of the Hochschule’s library and archive for her assistance with that collection. 25. Reginald Rudorf, Jazz in der Zone (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1964), 58. Regarding Rudorf, see Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 137–67. 26. BArch DR 1/8223 (Ministerium für Kultur, Sekretariat des Ministers Johannes R. Becher) Arbeitspläne der Abteilungen des Ministeriums für Kultur, December 1957–August 1958. 27. Interview with Kuschmitz, Knorrn, Müller, and Reinke-Walsh, 14 May 2009.

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28. Sander’s biography taken from Steffen Held, “Werner Sander,” in Einst und jetzt: zur Geschichte der Dresdner Synagoge und ihrer Gemeinde, ed. Nora Goldenbogen and Heinz-Joachim Aris (Dresden: Ddp Goldenbogen, 2001), 170–71. 29. Steffen Held, Zwischen Tradition und Vermächtnis: Die Israelitische Religionsgemeinde zu Leipzig nach 1945 (Hamburg: Dölling and Galitz Verlag, 1995), 43. 30. Interview with Knorrn and Müller, 14 May 2009. There is no documentation of this at the Gemeinde, although records for the 1950s are quite spotty in general. 31. Held, Zwischen Tradition und Vermächtnis, 73. Statistics in various sources differ slightly, but by any count the population was minuscule. See also Siegfried Hollitzer, “Die Juden in der DDR und ihr Verhältnis zu Staat wie Kirche,” in Judaica Lipsiensia: zur Geschichte der Juden in Leipzig, ed. Manfred Unger (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1994), 223; Lothar Mertens, Davidstern unter Hammer und Zirkel: Die jüdischen Gemeinden in der SBZ/DDR und ihre Behandlung durch Partei und Staat 1945–1990 (Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag, 1997), 29; and Mike Dennis and Norman LaPorte, State and Minorities in Communist East Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 28–60. Regarding Leipzig IRG leadership in the early postwar period, see chapters 4–6 in Robert Allen Willingham, “Jews in Leipzig: Nationality and Community in the 20th Century” (PhD diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2005). 32. M. Rainer Lepsius, “Das Erbe des Nationalsozialismus und die politische Kultur der Nachfolgestaaten des ‘Großdeutschen Reiches,’ ” in Demokratie in Deutschland: Soziologisch-historische Konstellationsanalysen. Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 229–245. 33. Wörterbuch der Geschichte, A–K (East Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1984), 290. Cited in translation in Jan Herman Brinks, “Political Anti-fascism in the German Democratic Republic,” Journal of Contemporary History 32, no. 2 (1997): 209. 34. Thomas C. Fox, “The Holocaust under Communism,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 422. I am grateful to Dan Stone for his assistance. 35. Christiaan F. Rüter et al., eds., DDR-Justiz und NS-Verbrechen: Sammlung ostdeutscher Strafurteile wegen nationalsozialistischer Tötungsverbrechen, 16 vols. (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2002–10). I am grateful to Will Rall for his assistance on this matter. 36. Bernard Mark, Der Aufstand im Warschauer Ghetto (East Berlin: Dietz, 1957). 37. Jeffrey Herf, introduction to Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective: Convergence and Divergence, ed. Herf (London: Routledge, 2007), xv–xvi; Jay Howard Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sigrid Meuschel, Legitimation und Parteiherrschaft in der DDR (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992); Mario

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Kessler, Die SED und die Juden—Zwischen Repression und Toleranz (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995); Thomas Haury, Antisemitismus von links: Kommunistische Ideologie, Nationalismus und Antizionismus in der frühen DDR (Hamburg: Hamburg Edition, 2002); Angelika Timm, Jewish Claims against East Germany: Moral Obligations and Pragmatic Policy (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1997). 38. Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Geller, Jews in PostHolocaust Germany; Timm, Jewish Claims against East Germany, 62–63 and 64. Timm summarizes these arguments in “Ideology and Realpolitik: East German Attitudes toward Zionism and Israel,” in Anti-Semitism and AntiZionism in Historical Perspective: Convergence and Divergence, ed. Jeffrey Herf (London: Routledge, 2007), 186–205. 39. Cited in Hans-Jürgen Nagel, “Musik und Politik: Paul Dessau und Hanns Eisler,” in Zwischen Politik und Kultur—Juden in der DDR, ed. Moshe Zuckermann (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein Verlag, 2003), 230. 40. Mertens, Davidstern unter Hammer und Zirkel, 22. 41. Hollitzer, “Die Juden in der DDR,” 217. 42. Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 161. 43. Olaf Groehler, “Integration und Ausgrenzung von NS-Opfern: Zur Anerkennungs- und Entschädigungsdebatte in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone Deutschlands 1945 bis 1949,” in Historische DDR-Forschung: Aufsätze und Studien, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993), 105–27. 44. Ibid., 100. 45. Regarding the communities and political organizing in the early years, see Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, chapters 3 and 5. 46. Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge, England: Polity, 1999), 65. Fulbrook’s statement concerns restitution in West Germany, but it is no less apt for the GDR. 47. Timm, Jewish Claims against East Germany, 68–69. 48. Ibid., 69. 49. Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 122. 50. David Pike, The Politics of Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945– 1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 572n117. 51. Esther Ludwig, “Die Auswirkungen des Prager Slansky-Prozesses auf die Leipziger Juden 1952/53,” in Judaica Lipsiensia, ed. Manfred Unger (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1994), 234. About five hundred fled in total, but since the Berlin community was not part of the GDR Association at that time, their exodus is not included in these data. 52. Yiddish appears to have signified as folk rather than Jewish. Rebling and Jaldati had been performing Yiddish folksongs publicly in the GDR since their arrival in 1952, sometimes at official functions. In their autobiography they tell a story of receiving an invitation to perform a concert of Yiddish songs at the party school in Kleinmachow, only to be uninvited once the host realized that Jaldati was actually Jewish. In 1966 they published a Yiddish songbook and

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released an album. Lin Jaldati and Eberhard Rebling, Sag nie, du gehst den letzten Weg: Lebenserinnerungen 1911 bis 1988 (Marburg, Germany: BdWi, 1995). 53. Regarding this treatment of Dessau and Eisler, see Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), chapter 4. Dessau and the Eisler brothers were also under scrutiny because they had spent the war years in the United States rather than in the USSR with SED leadership. 54. Verband der Komponisten und Musikwissenschaftler der DDR, Tagung des Zentralvorstands 87, Sitzung des Zentralvorstandes in Weimar 10 April 1958. VKM, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (hereafter AdK VKM). 55. Korrespondenz mit Bezirksverbänden über internationale Beziehungen 1955–59, AdK VKM 157. 56. Herf, Divided Memory, 177–78. 57. Ibid., 178. 58. Eine Tagebuch für Anne Frank was directed by Joachim Hellwig, produced in late 1958, and released early the following year. For more on the film as well as the program Jaldati produced about Frank much later, see Sylke Kirschnick, Anne Frank und die DDR: Politische Deutungen und persönliche Lesarten des berühmten Tagebuchs (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2009). Kirschnick calls the documentary “agitprop.” 59. Kegel was also nominally a member of the VKM. That organization wielded very little power over performers, although it was of vital importance for careers in composition and musicology since it reported to the music division of the Ministry of Culture. For a thorough explanation of SED bureaucracy, see Heike Amos, Politik und Organisation der SED-Zentrale 1949–1963: Struktur und Arbeitsweise von Politbüro, Sekretariat, Zentralkomitee und ZK-Apparat (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2003). 60. Konrad Dussel, Deutsche Rundfunkgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2004), 140–41. 61. Horst Fliegel worked with them from 1973 as chair of the Music Division (previously the Committee for Music Affairs) and reports that at that time Kegel had quite a bit of artistic latitude in programming and Spielhaus never had reason to interfere, suggesting that they shared a common vision for the LRSO. Email from Fliegel to the author, dated 31 March 2010. 62. BArch DR 6/261 (Staatliches Komitee für Rundfunk [Staatliches Rundfunkkomitee; hereafter SRK], Korrespondenz mit KfMF 1953–58), Protokoll der 4. Arbeitsbesprechung am 27.1.1958. Kegel and the ensemble made the recording the week after the concert, but it was not released at that time. 63. Gerhard Walther, Der Rundfunk in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone Deutschlands (Bonn: Bundesministerium für gesamtdeutsche Fragen, 1961), 167. Walther also includes a helpful bureaucratic flow chart on p. 215. 64. Konrad Dussel, Deutsche Rundfunkgeschichte: Eine Einführung (Konstanz, Germany: UVK Medien, 1999), 135.

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65. Walther, Der Rundfunk, 175. 66. Ibid., 187. 67. Karl Laux, Das Musikleben in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republic (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1963), 344–45. 68. Gary Bruce, The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 12. 69. Ibid., 9. Charles Maier described the regime as a manipulative dispenser and withholder of benefits in a keynote address delivered at the conference “The Fall of the Wall Reconsidered,” held at Northwestern University on 23–24 October 2009. 70. The best known musicological IM is Heinz Alfred Brockhaus (b. 1930), coauthor of the history of East German musical life cited at the beginning of this chapter. His Stasi work has been documented by Lars Klingberg in “IMS ‘John’ und Schostakowitsch: Zur Stasi-Karriere von Heinz Alfred Brockhaus,” in Dmitri Schostakowitsch: Komponist und Zeitzeuge, ed. Günter Wolter and Ernst Kuhn (Berlin: Ernst Kuhn, 2000), 194–226. See also Jonathan L. Yaeger, “The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in East Germany, 1970–1990” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2013). 71. Bruce, The Firm, 158 and 153, respectively. 72. The Stasi did concern itself with his activities in the 1960s and 1970s. See documents reproduced in Daniel zur Weihen, “ ‘Ich versprach, mein Möglichstes zu tun’: Komponisten im Blick des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit,” in Musik in der DDR: Beiträge zu den Musikverhältnissen eines verschwundenen Staates, ed. Matthias Tischer (Berlin: Verlag Ernst Kuhn, 2005), 276–79. Kegel was also under surveillance in the mid-1980s, when he moved to Dresden to conduct the philharmonic there. Correspondence with the Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (BStU), dated 15 April 2010. 73. I am indebted to Tina Frühauf for this information. 74. Wehnert, “Mozart, Schönberg, Shostakowitsch,” Musica 12, no. 6 (1958): 349–50. 75. Eberhard Creuzburg, identified as “rg,” “Bedeutsame Erstaufführung für Deutschland: Schostakowitschs elfte Symphonie,” Mitteldeutsche Neueste Nachrichten, 17 April 1958. 76. Julius Götz, identified as “Go.,” “Zeitgeschehen in Musik gesetzt: Schönberg und Schostakowitsch im Rundfunkkonzert erstaufgeführt,” Sächsisches Tageblatt (18 April 1958). My thanks to Pamela M. Potter for discussing the significance of these terms with me. 77. Geller, Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 165. That is not to say that the CDU never exhibited anti-Semitism. See Michael Richter, Die Ost-CDU 1948– 1952: Zwischen Widerstand und Gleichschaltung (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1990), 178. 78. Author identified as “ich,” “Kunst und Zeitgeschehen: Schostakowitsch und Schönberg im X. Sinfoniekonzert des Funks,” Die Union, 24 April 1958.

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79. Werner Wolf, “Überwältigende, atemberaubende ‘Elfte,’ ” Leipziger Volkszeitung, 17 April 1958. 80. Werner Wolf, “Aus dem Musikleben von Leipzig,” Musik und Gesellschaft 8, no. 5 (1958): 51–52. 81. Interview with Wolf, 14 May 2009. 82. Seeger, Musiklexikon, 1:463; Laux, Das Musikleben in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 88 and 419. 83. Silverberg, “Between Dissonance and Dissidence,” 62. 84. Different dates are given for the original release on vinyl. According to the Edel Group, the company that acquired the Eterna catalog, the LP was first released in 1961 as Eterna 8 25 201, with liner notes by Brockhaus. The 1974 rerelease as Eterna 8 20 201 has notes by Eberhard Kneipel.

poland: cultural diplomacy through a survivor from warsaw 1. Letters from Felix Greissle to Arnold Schoenberg, dated 5 October 1948, 4 November 1948, and 8 November 1948. On 15 November 1948 Schoenberg wrote to Greissle that he had yet to hear from Kassern, and after that the matter was dropped (ASC). 2. As quoted in Violetta Kostka, “An Artist as the Conscience of Humanity: Life in Emigration and the Artistic Output of Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern,” Musicology Today 8 (2011): 137–38. I am grateful to Violetta Kostka for her assistance with the details of Kassern’s biography. 3. Ibid., 141. 4. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 170. Newsreel footage of the unveiling can be viewed at www.britishpathe.com/video/unveilingmemorial-to-warsaw-ghetto-heroes-aka-mem/query/01185900. 5. Some significance may be ascribed to Leibowitz’s Paris performance— he was born in Warsaw in 1913 to Jewish parents of Polish-Latvian origin— but his participation would not have been perceived as Polish. He had moved to Paris while still a teenager and by 1948 was widely considered a French musician. 6. It was broadcast on Polskie Radio II starting at 7:34 p.m. Komitet do Spraw Radiofonii Polskie Radio. Biuro Koordynacji Programu Krajowego Dokumentacja programu PR z dnia 29 wrzes´nia 1958. 7. The period between 22 July and 21 September 1942, known as the first extermination Aktion, was particularly murderous, as the Germans transported about 280,000 Jews from the ghetto to Treblinka, where they died. Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 50. 8. Sheldon Anderson, A Cold War in the Soviet Bloc: Polish-East German Relations, 1945–1962 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001).

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9. Wolfgang Tietz, “Beim ‘Warschauer Herbst’ erfolgreich,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, 11 October 1958. The confidential report filed with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs by the GDR embassy in Warsaw recounted the press conference in some detail but did not include this remark, and neither did the Polish coverage of the press conference. Since Tietz’s article was published two weeks later, perhaps his report took into account the reviews published in the interim. 10. Witold Rudzin´ski, “Warszawska Jesien´,” Trybuna Ludu, n.d. 11. Anderson, Cold War, 5–6. 12. Lisa Jakelski, “Górecki’s Scontri and Avant-Garde Music in Cold War Poland,” Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (2009): 207. See also Andrzej Paczkowski, The Spring Will Be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom, trans. Jane Cave (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 269. 13. For a thorough account of the events of that year as well as their repercussions, see Paweł Machcewicz, Rebellious Satellite: Poland 1956, trans. Maya Latynski (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009). For an excellent summary, see A. Kemp-Welch, Poland under Communism: A Cold War History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 96–104. 14. Anderson, Cold War, 224–25. 15. Johannes Thilman, “Eindrücke vom ‘Warschauer Herbst,’ ” Musik und Gesellschaft 6, no. 12 (1956): 27–28. 16. Lars Klingberg, Politisch fest in unseren Händen: Musikalische und musikwissenschaftliche Gesellschaften in der DDR. Dokumente und Analysen (Kassel, Germany: Bärenreiter, 1997), 48. 17. See, for example, a letter from Nathan Notowicz of the East German VKM to the ZKP, dated 15 November 1955, which accompanied a shipment of recordings by East German composers Paul Dessau, Ottmar Gerster, Johann Cilenšek, and others (AdK VKM 2132). 18. Archiwum ZKP Kat. A 16/12. A copy of this document is also held in Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Bestände MfAA, Signatur A 3927 (hereafter PAAA MfAA). The friendship agreement appears to have come about as an effort to address concerns from several constituents. Notowicz wrote members of the ZKP on 6 March 1956, thanking them for the invitation to engage in a cultural exchange (AdK VKM 2132), and on 12 May 1956, Theodor Frickmann filed a report about his trip to Poland that included a recommendation that they commit to such an agreement (AdK VKM 2104). In a letter dated 21 June 1956, Hans-Georg Uszkoreit, director of the MfK Hauptabteilung Musik (Ministry of Culture’s Music Division), commended Notowicz for having done so (AdK VKM 2132). 19. There are several such letters in the ZKP collection: a letter from the VKM to the ZKP, dated 14 December 1956, reporting on a chamber concert of works by Szeligowski, Baird, and Lutosławski; a letter from the VKM to the ZKP, dated 11 February 1957, reporting that the Bezirksverband Schwerin performed Lutosławski’s Kleine Suite on 6 December 1956; a letter from the VKM

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to the PRP Embassy in East Berlin, dated 2 April 1957, responding to a request for a list of Polish works performed in the GDR as part of the Friendship Agreement (AdK VKM 2132). 20. Letter from Notowicz to Walther Siegmund-Schultze, dated 27 June 1957 (AdK VKM 2132). 21. PAAA MfAA A 3899. 22. AdK VKM 2104. Also Hella Brock, “Zur Lage der Musikerziehung in Polen,” Musik und Gesellschaft 8, no. 5 (1958): 33–36. 23. Regarding the meeting, see PAAA MfAA A 3932. For the plan itself, see PAAA MfAA A 3932. 24. Cynthia E. Bylander, “The Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, 1956–1961: Its Goals, Structures, Programs, and People” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1989), 314. 25. Three sources have proved invaluable for understanding and comparing the bureaucratic structures of the GDR and the PRP: Heike Amos, Politik und Organisation der SED-Zentrale 1949–1963: Struktur und Arbeitsweise von Politbüro, Sekretariat, Zentralkomitee und ZK-Apparat (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2003); Ingrid Muth, Die DDR-Außenpolitik 1949–1972: Inhalte, Strukturen, Mechanismen (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2001); and Włodzimierz Janowski and Aleksander Kochan´ski, Informator o Strukturze i Obsadzie Personalnej Centralnego Aparatu PZPR 1948–1990 (Warsaw: Instytut Studiów Politycznych Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2000). 26. PAAA MfAA A 3932. 27. Ibid., 14200. 28. BArch DR 1/8223; BArch DR 6 353. 29. PAAA MfAA A 14200. 30. Archiwum ZKP Kat. A 11/4; AAN MKiS CZIM 3247/30. 31. PAAA MfAA A 1768. 32. Archiwum ZKP Kat. A 11/4. 33. PAAA MfAA A 1768; PAAA MfAA A 14200. 34. Ibid., 14200. 35. Ibid., 3945. 36. Archiwum ZKP Kat. A 11/4. 37. PAAA MfAA A 3945. 38. Ibid., 14200. 39. AAN MKiS CZIM 3247/108. 40. PAAA MfAA A 3932. 41. Archiwum ZKP Kat. A 11/3 and Kat. A. 16/2; also AdK VKM 2132. Notowicz’s follow-up letter is located under the same archive signatures. 42. Eberhard Rebling, “Ein offenes Wort an unsere polnischen Freunde,” Musik und Gesellschaft 8, no. 7 (1958): 8–11. Rebling may not have been aware that Socrealizm had become the standard shorthand for socialist realism in Polish, but the articles he criticized for using the term were also explicitly dismissive of the aesthetic it represented. Even those who endorsed the ideals of socialist realism after 1958 began using different terminology, suggesting that

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Socrealizm had become associated with this critique. I am grateful to Lisa Jakelski and Lisa Vest for their help on this matter. 43. Zygmunt Mycielski, “Cie˛z˙ka Artyleria,” Przegla˛d Kulturalny, 18 September 1958. 44. PAAA MfAA A 3945. Copies also at Archiwum ZKP Kat. A 16/21 and AAN MKiS CZIM 3247/103. 45. Archiwum ZKP Kat. A 11/3. Copies also at Archiwum ZKP Kat. A 16/12 and AAN MKiS CZIM 3247/102. 46. Archiwum ZKP Kat. 11/3. Also Archiwum ZKP Kat. 16/12 and AdK VKM 2132. 47. PAAA MfAA A 13038. 48. Archiwum ZKP Kat. A 11/4. 49. AAN MKiS CZIM 3247/101. 50. Ibid., 3247/106. 51. PAAA MfAA A 3495. 52. Ibid., 14200; AAN MKiS CZIM 3247, p. 119. 53. PAAA MfAA A 14200. 54. Ibid., 3945. 55. BArch DR 6/261. 56. PAAA MfAA A 14200. The political leadership party included Franz Spielhagen and Riedel from the RSK; a comrade Bratke (or Bratge) from the MfK; Manfred Schmidt from the MfAA; and Elly Pippig, the human resources director for Radio Leipzig whose job description included reporting on the political reliability of her employees to the Stasi (PAAA MfAA A 3945). Stasi records suggest that there were no security problems on the tour. Correspondence with the Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (The Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives) dated 15 April 2010. Poland’s Instytut Pamie˛ci Narodowej (Institute of National Remembrance) is charged with assessing and disclosing the actions of the Polish security services between 1944 and 1989, and it reported no activity pertaining to the GDR’s participation in Warsaw Autumn in 1958. Correspondence with Robert Skolimowski, dated 7 April 2010. 57. In his review of the 1956 event, Thilman had complained about the lack of music by current German composers from East or West. Thilman, “Eindrücke vom ‘Warschauer Herbst,’ ” 27. In 1957 the State Radio Committee determined that the Leipzig Radio Choir would be allowed to go on an international tour only if the program featured music by East German composers. (Their proposed program did not.) This discussion also included the suggestion that a Kader instructor should accompany the ensemble (masquerading?) as a member of the choir to monitor political orientation (BArch DR 6 352 Vorlage 36/57). 58. David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 299. Caute notes that in 1976 the editors of Brecht’s collected poems declined to include this text, despite its status as “the major poem of 1950,” because “its fifty-two stanzas in

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praise of the generally discredited theories of Trofin Lysenko and its one mildly flattering reference to Stalin (‘our great harvest-leader’)” made it “hard to stomach” despite “all its technical skill.” Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Eyre Methuen Limited, 1976), xx. The poem was published as “Tschaganak Bersijew, oder Die Erziehung der Hirse” in Sinn und Form 2 (1950): 124–34; an English translation by Robert C. Conard and Ralph Ley as “The Rearing of the Millet” appeared in New German Critique 9 (1976): 142–52. 59. Bylander, “Warsaw Autumn,” 553–55. 60. Archiwum ZKP recording 1958 nr 2 (W-513, Nr arch. 185). 61. Lucjan Kydryn´ski, “Jesien´ w Warszawie,” Dziennik Polski, 2 October 1958; Norbert Karas´kiewicz, “Warszawska Jesien´,” Tygodnik Zachodni, 11 October 1958; Kazimierz Czekaj, “Wyste˛py Orkiestry i Chóru Radia Lipskiego,” Trybuna Ludu, 30 September 1958. 62. PAAA MfAA A 14200. 63. Jerzy Waldorff, “Premier bił brawo!” Stolica, 12 October 1958; Zbigniew Pawlicki, “List z Warszawy—Warszawska Jesien´,” Głos Szczecin´ski, 30 September 1958; Ludwik Erhardt, “Z notatnika recenzenta koncertowego: ‘Warszawska Jesien´,’ ” Express Wieczorny, 30 September 1958; Zdzisław Sierpin´ski, “Okiem i uchem recenzenta: Pierwsze tony ‘Warszawskiej Jesieni,” Z˙ycie Warszawy, 1 October 1958; Norbert Karas´kiewicz, “Warszawska Jesien´,” Tygodnik Zachodni, 11 October 1958; Krzysztof Antoni Mazur, “Warszawska Jesien´,” Odgłosy, 26 October 1958; and the National News Service story entitled “Muzycy z Lipska w Warszawie,” Trybuna Ludu, 28 September 1958. 64. PAAA MfAA A 14200. 65. Everett Helm, “Current Chronicle: Poland,” Musical Quarterly 45, no. 1 (1959): 112. 66. Johannes Thilman, “Die Kompositionsweise mit zwölf Tönen,” part 2, Musik und Gesellschaft 6, no. 8 (1956): 12. 67. Johannes Thilman, “Gedanken zum ‘Weltmusikfest’ in Stockholm,” Musik und Gesellschaft 6, no. 9 (1956): 9–10. 68. Thilman, “Eindrücke vom ‘Warschauer Herbst,’ ” 28. 69. Michael Berg, in discussion following the paper by Andrzej Chłopecki, “Zur Rezeption der Neuen Musik der DDR aus der Perspektive des ‘Warschauer Herbst,’ ” in Zwischen Macht und Freiheit: Neue Musik in der DDR, ed. Michael Berg, Albrecht von Massow, and Nina Noeske (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2004), 116. 70. Michael Bristiger, “Demon Zgrzytów,” Polityka, 8 November 1958. 71. Stefan Kisielewski (pseudonym Kisiel), “Vivat muzyka!” Tygodnik Powszechny, 12 October 1958. This Catholic paper based in Krakow had had the distinction of having been shut down for three years after it refused to publish Stalin’s obituary. 72. PAAA MfAA A 14200. 73. Jacek Zygmunt Sawicki, Bitwa o prawde˛: Historia zmagan´ o pamie˛c´ Powstania Warszawskiego 1944–1989 (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo “DiG,” 2005),

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230; and Norman Davies, Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw (London: Pan Books, 2004), 521–22. Regarding the slow emergence of recognition of this event in public and official discourse, see Włodzimierz Borodziej, The Warsaw Uprising of 1944, trans. Barbara Harshav (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 142–45. 74. Plonowska Ziarek, “Melancholic Nationalism and the Pathologies of Commemorating the Holocaust in Poland,” in Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust, ed. Dorota Glowacka and Joanna Zylinska (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 310. Regarding the communist manipulation of representation of the Holocaust, see also the introduction to Anthony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1–13. 75. Tadeusz Marek, ed., Program II Mie˛dzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej: Warszawa 27.IX5.X.1958 (Warsaw: Komitet Organizacyjny II Mie˛dzynarodowego Festiwalu Muzyki Współczesnej, 1958). 76. Marian Fuks, “Warszawska Jesien´,” Z˙ołnierz Wolnos´ci, 29 September 1958. The others were Kazimierz Czekaj, writing for Trybuna Ludu, and Tadeusz Mazurkiewicz in Tygodnik Demokratyczny. 77. Ludwik Erhardt, “Z notatnika recenzenta koncertowego: ‘Warszawska Jesien´,’ ” Express Wieczorny, 30 September 1958. 78. Postwar data from Henry Frankel, “Eastern Europe,” American Jewish Year Book (1946–47), 336. Data for 1958 from Leon Shapiro, “Poland,” American Jewish Year Book (1959), 216. 79. For a nuanced study of relations between ethnic Poles and Jews in postwar Poland up to the 1960s, see Boz˙ena Szaynok, “The Role of Antisemitism in Postwar Polish-Jewish Relations,” Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland, ed. Robert Blobaum (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 265–83. 80. Marek Haltof, Polish Film and the Holocaust: Politics and Memory (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 28. 81. Young, Texture of Memory, 167. Regarding the immediate postwar period, see Joanna Michlic, “The Holocaust and Its Aftermath as Perceived in Poland: Voices of Polish Intellectuals, 1945–1947,” in David Bankier, ed., The Jews Are Coming Back (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005), 206–30. 82. These include Audrey Kichelewski, “A Community under Pressure: Jews in Poland, 1957–1967,” POLIN: Studies in Polish Jewry 21 (2008): 159–86; Anat Plocker, “Zionists to Dayan: The Anti-Zionist Campaign in Poland, 1967– 1968” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2009); Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Meng, “Muranów as a Ruin: A Collage of Memories in Postwar Warsaw,” in Constructing Pluralism: Space, Nostalgia, and the Transnational Future of the Jewish Past in Poland, ed. Erica Lehrer and Michael Meng (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming), 99–114. I am grateful to Michael Meng for his guidance on this and for sharing his forthcoming chapter.

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83. Szaynok, “Role of Antisemitism,” 282. 84. Sawicki, Bitwa o prawde˛, 230; Davies, Rising ’44, 521–22. 85. Machcewicz, Rebellious Satellite, 210. 86. Correspondence with Boelke-Bomart, dated 14 October 1958 and 5 December 1958, ASC GSC; statements dated 10 February 1959 and 20 June 1960, ASC GSC. Boelke-Bomart collected fees from “Radio Warsaw” and “Radio Krakow” in 1958 and two sets of fees from Ars Polona, the Polish agency that rented scores and handled payments to international music publishers, in 1959. It cannot be determined from the surviving records if those payments were only for the Polskie Radio broadcasts or if the Kraków ensemble rented parts as well. 87. AAN MKiS CZIM 3247/157. See also the ZKP’s annual report, Biuletyn Informacyjny Zwia˛zku Kompozytorów Polskich, which includes an overview of Warsaw Autumn 1958 (Archiwum ZKP Kat. A 11/14). 88. PAAA MfAA A 1768. 89. BArch DA 6 517 Bd. 2 n.p. 90. Anderson, Cold War, 259–76.

czechoslovakia: a survivor as a survivor from warsaw 1. Ezra Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 131. 2. Bradley F. Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 25. 3. Ibid., 55. 4. Joseph Rothschild and Nancy M. Wingfield, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War II, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 71. See also Igor Lukeš and Erik Goldstein, The Munich Crisis, 1938: Prelude to World War II (London: Frank Cass and Co. Limited, 1999). 5. Sharon L. Wolchik, “Czechoslovakia,” in Eastern Bloc: Politics, Culture, and Society since 1939, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 36. 6. Abrams, Struggle for the Soul, 56 and 58. 7. Robert C. Grogin, Natural Enemies: The United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, 1917–1991 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 134. 8. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 436–37. 9. Livia Rothkirchen, The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 297. 10. Helena Krejcˇová, “Czechs and Jews,” in Bohemia in History, ed. Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 359.

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11. Hillel J. Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 204. All of chapter 9, “Masaryk and Czech Jewry: The Ambiguities of Friendship,” 198–216, is relevant to this point. I am most grateful to Kieval for his help with the material about Czech Jewry. Regarding the position of Jews in interwar Czechoslovakia generally, see Katerˇina Cˇapková, Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Identity of the Jews of Bohemia, trans. Derek Paton and Marzia Paton (New York: Berghahn, 2012). 12. Mendelsohn, Jews of East Central Europe, 147. 13. Rothkirchen, Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, 116. 14. The experience in the Slovak republic was very different, as it was the first Axis partner to participate in the systematic deportation of its Jews. In the immediate postwar period anti-Semitic tensions were greater there than in the Czech lands, with pogroms recorded again in eastern Slovakia as early as September 1945. 15. Rothkirchen, Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, 145. 16. Ibid., 134. 17. Ibid., 284. Regarding the Jewish experience in the immediate postwar period, see Petr Brod, “Die Juden in der Nachkriegstschechoslowakei,” and Jana Svobodová, “Erscheinungsformen des Antisemitismus in den Böhmischen Ländern 1948–1992,” in Judenemanzipation—Antisemitismus—Verfolgung in Deutschland, Österreich-Ungarn, den Böhmischen Ländern und in der Slowakei, ed. Jörg K. Hoensch, Stanislav Biman, and L’ubomír Lipták (Essen: Klartext, 1999), 211–28 and 229–48, respectively. 18. Peter Meyer, “Czechoslovakia,” in The Jews in the Soviet Satellites, ed. Meyer et al. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1953), 113–14. 19. Livia Rothkirchen, “Czechoslovakia,” in The World Reacts to the Holocaust, ed. David S. Wyman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 174. 20. Terezín-ghetto (Prague: Repatriacˇní odbor ministerstva ochrany práce a sociální pécˇe, 1945); Richard Feder, Židovská tragedie: deˇjství poslední (Kolín, Czech Republic: Lusk, 1947); Bedrˇich Steiner, ed., Tragédia slovenských židov: fotografie a dokumenty (Bratislava: Dokumentacna akcia pri USŽNO, 1949). The film is Továrna na smrt by Ota Kraus and Erich Kulka. Rothkirchen, “Czechoslovakia,” 174–75. 21. Rothkirchen, Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, 286. Haganah, Hebrew for “defense,” was the Jewish paramilitary organization in Mandate Palestine that organized the illegal immigration. 22. Rothkirchen, Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, 286. See also Ehud Avriel’s fascinating memoir entitled Open the Gates: A Personal Story of “Illegal” Immigration to Israel (New York: Atheneum, 1975). Avriel negotiated the arms deal and became the first Israeli ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1948. 23. There were tragic exceptions, such as those Jews who had registered in prewar censuses as being of German nationality, as was the custom in the Czech lands, and now found themselves treated like German perpetrators rather than

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Notes for Pages 141 – 144

Czech Jewish victims; Bernard Wasserstein, Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 38. See also Meyer, “Czechoslovakia,” 78–79. Alena Heitlinger’s In the Shadows of the Holocaust and Communism: Czech and Slovak Jews since 1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006) is a sociological study of Jewish identities as formulated by those who remained in Czechoslovakia and those who emigrated around the world. 24. Meyer, “Czechoslovakia,” 153. 25. That number held steady into the 1960s, although by 1994 there were only 7,600 Jews in the Czech Republic and Slovakia combined. Data from Wasserstein, Vanishing Diaspora, viii. 26. Pavel Kypr, Malá pevnost Terezín: Dokument cˇeskoslovenského boje za svobodu a nacistického zlocˇinu proti lidskosti (Prague: Mír, 1950); Václav Deˇdek, Památná místa boje cˇeských zemí proti fašismu (Prague: Mír, 1953). 27. Michael Frankl, “Antisemitism in Bohemian Lands,” in Antisemitism in Eastern Europe: History and Present in Comparison, ed. Hans Christian Petersen and Samuel Salzborn (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010), 34–40. 28. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, Arnold Schoenberg: His Life, World, and Work, trans. Humphrey Searle (New York: Schirmer, 1978), 208. 29. Brian S. Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague: Polemics and Practice at the National Theater, 1900–1938 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 152. 30. Sigrid Wiesmann, “Schönbergs Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen in Prag,” in Prager Musikleben zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Aleš Brˇezina (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000), 237–45. 31. Alexander L. Ringer, Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Jew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 169. 32. Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague, 139. 33. Jirˇí Vysloužil, “Arnold Schönberg in Brünn,” in Die Wiener Schule in der Musikgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Rudolf Stephan and Sigrid Wiesmann (Vienna: Lafite, 1986), 142–44. 34. Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague, 329. 35. Ibid., 199 and 202. The assertion that Berg was a German Jew (he was neither) was part of the original campaign against Wozzeck in 1926. See, for example, Jitka Ludvová, “Causa Wozzeck 1926,” Czech Music 2 (2006): 17–20. 36. Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague, 273. 37. Zdeneˇk Nouza, “Schönberg—Eine vergessene Uraufführung?” Hudební ve˘da 46, nos. 1–2 (2009): 210–12. 38. Thomas D. Svatos, “Sovietizing Czechoslovak Music: The ‘HatchetMan’ Miroslav Barvík and His Speech ‘The Composers Go with the People,’ ” Music and Politics 4, no. 1 (2010): 4. Svatos’s article is an essential source of information about the syndicate and the early years of its subsequent incarnation as the Svaz cˇeskoslovenských skladatelu˚ (Czech Composers’ Union). 39. Regarding the relationship between the Prague Manifesto and the Zhdanov document, see Julie Waters, “Proselytizing the Prague Manifesto in

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Britain: The Commissioning, Conception, and Musical Language of Alan Bush’s Nottingham Symphony,” Music and Politics 3, no. 1 (2009): especially 1–4. 40. The one institution not forced to assimilate was the Umeˇlecká beseda. It was associated with Smetana historically and was allowed to remain autonomous out of deference to Zdeneˇk Nejedlý. 41. Antonín Sychra, “Experiment nebo umeˇní? Na okraj festivalu Mezinárodní spolecˇnosti pro soudobou hudbu v Curychu,” Hudební rozhledy 10, nos. 14–15 (1957): 608–609. 42. According to Czech records, only seven citizens traveled to Poland on music-related business in all of 1958, and neither Hába nor Jiránek appear on that list. Such inconsistencies are not unusual, but the presence of some individuals can be confirmed by travel reports filed with the SCˇS upon return. Národní Archiv, Svaz cˇeskoslovenských skladatelu˚ 1949–1970 (Union of Czech Composers of the Czech National Archives; hereafter NA SCˇS), box 103, Zahranicˇní komise a Zahranicˇní oddeˇlení 1954–1967, “Cesty do zahranicˇí r. 1958.” 43. Jaroslav Jiránek, “Varšavské meditace nad soudobostí,” Hudební rozhledy 11, no. 20 (1958): 823. He had held positions in the SCˇS since 1950 and was program director and enforcer of party ideology at Czech Radio during 1950–52 but seemed to temper his position a bit in his role as journal editor, 1953–60. For more on Jiránek, see Svatos, “Sovietizing Czechoslovak Music,” especially 25–26. For biographies of Jiránek and other key figures, see Cˇeský hudební slovník osob a institucí (Czech musical dictionary of persons and institutions), an online resource edited by Petr Macek of the Institute of Musicology at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno: www.ceskyhudebnislovnik. cz/slovnik/index.php?option = com_mdictionary&action = record_detail&id = 4977 (accessed 11 May 2011). 44. Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague, 38–39. For more on Nejedlý’s early development of this agenda, see 54–64. For discussion of Nejedlý’s role in the postwar period, see Svatos, “Sovietizing Czechoslovak Music,” 11n52. I am indebted to Svatos on this subject. 45. Jiránek, “Varšavské meditace nad soudobostí.” 46. I am grateful to Dan Stone for assistance on this point. See Thomas C. Fox, “The Holocaust under Communism,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), esp. 428–30. For a study of the various appropriations of the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, see Markus Meckl, “The Memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” European Legacy 13, no. 7 (2008): 815–24. 47. Mikuláš Bek, “Socialist Realism and the Tradition of Czech National Music, or Who Goes with Whom?” Philosophica—Aesthetica 24 (2001): 39. Regarding the 1926 production and its attendant scandal and polemics, see Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague, 200–11. 48. Jan Smolík, “Alban Berg,” Hudební rozhledy 13, no. 4 (1960): 141. A comparable article about Schoenberg appeared in the journal in 1961 (see n. 61). Webern was the last to get his due in this forum: Jirˇí Vysloužil, “K hudebnímu slohu Antona Weberna,” Hudební rozhledy 15, no. 22 (1962): 938–43.

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Notes for Pages 147 – 148

49. Jan Mateˇjcˇek, Music in Czechoslovakia: Survey of the Main Institutions and Organisations of Musical Life, trans. Jean Layton-Eislerová (Prague: Czech Music Fund, 1967), 24–29. The publication date no doubt contributed to the optimistic tone of this book and to the fund’s commitment to publishing it in English translation. Mateˇjcˇek (b. 1926) left the CˇSR in 1968, worked for Schott publishing in West Germany, and then emigrated to Canada, where he became very active in that country’s musical culture. 50. In 1961 he became conductor of the Bratislava Radio Symphony Orchestra en route to a post at the Ostrava Philharmonic Orchestra, where his tenure was cut short by a fatal plane crash in 1966. Jirácˇek’s legacy is preserved on over one hundred commercial recordings he made with radio orchestras. His widow, Marta Jirácˇková (b. 1932), a student of Alois Hába, remains a prolific and respected composer. I am grateful for her kind correspondence with research assistant Katerˇina Nová. 51. Evidence of part rentals in the archive of the Cˇeský rozhlas Praha (Czech Radio Prague), hereafter identified as ACˇR (Archiv Cˇeského rozhlasu, or Czech Radio Archive). Chorus and orchestra parts were returned to the fund on 16 September, the conductor’s score on 4 October. Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra score library 1960. Information about the recording session in ACˇR Id. Cˇís. CR.HKV.1990.3024 Cˇíslo nosicˇe MS62579 ACˇR. 52. See Cˇervinka’s Czech Radio’s biography at www.rozhlas.cz/rozhlasovahistorie/lide/_zprava/694092 (accessed 30 May 2011). 53. Burjanek compared Egzorta (Exhortation) by the Polish composer Tadeusz Baird to A Survivor. The link is obvious (Baird’s work is about eight minutes long, scored for reciter, orchestra, and mixed chorus, and based on “horrendous old-Hebrew texts”), but Burjanek argues that yet another dodecaphonic work on horrific wartime themes suggests musical limitations. “This can only confirm our opinion that the expressive range of the compositional system is really limited to horror and death, let alone the fact that it is little comprehensible to people.” Burjanek, “Varšavský podzim,” Hudební rozhledy 13, no. 20 (1960): 851. 54. Viktor Pantu˚cˇek, “Some Experimental Trends in Post-war Czech Music,” trans. Anna Bryson-Gustová, Czech Music Quarterly 1 (2008): 17–18. See also Mateˇjcˇek, Music in Czechoslovakia, 35–36. 55. Mateˇjcˇek, Music in Czechoslovakia, 55–56. For a synopsis of the history of this infrastructure, see Vojteˇch Mojžíš, “Publications of Editio Supraphon,” Fontes artes musicae 39, nos. 3–4 (1992): 259–61. 56. Jirˇí Vysloužil, “Alois Hába, Arnold Schönberg, und die tschechische Musik,” in Aspekte der Neuen Musik, ed. W. Burde (Kassel, Germany: Bärenreiter, 1968), 58–67. In this essay Vysloužil argues that Hába was greatly influenced by Schoenberg’s personality and music between 1918 and 1920, and that this is especially evident in Hába’s Symphonic Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra, op. 8 (1922). Rudolf Stephan later argued that Schoenberg’s writings on music theory, especially Harmonielehre, were most important for Hába in the 1920s. Stephan, “Hába und Schönberg. Zum Thema: Die Wiener Schule

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und die tschechische Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Festschrift für Arno Volk, ed. Carl Dahlhaus et al. (Cologne: Gerig, 1974), 125–38. 57. Interview with Jirˇí Vysloužil, 24 June 2011. 58. NA, Ministerstvo školství a kultury (Ministry of Education and Culture, hereafter MŠK), box 33,Výbeˇr titulu˚ pro rocˇní nahrávací plány III. peˇtiletky 1961–1965 (Titles selected for the annual studio recording plans for the Third Five-Year Plan, 1961–1965), p. 65. To the best of my knowledge, these recordings were not made during this time period. 59. They also relayed a show from Deutschlandsender, entitled From the Works of Schoenberg, at 11:15 p.m. on 13 July, but there is no record of its precise contents. Other titles confirmed with program schedules published in Czech Radio’s periodical, Rozhlas. 60. ACˇR, Cˇeskoslovenský rozhlas protocol for 20.00–21.00 on 10 July 1961. The station recorded the broadcast on tapes 53367 and 53567, but neither tapes nor transcripts survive. The titles of Schoenberg’s works are given in Czech translation. The protocol also lists two other participants, actors Otakar Brousek and Veˇra Hrabánková; the latter would marry Milan Kundera in 1967. Perhaps Nouza enlisted them to do dramatic readings in Czech of the poems Schoenberg had set to music. 61. Jirˇí Vysloužil, “Nedokoncˇená umeˇlecká zpoveˇd’,” Hudební rozhledy 14, no. 20 (1961): 806–809. 62. See for example Laura Silverberg, “Between Dissonance and Dissidence: Socialist Modernism in the German Democratic Republic,” Journal of Musicology 26, no. 1 (2009): 44–84. 63. Vysloužil, “Nedokoncˇená umeˇlecká zpoveˇd’.” The Austrian Alois Melichar, who lived in Munich and wrote diatribes against Schoenberg throughout the 1950s, had just published his most vicious attack yet: Schönberg und die Folgen: Eine notwendige kulturpolitische Auseinandersetzung (Vienna: Eduard Wancura Verlag, 1960). In it, he decried the “twelve-tone fascism that declared total war on the tonal world, in which anyone who doesn’t like Schoenberg’s music is branded an anti-Semite” (p. 6). 64. NA SCˇS, box 103, Zahranicˇní komise a Zahranicˇní oddeˇlení 1954–1967, “Zpráva o studijním zájezdu do Edinburgu, srpen 1961.” 65. Email from Ourania Karoula, reference services assistant at the National Library of Scotland, concerning the Edinburgh International Festival program collection, 29 March 2010. 66. Pinkas had been choirmaster and conductor for Czechoslovak Radio (1945–55) before moving to the National Opera Theater in Brno in 1956, a post he continued to hold while working for the philharmonic. His role with the Brno State Philharmonic Orchestra focused on orchestral repertoire that included singers. Bomart’s payment records contain no evidence that this ensemble rented parts from Universal, although they must have done so; it appears to be an example of the careless oversight that so exasperated Gertrud Schoenberg. 67. Concert program for Státní Filharmonie Brno concerts on 7–8 February 1963, courtesy of the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra.

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Notes for Pages 152 – 155

68. Jirˇí Vysloužil, “Únor ve Státní filharmonii Brno,” Hudební rozhledy 16, no. 7 (1963): 294. I am grateful to Michael Warner for his research assistance in this matter. 69. Klára Móricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 298. 70. NA SCˇS, Slavnostní zasedání ÚV SCˇS, box 17, 12. zasedání ÚV SCˇS 27.4.1962—Praha, pp. 1/8–1/9. Regarding this statement by the “elder statesmen of Soviet music,” particularly their complaints about Pärt’s Obituary, see Peter Schmelz, Such Freedom, if Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 131–32. The invitation is in NA SCˇS, Slavnostní zasedání ÚV SCˇS, box 17, 14. zasedání ÚV SCˇS 27.9.1962— Praha, pp. 26/2–26/4. 71. Khrushchev’s speech cited in Schmelz, Such Freedom, 5. The most significant such articles are Jan Rychlík, “Diskuse: Skladatel a nové skladebné metody,” Hudební rozhledy 15, no. 16 (1962): 666–73; and Jindrˇich Feld, “Diskuse: K otázkám nových kompozicˇních metod,” Hudební rozhledy 15, nos. 23–24 (1962): 993–94. 72. Edison Denisov, “Dodekafoniya i problemï sovremennoy kompozitorskoy tekhniki,” Muzïka i sovremennost’ 6 (1969): 493–94. I am grateful to Peter Schmelz for bringing this to my attention and to Anna Zayaruznaya for translating the passage. For more about Denisov’s essay, see Schmelz, Such Freedom, 147–50. 73. NA SCˇS, Slavnostní zasedání ÚV SCˇS, box 20, 8. zasedání ÚV SCˇS 14.10.1964—Praha. Volek’s remarks are on pp. 12/3–12/4. Passages cited from Kucˇera’s speech are on pp. 15/2, 16/4, and 16/5. Kucˇera’s list is puzzling in that it omits Denisov and appears to include instead a poet (Blok) whose texts Denisov had set. 74. Václav Kucˇera, Nové proudy v soveˇtské hudbeˇ: Eseje a stránky z deníku (Prague: Panton, 1967). See also Schmelz, Such Freedom, 21–22. 75. Geoffrey K. Spratt, The Music of Arthur Honegger (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1987), 297–98. 76. The track was released on Supraphon 141 0122 on 31 December 1967. The recording made on 15 November 1967 with Richard Baker suggests that Supraphon was hoping to expand its reach into the international market by offering a reading of the standard version. This track first appeared on Supraphon 019 1134 on 31 December 1971 and was rereleased in 1991 and 1995 on compilations. Information from the Supraphon database shared via email, dated 27 April 2009 from Helena Bartíková of Supraphon. 77. The chamber works were also released separately on other Supraphon recordings, but this appears to be the only release of Berman’s A Survivor. Musica viva pragensis recorded Schoenberg, op. 29, and Webern, opp. 20 and 22; Chamber Harmony recorded Berg, op. 9. Recordings by these groups circulated in North America via Abbey Records in New Jersey, which acquired the

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distribution rights for the Supraphon catalog after Artia-Parliament folded in 1963. “Grennell Nabs Czech Label Rights,” Billboard, 27 April 1963, p. 6. 78. The only sources by Czechoslovak scholars included in the bibliography were by Vojteˇch. The recordings scheduled for release in 1968 were opp. 26, 47, and 36 by Schoenberg; opp. 7 and 9 by Webern; the Violin Concerto and Wozzeck by Berg. 79. NA, Archiv Národního divadla, Praha, Karton 16, Berman K. 80. František Ehrmann, Otta Heitlinger, and Rudolf Iltis, eds., Terezín (Prague: Council of Jewish Communities in the Czech Lands, 1965). Chapter 5 is entitled “Culture on the Threshold of Death” and includes contributions about musical life written by Berman, Karel Ancˇerl, Truda Solarová, Alena Synková, and Rudolf Franeˇk. 81. Berman is commonly featured in studies of musical life in Terezín, and he is a recurring figure in numerous memoirs published by survivors. For one example, see Joža Karas, Music in Terezín, 1941–1945, 2nd ed. (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2009). 82. Amy Lynn Wlodarski, “The Testimonial Aesthetics of Different Trains,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63, no. 1 (2010): 99. 83. Van Alphen quoted in ibid., 135. 84. Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 45. 85. Claude Schumacher, Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 29. 86. I am grateful to Tomás Kraus, executive director of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic, and Alice Marxova, editor of Rosh Hodesh (formerly Veˇstník ŽNO), for their help in this matter. 87. Matthew J. Ouimet, “Reconsidering the Soviet Role in the Invasion of Czechoslovakia: A Commentary,” in The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968: Forty Years Later, ed. M. Mark Stolarik (Mundelein, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2010), 22. 88. Frankl, “Antisemitism in Bohemian Lands,” 40. 89. Data from Czech Philharmonic Orchestra concert database control nos. 10170, 10171, 10194, and 10201.

afterword 1. Letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Kurt List, 1 November 1948 (ASC). 2. Cited in James E. Young, “The Biography of a Memorial Icon,” Representations 26 (spring 1989): 82. 3. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 8. I am indebted to Alexander Rehding for recommending this work to me. 4. Www.stih-schnock.de/remembrance.html, accessed 5 July 2013. 5. Michael P. Steinberg, Judaism Musical and Unmusical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 217–18.

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6. Ibid., 219. 7. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “After Such Knowledge, What Laughter?” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 297. 8. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 8. 9. The starting point for most such discussions is the volume Saul Friedländer edited, entitled Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 10. “How we orient ourselves to this ending will determine whether A Survivor from Warsaw ends catastrophically or redemptively.” David M. Schiller, Bloch, Schoenberg, Bernstein: Assimilating Jewish Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 115. 11. Alexander Rehding, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4, 5, 9, 9, 9, and 14, respectively. 12. Ibid., 4. 13. Young, “The Biography of a Memorial Icon,” 69. 14. James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), viii.

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Index

Aachener Nachrichten (newspaper), 28 Abend, Die (Austrian communist newspaper), 62, 64 Abendpost, Der (Frankfurt newspaper), 28 Abendroth, Walter, 36 Acht Lieder, op. 6 (Schoenberg), 67 Adams, John, 4 “Adonoi Elohenu” (“Lord Our God”), 9 Adorno, Theodor, 25, 34; criticism of A Survivor, 30–31; as Mann’s musical informant, 58; on Nazi musical aesthetics, 53; Schnoor’s antiSemitic reference to, 37 Aftenposten (Norwegian newspaper), 84, 188n25 Agreement of Cultural Cooperation, 6–120, 134 AK [Armia Krajowa] (Polish Home Army), 130, 133 Albuquerque Civic Orchestra, 10 Albuquerque premiere (1948), 3, 10, 51, 89, 112, 166 aleatoric music, 152 Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst (East German News Service), 102 Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland (Jewish newspaper), 29–30, 77–78 Alphen, Ernst van, 158, 164

American Jewish Congress, 8 American Jewish Year Book, 43, 78 Améry, Jean, 164 Amidah prayer, 81 Amsterdam String Quartet, 52 Anielewicz, Mordechai, 162, 170n14 Anointed, The (Kassern), 113 Anschluss, 10, 43, 45, 48, 56 anti-Americanism, 1, 28, 40, 61 antifascism, 16, 126, 147, 166; de-Semitization in name of, 2, 95–101, 147, 160, 182n24; dodecaphony in service of, 18; Jewishness and antifascism in reviews of A Survivor, 104–11 anti-Semitism, 1, 39, 96, 97; antiAmericanism intertwined with, 28, 40; anti-Zionism connected to, 96, 139, 142, 160; in Austria, 42, 43–47, 59–60; in Czechoslovakia, 139, 142, 144, 160; in East Germany, 96, 97, 99; in Norway, 69, 73, 74; in Poland, 15, 131, 132, 160; in West Germany, 16, 21, 35, 36, 93, 152 “Anti-Semitism: Five Old Theses and a Warning” (Kołakowski), 132 Apostel, H. E., 49–53, 54, 55 Appell (Dessau), 91 applause, restraint on, 3, 4 Applegate, Celia, 3 Arbeiderbladet (Norwegian Labor Party newspaper), 83

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Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Musikkritiker, 31 ARD (public broadcasting corporations in West Germany), 26, 33, 175n18 Arendt, Hannah, 163 Argentino, Joe R., 9 Arnold Schoenberg Gesamtausgabe, 148 “Arnold Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, or the Possibility of Committed Art” (Leibowitz), 22, 174n10 Ars Nova (Nuremberg), 25 Art, David, 45 Artiste et sa conscience, L‘ (Leibowitz), 11 Art of the Fugue (Bach), 77 “A Survivor from Warsaw as Personal Parable” (Strasser), 169n10 atonality/atonal music, 4, 67, 77, 85, 148; Communist critiques of, 63, 116; minimal presence in Norway, 66, 68; Nazi-era critiques of, 61. See also dodecaphony; serialism; twelvetone music audiences, 2, 4, 10, 13, 124, 160; American, 1, 5, 8, 162; appeal to broadest audience, 23; applause by, 3, 4; Austrian, 50–53; Czech, 152, 154, 157, 158; East German, 89, 106, 108; French, 23; Norwegian, 73, 80, 81, 82, 84; Polish, 114, 127, 128, 132, 133; at Scandal Concert (1913), 143; West German and IFNM, 22, 26, 29, 40, 42 augmented triads, 9, 165 Auschwitz death camp, 8, 70, 71, 132, 140; Berman as survivor of, 155, 159; foreign Jews in Auschwitz after Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 65 Austria, 1, 14, 15, 41–42; antiSemitism and Holocaust in, 43–45; “first victim” status of, 16, 46–49, 65; postwar occupation of, 45–47; A Survivor premiere in, 17, 18, 53–57, 176n23. See also Anschluss Austro-Hungarian Empire, 137, 139 Avidom, Menachem, 78

Avodat hakodesh (Bloch), 81 Babbitt, Milton, 76 Bach, Carl Philip Emanuel, 78 Bach, David Joseph, 51 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 3, 26, 39, 77, 128; revival of, 68; A Survivor’s allusion to cantatas of, 82 Baeck, Leo, 77 Baird, Tadeusz, 116, 208n53 Baker, Richard, 155 Barenboim, Daniel, 3 Bartók, Béla, 53, 151 Baruch plan, 99 Bauer, Rudolf, 36 Bauhaus, 44 Bayerischer Rundfunk, 175n18 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 3, 32, 46, 48, 62, 78, 160; expression of feeling in music and, 63; as symbol of German musical nationalism, 32; Viennese musical tradition and, 48 Beneš, Jirˇí, 151 Benestad, Finn, 84, 85 Ben-Gurion, David, 141 Ben-Haim, Paul, 78 Berg, Alban, 24, 43–44, 51, 52, 53, 85, 129; Czech recordings of, 155, 210n77; reputation in Czech society, 143–44, 146; Second Viennese School and, 49, 144, 147; Thaw in Czechoslovakia and, 148 Berg, Michael, 129 Berio, Luciano, 126, 153 Berlin, city of, 31, 47, 72; Berlin Wall, 3, 135, 150, 151; dialect, 55, 57; East Berlin, 96, 105, 119, 156; Hall in, 67, 71, 72, 73, 74; Holocaust memorials in, 163–64; postwar occupation of, 46; West Berlin, 24, 25 Berliner Festwochen, 25 Berlin Philharmonic, 48 Berman, Karel, 19, 136, 155–56, 156, 157–160, 211n81 Bernstein, Leonard, 30 Bertelsmann, C. (publisher), 35

Index Betrothal in a Monastery (Prokofiev), 120 Biblische Weg, Der (play by Schoenberg), 162 Birthday of the Infanta, The (Wilde), 176n20 Bisgaard, J. Chr., 67 Blacher, Boris, 91, 193n16 Blaukopf, Kurt, 62, 164, 186n88 Bloch, Ernest, 81 Bloch, Ernst, 93 Blockflötenkultur, 52–53 Blok, Alexander, 153 Boelke, Margot, 134 Boelke-Bomart (music publisher), 11, 15, 37, 147, 177n35, 209n66; Oslo performance and, 190n50; Warsaw performance and, 134, 204n86 Bohemia, 137, 139, 140, 147 Bohlman, Phil, 172n42 Böll, Heinrich, 35 Bongartz, Heinz, 135 Borgstrøm, Hjalmar, 67 Boston Symphony Orchestra, 10 Boulanger, Nadia, 78 Boulez, Pierre, 153 Boyer, Noël, 11 Brahms, Johannes, 81, 128 Brecht, Bertolt, 71, 99, 124, 126, 128, 201–2n58 Brezhnev, Leonid, 153 Brihah movement, 141 Bristiger, Michael, 129 Britain, 15, 39, 61, 116 Brno State Philharmonic Orchestra, 151, 209n66 Brock, Hella, 117–18 Brockhaus, Heinz Alfred, 87–88, 109–10, 111, 197n70, 198n84 Brousek, Otakar, 209n60 Brown, Earle, 153 Bruce, Gary, 103 Bruland, Bjarte, 69, 70 Bryn, Erle, 79 Buch der hängenden Gärten, Das (Schoenberg), 24, 143, 149

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Buchenwald concentration camp, 95, 100–101, 110 Buchthal, Arnold, 37, 179n57 Bull, Ole, 74 Burjanek, Josef, 148, 208n53 Busse, Karl-Wilhelm, 179n61 Butting, Max, 93, 109 Buxtehude, Dietrich, 77 Bužga, Jaroslav, 155 BWKZ (Polish Bureau of International Cultural Relations), 120, 123 Cage, John, 126, 153 Cahn, Steven J., 9 capitalism, 62, 89, 96, 117, 122, 129, 150 Carroll, Mark, 172n34 Carter, Elliott, 76 Caruth, Cathy, 4 Catholic Central Radio (BethelBielefeld), 35 Catholicism/Catholic Church, 64, 85, 97; German, 34; Polish, 132, 202n71 CDU (Christian Democratic Union Party): in East Germany, 105–6, 108; in West Germany, 34 Cello Concerto no. 1 (Shostakovich), 4 Cˇervinka, Josef, 136, 147–48, 149, 157 Chamber Concerto for Piano and Violin with Thirteen Wind Instruments (Berg), 155 Chamber Harmony, 148, 155, 210n77 Chamber Symphony, First, op. 9 (Schoenberg), 50, 59, 67, 110, 143 Chamber Symphony, Second, op. 38 (Schoenberg), 11, 24 Chochem, Corinne, 6, 169n10 Chorus Mysticus, 60 Christians and Christianity, 45, 70, 85, 96, 108, 121; Christian socialism, 34; music libel against Jews and, 59. See also Catholicism/Catholic Church; Protestantism Church of Norway, Lutheran, 70, 81 Cilenšek, Johann, 114, 123, 124, 126, 128 City Temple [Seitenstettengasse Temple] (Vienna), 10

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Claudel, Paul, 154 Cohen, Brigid, 5 Cold War, 1, 16, 31, 45; Austrian neutrality in, 46; cultural history of, 2; East German enmity toward United States, 89, 95, 99–100, 101, 103–4; roots of, 15; within the Soviet Bloc, 114, 115, 129, 134–35; West German musical culture and, 20 “Come Sweet Death” (Bach), 3 Commemorating Sites of Antifascist Resistance in the Czech Lands, 142 “Commitment” (Adorno), 30 Committee for Antifascist Resistance Fighters, 97–98, 100 communism, 96, 132, 147 Communist Party, Czech. See KSCˇ (Komunistická strana Cˇeskoslovenska) Communist Party, East German. See SED [Socialist Unity Party] (East Germany) Communist Party, German (before World War II), 26 Communist Party, Polish. See Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) Communist Party, Soviet, 153 concentration camps, 7, 65, 101, 140, 155, 158; Buchenwald, 95, 100–101, 110; Dachau, 155, 159. See also Terezín (Theresienstadt) Ghetto; Warsaw Ghetto Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra after Handel (Schoenberg), 144 Concert Suite (Fortner), 26 Congress of Soviet Composers, Third (1962), 152 Copenhagen, city of, 67, 69, 78, 187n1 Copland, Aaron, 30 Council of Jewish Communities in the Czech Lands, 157 Cowell, Henry, 12–13 critical reviews, 12–13, 31–32, 39; of Leizig performance, 104–11; of Oslo performance, 83–86; of Vienna performance, 59–65,

186n91; of Warsaw performance, 131–32 Crittenden, Camille, 7 cultural diplomacy, in GDR–PRP relationship, 114, 115–18; musical style as cultural diplomacy, 123–29; negotiated behind the scenes, 118– 123; A Survivor as cultural diplomacy, 129–135 Czech lands, Nazi occupation of. See Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia Czech language, 15, 148, 154, 155 Czechoslovakia, 1, 15, 17, 19; Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (CˇSSR), 137, 146–152, 154, 157; First Republic (CˇSR), 137, 139; history and politics of, 137–146; Holocaust survivors in title role, 16, 136, 147–48, 155–59; Jews and Jewishness in, 64, 65, 139–142, 158, 159–160, 205–6n23, 206n25; Ministry of Education and Culture, 149; modernist music in, 143–45, 147; second performance of A Survivor in, 154–160; Soviet invasion of, 15, 149, 154, 160; State Music Publishing House, 148; A Survivor premiered and performed in, 136, 151, 154–160; Third Republic, 137. See also Thaw, in Czechoslovakia Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, 154, 160 Czech Radio, 18, 136, 147, 148, 149, 153 Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir, 18, 147, 149 Dachau concentration camp, 155, 159 Dagbladet (Norwegian newspaper), 66, 71, 72, 73, 74; concert previewed in, 79; Hall’s concert review in, 83 Dahlhaus, Carl, 149 Dallapiccola, Luigi, 153 Danse des morts, La (Honegger), 154 Darmstadt, city of, 20, 22, 24, 26, 54, 93, 147, 150

Index Darmstadt premiere (1950), 17, 25–31 Dean, Winton, 54 death camps, 45, 65 Debussy, Claude, 68, 71, 72, 74 DEFA (Deutsche FilmAktiengesellschaft), 88, 101 “degenerate” (entartete) art/music, 1, 61, 121, 131, 159 democracy, in Czechoslovakia, 137, 138 denazification, 28, 177n39; in Austria, 45, 49, 51, 182n28; lawsuits in context of, 38; Soviet initiative for, 31 Denisov, Edison, 153 Denmark, 67, 70, 187n1 Dessau, Paul, 18, 88, 91–93, 120, 135, 193n16; anti-Semitism and, 93, 96–97, 99; Polish critics’ hostility to, 126–27, 128, 129; relationship to Kegel, 91, 93, 124; Warsaw Autumn festival and, 114, 121, 123, 124; wartime stay in United States, 196n53 de-Stalinization, 115, 138, 147 Deuteronomy, 8–9 diatonic music, 4, 83, 124, 126, 135 Different Trains (Reich), 158 Dimitrov, Georgi, 95 Diner, Hasia R., 4–5, 6 Dirks, Walter, 34–36 displaced persons (DPs), in postwar Europe, 13, 30, 47, 140–41, 190n48 dissonance, 12, 62, 74 Dita Saxová (film, 1968), 158 Dobrowolski, Andrzej, 120, 121, 122–23 Doctor Faustus (Mann), 58–59 dodecaphony, 1, 5, 16, 55, 63, 66, 74; controversial status in East Germany, 87–88, 90, 91–92, 93, 108, 111, 124, 126, 128–29; Czech composers and, 146, 148; as expression of antifascist resistance, 18, 91–92; GDR–PRP cultural diplomacy and, 121; international modernism identified with, 50;

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Khrushchev’s denunciation of, 152; in Mann’s Doctor Faustus, 58; music experts interested in, 23; in Norway and Scandinavia, 66, 67, 68; in postwar Austria, 52, 53, 61, 63; Romanticism and, 165; Rufer’s primer on, 54; in A Survivor score, 9; viewed as distasteful, 86. See also atonality/atonal music; serialism; twelve-tone music “Doktor Faustus und die deutsche Katastrophe” (Fischer), 58–59 Donaueschinger Musiktage festival, 24, 25 Downes, Olin, 12, 13, 172n35 Dreigroschenoper, Die (Brecht and Weill), 71 “Dreimal Tausend Jahre” (Schoenberg), 52, 67 Dresden Opera, 120, 121, 122 Dresden Philharmonic, 135 Dresdner Anzeiger (newspaper), 31 Du (Babbitt), 76 Dubcˇek, Alexander, 160 Dvorˇák, Antonín, 144 Dziennik Polski (newspaper), 126 Eastern (Soviet) Bloc, 1, 64, 88, 102, 129, 146; Cold War within, 114, 115, 129, 134–35; cultural mobility in, 91, 115; de-Semitized antifascism in, 9, 96; new music in, 18; party purges in, 98; positions toward Israel, 89, 96 99, 101, 113, 191; represented at Warsaw Autumn festival, 118, 126; Thaw in, 16, 138 E. B. Marks (music publisher), 112 Edinburgh International Festival, Fourteenth, 150, 151 Egge, Klaus, 83–84 Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich, 149 Egmont overture (Beethoven), 32 Egzorta [Exhortation] (Baird), 208n53 Eichmann, Adolf, 45 Eimert, Herbert, 126 Einstein, Albert, 44 Eisenman, Peter, 164

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Eisler, Hanns, 13, 49, 185n77; dodecaphony (twelve-tone music) and, 93, 109, 111; Müller’s criticism of, 89–90; public humiliation of, 99 electronic music, 78, 145; Schnoor and, 35, 38, 39; at Warsaw Autumn festival, 126 Elling, Catharinus, 71 “Embarrassing Defense of Riemann, An” (Schnoor), 37 Endkrise der bürgerlichen Musik und die Rolle Arnold Schönbergs, Die (Blaukopf a.k.a. “Wind”), 62 English language, A Survivor narration in, 4, 15, 26, 81, 133; European reception of, 5, 29; in German translation, 54–56, 75; interrupted by German phrases of sergeant, 6, 80, 107; sudden switch to Hebrew of Sh’ma recitation, 165; unidiomatic, 40 Erhardt, Ludwik, 131–32 Erwartung (Schoenberg), 29, 143, 149 Erziehung der Hirse, Die (Dessau), 123, 124, 126–27, 128 Es ist, als habe einer die Fenster aufgestoßen (Goldmann), 3 Eterna (East German record label), 103, 110, 198n84 Evangelical Academy of Radio Broadcasting and Television, 35 Exilforschung, 13–14 expressionism, 2, 5, 10, 13, 63, 87, 146 Express Wieczorny (Polish newspaper), 127, 131 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, 164 Falla, Manuel de, 49 Fanta, Robert, 48 fascism, 130, 142; Austro-fascism, 45; East German Cold War rhetoric and, 89, 95–96, 100, 101, 108; twelvetone, 36. See also Nazism (Third Reich) Fasting, Kåre, 189n29 Faust (Goethe), 59–61 Feisst, Sabine, 61, 82

Feld, Jindrˇich, 160 Feldwebel (German sergeant), 6, 7, 55–57, 80 Feuchtwanger, Marta, 58 Fibich, Zdeneˇk, 145 Fidelio (Beethoven), 3 Fiedler, Hans Herbert, 30 Film Unfinished, A (Heronski film, 2010), 166 Fischer, Ernst, 58–59, 185n77 Fischer, Jens Malte, 36 Fischer, Kurt von, 149 Fitelberg, Grzegorz, 112 Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16 (Schoenberg), 143, 149 Five Piano Pieces (Fünf Klavierstücke), op. 23 (Schoenberg), 52, 67, 143 Fliegel, Horst, 196n61 Fliegende Holländer, Der (Wagner), 88 Foerster, Josef Bohuslav, 145 folk music, 68, 78 Ford, Aleksander, 132 Fortner, Wolfgang, 26, 176n20 France, 15, 18, 69, 116, 125; Communist Party, 137; occupation army in West Germany, 39 Frank, Anne, 101 Frankel, Benjamin, 75 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 32, 34, 38, 178n42 Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, 34 Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, 24, 30 Frankfurt School, 174n8 “Frå tonalitet til atonalitet” [From Tonality to Atonality] (Gurvin), 67 Frauenfeld, Alfred, 57 Fraund, Adolf, 35–36 Frederick, Kurt, 3, 10, 51, 112, 183n39 French language, 54, 81 Frenkel, Pawel, 170n14 Freudenthal, Heinz, 18, 66, 68, 80, 81, 84; Hall and, 76–77; in Israel, 78, 79; lack of affinity for Schoenberg, 76; life and career of, 77–79; preview of Oslo concert and, 79

Index Freudenthal, Max, 77 Freudenthal, Otto, 77 Freudenthal, Peter, 77, 78 FRG (Federal Republic of Germany). See Germany, West (FRG) Frickmannn, Theodor, 199n18 “Friede auf Erden” (Schoenberg), 30, 110 Friedl, Milan, 155 From the World of Music (Bisgaard), 67 Fucˇík, Julius, 3 Fuks, Marian, 131 Fulbrook, Mary, 98, 195n46 Furche, Die (Austrian Catholic newspaper), 64 GDR (German Democratic Republic). See Germany, East (GDR) Geller, Jay Howard, 96 Gerlach, Jens, 193n16 German language, 4, 6, 162; Jews in Czech lands and, 139; in A Survivor’s narration, 7, 26, 40; for Viennese performance of A Survivor, 54–57, 185n70 Germans, ethnic: expelled from Czech lands, 141; migration to West Germany, 21 Germany, East (GDR), 2, 15, 87–88, 185n77; antifascist agenda of, 16, 89; bureaucracy of, 101–4; Composers’ Union, 93, 100, 118, 120, 134; concert reviews of A Survivor, 104–11; culturally conservative reputation of, 87; Czechoslovakia compared with, 138; de-Semitization in, 2, 96, 100; establishment of, 95; formalism debates (1951), 93; Jewishness and antifascism in, 95–101, 104–11; Jews/Jewish communities in, 64, 94–95, 97–98, 99, 108, 194n31; “Kleiber case” in, 192n8; Leipzig music scene, 88–95; listeners of West German radio, 102–3; national anthem, 90; Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia

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supported by, 154; SRK (State Radio Committee), 102, 103, 119, 134; A Survivor premiere in, 87, 88–90; tensions with People’s Poland, 114, 115–18; Thaw in, 17, 87; in Warsaw Autumn festival, 114. See also cultural diplomacy, in GDR–PRP relationship; SED [Socialist Unity Party] Germany, West (FRG), 1, 15–16, 17, 20–22, 64, 91; American occupation of, 16, 17, 22, 39–40; antiAmericanism in, 16, 28; antiSemitism in, 16, 21–22, 93, 150; British occupation presence, 32, 39; as Cold War enemy of East Germany, 89; “Cold War within the Soviet Bloc” and, 115, 116, 117; former Nazis in postwar German society, 31; rearming of, 99, 100; reputation for support of new music, 15, 19, 20–21, 40; retrenchment in musical culture, 20–21, 174n3; Schnoor and resistance to A Survivor, 31–40; Schoenberg’s music and reputation before A Survivor, 22–25; shared border with Czechoslovakia, 150; A Survivor premiere in, 17, 25–31 Gewandhaus Orchestra (Leipzig), 88, 91, 154 Gielen, Michael, 3 Giulio Cesare (Handel), 77 Glaser, Ernst, 66, 73–74 Globocnik, Otto, 45, 65 Głos Szczecin’ski (Polish newspaper), 127 God motif, 9 Goebbels, Joseph, 47 Goehr, Walter, 110 Goldberg, Ann, 38 Goldmann, Friedrich, 3 Goldschmidt, Harry, 93, 99, 100 Goléa, Antoine, 29 Gomułka, Władysław, 115, 116, 125, 132, 135 Göttig, Willy Werner, 28

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“Gott strafe England” (God punish England) slogan, 32 Gottwald, Klement, 138 Götz, Julius (“Go.”), 107, 108, 197n76 Gould, Glenn, 129 Graf, Max, 186n81 Greenblatt, Stephen, 14, 42, 105 Greissle, Felix, 112 Grieg, Edvard, 71, 73 Grinde, Nils, 67 Gross, Jan, 13 Gubaidulina, Sofia, 153 Guernica (Picasso), 30 Guide, Le, 171n31 Gurre-Lieder (Schoenberg), 67, 68, 143, 149 Gurvin, Olav, 67–68 Hába, Alois, 145, 148, 207n42, 208n56 HaCohen, Ruth, 59, 186n84 Haganah, 141, 205n21 Hagen, Holger, 27–28 Hall, Pauline, 18, 66, 67, 68, 72; biography of, 71–74; concert review by, 83; as organizer of Oslo premiere, 74–77; program notes by, 80; on wounds of Holocaust in Norway, 66, 86 Handel, Georg Friedrich, 77, 144 Hansen, Wilhelm, 67 Harlan, Veit, 47 Harmonielehre (Adams), 4 Harmonielehre (Schoenberg), 4, 208n56 Harmonie und Chaos (Schnoor), 39 “Harp of King David, The” (radio program), 77–78 Hartmann, Karl Amadeus, 193n16 “Haßgesang gegen England” (Lissauer), 32 Hauer, Josef Matthias, 41, 75 Haury, Thomas, 96 Haydn, Franz Josef, 48 Hebrew language, 10, 28, 29, 80, 131, 165; chorus in Czechoslovakia coached in, 147, 157; as Jewish liturgical language, 133, 159; as

marker of Jewishness, 159; in Milhaud’s Sacred Service, 66, 81; as original language of Sh’ma prayer, 15, 90, 152; Sephardic and Ashkenazic, 81; taught phonetically to ensemble singers in GDR, 95; translated for Czech audiences, 154; untranslated for audiences, 40; in Warsaw Ghetto Monument inscription, 162 Heide, Harald, 74 Heidemann, Hans Olaf, 26–28, 56 Heine, Heinrich, 37 Held, Steffen, 95 Hellwig, Joachim, 196n58 Helm, Everett, 128 Henkels, Kurt, 94 Hennenberg, Fritz, 93 Henze, Hans Werner, 153, 193n16 Herdegen, Leszek, 134 Herf, Jeffrey, 96, 100–101 Heronski, Yael, 166 Herz, Joachim, 88 Hessischer Rundfunk, 30, 175n18 hexachordal combinatoriality, 9 Heydrich, Reinhard, 140 Heyer, Hermann, 93–94 Hill, Richard S., 172n38 Hindemith, Paul, 24, 34, 49, 77, 175n15; neoclassicism of, 52, 53; Thilman as pupil of, 129 Hippeli, Elsbet, 77 Hirden (Norwegian fascist organization), 74 Hitler, Adolf, 31, 32, 44, 108, 124; Austrian origins of, 45, 46; era of, 63, 64; Munich Agreement and, 137 Hollywood film scores, 5, 11, 12, 171n29 Holocaust, 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 21; in Austria, 42–47; East German antifascism and, 95–101, 110; ethics of art and, 10, 30; memory and, 8, 21, 43, 66, 81, 152; in Norway, 16, 69–71, 80–83, 86; in Poland, 130–31, 132–34; representations of, 162–66; responsibility for, 22, 29, 40, 65;

Index silence about, 5; survivors, 78, 141, 158; vocabulary for response to, 4 Holocaust survivors, in title role of A Survivor, 4, 16; Berman, 19, 155–56, 158–160; de-Semitization agenda and, 157; experience of Holocaust in Czech lands and, 140 Honegger, Arthur, 154 Höngen, Elisabeth, 49 Horizon (journal), 22, 174n10 House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), 13 Hrabánková, Veˇra, 209n60 Hudba dneška (Music of Today), 148 Hudba terezínského ghetta (Vrkocˇová), 157 Hudební rozhledy (Czech music journal), 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152 Hungary, 115, 137, 139, 140 Hurum, Hans Jørgen, 188n25, 189n29 “Hymn of Hate” (Haßgesang), 32, 178n41 IFNM (Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik), 17, 20, 22, 28; courses on twelve-tone music, 24–25; founder of, 23; important achievements of, 25; performance of A Survivor, 25–28; shift in programming patterns, 175n17 imperialism, 89, 95–96 imperialism, linguistic, 40 Institute for Music Sociology (Vienna), 62 Intelligent Person and the Radio, The (conference), 32–33 internationalism, 17 International Musicological Colloquium (Brno), 149 International Musikfest (Vienna), 17, 26, 41, 50, 53, 59; Hall at, 68, 74–75; A Survivor performed at, 53–57, 68 International Refugee Organization, 13 Introduction à la musique de douze sons (Leibowitz), 22

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Ionisation (Varèse), 26, 29 Iron Curtain, 2, 18, 87, 129, 166 ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music), 24, 49, 51–52, 75, 76, 129, 183n33; in Czechoslovakia, 143, 144; German chapter of, 25; Norwegian section of, 68, 72; Oslo premiere of A Survivor and, 66, 68, 75. See also Ny Musikk Isene, Ola, 66, 80 Isenstein, Harald, 70 Israel, 11, 18, 64, 70, 77, 78, 79, 141; Arab nations’ conflict with, 96, 101, 141; Czechoslovakia and, 141; Eastern Bloc opposition to, 89, 96, 99, 101, 141; Eastern Bloc support of newly founded state, 113; emigration to, 95, 141; Hebrew revived as spoken language in, 159. See also Zionism Israel Defence Forces’ Symphony Orchestra, 11 Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, 78 Israel State Radio Symphony, 79 Ives, Charles, 4 Jakelski, Lisa, 17 Jakobsleiter [Jacob’s Ladder] (Schoenberg), 33, 143 Jakubowska, Wanda, 132 Jaldati, Lin, 99, 195n52, 196n58 Jalowetz, Heinrich, 143 Janácˇek, Leoš, 144, 148, 151 Japanese-American internment camps, WWII, 4 jazz, in Leipzig, 94 Jelinek, Hanns, 52 Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), 131 Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 30, 141 Jewish Museum (Oslo), 69, 82 Jewish music, 77–78, 84, 85 Jews/Jewish communities: under Austrofascism, 45; coexistence with former Nazis, 13; Communist Party members, 98; in Czechoslovakia, 64,

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Jews/Jewish communities (continued) 139–142, 158, 159–160, 205–6n23, 206n25; deportation to camps, 65, 69, 70; German Jews, 18, 30; Israelitische Kultusgemeinde (IKG) in Vienna, 43, 47; Israelitische Religionsgemeinde (IRG) in eastern Germany, 94–95, 97–98, 99, 108, 194n31; mass extermination of, 26; murdered Jews of Europe, 5; in Norway, 68, 69–70, 73–74, 82; in Poland, 132–33; return to Germany after war, 21–22, 40; in United States, 4–5 Jirácˇek, Václav, 147 Jiránek, Jaroslav, 145–46, 147, 207nn42–43 Johann Faustus (Eisler, planned opera), 99 Johansen, David Monrad, 68 Jonsson, Rolf, 190n47 Judaism, 6, 47, 81, 82, 90. See also liturgy, Jewish Jüdische Chronik (various GDR and FRG composers), 92–93, 193n16 Jüdische Nachrichten (German Jewish newspaper), 35, 178n48 Jud Süß [The Jew Süß] (anti-Semitic film), 47 Julius Fucˇík (Nono), 3 Jüngste Gericht, Das (Buxtehude), 77 Jurowski, Vladimir, 3 Kadár, Ján, 157–58 Kagel, Mauricio, 153 Kaiser von Atlantis, Der (Ullmann), 155 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst, 45 Kammerorchester Berlin, 110 Kanał (Wajda film, 1956), 133 Kandinsky, Wassily, 44 Karner, Otto, 51 Kasseler Musiktage, 25 Kassern, Tadeusz, 112–13, 132, 198n1 Kater, Michael, 36 Kauffmann-Jassoy, Erich, 71 Kegel, Herbert, 18–19, 97, 101, 102, 135, 196n59; Leipzig music scene

and, 88–95; under Stasi surveillance, 103, 104, 197n72; A Survivor performance in East Germany and, 105, 106, 110, 124; in Warsaw, 92, 114, 119, 125, 126 Kershaw, Ian, 180n69 Kessler, Mario, 96 Khrennikov, Tikhon, 120 Khrushchev, Nikita, 16, 87, 125, 138, 152, 153 Kiddush Hashem, 82 Kieval, Hillel, 9 Kisielewski, Stefan, 129 kitsch, 165, 166, 167, 171n29 Kleiber, Erich, 192n8 Kleinert, Wolfgang, 101 Klemm, Eberhardt, 111 Klemperer, Otto, 97 Klenau, Paul von, 67 Kloiber, Rudolf, 36 Klos, Elmar, 157–58 Kluge, Die (Orff), 120 Knepler, Georg, 99 Knorrn, Horst-Dieter, 193n24 Koch, Helmut, 102, 110 Kochan, Günter, 135 Koeltzsch, Hans, 36 Köhler, Siegfried, 93 Kołakowski, Leszek, 132 Kolisch Quartet, 10, 144 Kol Israel (Radio) Orchestra (also known as Kol Israel Symphony Orchestra), 11, 77, 78 Kol nidre (Schoenberg), 90, 92, 150 Kol Zion Lagola Male Choir, 11 Komische Oper (East Berlin), 154 Komorní (Chamber Harmony), 148, 155 Koniec . Mesjasza [End of the Messiah] (Zuławski), 113 Korean conflict, 142 Košler, Zdeneˇk, 160 Kostbarkeiten jüdischer Folklore (Treasures of Jewish Folklore), 94–95 Köster, Maren, 21 Kostka, Violetta, 113

Index Koussevitzky, Serge, 30 Koussevitzky Music Foundation, 6, 10, 113 KPÖ (Austrian Communist Party), 51, 58, 62, 63, 64 Kraków National Philharmonic, 134 Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra, 3 Krátký, Rudolf, 151 Krauss, Clemens, 48 Krauss, Marita, 14, 21, 42 Krenek, Ernst, 26, 52–53 Krenz, Jan, 134 Krips, Josef, 48 Kristallnacht, 3, 95 KSCˇ (Komunistická strana Cˇeskoslovenska): early history of, 137–38; musical Thaw and, 151; power over musical life, 144, 148 Kucˇera, Václav, 153–54 Kundera, Milan, 209n60 Kunschak, Leopold, 43 Kuschmitz, Helga, 193n24 Kypr, Pavel, 142 Lafite, Peter, 50–51 Latte, Konrad, 29 Laux, Karl, 110 Lavry, Marc, 78 lawsuits, in West Germany, 37–39, 179n61, 180n62 Lazar, Moshe, 43 Lechner, Konrad, 28 Ledenyov, Roman, 153 Lehmann, J. F., publishing house of, 39, 180n69 Leibowitz, René, 12, 18, 29, 61, 112; as conductor, 11, 24, 50; correspondence with Schoenberg, 171–72n33; course on twelve-tone composition, 24; as Dessau’s teacher, 91–92; French translation of Survivor text by, 54–55; orchestral score of A Survivor prepared by, 6, 92; PolishJewish origins of, 198n5; as source of misinformation about A Survivor, 22–23 Leipzig Opera, 88, 120, 121, 122, 154

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Leipzig premiere (April 1958), 88–90, 101–11 Leipzig Radio Dance Orchestra, 94 Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra (LRSO) and Choir, 18, 88, 91, 93, 94, 95, 100; GDR–PRP cultural diplomacy and, 119–120, 123, 124, 128; A Survivor performed in East Germany, 101–2, 103, 104, 105, 110; A Survivor performed in Poland, 114, 125, 126, 127, 134, 145 Leipzig Symphony Orchestra, 18 Lepsius, M. Rainer, 95 Lerner, Adolf R., 8 Leverkühn, Adrian (fictional character), 58, 62 Levin, Robert, 73, 80 Levin, Solveig, 80 Lexikon (Riemann), 31, 37 Liberal Democratic Party [LDPD] (East Germany), 105, 107 Liberal Party [Venstre], Norwegian, 71 Lidice (Martinu° ), 91 Ligeti, Györgi, 126, 153 Lilo Hermann (Dessau), 121 Lissa, Zofia, 122, 149 Lissauer, Ernst, 32 List, Kurt, 7, 8, 10–11, 12 Liszt, Franz, 67, 150 liturgy, Jewish, 66, 68, 81–85, 108 Locke, Brian S., 143–44 Lohengrin (Wagner), 3 London Philharmonic Orchestra, 3 L’Orfeo (Monteverdi), 77 Lovano, Lucien, 11 Lüdeke, Rainer, 88 Lueger, Karl, 43 Lustig, Arnošt, 158 Lustig, Moses, 178n48 Lutheranism, 82 Lutosławski, Witold, 122 Maderna, Bruno, 126, 153 Mahler, Gustav, 3, 33, 44, 45, 54, 60, 64; anti-Semitic opposition to, 49; attacked for “degenerate music,” 59; Faustian connection with

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Mahler, Gustav (continued) Schoenberg and Mann, 57–60; modernist music and, 67; Soviet agenda for postwar Austria and, 48; Zemlinsky memorial lecture on, 143 Maier, Charles, 197n69 Malawski, Artur, 116 Mánes Group, 144 Mann, Thomas, 57–59, 62 Marek, Tadeusz, 116–17, 122–23 Mark, Bernard, 96 Markowski, Eugeniusz, 120 Martinu° , Bohuslav, 91, 151 Marx, Karl, 29–30, 96 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue, 137, 139 Matejka, Viktor, 51 Matz, Arnold, 93, 109 MDR (Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk) Leipzig Radio Choir, 91, 193n24 Mediterranean School, 78 Melichar, Alois, 36, 150, 180n62, 209n63 Melos (West German new-music journal), 24, 34, 35, 121 Mendelssohn, Felix, 30 Merker, Paul, 98 Meuschel, Sigrid, 96 Meyenn, Hans Werner von, 35 Meyer, Ernst Hermann, 99, 135 Meyer, Julius, 99 MfAA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] (East Germany), 117, 119–123; Department of Cultural Relations, 121; Division of Neighboring Countries, 120; political liberalization of Poland and, 124 MfK [Ministry of Culture] (East Germany), 101, 103; Department of Cultural Relations, 119; radio ensembles and, 102; relations with Poland and, 117 microtonality, 148 midrash, 9 Milhaud, Darius, 30, 62, 66, 78; Les Six and, 154; performed with Schoenberg in Oslo, 76, 77, 79–81 Mitropoulos, Dimitri, 12, 172n35

Mittag, Der (Düsseldorf newspaper), 22, 23, 28–29 Mitteldeutsche Neueste Nachrichten (NDPD newspaper, East Germany), 107 Mjøen, Reidar, 188n25 MKiS [Ministry of Culture and Art] (Poland), 119, 134 mobility, cultural, 19, 68, 136; Greenblatt’s theory of, 42, 105; transnational agency and, 18; unofficial networks in Eastern Bloc, 91 Modern Psalm (Schoenberg), 33, 114, 127 Mommsen, Hans, 42, 44 Monteverdi, Claudio, 77 Moravia, 137, 139, 140, 151 Morgenbladet (Norwegian newspaper), 85 Móricz, Klára, 13, 30, 152 Moscow Conservatory, 153 Moses und Aron (Schoenberg), 26, 30, 33, 131, 145, 150, 162 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 48, 88, 89, 109 Müller, Ludwig Richard, 89–90, 94, 105, 192n6 Müller, Siegfried, 193n24 Munich Agreement (1938), 137–38 Musica (West German journal), 106 Musical America (journal), 12 “musical Bolshevist” epithet, 59 Musical Offering (Bach), 77 Musica Nova, 148 Musica Viva (Munich), 25 Musica viva pragensis, 148, 155, 210n77 Music Survey (journal), 174n10 Musik der Gegenwart (Berlin), 25 Musik der Zeit (Cologne), 25 Musik im NS-Staat (Prieberg), 39 Musikleben in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Das (Laux), 110 Musiklexicon (Seeger), 110 Musik und Chaos (Schnoor), 36, 39

Index Musik und Gesellschaft (East German journal), 109, 116, 121 Musik unserer Zeit (Stuttgart), 25 Mussorgsky, Modest, 67, 71 Mycielski, Zygmunt, 121 Nachlass (Dessau), 92 Nachod, Pauline (mother of Arnold Schoenberg), 139 Nachrichtenblatt (Jewish quarterly in East Germany), 105 Nansen, Odd, 69 Narodowa Demokrajca, 132 Nashville Symphony, 4 national anthems: East Germany, 90; Norway, 74 National Democratic Party [NDPD] (East Germany), 105, 106–7 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 15, 46 Nazis, former: in Austria, 57; coexistence of Jews with, 13; in East Germany, 106; in West Germany, 21, 36, 37, 39, 40, 101 Nazism (Third Reich): aesthetics of, 52; in Austria, 41, 45; Catholicism and, 35; Civil Service Law (1933), 44; Comintern definition of fascism and, 95–96; “cultural Bolshevist” epithet, 59; “degenerate” art/music and, 1, 121, 131; music banned by, 33, 42; NSDAP (Nazi Party), 31, 48; SA (Sturmabteilung), 74; stories of resistance to, 89 Neef, Wilhelm, 93, 100 Neiman, Susan, 163, 164 Nejedlý, Zdeneˇk, 144, 145 neoclassicism, 52–53, 68, 71, 77, 78, 144 neotonal music, 77 Neue Sachlichkeit aesthetic, 71 Neues Österreich (Austrian newspaper), 63–64 Neue Werk, Das (Hamburg), 25, 30 Neue Zeitung, Der (West German newspaper), 27 Neue Zürcher Zeitung (West German newspaper), 36

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Neumann, Erich, 179n61 Neumann, Václav, 154, 155 new music. See Ny Musikk “New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea” (Schoenberg lecture, Prague), 144 New York Philharmonic Orchestra, 11–12 New York Times, 12 Nielsen, Finn, 73 Niemann, Konrad, 87–88, 110, 111 Nilsson, Bo, 52, 126 Nono, Luigi, 3, 52, 153 Norddeutsche Rundfunk, 77 Norden, Albert, 102 Nordraak, Rikard, 73 Norway, 1, 15, 18, 64, 66–69; German occupation of, 68–69, 72–74, 188n25; Holocaust in, 16, 69–71, 80; Resistance movement, 17, 68, 69, 70, 84. See also Oslo premiere Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, 66 “Norwegianism,” in music, 68 Norwegian language, 80, 81 Notes from the Gallows (Fucˇík), 3 Notowicz, Nathan, 99, 100, 117, 118, 121, 122, 199n18 Nouza, Zdeneˇk, 149 Novák, Víteˇzslav, 151 Novotný, Antonín, 138 NRK [Rikskringkasting] (Norwegian radio), 68 NS [Nasjonal Samling] (Norwegian fascist party), 70, 73, 74, 188n25 nuclear weapons, 15, 29, 87, 99–100, 101, 104 Nuremberg race laws, 48, 97 Nuschke, Otto, 108 NWDR [Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk] (Hamburg), 26, 30, 175n18 Ny Musikk (Norwegian section of ISCM), 66, 68, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76 Ode to Napoleon (Schoenberg), 3, 50, 63, 64, 74, 150

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Olav, Crown Prince of Norway, 69, 70 Olden, Caro, 73, 189n27 ÖMZ [Österreichische Musikzeitschrift] (journal), 50–51, 54, 55, 60 “Open Letter to Our Polish Friends, An” (Rebling), 121, 129 Oper, Operette, Konzert (Schnoor), 35 Opfer des Faschismus [OdF] (victimof-fascism) status, 97 Orchestral Suite no. 2 in B minor (Bach), 128 Orchestre Radio-Symphonique, 11, 18 Orff, Carl, 120 Oslo premiere, 18, 66, 79–82; Freudenthal as conductor, 77–79; Hall as organizer, 74–77; reviews of, 82–86 Ostatni etap [The last stage] (Jakubowska film), 132 Österreichische Volksstimme (Austrian communist newspaper), 62, 64 Österreichische Zeitung (Soviet newspaper), 48, 64 Ostrcˇil, Otakar, 145 Ovchinnikov, Vyacheslav, 153 ÖVP (Austrian People’s Party), 47, 63, 64 Palestine, Mandate, 139, 141, 205n21 Panton (Czech musical press), 148, 154 Panufnik, Andrzej, 122 Pärt, Arvo, 152, 153 Partos, Oedoen, 78 Penderecki, Krzysztof, 91 Peragallo, Mario, 41 Peter, Margaret, 54, 55 Péteri György, 18 Philharmonic Society Orchestra [Filharmonisk Selskaps Orkester] (Oslo), 66, 79 Piano Concerto (Feld), 160 Piano Concerto (Peragallo), 41 Piano Concerto (Schoenberg), 24, 26, 74, 116, 129, 149 Piano Concerto, Second (Bartók), 151

Picasso, Pablo, 30 Pierrot lunaire (Schoenberg), 26, 50, 75, 109, 143, 144, 149 Pinkas, Jirˇí, 151, 209n66 Pippig, Elly, 103, 201n56 Pirumov, Alexander, 153 Places of Remembrance Memorial (Berlin), 163–64 Plöner Musiktag (Hindemith), 77 pointillism, 152 Polacca Guerriera (Bull), 74 Poland, People’s Republic of (PRP), 2, 14, 15, 16, 96, 112–15; anti-Semitic campaign in (1968), 160; Czechoslovakia compared with, 138– 39; CZIM (Central Administration of Musical Institutions), 123, 134; Holocaust memory in, 132–34; Jews unnamed in, 64; resurgence of antiSemitism in, 15; Stalinization in, 132, 133; A Survivor premiere in, 17, 113–14; Thaw in, 17, 115–18. See also cultural diplomacy, in GDR– PRP relationship Polish language, 162 Polish National Philharmonic Symphonic Orchestra, 127, 134 Polish Socialist Party, 112 Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), 112–13, 114, 130, 131; formal condemnation of anti-Semitism, 132; liberalization of the Thaw, 115; position on Warsaw Uprising (1944), 133 Polish Workers’ Party, 112 Polskie Radio, 114, 198n6 Po prostu (Polish journal), 132 popular music, American, 61, 87, 89, 94, 99, 103, 104 Pousseur, Henri, 126 Prague, city of, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141; Deutsches Landestheater, 143; National Theater, 146, 155; Staronová synagoga (Old-New Synagogue), 139 Prague Manifesto, 144 Prague Radio Orchestra, 144

Index Prague Spring (1968), 138, 142, 149, 157, 160 Prague Spring Music Festival, 144 Presse, Die (Vienna newspaper), 51 Preussner, Erhard, 185n81 Prˇežil jsem Varšavu [I Survived Warsaw] (Czech title of A Survivor), 151 Prieberg, Fred, 37, 38, 39, 179n61 Prisma (Swedish music magazine), 67 Prokofiev, Sergei, 49, 120, 121 Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 137–38, 140 Protestant Academy for Radio and Television, 33 Protestantism, 43, 44, 97, 131 Prussian Academy of Arts (Berlin), 44, 67 Przegla˛d Kulturalny [Cultural Review] (Polish journal), 121 Purim, 82 Quartet for Violin, Clarinet, Tenor Saxophone, and Piano op. 22 (Webern), 155 Quattro pezzi sacri (Verdi), 41, 63, 81 Quisling, Vidkun, 70, 73 Qvamme, Børre, 85 Radio (Radio France circular), 11 Radio Bremen, 26, 175n18, 176n20 Radio DDR (East German radio), 91, 101–3, 110 radio ensembles, 18, 91, 101–2, 147 Radio France, 11, 171n31, 171n33 Rapoport, Nathan, 113, 130, 132, 161–63, 166 Rattle, Simon, 3 Ravel, Maurice, 68, 71 Rebling, Eberhard, 99, 121, 122, 129–130, 200n42 redemption, 3, 167 Rehding, Alexander, 165 Reich, Steve, 158 Reich, Willi, 25 Reichsschrifttumskammer of the Reichskulturkammer (RSK RKK), 31

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Reinke-Welsh, Bettina, 193n24 remigration, 13–14, 16, 21; of Jewish composers, 49; of Schoenberg, 22, 42, 43, 57, 65 RIAS (radio station), 25 Ricordi, 15, 147, 177n35 Rinder, Rueben, 81 Romania, 137, 139, 140 Rosenblüth, Leo, 66, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83 Roskies, David, 82 Rostand, Claude, 11 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 163 Rubin, Marcel, 62–63, 64 Ruch Muzyczny (Polish journal), 121 Rudorf, Reginald, 94 Rufer, Josef, 25, 54 RŽNO [Council of Jewish Religious Communities] (Czechoslovakia), 140 Saathen, Friedrich, 54 Sächsisches Tageblatt (LDPD newspaper, East Germany), 107–8 Sacred Service [Service sacré] (Milhaud), 66, 76, 77, 78, 79–81, 83–85 St. John’s Passion (Bach), 39 St. Matthew Passion (Bach), 3 Salomon, Carl, 78 Sammern-Frankenegg, Col. Ferdynand von, 65, 187n96 Sander, Werner, 94–95 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 11, 22 Scandal Concert [Skandalkonzert] (1913), 143 Schartum, Johannes, 73 Scheit, Gerhart, 59 Schema Yisroel. See Sh’ma Yisroel Scherchen, Hermann, 18, 19, 24, 32, 56, 60; International Musikfest and, 47, 54, 55; new music and, 75; performance of Moses und Aron, 30; photographic portrait of, 27; as promoter of Schoenberg’s music, 26; Schoenberg’s correspondence with, 41–42, 53 Schicksalslied (Brahms), 128 Schiller, David M., 9, 82

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Schmidt, Manfred, 117, 119, 201n56 Schmiedel, Gottfried, 105 Schnock, Frieder, 163 Schnoor, Hans, 22, 31–40, 179n61 Schoenberg, Arnold: in Berlin, 44, 53, 59, 67; conversion to Protestantism, 43, 44, 131; correspondence with Greissle, 112, 198n1; correspondence with List, 7–8; correspondence with Scherchen, 41–42; Czech recordings of, 155, 210n77; death of, 25, 29, 30, 42; Dessau and, 92–93; East German cultural-political debate about, 87, 90, 105, 110–11; emigration from Europe, 21; family in Czech lands, 139, 143; Faustian connection with Mann and Mahler, 57–59; identities projected upon, 16; in Israel, 11; Jewishness of, 2, 16, 21, 131, 137, 154–55; nonmusical works (paintings, lectures, writings) by, 51, 144, 162; as “pope of twelve-tone serialists,” 128, 129; postwar cultural politics of Vienna and, 50–53; in Prague, 143; Second Viennese School and, 49, 144; supporters in Europe, 11; A Survivor described by, 8, 161–62; U.S. citizenship of, 5; vaunted status at Warsaw Autumn festival, 130, 132; in Vienna before emigration, 41, 43–44; Zionism of, 90 Schoenberg, Arnold, musical compositions by: Acht Lieder, op. 6, 67; Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, 24, 143, 149; Chamber Symphony, First, 50, 59, 67, 110, 143; Chamber Symphony, Second, 11, 24; Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra after Handel, 144; “Dreimal Tausend Jahre,” 52, 67; Erwartung, 29, 143, 149; Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, 143, 149; Five Piano Pieces (Fünf Klavierstücke), op. 23, 52, 67, 143; “Friede auf Erden,” 30, 110; GurreLieder, 67, 68, 143, 149; Jakobsleiter

(Jacob’s Ladder), 33, 143; Kol nidre, 90, 92, 150; Modern Psalm, 33, 114, 127; Moses und Aron, 26, 30, 33, 131, 145, 162; Ode to Napoleon, 3, 50, 63, 64, 74, 150; Piano Concerto, 24, 26, 74, 116, 129, 149; Pierrot lunaire, 26, 50, 75, 109, 143, 144, 149; Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, 149; Serenade, op. 24, 67; Six Orchestral Songs, op. 8, 143; String Quartet,Second, 24, 30, 49; String Quartet,Third, 149; String Quartet, Fourth, 52; String Trio, 109; Suite for Two Clarinets, Bass Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano, 155; Theme and Variations for Wind Band, 149; Verklärte Nacht, 33, 68, 149; Violin Concerto, 75, 76; “Der Wunsch des Liebhabers,” 144 Schoenberg, Gertrud (wife of Arnold), 15, 36–37, 134 “Schoenberg, Mattsee, and Denomination” (newspaper article), 44 Schoenberg, Samuel (father of Arnold), 139 Schönberg und die Folgen (Melichar), 36 Schreker, Franz, 49 Schubert, Franz, 48 Schumacher, Claude, 159 Schumann, Otto, 36 Schwarz, Josef, 147 Schwarze Korps, Das (SS newspaper), 37, 38 SCˇS (Union of Czechoslovak Composers), 17, 144, 148, 152–54, 207nn42–43 Sechs kleine Klavierstücke (Schoenberg), 149 Second Viennese School, 24, 49, 52, 129; Czech reception of, 147, 154, 157; dodecaphony of, 50; Mann’s Doktor Faustus and, 58; neglect of, 53, 55; as theme of fourth International Musikfest, 53; triumvirate of, 144; Warsaw

Index Autumn festival and, 124, 126, 127–28, 131 SED [Socialist Unity Party] (East Germany), 94–98, 103, 107, 108, 116; antifascist foundational narrative of, 98, 104; Central Committee, 102, 118; control of subsidiary political parties, 105–6; radio as propaganda tool and, 101; A Survivor performance reviewed in publications of, 109–10, 130, 131; Warsaw Autumn festival and, 114; Zionism opposed by, 96. See also cultural diplomacy, in GDR–PRP relationship Seder Ritual of Remembrance, 8 Seefehlner, Egon, 49–50, 53, 55, 184n54 Seeger, Horst, 110 Seiber, Mátyás, 76 Selmer, Johan, 67 Serenade, op. 24 (Schoenberg), 67 serialism, 127, 128; Czech composers and, 152, 153; as descendant of dodecaphony, 52; East German opposition to, 129; in Israel, 78. See also atonality/atonal music; dodecaphony; twelve-tone music Shlonsky, Verdina, 78 Sh’ma Yisroel (“Hear, O Israel”), 5, 15, 60, 63, 64, 75, 80; in Czech performances, 151, 154; defiant singing of, 192n4; Deuteronomy text of, 8–9; in East German printed program, 90; in Milhaud’s Sacred Service, 81; narration of, 6–7; narrator’s preparation of listeners for, 163; in Norwegian performance, 82; Schoenberg’s description of, 161–62; transitions leading to choral entry, 164–65 Shop on Main Street, The (film, 1942), 158 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 4, 88, 89, 102, 106, 107, 135, 192n4 Shreffler, Anne C., 28 Sikorski, Kazimierz, 121, 122

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Silvestrov, Valentin, 152 Sinding, Christian, 74 Sinfonietta (Kochan), 135 Six, Les, 53, 154 Six Orchestral Songs, op. 8 (Schoenberg), 143 Skoda, Albin, 41, 55, 184n64 Slánský, Rudolf, 138, 141–42 Slonimsky, Sergei, 153 Slovakia, 139, 140, 158, 205n14 Small Fortress Terezín, The (Kypr), 142 Smetana, Bedrˇich, 144, 145, 154 Smith, Sherman, 10 socialist realism, 58, 117, 122, 129; accessibility as tenet of, 52, 126; in Czechoslovakia, 144–45; imperative of socially engaged art, 150, 152; Rapaport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument and, 166; Socrealizm as Polish shorthand for, 121, 200–201n42 Society for Private Musical Performances, 52, 55, 143 “Solidaritätslied” (Eisler), 90 Sonatori di Praga, 148 Sørensen, Dag Winding, 84 Southwest Radio (Baden-Baden), 39 Soviet Union (USSR), 15, 89, 144, 166; coup in Czechoslovakia (1948) and, 138; denazification and, 31, 177n39; de-Semitized antifascist rhetoric of, 182n24; German occupied territories of, 65; invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), 15, 149, 154, 160; Israel recognized by (1948), 141; nuclear weapons proposals and, 99–100; occupation zone in Austria, 46, 48, 184n64; occupation zone in Germany (SBZ), 97, 98, 107, 141; party purges in, 98; “Polish road to socialism” and, 115; Warsaw Autumn festival and, 125; Warsaw Uprising (1944) and, 130; “young composers” from, 152–53, 154 Spielhagen, Franz, 102, 201n56 Spielhaus, Max, 97, 102, 104, 196n61

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Spitz, Hermann, 30 SPÖ (Austrian Social Democratic Party), 61 Sprechstimme, narrator’s, 7, 109 SS (Schutzstaffel): Austrian members of, 45, 48, 65; official newspaper of, 37, 38; Winter’s application to join, 57 Staatsoper (East Berlin), 119–120, 135 Stalin, Joseph, 87, 138, 141, 202n58, 202n71 Stalinism, 16, 87, 128, 138, 147 Stangl, Franz, 65 Stanley, Louis, 12, 13 Stasi (East German secret police), 94, 101, 103–4, 117, 197n72, 201n56 Steinberg, Michael P., 163–64 Steinecke, Wolfgang, 23–24, 25, 33, 175n17 Stephan, Rudolf, 208n56 Steuermann, Eduard, 26 Stier, Alfred, 91 Stih, Renate, 163 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 126, 153 Stokowski, Leopold, 3 Stolica (Polish newspaper), 127 Strasser, Michael, 169n10 Strauss, Johann, II, 67 Strauss, Richard, 67 Stravinsky, Igor, 24, 53, 71, 153 Striegler, Kurt, 91 String Quartet,Second (Schoenberg), 24, 30, 49 String Quartet,Third (Schoenberg), 149 String Quartet, Fourth (Schoenberg), 52 String Trio (Schoenberg), 109 String Trio (Webern), 155 Strobel, Heinrich, 24, 33, 34, 35, 37, 53, 175n13 Stroop, Jürgen, 187n96 Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, 24 Stumpf, Hermann, 34, 36 Sturm, Der (Khrennikov), 120 Style and Idea (Schoenberg), 54, 60–61

Süddeutscher Rundfunk (Stuttgart), 175n18 Süddeutsche Zeitung (newspaper), 36 Sudetenland, 137 Suite for Two Clarinets, Bass Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano (Schoenberg), 155 Supraphon (Czech record label), 155, 210n76 Survivant de Varsovie, Un (French title of A Survivor), 11 Survivor from Warsaw, A (Schoenberg), 2, 6, 158; Albuquerque premiere [world premiere] (1948), 3, 10, 51, 89, 166; Czech composers at Warsaw premiere, 145–46; Czech premieres/performances (1960s), 136, 151, 154–160; European premiere (Paris, 1948), 11, 15, 112; Holocaust survivors in title role, 4, 16, 136, 140; Leipzig premiere (1958), 88–90, 101–11; misconceptions about, 22–23, 75, 80; Oslo premiere, 18, 66, 71–86; Rapaport’s Warsaw Ghetto Monument compared to, 161–63, 166; text of, 7, 40; theatricality of, 165; Vienna premiere (1951), 17, 41, 53–57, 81, 176n23; Warsaw premiere (1958), 112, 113, 129–134, 145; West German premiere (Darmstadt, 1950), 17, 25–31; writing of, 6. See also Holocaust survivors, in title role; Sh’ma Yisroel Survivor from Warsaw, A (Schoenberg), music paired with: at Albuquerque premiere, 3; at Czech premieres/performances, 151, 154, 160; at Darmstadt premiere, 26; at Leipzig premiere, 89; at Oslo premiere, 66, 76, 77–79, 81; at Vienna premiere, 41, 81; at Warsaw premiere, 114, 124 Suzin, Leon Marek, 130 Svoboda, Wilhelm, 59 Sweden, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79 SWF (Südwestfunk), 24, 26, 38, 175n18

Index Switzerland, 58, 94, 151, 180n62 Sychra, Antonín, 145 Symphonic Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra (Hába), 208n56 Symphony for Strings (Meyer), 135 Symphony no. 1 (Mahler), 48 Symphony no. 1 (Milhaud), 78 Symphony no. 2 (Resurrection) (Mahler), 3 Symphony no. 3 (Mahler), 48 Symphony no. 4 (Cilenšek), 123, 124 Symphony no. 4 (Krenek), 26 Symphony no. 5 (Beethoven), 3 Symphony no. 5 (Tchaikovsky), 48, 160 Symphony no. 6 (Tchaikovsky), 151 Symphony no. 7 (Beethoven), 3 Symphony no. 8 (Beethoven), 3 Symphony no. 8 (Mahler), 54, 59, 60 Symphony no. 8 (Milhaud), 154 Symphony no. 9 (Beethoven), 3–4, 62, 160, 171n29 Symphony no. 9 (Mahler), 45 Symphony no. 11 (Shostakovich), 88, 89, 102, 107, 109, 110, 192n4 Symphony no. 39 (Mozart), 88 Synagogalchor, 94, 95 Syndicate of Czechoslovak Composers, 144, 206n38 Syria, 64 Szabelski, Bolesław, 116 Tagebuch für Anne Frank, Eine (DEFA documentary film), 101, 196n58 Tage der neuen Musik (Hannover), 25 Takei, George, 4 Tal, Josef, 78 Taruskin, Richard, 171n29 Tat, Die (newspaper), 36 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich, 48, 151, 160 Tempel Synagogue (Kazimierz), 3 Temps modernes, Les (journal), 11 Ten, který prˇežil Varšavu (Czech title of A Survivor), 148, 149 Tenschert, Roland, 63, 186n91 Terezín (Theresienstadt) Ghetto, 95, 140, 155, 166; de-Semitization of

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narrative of, 142, 157–58; music in, 136, 155, 157 Terezin: Small Fortress, Cemetery, Ghetto (Kulišová), 140 T-4 euthanasia program, 65 Thaw, 17, 129; anti-Semitism in Poland during, 132; “Cold War within the Soviet Bloc” and, 114; cultural diplomacy between East Germany and Poland during, 115– 18; effort to address problem of antiSemitism and, 132; as precondition for A Survivor in the Eastern Bloc, 138; Schoenberg issue in East Germany and, 87 Thaw, in Czechoslovakia, 1–2, 144–45, 147, 148, 155, 157; Composers’ Union and, 152–54; delay in arrival of, 138; early hint of musical Thaw in CŠR, 145–46; ended by Soviet invasion, 149, 160; greater freedom for Jews, 142; A Survivor in CˇSSR, 146–152 theatricality, 165 Theme and Variations for Wind Band (Schoenberg), 149 Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (unreleased Nazi propaganda film), 157 Thilman, Johannes, 116, 128–29, 201n57 Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (Penderecki), 91 Timm, Angelika, 96 Timpani Concerto (Weinberger), 3 tonality, 61, 74 Torjussen, Trygve, 73 Tragic Overture (Brahms), 79, 81 “Tragödie unserer Zeit” (Leibowitz), 22–23 transnationalism, 17 Treblinka death camp, 8, 65, 198n7 Trybuna Ludu (Polish newspaper), 126 Tudor, David, 126 twelve-tone music, 1, 9, 10, 42, 145, 155; critics and, 85, 107; described as

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twelve-tone music (continued) “fascism,” 36, 209n63; opposition to, 36, 129. See also atonality; dodecaphony; serialism Tygodnik Powszechny (Polish newspaper), 202n71 Tygodnik Zachodni (Polish newspaper), 126, 127 Überlebender von Warschau, Der (German title of A Survivor), 28 Überlebender von Warschau, Ein (German title of A Survivor in Austria), 41 Ulbricht, Walter, 94, 115–16, 135 Ulica Graniczna [Border Street] (Ford film), 132 Ullmann, Viktor, 143, 155 Unanswered Question, The (Ives), 4 Unfinished Symphony (Schubert), 48 Union, Die (CDU newspaper, East Germany), 108–9 Union Prayerbook for Jewish Worship, The, 81 United States, 14, 76, 97, 118, 147, 160; Cold War and, 15, 89, 95, 99; as Cold War enemy of Czechoslovakia, 136; as Cold War enemy of East Germany, 89, 95, 99; European opinions on Schoenberg’s American oeuvre, 18, 105, 136, 149–150; House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), 13; Jews in, 4–5, 8, 81; occupation zone in Germany, 140–41; Warsaw Autumn festival and, 118, 125; West German relationship with, 20 Unsterbliche Geliebte (film), protests against, 47, 182n24 Uszkoreit, Hans-Georg, 199n18 Valen, Fartein, 67–68, 85 Varèse, Edgard, 26, 29, 153 Varga, Tibor, 76 Variations for Orchestra, op. 30 (Webern), 154 VEB Deutsche Schallplatten, 102, 103

Venice Biennale, 26 Verdens Gang (Norwegian newspaper), 84 Verdi, Giuseppe, 41, 63, 81 Verklärte Nacht (Schoenberg), 33, 68, 149 Vertovec, Steven, 17 Verurteilung des Lukullus, Die (Dessau and Brecht), 88, 99, 120, 124, 135 Veˇstník ŽNO (Jewish newspaper in Czechoslovakia), 159–160 Vienna, city of: Academy of Music and Fine Arts, 43; anti-Semitism in, 42, 43–45, 47; Concert House Society (Konzerthausgesellschaft), 49, 50, 53, 55; cultural institutions of, 49–50; Faustian constellation (Schoenberg–Mann–Mahler), 57–59; postwar music and cultural politics in, 47–50; prewar Jewish community of, 10; Schoenberg and postwar cultural politics, 50–53; Schoenberg’s love-hate relationship with, 41; in Soviet occupation zone, 46. See also International Musikfest Vienna Chamber Choir, 41 Vienna Philharmonic, 45, 48, 182n28 Vienna premiere (1951), 17, 41, 53–57, 81, 176n23 Vienna Singakademie, 41 Vienna Symphony (Wiener Symphoniker), 41, 48, 51–52 Vietnam-Diskurs (Dessau), 91 Violin Concerto (Schoenberg), 75, 76 VKM (Verband der Komponisten und Musikwissenschaftler), 116, 117, 118, 121, 128, 199nn18–19 “Vltava” (Smetana), 154 Vojteˇch, Ivan, 148–49 Volkonsky, Andrei, 152, 153 Volkstümlichkeit (folksiness), 49 Voltaire, 164 Vrkocˇová, Ludmila, 157 VVN (Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime), 97–98 Vysloužil, Jirˇí, 19, 148–152, 208n56

Index Wagner, Cosima, 67 Wagner, Klaus, 28 Wagner, Richard, 3, 72, 88 Wagner-Règeny, Rudolf, 193n16 Wajda, Andrzej, 133 Waldhan, Jirˇí, 151 Waldheim Affair (1986), 47 Waldorff, Jerzy, 127 Walter, Bruno, 45 Wandlungen (Hauer), 41, 75 Warsaw, German destruction of, 64, 80, 96, 115, 146 Warsaw Autumn festival, 16, 18, 114, 120, 121, 134; critical reviews in Polish press, 126–28; Czech composers and, 145, 148; GDR–PRP cultural diplomacy and, 115, 122– 135; Piano Concerto at, 116; Polish premiere of A Survivor at, 17, 112, 113, 119, 129–134 Warsaw Ghetto, 10, 23, 62, 63, 80, 198n7; deportation of Jews to, 65; German destruction of, 90, 115; symbolic significance in Eastern Bloc, 156 Warsaw Ghetto Monument (Rapoport), 113, 130, 132, 161–63, 166 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943), 8, 9, 82, 155, 170n14; appropriated for antifascist purposes, 96; de-Semitization of narrative of, 142, 146; fifth anniversary of, 132; fifteenth anniversary of, 130; film representations of, 132; German offensives to crush, 65; Jewishness downplayed in Eastern Bloc, 18; Kassern opera as homage to victims of, 113; survivors of, 190n47 “Warsaw Meditations on Modernity” (Jiránek), 145 Warsaw Pact, 15 Warsaw Philharmonic, 112 Warsaw Uprising (1944), 114, 130, 133–34 Warschawa Ghetto (Norwegian title of A Survivor), 79

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Weber, Carl Maria von, 31 Webern, Anton, 25, 51, 52, 53, 207n48; Czech recordings of, 155, 210n77; Czech Thaw and, 148, 154; performed in Soviet Union, 129; Second Viennese School and, 49, 144 Weg, Der (Berlin Jewish newspaper), 29 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 14 Wehnert, Martin, 106 Weill, Kurt, 71 Weimar Republic, 26, 72 Weinberger, Jaromir, 3 Weiße Rose, Die (Fortner), 26, 176n20 Welt, Die (newspaper), 36 Weltpresse Wien (Austrian socialist newspaper), 61 Westdeutsche Rundfunk (Cologne), 34, 38–39 Westfalen-Blatt (Bielefeld newspaper), 31, 32, 33, 38, 178n42 Wiedergutmachung (“make good again”) postwar reparations, 98, 114 Wiener Kurier (U.S. Army Group Press newspaper), 60, 61, 64 Wiener Montag (newspaper), 47 Wiener Morgen-Zeitung (newspaper), 44 Wiener Tageszeitung (Austrian conservative newspaper), 63, 64 Wiesenthal, Simon, 45 Wilde, Oscar, 176n20 Wildgans, Friedrich, 51, 53 “Wind, Hans E.” (pseudonym of Kurt Blaukopf), 62 Winter, Hanns von, 55, 56, 57, 58 “Wir und der Funk” (Schnoor column), 31 Wisse, Ruth R., 40 Wistrich, Robert, 45, 47 Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik, 25 Wlodarski, Amy Lynn, 9, 29, 158 Wolf, Werner, 109, 110, 193n24 Wolff, Hellmuth Christian, 93, 126, 193n23 World Monuments Fund, 2–3

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World War, First, 32 World War, Second, 29, 32, 88, 114, 150, 158 “Wort und Ton” [Word and tone] (newspaper column), 30 Wozzeck (Berg), 71–72, 119, 146–47, 156 “Wunsch des Liebhabers, Der” (Schoenberg), 144 Yiddish language/song, 99, 133, 162, 195n52 youth music movement (Jugendmusikbewegung), 53 Yugoslavia, 137 Zeit, Die (newspaper), 36 Zemlinsky, Alexander, 143 Zender, Hans, 3 Zevi, Sabbatai, 113 Zhdanov decree (1948), 89, 144, 145

Ziarek, Plonowska, 130–31, 133 Zillig, Winfried, 24, 33, 35, 36–37, 38, 178n43 Zionism, 89, 90, 96, 101; anti-Zionism as cover for anti-Semitism, 140, 160; in Czech lands, 139, 140; Slánský trial and, 141, 142 ZKP (Swia˛zek Komposytorów Polskich), 116, 118, 120, 122, 199nn18–19; Ruch Muzyczny journal, 121; Warsaw Autumn . festival . and, 121 ZOB [Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa] (Jewish Fighting Organization), 170n14 Zohar, Yehoshua, 11 . Zołnierz Wolnos’ci (Polish newspaper), . 131 Z. uławski, . Jerzy, 113 ZZW [Zydowski Zwia˛zek Wojskowy] (Jewish Military Union), 170n14