Musical Journeys: Performing Migration in Twentieth-Century Music 1783274611, 9781783274611

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Music Examples
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Mobility between Margin and Centre
1 Angels in Paris
2 Facing the Nation
3 Airwaves in London
4 Singing Exile of Progress and Nostalgia
5 Jewish Memories
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

FLORIAN SCHEDING is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol.

Cover images: István Anhalt, drawing, sketches, HungarianEnglish dictionary and letter to George Rochberg, 1 July 1996 (details), Istvan Anhalt Fonds, Library and Archives Canada, with kind permission of the estate of Istvan and Beate Anhalt. Hanns Eisler, title page of the third movement of his Deutsche Sinfonie, 1938 (detail), with kind permission of Akademie der Künste Berlin. Hanns Eisler landing card, file ‘Hanns Eisler KV2/2009’ (detail), with kind permission of The National Archives, London. Compensation claim Mátyás Seiber, Aktenzeichen I 6 W 37468, Abt. 518 Nr. 1541/14, Hessisches Staatsarchiv (detail), with kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber Estate and Trust. Globe and Mail front page, 10 March 1994 (detail), with kind permission of The Globe and Mail. Announcement in Freie Deutsche Kultur 1:3, 1942 (detail), with kind permission of Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Telegram from Lady Davis Foundation to István Anhalt (detail), Istvan Anhalt Fonds, Library and Archives Canada, with kind permission of the estate of Istvan and Beate Anhalt.

MUSICAL JOURNEYS

The displacement of European musics and musicians is a defining feature of twentieth-century music history. Musical Journeys uses vignettes of migratory moments in the works of Hanns Eisler in Paris, Mátyás Seiber in London, and István Anhalt in Montreal to investigate concepts of identity construction and musical aesthetics in the light of migratory experiences. Moving between the AustroHungarian Empire, proto-fascist Hungary, fascist Germany, war-time Britain, post-war Canada, and socialist East Germany, the book explores aspects of musical migrant culture including creative responses to nationalist ideas and politics, the role of cultural institutions in promoting (or censoring) the works of immigrant composers, and the complex interaction between Jewish identity and memory. It contends that an approach to music through the lens of migration can challenge and enrich socio-cultural understandings of music as well as conceptions of music historiography. Drawing on exile, diaspora, migration and mobilities studies, critical theory, and post-colonial and cultural studies, Musical Journeys weaves detailed biographical and contextual historical knowledge and analytical insights into music into an intricate fabric that does justice to the complexity of the musical migratory experience.

FLORIAN SCHEDING

MUSIC IN SOCIETY AND CULTURE

MUSICAL JOURNEYS PERFORMING MIGRATION IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSIC FLORIAN SCHEDING

musical journeys

Music in Society and Culture issn 2047-2773

Series Editors vanessa agnew, katharine ellis, jonathan glixon & david gramit Consulting Editor tim blanning

This series brings history and musicology together in ways that will embed social and cultural questions into the very fabric of music-history writing. Music in Society and Culture approaches music not as a discipline, but as a subject that can be discussed in myriad ways. Those ways are cross-disciplinary, requiring a mastery of more than one mode of enquiry. This series therefore invites research on art and popular music in the Western tradition and in cross-cultural encounters involving Western music, from the early modern period to the twenty-first century. Books in the series will demonstrate how music operates within a particular historical, social, political or institutional context; how and why society and its constituent groups choose their music; how historical, cultural and musical change interrelate; and how, for whom and why music’s value undergoes critical reassessment. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the series editors or Boydell & Brewer at the addresses shown below.

Professor Vanessa Agnew, University of Duisburg-Essen, Department of Anglophone Studies, r12 s04 h, Universitätsstr. 12, 45141 Essen, Germany email: [email protected] Professor Katharine Ellis, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, 11 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP, UK email: [email protected] Professor Jonathan Glixon, School of Music, 105 Fine Arts Building, University of Kentucky, Lexington, ky 40506–0022, USA email: [email protected] Professor David Gramit, Department of Music, University of Alberta, 3–82 Fine Arts Building, Edmonton, Alberta, t6g 2c9, Canada email: [email protected] Boydell & Brewer, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, ip12 3df, UK email: [email protected] Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume.

musical journeys

performing migration in twentieth-century music

florian scheding

the boydell press

© Florian Scheding 2019 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Florian Scheding to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2019 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge isbn  978 1 78327 461 1 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk ip12 3df, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, ny 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset in Warnock Pro by Sparks Publishing Services Ltd—www.sparkspublishing.com

Contents

List of Music Examples

vi

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction: Mobility between Margin and Centre

1

1  Angels in Paris

15

2  Facing the Nation

45

3  Airwaves in London

83

4  Singing Exile of Progress and Nostalgia

113

5  Jewish Memories

143

Bibliography

165

Index

187

The Deutsche Sinfonie • Migratory Networks • Migrant Places • Paris as Migrant Capital • Resisting Stasis • German Tradition in Diaspora • Angelus Novus and Jewish Thought • Fragmented Epics • Migratory Culture Sounding the Nation • National Cosmopolitanism • Othered by the Nation • The Nation Degenerate • Educating the Nation • Twelve Notes Transnational • English Pastorals and Migrant Fantasies • International Nationalism • The Nation Re-Emerging • Folkishness Otherwise • The Nation Unsounded Migrant Connections • Migrant Voices in the Margins • Banning Migrant Voices • Home versus Foreign • Internal Bordering • Instituting Centrality • Portfolio Careers The Archetypal Wanderer • Reconciling Opposites • Twelve-Note Symmetries • Modernism Displaced • Dodecaphony as Nostalgia • Administering the Past? • Progressivism in Memoriam • Out of Place, Out of Time

Sketching a Migratory Journey • Jewish Perspectives • Tiqūn • Anti-Essentialism • Jewish Identities – Mobile Identities • Responses

List of Music Examples 1.1

Hanns Eisler, Deutsche Sinfonie, 1st movement, Praeludium, bars 81–6. © by Deutscher Verlag für Musik Leipzig / used by kind permission of the publisher.

1.2

Hanns Eisler, Deutsche Sinfonie, 1st movement, Praeludium, choir, bars 44–9. © by Deutscher Verlag für Musik Leipzig / used by kind permission of the publisher.

2.1

Mátyás Seiber, 1st String Quartet, 2nd movement, Lento, bars 9–16. With kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber estate and Trust.

2.2

Mátyás Seiber, 1st String Quartet, 2nd movement, Più moto, bars 47–55. With kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber estate and Trust.

2.3

Mátyás Seiber, 2nd String Quartet, 2nd movement, Intermezzo. Alla “Blues”, bars 1–3. With kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber estate and Trust.

2.4

Hanns Eisler, ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen’, beginning. © Copyright 1951 by Edition Peters Leipzig. With kind permission of the publisher.

2.5

Ludwig van Beethoven, Ode to Joy, beginning.

4.1 Mátyás Seiber, Ulysses, 3rd movement, twelve-note row. With kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber estate and Trust. 4.2

Mátyás Seiber, 2nd String Quartet, twelve-note row. With kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber estate and Trust.

4.3

Mátyás Seiber, Ulysses, 1st movement, twelve-note row. With kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber estate and Trust.

4.4

Mátyás Seiber, Ulysses, 1st movement, beginning. With kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber estate and Trust.

4.5

Arnold Schoenberg, Sechs kleine Klavierstücke op. 19 No. 6, Sehr langsam, beginning. Used by permission of Belmont Music Publishers, Los Angeles.

4.6

Arnold Schoenberg, Klavierstück op. 33a, Mäßig, beginning. Used by permission of Belmont Music Publishers, Los Angeles.

4.7

Mátyás Seiber, Ulysses, 4th movement, Nocturne. Intermezzo (lento), bars 24–29. With kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber estate and Trust.

4.8

István Anhalt, Fantasia for Piano, beginning. With permission of the estate of Istvan and Beate Anhalt.

4.9

István Anhalt, Fantasia for Piano, prime row. With permission of the estate of Istvan and Beate Anhalt.

vi

List of Music Examples

vii

4.10 Mátyás Seiber, Elegy for viola and small orchestra, Molto Moderato, beginning. With kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber estate and Trust. 4.11 Béla Bartók, Viola Concerto, 1st movement, Allegro moderato, beginning. © Copyright 1949 by Boosey & Hawkes Inc. (Viola and Piano). © Copyright 1950 by Boosey & Hawkes Inc. (Full Score). 4.12 Mátyás Seiber, Violin Sonata, 3rd movement, Lento e Rubato, beginning. With kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber estate and Trust.

viii

Acknowledgements

W

riting a book is not my idea of fun. There is no doubt that I’d never have completed it had it not been for the encouragement, support, help, and friendship of a great many people. It is probably fair to say that well-nigh everyone I know has endured me droning on about the book at some point or another. I am deeply grateful to your generosity and wouldn’t have done it without you. If I mention some of you by name, I do so fully conscious that there are many more whose support I do not acknowledge individually in this section. Please know that this doesn’t mean I’m not grateful to you. This book is the result of a fairly longstanding interest, which began when I was a student at Hamburg University in Germany. This interest in music and migration was first awoken, and has continuously been nurtured, by Peter Petersen. Later, at Royal Holloway University of London, Erik Levi made an equally huge impression on me and has been invaluable. I am immensely grateful to both of you and have written this book very much with the two of you in mind. The specific prompt to actually sit down and put it all into shape is due to Katharine Ellis, who gave me much-needed encouragement when, in a memorable meeting over coffee, she put my PhD thesis on the table, and told me what sections could be altered in which way in order to form a backbone of a book. Katharine’s generosity kickstarted the writing of the book proper. Come to think of it, a lot of discussions and conversations I had about this book project seem to have happened in cafés. I think especially of a lengthy and fateful Berlin breakfast during which Andrea Bohlman suggested that we might do something together on Hanns Eisler. Working with Andrea has made a huge impact on me and many of the ideas in this book are rooted in this collaboration. Having received the tremendously helpful comments by the anonymous reviewers and series editors, I changed, perhaps overzealously, my initial book plan almost beyond recognition. A University Research Fellowship, awarded by my institution, the University of Bristol, allowed me to rethink and, I hope, improve my ideas and mould them into shape. Throughout the work that followed, Michael Middeke, the wonderful commissioning editor of Boydell, was continuously there for me, providing effective and much-needed encouragement. Once in production, Fiona Little did an amazing job proofreading the manuscript, and the team at Boydell, especially Megan Milan and Emily Champion, was wonderful in guiding me through the various processes that are part of publishing a book. The cover, realised by Nick Bingham, is based on an idea by Pauline Fairclough, who has also read several sections of the book and provided invaluable suggestions and comments. Indeed, I am lucky to work at a department where help and collaboration are writ large. Justin Williams, Sarah Hibberd, Guido Heldt, and Kate Guthrie each read and helped me with portions of the ix

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book and Michael Ellison and John Pickard were available to discuss individual compositions that are in the book. I am fortunate to be surrounded by colleagues who work hard every day to create an atmosphere of cooperation and friendliness. This sense of collective work extends beyond my department. Bristol is a bit of a hub for migration studies. While writing this book, I set up a postgraduate programme in migration and mobility studies, and the generous contributions of many colleagues to this venture has been humbling. Many discussions with colleagues with hugely varied disciplinary backgrounds have, I hope, helped me think beyond music studies and recognise the diversity of approaches to migration. Researching this book, I’ve been to more libraries and archives than I can really remember. Some of them are listed in the bibliography. I extend thanks to all staff working at those I list and those I don’t. Likewise, I am grateful to the many colleagues who invited me to present portions of the book at conferences and seminars, and to audiences for their probing questions and encouraging feedback. Markus Mantere, Derek Scott, and Elaine Kelly encouraged me to draw on portions of a text I wrote for their book Confronting the National, and the Anhalt family, Julia Seiber Boyd, and several copyright holders gave me kind permission to include musical examples. Finding copyright holders was tricky in some instances, and I am grateful to Johannes Gall, who helped me with my Eisler questions. In this context, I’d like to specially thank Universal Edition Vienna for allowing me to use the lyrics of Eisler’s Kantate im Exil (Kantate im Exil, ‘Man lebt vom einen Tag zu dem anderen’ für Frauenstimme, 2 Klarinetten, Viola und Violoncello, op. 62 © Copyright 1972 Universal Edition A.G., Wien). More than anything else, I’m grateful to my closest friends and my family. My friend Christopher Vanja gave me perhaps the nicest feedback of anyone after reading the proofs that he’d seen lying around, and Sebastian Kaempf was so happy for me that he promoted the book on social media well before it was out. Mama and Hermann are always there for me and Emma has been a rock, reading everything, listening to everything, helping with everything. My beautiful boys, Felix and Leopold, remind me every day that it’s worth writing a book, and that there are so many things which are so much more important.

Introduction: Mobility between Margin and Centre

I

n the summer of 1941, Hanns Eisler was busy composing in the small town of Woodbury, Connecticut. Eisler had decided to stay there with friends, fellow migrants Sylvia and Joachim Schumacher, in no small part for financial reasons, to escape expensive rent and urban life in New York. His wife, Louise, meanwhile, was earning money as a governess in Vermont. The Schumachers organised a room with an out-of-tune piano, rented from a gardener, who got on well with Eisler and enjoyed the composer’s renditions of American folksongs.1 The peace and quiet of the countryside, alongside stimulating conversations with the Schumachers, resulted in a productive spell of compositions, which included the Woodbury Songbook, the film music to A Child Went Forth, and work on Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain. Eisler also wrote a set of piano variations there, which, as Christoph Keller has noted, he composed without a specific reason such as a commission or performance, unlike the other three works.2 Instead, it seems that the impulse for the work, written for Eisler’s own instrument, the piano, can be located nearer to home, so to speak, in Eisler’s biography. Keller speculates that discussions with the Schumachers about Beethoven’s variation technique, prompted by Sylvia Schumacher’s practising of Beethoven’s C minor Variations, may have inspired Eisler to write his own set of variations. Indeed, Keller points out that the work follows compositional principles, which Eisler had discovered in Beethoven’s variations.3 But the composition is not merely an exercise in invoking Beethoven. Instead, Eisler’s commitment to the dodecaphonic technique of his erstwhile teacher, Schoenberg, is a hallmark of the work, while the recurrent first theme is itself based on the quintet from the first act of Mozart’s Magic Flute, in which Papageno cannot speak because of a padlock that has been placed over his mouth. The compositional history of

1 See Joachim Schumacher, ‘Erinnerungen an Hanns Eisler’, Musik und Gesellschaft 27 (1977), 538–41. 2 Christoph Keller, ‘Introduction’, trans. Chris Walton, in Hanns Eisler Complete Edition, Series IV, vol. 10: Piano Music I – Sonatas and Variations, ed. J. C. Gall and C. Keller (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2015), xxv–xxxix. 3 Eisler explained these several years later, in a series of interviews in 1958, published by Nathan Notowicz as Gespräche mit Hanns Eisler und Gerhard Eisler: Wir reden hier nicht von Napoleon. Wir reden von Ihnen!, ed. Jürgen Elsner (Berlin: Verlag Neue Musik, 1971), 61–163.

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the work, too, is less than straightforward, and maps out how the musical-historical reference points intermingle with personal semantic layers. Later in the same year, 1941, Eisler added a second coda, later renamed the first finale, as a funeral music for his friend Grete Steffin, who had died in Moscow on 4 June while fleeing the Nazis. Following the premiere performance by a fellow migrant, Eduard Steuermann, on 8 May 1941 at the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) festival in New York, the composer added two further finales, possibly composed in 1947, and the work was only premiered in this guise on 18 December 1956 in East Berlin, and first published in Leipzig in 1959, though with an incorrect composition date of 1940. For a migration scholar like myself, such stories are as fascinating as they are evocative. That a migrant composer reflects on his own displacement by quoting a voiceless fictional superstar of the operatic stage might perhaps seem an obvious gesture. In invoking Papageno, Eisler reminds us that, as a refugee, he is disempowered, even silenced, as he escapes fascist persecution. Even so, like Papageno, he is not voiceless, retaining the ability to sound his predicament, and, more so, intent on turning it into a performative act full of agency and expressiveness. What is more, Eisler does not provide a direct quotation from Mozart’s Magic Flute and avoids drawing an all-too-neat parallel analogy between himself and Tamino’s bird-hunting companion. Instead, he obscures the reference, which does not readily reveal itself to the listener.4 While referencing Papageno’s predicament, then, Eisler invokes a historical trajectory, even a longue durée, of silencing, while at the same time acknowledging the specificity of individual voices and diverse historical contexts. (Papageno and Eisler are both on journeys, but the former is silenced for his lies while fascist forces seek to silence the latter for speaking antifascist truths.) Similarly, the references to Beethoven and Schoenberg do not describe Eisler as an epigone, but rather are reflections on a continued Austro-German musical heritage in which Eisler participates, and which he sustains even as he finds himself in rural Connecticut. Austro-German culture, as it manifests itself in the piano variations, is now presented as migratory. The compositional and performance histories of the piano variations themselves are mobile, spanning across continents and extending to several decades. Beyond the conceptual, this migratory aspect manifests itself more profanely. Eisler the migrant posits the idiom of a fellow migrant, Schoenberg, as the latest development of Austro-German musical culture in a piece grown out of a summer spent with fellow migrants, the Schumachers, dedicated in part to a fellow migrant, Steffin, and premiered by another fellow migrant, Steuermann, at an event organised by an institution

4 The first scholar to point out the Papageno link was Manfred Grabs in 1974, some three decades after the composition. See Grabs, ‘Über Berührungspunkte zwischen der Vokal- und der Instrumentalmusik Hanns Eislers’, in Hanns Eisler heute: Berichte – Probleme – Beobachtungen, ed. Manfred Grabs (Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1974), 114–29.

Introduction: Mobility between Margin and Centre

3

committed to internationalism, the ISCM. The migratory aesthetics, then, link and grow with a tangible migratory community. I find seemingly little stories such as this one fascinating. Set against the dominant narratives of twentieth-century Western art musics, Eisler’s piano variations would barely seem to matter much. To my knowledge, the piece is not discussed in any of the main textbooks, encyclopaedias, or anthologies of Western art music, and barely gets a mention even in the Eisler literature. And yet, the little story with which I start my book is multi-layered and rich in ambiguities, inviting readings that embrace the paradoxical and encourage dialectical approaches, opening up a world of questions and intellectual opportunities. I find myself returning time and again to the words of Jim Samson. Referencing Jacques Derrida’s attack on triumphalist neo-conservatism, Samson encourages us to foreground little stories, so rich in ambiguities. For him, they have a way of constantly taking detours from the simple characterizations offered by grand narratives. … They allow us to see around the edges of the grand narratives, lighting them up in various ways; they can instantiate them, critique them, revise them.5

The potential of migrant stories to delexicalise the foreign, as Gayatri Spivak has termed it, lies at the heart of many texts that address migration and mobility.6 This ranges from influential calls by authors such as Hannah Arendt and Edward Said to centralise marginalised migrant voices to suggestions to realise the importance of mobility and movement as socio-historic factors, amongst others.7 It would be easy to point to the fact that much of mainstream music studies has struggled to include migrant voices. I used to open a paper I gave in various guises and on various occasions with an attack on my discipline, highlighting the extent to which we tend to displace displacement from our narratives. Most major textbooks on twentieth-century Western art music end their discussions of individual composers with their migrations in the 1930s and give scant attention to post-migration works. If included at all, migrant stories are frequently marginalised as historical accidents. In his standard Twentieth Century Music, Robert P. Morgan, for example, claims that figures such as ‘Stravinsky, 5 Jim Samson, ‘Little Stories from the Balkans’, in Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond, ed. Erik Levi and Florian Scheding (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 192. 6 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Dialogue: World Systems & the Creole’, Narrative 14:1 (2006), 102–12. 7 See Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, Menorah Journal 31 (1943), 69–77; Edward W. Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 3rd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 173–86; Mimi Sheller and John Urry, ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm’, Environment and Planning A 38:2 (2006), 207–26.

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Schoenberg, Bartók, Hindemith, Weill, and Milhaud [were] significantly realigning the cultural map and giving America a vastly more prominent position within the international musical configuration.’8 Yet, instead of exemplifying his position, Morgan moves directly from the interwar to the postwar period and fails to analyse any of the migrants’ activities or the extent of their impact on musical life in the United States or elsewhere. Even the compositions of the most prominent figures are often ignored after their migration (Schoenberg), seen through the lens of a biographical swansong (Bartók), or narrated as a tale of aesthetic decline (Weill). Taruskin does talk about migrants, but files them away in their own subchapter, as though music history otherwise were unaffected.9 Behind the little stories that make up this book, then, I could have constructed a fundamental critique of music historiography. I might have highlighted that displacement has affected humanity since the dawn of time and contrasted this with musicology’s unwillingness to investigate the impact of migration on Western art music. One could view musicology’s relative silence of discourse regarding displacement as a political act and relate it to the aim to narrate the history of the avant-garde as largely homogeneous and progressivist and the frequent urge to construct places as fixed, as though there existed no mobilities between them. I would not have been the first to draw up this line of argument. Authors such as Nina Glick Schiller and Andreas Wimmer have pointed out the extent to which static notions of the nation and society underpin scholarly research, an assumption they term methodological nationalism.10 As a consequence, stasis is methodologically conceived of as normal, while movement is relegated as out of the norm. Such approaches, of course, clash with migration’s heterogeneous spaces of mobility and the migrants’ mobile and sometimes unpredictable engagements with nationalist discourses. I do still believe that the influence of migration on a wide range of musics in the twentieth century has long been downplayed in musicology. And yet, beyond the lacunae in textbooks, engagements with migrations and mobilities 8 Robert P. Morgan, Twentieth Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America (New York: Norton, 1991), 326. 9 Richard Taruskin, ‘Varieties of Emigration’ and ‘Shades of Gray’, in The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 5: Music in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 765–74. Strikingly, one of his two examples is Karl Amadeus Hartmann, who was not, in fact, a migrant, and stands out as a remarkably immobile musician, spending his entire life in Munich in Germany. I’m not the first to notice that Taruskin sidesteps migration. Karl Kügle has done so, too. See his review ‘Past Perfect: Richard Taruskin and Music Historiography in the Early Twenty-First Century’, Tijdschrift van de Koniklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis 1 (2008), 81–2. 10 See, for example, Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, ‘Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in Historical Epistemology’, International Migration Review 37:3 (2003), 576–610.

Introduction: Mobility between Margin and Centre

5

are thriving in music studies, and they are rich and highly diverse. For example, a considerable body of work exists on the lives and works of individual musicians and composers who, from the 1930s onwards, fled European fascism to the United States and elsewhere. Following an edited volume that has become a cornerstone in this field, Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff ’s Driven into Paradise, several authors have contributed insightful and influential biographical studies on elite individuals, amongst them Brigid Cohen on Stefan Wolpe and Sabine Feisst on Arnold Schoenberg, to name only two.11 A few years earlier, in 1993, the volume Musik im Exil, co-edited by Hanns-Werner Heister, Claudia Maurer-Zenck, and Peter Petersen, had set a benchmark for German-language academia.12 Beyond such historical approaches, numerous authors have adopted ethnographic lenses, often focused on specific diasporic communities, that offer fascinating insights into music’s potential, unique in each case, to engage with diasporic identities.13 To some extent, volumes such as Jason Toynbee and Byron Dueck’s Migrating Music and also Erik Levi’s and my volume Music and Displacement have sought to bridge the gap between historical and ethnographic approaches, while still placing music’s movements centre stage.14 Ethnomusicologists have increasingly reminded musicologists of the importance of place, just as musicology continues to remind ethnomusicologists of the importance of history. And if Božidar Jezernik is right that ‘there is no history without a place, and no place without a history’, migrations and displacements may serve as a connective of history and place, the

11 Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff, eds, Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Brigid Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Sabine Feisst, Schoenberg’s New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 12 Hanns-Werner Heister, Claudia Maurer-Zenk, and Peter Petersen, eds, Musik im Exil: Folgen des Nazismus für die internationale Musikkultur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1993). 13 Examples are Roberto Avant-Mier, Rock the Nation: Latin/o Identities and the Latin Rock Diaspora (New York: Continuum, 2010); John Baily, War, Exile and the Music of Afghanistan: The Ethnographer’s Tale (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015); Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Sanjay Sharma, John Hutnyk, and Ashwani Sharma, eds, Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music (London: Zed Books, 1996); Alejandro L. Madrid, ed., Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S.– Mexico Border (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Matthew B. Karush, Musicians in Transit: Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 14 Jason Toynbee and Byron Dueck, eds, Migrating Music (London: Routledge, 2011); Levi and Scheding, eds, Music and Displacement.

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characteristic concerns of historians and ethnomusicologists.15 The breadth of engagement in music studies can perhaps best be illustrated by the fact that the emphasis on exile, refuge, displacement, and migration is practically absent in Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek’s two-volume Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, which focuses, instead, on theories and technologies related to the mobility of sound.16 The terminological debate regarding the various facets of border-crossing reaches as far back as the discipline itself, mirroring the diverse and all-toooften conflicting self-descriptions of the migrants themselves.17 There is much potential for conflicts between concepts pertaining to globalisation, transnationalism, interculturalism, cosmopolitanism, migration, emigration, displacement, mobility, diaspora, exile, immigration, and several more. Focusing on music studies alone, usage of the terms ‘exile’ (Baily), ‘displacement’ (Levi and Scheding), ‘diaspora’ (Cohen), ‘journey’ (Hinton), ‘mobility’ (Gopinath and Stanyek), ‘heterotopia’ (Bohlman), and ‘in-betweenness’ (Beckles Willson), or the avoidance of any one specific term (Feisst), might suggest disagreement at first sight.18 And yet a closer engagement suggests that the lack of a steadfast terminology does not stand in the way of much common ground as far as the actual debate is concerned. This topical and methodological richness and diversity is mirrored in migration studies more widely. Kate Elswit, whose research focuses on German-language dance and cabaret artists who left Germany during the 1930s, points out that the varied usage of terms often reflects heavily politicised contexts, in which migrants themselves and scholars seek to differentiate and, at times, instrumentalise diverse forms of migration.19 For example, while exile studies zoomed in on refugees from European fascism and 15 Božidar Jezernik, ‘Europeanisation of the Balkans’, in Urban Music in the Balkans: Drop-Out Ethnic Identities or a Historical Case of Tolerance and Global Thinking?, ed. Sokol Shupo (Tirana: Asmus, 2006), 23–31. 16 Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 17 See Christine Brooke-Rose, ‘Exsul’, in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travellers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, ed. Susan Suleiman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 9–24, and my text ‘“ The Splinter in your Eye”: Uncomfortable Legacies and German Exile Studies’, in Music and Displacement, 119–34. 18 Baily, War, Exile and the Music of Afghanistan, Levi and Scheding, eds, Music and Displacement; Cohen, Stefan Wolpe; Stephen Hinton, Weill’s Musical Theatre: Stages of Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Gopinath and Stanyek, eds, Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies; Philip V. Bohlman, Jewish Music and Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Rachel Beckles Willson, Ligeti, Kurtág, and Hungarian Music during the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Feisst, Schoenberg’s New World. 19 Kate Elswit, ‘The Micropolitics of Exchange: Exile and Otherness after the Nation’, in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, ed. Rebekah J. Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 419–21.

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had a distinct anti-fascist agenda, diaspora studies removed this geographical focus and, instead, highlighted postcolonial violence and nationalist conflict.20 Pioneered by scholars such as Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Stephen Greenblatt, mobility studies, conversely, endeavours to conceive of mobility as the norm in sociological research, as I have noted above.21 On one hand, such multifacedness constitutes a disadvantage. Scholarly engagements with the movements of people, objects, and ideas are so numerous that it is hard to see how anyone could have an overview. (For all my efforts to try to keep on top of developments I am frequently defeated by the speed with which important contributions appear from all disciplinary corners.) As a result of such richness, the field appears almost too fragmented to allow for some sort of disciplinary coherence. At the same time, this very resistance to disciplinary coherence is an advantage, for it prevents trends that are overbearingly dominant. Instead, diverse spaces open up, leaving room for conflicting and complementing interpretations, thus mirroring the diversity of migration itself. In this book, I try as much as possible to communicate with some of the trends of migration studies inside and beyond music studies, drawing on exile, diaspora, migration and mobilities studies, critical theory, and postcolonial and cultural studies, amongst others. At the same time, my book cannot possibly represent or mirror such disciplinary richness and diversity. Instead, the available scholarly breadth of focus, methodology, and disciplinary background allows me to be a magpie, picking and choosing ideas and concepts according to their potential to enrich the little stories I present conceptually. My opening story might suggest that this book is an Eisler biography. Instead, I offer vignettes by concentrating on individual works and migratory moments of three composers. In addition to Eisler, these are the less-well known Mátyás Seiber and István Anhalt. This, then, is a humble and, in some ways, unambitious book that tells little stories and works outwards from them, linking them with wider themes. The perhaps fanciful thoughts prompted by Eisler’s piano variations encapsulate several of the core themes of this book. While the overall trajectory is roughly chronological, the chapters are primarily organised thematically, and each takes one or two of the three case studies as starting points and main examples. I mainly engage with Hanns Eisler’s work in the first two chapters; Mátyás Seiber takes centre stage in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, and István Anhalt moves into focus in Chapters 4 and 5. Migration is a mass phenomenon which has fundamentally shaped our history and our thinking. This fundamental belief in the centrality and importance of migration, shared by influential thinkers like Edward Said and Hannah Arendt, clashes with the often-marginalised status of migrant voices.22 Arendt 20 For a discussion of exile studies, see Scheding, ‘“ The Splinter in your Eye”’. 21 Sheller and Urry, ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm’, and Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 22 See Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, and Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’.

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and Said both recognise a basic methodological problem at the core of thinking about migration, the paradox between the collective and the individual. How does one square the fact that migration is a mass phenomenon of modernity on the one hand with the diversity of individual migrant stories, all of them unique, on the other? How can one make plausible assessments about migratory culture and aesthetics while at the same time envoicing individual migrant identities? And to what extent does the grouping of highly diverse individuals into a migrant community unwittingly essentialise and disempower these individuals? The issue of place, too, matters here. While migrations and mobilities necessarily happen in between places, en route, migrants are still in specific places at any one time. Jacques Derrida has pointed out how the uneasy relationship between the universal and the particular regarding people and places has shaped debates about cosmopolitanism into postcolonial assumptions of universal identity on the one hand and hard projections of otherness on the other. Translated as ‘universal city’, ‘cosmopolitanism’ invokes an anyplace. And yet even the most superficial assessment of migration will recognise that the difference of places and cities matters to migrant stories. Derrida invites us to consider a strategy of hospitality that goes beyond viewing identity and difference as mutually exclusive.23 Taking on board such prompts, I tackle the conundrum of the collective versus the individual, the specific versus the particular throughout this book, focusing on specific migratory musical moments against broader backgrounds. In the first chapter, I exemplify my strategy to combine a specific focus within a wider migratory context. My chronological focus concentrates on 1937 Paris. Hanns Eisler was highly mobile that year, travelling almost frantically across Europe, before eventually migrating to the United States. Paris, too, was among these locations, hosting the ISCM festival that year. I charter the importance of Paris as a location in Eisler’s long migration through an examination of the emerging Deutsche Sinfonie, which develops as a work marked by the dichotomy of places and displacements. Beyond this focus, I view Eisler’s music in a wider context of migratory culture in mid- to late 1930s Paris, in which the composer played a prominent, if transitory role, mixing with other refugees from Hitler’s Germany like Lion Feuchtwanger, who modelled Sepp Trautwein, the protagonist of the novel Exil, on Eisler. I draw attention to contemporaneous novels, such as Klaus Mann’s Vulkan and Lion Feuchtwanger’s Exil, as well as Walter Benjamin’s philosophical writing. While alert to their distinctive qualities and differences, I foreground common themes, all of which are treated dialectically, such as breadth and fragmentation, specificity and namelessness, place and space, and an engagement with Jewish concepts and thought. The engagement with utopia and dystopia emerges as the most persistent feature. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopian spaces, I explore the

23 Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001).

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extent to which Mann, Eisler, Feuchtwanger, and Benjamin conjure up a migratory heterotopia in their works.24 Despite conjuring up tentative suggestions for intertextual commonalities and the rich nexus of migrant connections, the migratory culture of my named community is not homogeneous. Instead, it is an aesthetic that speaks profoundly of migration and mobility as heterotopian spaces of engagement, envoicement, and empowerment. Rather than covering the extremely varied arenas of migrant culture superficially, or alternatively focusing only on one area (such as London) or one institution (such as the BBC) in detail while ignoring others, my strategy to employ vignettes from three selected case studies allows for a balance between inclusiveness on the one hand and in-depth investigation on the other. Zooming in on specific musical migratory moments enables a stringent and coherent focus and prevents the narrative from becoming shallow. For example, Mátyás Seiber may today be a lesser-known figure. Nonetheless, of the numerous composers and musicians who migrated to Britain during the 1930s and 1940s, few engaged in as many activities and few were as productive as Seiber. Further, it is exactly an exploration of the less well-known protagonists of history and the power of their ‘little stories’ that afford insight into the everyday experience of migration. A focus on Seiber, paradoxical though this might sound, therefore allows for a broader exploration of issues that are also pertinent to many other migrant composers in mid-twentieth-century Britain who feature throughout because of the wide connections Seiber had within the migrant community and London’s wider musical circles. In Chapter 3, I situate Seiber’s musical activities in the complex and sometimes confusing setting of wartime Britain. Throughout the chapter, I continuously zoom out to include numerous contemporaneous migrant musicians. Rather than offering in-depth analyses of any migrant compositions at this stage, the chapter investigates three questions, which all locate migrant milieu and culture in mid-century London. First, which institutions (radio stations, concert halls, publishing houses, and organisations) did migrants like Seiber participate in, and which were they were admitted to (and in which capacities) or excluded from? Second, how were the voices and works of the immigrant composers heard, and what were the circumstances of such performances? The works of immigrant composers that were not performed, for example, can hardly have made an impact upon British musical life, however much or little they speak of migration or exile. In combination, the scale of institutional involvement and related performance opportunities inform assessments regarding the extent to which the immigrants managed to integrate into musical life. Third, what factors contributed towards the relative silence of the avant-garde? A common feature of the work catalogues of numerous migrant 24 Michel Foucault, ‘Different Spaces’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 2, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (London: Penguin, 2000), 175–85.

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composers is that they turned to lighter musical idioms after their migrations to Britain. Several pertinent musical institutions, too, displayed little support for the musical avant-garde, including those erected by the migrants themselves. A particular focus here is Seiber’s fractious involvement with the BBC, which acted as the most influential gatekeeper of musical dissemination in mid-century Britain. The BBC’s role was highly ambiguous as it negotiated its own strategies of bordering the nation in sound. On the one hand, it acted as an employer of large numbers of migrant musicians, who held crucial positions in the provision of overseas services. On the other, the BBC to some extent prevented migrant voices being heard on the Home Service. Chartering this paradox through Seiber’s example, I emphasise the extent to which institutions such as the BBC had real impact on migrant musicians, a point that resurfaces in my discussion in Chapter 5 of István Anhalt’s struggle to seek performance for his recently completed Tikkun in 1990s Canada. The dialectics of macro- and micro-historical contexts framed the migratory journey of all my musical migrants, much as they did that of countless other composers – some now part of the canon of Western art music, others all but forgotten – that formed the musical fabric of the twentieth century. As they travelled for personal and career reasons, broader political changes continuously affected their movements, placements, and displacements. In the ‘age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration’, to use Edward Said’s words, the personal and the political are continuously and inseparably intertwined.25 And if there exists a tension between specific locations and cities on the one hand and the anyplace of cosmopolitanism on the other, it follows that, perhaps paradoxically, migration might cross borders, but it does not transcend confrontation with the national. From the moment of border-crossing, migrants continuously encounter the nation as part of their everyday experience. Migration therefore engenders confrontation with the national. Few twentieth-century musicians were affected by outbursts of nationalist politics as directly as those displaced by the century’s extremist regimes. The particular ways in which my three migrant musicians engaged with the nation permeates all chapters but moves into particular focus in Chapter 2. Focusing on Eisler and Seiber, I detail how their responses to the nation and the national evolved. My story unfolds in Budapest, Frankfurt, Berlin, London, and elsewhere, against varied socio-political contexts ranging from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy via proto-fascist Hungary and fascist Germany to postwar Britain and socialist East Germany. At times, the conceptual and musical engagement of Seiber and Eisler with the national sat at odds with the nations which they encountered, and which often marginalised them, but their creative responses act as a prism into their migratory identities. My discussion of debates and works that charter a direct engagement with nationalism and the nation throws into focus the multitude of nationalisms at play, encompassing 25 Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, 174.

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the chauvinistic and idealistic, the cultural and the historical, the societal and the political, and so on. The places my musical migrants encountered acted as heterogeneous spaces of mobility that allowed for sometimes unpredictable, and often dialectic, engagements with nationalist discourses. But the national matters here beyond direct engagements. As they embarked on their journeys as migrants, the commitment to the musical heritage of all three musical migrants I focus on became increasingly destabilised. The creative responses of Anhalt, Eisler, and Seiber and the shifts in their compositional approaches may seem paradoxical. As I detail in Chapters 1 and 4, they reveal a musical turning away from nationalism in search of more internationalist idioms on the one hand, and a recourse to traditional Austro-German forms on the other. I highlight the extent to which the dialectics between internationalist outlook and nationalist memory mark several of their works. As migrants, all three composers re-focused their employment of certain compositional avant-garde idioms, notably that of the Schoenberg School. In the tense political climate of World War II and its aftermath and under the circumstances of displacement, I point out how such artistic strategies cannot be seen solely as manifestos of convicted avant-gardists: they also bear the imprints of nostalgia. They are nods to interwar serialism, which was being expulsed around them, pointing from the heterotopia of migration to a place of nostalgia. As their national cultural heritage was fast disappearing under the onslaught of fascist cultural politics, perceived aesthetic stabilities turned into personal uncertainties and political battlegrounds. At the same time, the insertion of well-rehearsed, more traditional compositional principles renders their works internationally recognisable, and therefore elevates them beyond memorialisation alone. Paradoxically, then, migration acted as a catalyst for a dialectic engagement with nationalism while at the same time undermining nationalist historiographical approaches to understanding their musics. I believe that it is worth taking such strategies seriously. For migration is a fact, but it can also manifest itself performatively. Chapters 4 and 5 consider migratory culture as a performative act and engage with what Mieke Bal, amongst others, has called migratory aesthetics.26 What I mean by this is that the works I discuss are never entirely and exclusively about migration, but they nonetheless take part in migratory discourses and form a migratory aesthetic. Migratory aesthetics does not conceive of migration as all-encompassing. Rather, traces of migration form aspects or components of the works I discuss. I aim to avoid simplistic generalisations and consider the potential as well as pitfalls of separating biography from musical analysis. Inevitably, the traces of migration are more evident with some works than others. In Seiber’s particular case, as I argue in Chapter 4, it is in the friction and fragmentation of 26 Mieke Bal, ‘Lost in Space, Lost in the Library’, in Essays in Migratory Aesthetics: Cultural Practices between Migration and Art-Making, ed. Sam Durrant and Catherine Lord (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 23–35.

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his postwar avant-garde music where one can detect most closely the condition of exile, notably in his cantata Ulysses. I seek to reveal that migration musically manifests itself in a double and sometimes multiple focus, a symbiosis of different style worlds, and a fragmentation of the narrative. The dichotomy of conflicting cultural contexts (past and present, tradition and avant-garde, new environment and old environment, etc.) manifests itself in an inner dialogue. Indeed, the attempt to bridge the migrant’s ‘difference within’, to borrow Homi Bhabha’s term, is a hallmark of Seiber’s progressive postwar music.27 This dialogue is markedly dialectic. I focus on the extent to which recourses to avant-garde techniques, and specifically Schoenbergian dodecaphony, engender an engagement with a past promise of utopia that views the avant-garde through nostalgic eyes. Migrant culture cannot be located and absorbed in its entirety either into the culture from which the migrants came or into the culture of the migrants’ destinations. It is neither locatable as a ‘from here’ nor as a ‘from there’. Instead, as Bhabha has shown, it forms a third space that communicates and interacts fluidly with the here and there, just as it does with present and past, utopia and nostalgia. Rather than participating in the feverish reconstruction of the musical avant-garde following World War II in Paris, Darmstadt, and elsewhere, the musics by Seiber and Anhalt emerge as displaced, locatable in a space of migratory heterotopia. Even so, the combination of numerous references to past musical forms with a commitment to progressivism position migratory aesthetics within the longue durée of Western art musical tradition, rather than excluded from it. Simultaneously progressivist and yet nostalgic, cosmopolitan and displaced and yet saturated with geographically and historically locatable individual and collective memories, the works I discuss in Chapter 4 engender a migratory culture that extends beyond specific diasporic communities towards a broader phenomenon of musical responses to migration mid-twentieth century. In addition to Seiber’s works, I engage with those of István Anhalt, especially the Fantasia for piano. I point towards the widely made argument that Canadian musical life specifically benefited considerably from the influx of migrants like Anhalt, who helped internationalise Canada’s musical environment. Despite this seeming integration into national narratives of music historiography, Anhalt continuously remembered his migrations and the opportunities as well as challenges these entailed. In his case, migratory memory increasingly became inseparable from his Jewish identity. Chapter 5 tackles the relation between memory on the one hand and identity on the other head on. Taking seriously Hannah Arendt’s call to place marginalised Jewish experience at the centre of discourse, I focus on Anhalt’s Tikkun (Traces), which, I argue, crystallises the complex interactions between Jewish identity and memory from

27 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 13–14.

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a migratory perspective.28 Jewishness is present in all chapters, but diversely so, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes moving out of focus. I take on board Klara Móricz and Philip Bohlman’s call for a view of Jewish musical modernity as diverse and evolving, resisting easy categorisation.29 Alongside István Anhalt, I turn to György Ligeti and suggest that their continuous explorations of their identities evidence a complex engagement with time and place, memory and history, in which Jewish as well as migratory identity are multi-layered and mobile. As my book moves from one little story to the next, it accompanies my musicians and their musics on their migratory journey. My strategy to focus on migratory moments, rather than aim for a sense of comprehensiveness, no doubt means that I leave several avenues unexplored. Among these lacunae, popular and functional musics stand out, even if I do engage with incidental music for radio in Chapter 3. This is especially true of film music, which occupies a central position within the output of several twentieth-century migrant musicians, including Eisler and Seiber. Planning and writing a book is, to some extent, an exercise of constant exclusion of topics and angles, and including film music would have gone beyond the scope here. This is not to say that I consider film music irrelevant. I have published two texts on Seiber’s film music elsewhere, both against the context of migration.30 With regard to Eisler, I point readers to other authors who have contributed authoritative studies about the composer’s large body of film music.31 Despite the fact that today migrants globally continue to be marginalised, often violently so, migration as a topic is at the heart of some very current debates and shapes contemporary societies at large. As I am writing this introduction, in January 2019, the United States government is in shutdown following presidential demands to build a wall at the border between the United States and Mexico to prevent the flow of migrants. The British plebiscite to leave the European Union has widely been linked with public anxieties about 28 Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York: Grove Press, 1978). 29 Klára Móricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), and Philip V. Bohlman, ed., Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 30 ‘Charley and the NHS’, Twentieth-Century Music 15:3 (2018), 466–74, and ‘“An Animated Quest for Freedom”: Mátyás Seiber’s Score for The Magic Canvas’, in Destination London: German-Speaking Émigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1950, ed. Tim Bergfelder and Christian Cargnelli, Film Europa 6 (Oxford and New York: Berghahn, 2008), 230–42. 31 Two noteworthy examples are Eisler’s book Komposition für den Film, which he co-authored with Adorno (the best edition is by Johannes C. Gall, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006), and Horst Weber’s book ‘I am not a Hero, I am a Composer’: Hanns Eisler in Hollywood (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2012).

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immigration, and Slavoj Žižek has called the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, the increase in migration to the European Union, one of the major challenges of our time.32 A book on mid-twentieth-century Western art music migrants will hardly feature in such debates. Even with regard to music historiography, views as to whether my cases are representative of twentieth-century music more widely will inevitably differ from reader to reader. To some extent, of course, every case is only representative of itself, and those chosen for this book are no exception. Eisler, Seiber, or Anhalt are hardly central to music historiography, if major textbooks on which music history surveys at universities are based are to be believed. Perhaps you find that my three case studies are just three little stories that barely have any impact on musicology’s dominant view of the twentieth century. Then again, my little stories connect with some of the important topics and themes of recent music history that go beyond the experience of migration itself, as I have detailed above. And they also illustrate a wider point, namely that migration has shaped and continues to shape wider engagements with the musical past, present, and future, and does so with an impact and urgency that demands migrant voices to be heard. It is possible to write music history without referencing migration. But ignoring migration as a powerful factor would be doing a disservice, for it would, to adopt Edward Said’s words, reduce musical works to caricatures.33 With numbers of migrants in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries exceeding those of any previous point in history, the migrant has turned from a figure on the fringe to a mobile player at the epicentre of our global world, an inextricable part of the very fabric of our society. I suggest that listening to their voices is worth it.

32 See David Runciman, ‘Where Are We Now? Responses to the Referendum’, London Review of Books, 14 July 2016, 8, and Slavoj Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours (London: Allen Lane, 2016). 33 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage Books, 1994), 157.

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eflecting on exile, Edward Said performs a rhetorical and strategic shift. While his opening emphasises migration as a phenomenon that defines our age, conjuring up images of mass displacement and streams of refugees, his prose moves increasingly away from collective namelessness and towards a focus of individual migrants, such as James Joyce, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Auerbach, and others, instead. This strategy of envoicement foregrounds Said’s call to empower the migrant as a central figure in modernity. But he goes further, enacting a move from a dystopian world of homelessness and uprootedness towards an almost utopian vision that imagines migration as not only a central experience of the human condition, but as essential for socio-cultural progress more widely. In so doing, however, Said is cautious of being overly celebratory, interspersing his prose with continuous reminders of the other place of the migrants, the heterotopia of migratory culture.1 This dialectic between the collective and the individual on the one hand and the interplay between dystopia and utopia on the other permeates much of migration studies and scholarship concerned with the mobility of people. As scholars negotiate between individual and collective migratory identities, methodologies range from biographical approaches that often focus on elite individuals to those that emphasise a sense, however heterogeneous, of diasporic community. On occasion, such different methodologies run parallel to sub-disciplinary boundaries, with studies on Western art music tending to favour biographical approaches, while ethnomusicologists and popular music scholars sometimes incline towards methods that employ case studies as a means for foregrounding broader identity politics.2 1 Edward W. Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 3rd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 173–86. 2 Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff ’s influential Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) operates along biographical lines, for example. Further representative examples for biographical approaches are Sabine Feisst, Schoenberg’s New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Brigid Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), while Su Zheng, for example, emphasises collective diasporic identity (Claiming Diaspora: Music, Transnationalism, and Cultural Politics in Asian/Chinese America, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Matthew B. Karush’s Musicians in Transit: Argentina and the Globalization of Popular Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) marries the two approaches. Each of his book’s chapters have a biographical focus, but collectively

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The dialectics of biographical specificity versus the collective extend well beyond musicology and migration studies. Benedict Anderson’s influential concept of the imagined community, for example, which, according to him, arises when numerous individuals, who may not know each other personally, identify with one another, reverberates in Rebecca Mitchell’s concept of aesthetic communities.3 Conversely, migration studies scholars have increasingly offered critiques of notions that rely on assumptions of imagined communities. For example, in her review of Alejandro L. Madrid’s Transnational Encounters, Ruth Hellier-Tinoco has pointed to the extent to which studies that seek to foreground diversity and complexity unwittingly essentialise large numbers of people along imagined ethnic boundaries.4 Ayşe Çağlar and Nina Glick Schiller go further and deconstruct the underlying hypothesis of a migrant−native divide as inherently flawed and counterproductive to notions of heterogeneity and diversity. They caution against the assumption of diasporic communities based on ethnic similarity, because it reinforces a sense of methodological nationalism. This methodological nationalism, they argue, assumes historical, social, and cultural processes to be reified by the nation within whose borders the alleged communities unfold.5 This chapter tackles the methodological dichotomy of biographical specificity versus the collective via a focused study. I chart a moment in Hanns Eisler’s long migration through an examination of the gradually unfolding Deutsche Sinfonie, a work marked by the dichotomies of places, spaces, and displacements. Rather than situating the work in a nameless context of German-language exile from Nazism, I view it in a wider context of migratory culture in mid- to late 1930s Paris, drawing particular attention to contemporaneous novels, such as Klaus Mann’s Vulkan and Lion Feuchtwanger’s Exil, as well as Walter Benjamin’s philosophical writing. While alert to their distinctive qualities and differences, I foreground common themes that predominate in these works, all of which are treated dialectically, such as breadth and fragmentation, specificity and namelessness, place and space, and an engagement with Jewish concepts and they construct a global Argentine-Latin identity. Michael Haas, to name another example, likewise constructs a sense of diasporic collective identity through bringing together a number of biographical sketches (Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). 3 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2006), and Rebecca Mitchell, Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 4 Ruth Hellier-Tinoco, ‘Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S.–Mexico Border ed. by Alejandro L. Madrid’ (review), Latin American Music Review 35:1 (2014), 155–7. 5 Ayşe Çağlar and Nina Glick Schiller, Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, & Urban Regeneration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 1–32.

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thought. The engagement with utopia and dystopia emerges as the most persistent feature, and I explore the extent to which Mann, Eisler, Feuchtwanger, and Benjamin conjure up a migratory heterotopia in their works. Despite these tentative suggestions for intertextual commonalities, the migratory culture of my named community is not homogeneous. Instead, in terms of content, form, and technique, the migratory works I discuss, linked by their connections to mid1930s Paris, speak profoundly of migration and mobility as heterotopian spaces of engagement, envoicement, and empowerment. They challenge homogeneous notions of rigid stylistic fixities and extend beyond negotiations between home and exile, nostalgia and acculturation. Instead, the seeming paradoxes between place and displacement, form and formlessness, technical constraint and eclecticism, length of duration and breathless brevity of individual elements, outline a tangible migratory aesthetics as fluid, syncretic, and heterogeneous. They exemplify profoundly a cultural space of displacement and form part of a wider, displaced network of the heterotopia of migration. Throughout the chapter, I am drawn to Foucault’s description of public and semi-public urban spaces as heterotopias, those other places which, as Henri Lefebvre has pointed out, interact in the social production of space and the urbanisation of society.6 The precariousness of migratory culture in 1930s Paris, full of seemingly contradictory engagements with, for example, the epic and the fragmentary, the nation and cosmopolitanism, rootedness and diaspora, utopia and dystopia, history’s longue durée and the everyday, the specific and the general, suggests that Benjamin, Eisler, Mann, Feuchtwanger, and others conceived of the city as a heterotopia. The fact that Foucault only formulated the concept some three decades later and the word ‘heterotopia’ does not make a textual appearance in the writing of any of the migrants I refer to makes it no less relevant and appropriate. It is significant that, while not referring to migrants explicitly, Foucault describes the ship not only as the quintessential heterotopian space, but as ‘the greatest reservoir of imagination’, as it sails from port to port, continuously signifying mobility. Heterotopian spaces engender real, and often physical, places with multi-layered meanings. Disturbing the places they mirror, heterotopias act as placeless places, affirming difference and heterogeneity. Crucially, for Foucault, heterotopian culture is ideally suited to formulating responses to totalitarianism and emerges as a constitutive marker of a non-repressive society. Not a utopia, then, but a crucial response to the dystopian present.

6 Michel Foucault, ‘Different Spaces’, in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 2, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (London: Penguin, 2000), 175–85, and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).

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The Deutsche Sinfonie In March 1937, Paris hosted the fifteenth festival of the ISCM. Eisler had submitted two of the movements of the emerging Deutsche Sinfonie for performance at the festival, ‘An die Kämpfer in den Konzentrationslagern’ and ‘Begräbnis des Hetzters im Zinksarg’, which would eventually form the second and seventh movements. He won a prize that was to secure a performance at the festival and the Paris World Exhibition later that same year, as the international jury judged Eisler’s the best of all submissions. As Thomas Phleps has reported, the ISCM board’s fear of interference by German authorities thwarted the concert, however, of what was then still titled Anti-Hitler Symphony. In a likely attempt to placate Eisler that smacks of a white lie, the committee chair, Jacques Ibert, claimed that no choir was available for the performance and tried to reach a compromise by suggesting that vocal lines be replaced with saxophones. Eisler refused and the performance was cancelled, a reversal that witnesses a peculiarly poignant case of musical, indeed sonic, displacement and points towards the influence of fascist oppression beyond national borders. As a compromise, the committee scheduled Eisler’s Third Suite for Orchestra op. 26 for performance.7 Ironically, the suite was based on the music for the feature film Kuhle Wampe. Scripted by Bertolt Brecht and directed by Slatan Dudow, Kuhle Wampe addressed homelessness and unemployment amongst the working classes in Weimar Germany from a left-wing, proletarian perspective. From its inception, the film had been surrounded by the highly charged political context in Weimar Germany. During filming, members of Germany’s communist party protected actors and crew from disruptions by Nazi groups, and the film was banned soon after its release in 1932. With several scenes referencing an abortion and another that shows some of the protagonists bathing naked in a lake while ignoring the church bells that call them to prayer removed, the film was briefly shown, until the Nazi ascent to power removed it from circulation for good. Paradoxically, instead of saxophones in two movements of the Deutsche Sinfonie, Paris audiences thus witnessed a performance of the music to a highly politicised film, which prominently quotes the ‘Solidarity Song’ played by saxophones and trumpets. By this point, the song was well known, having spread quickly during the final months of the Weimar Republic, and it is no doubt tempting to read its programming as a subversive response to feared Nazi plots to thwart the performance of an Anti-Hitler Symphony.8 7 See Manfred Grabs, Hanns Eisler: Kompositionen, Schriften, Literatur. Ein Handbuch (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1984), and Thomas Phleps, ‘Eine neue Nützlichkeit: Der Sektor der angewandten Musik bei Hanns Eisler’, in Musik-Konzepte Sonderband Hanns Eisler: Angewandte Musik, ed. Ulrich Tadday (Munich: Edition Text+Kritik, 2012), 19. 8 The episode of the Nazi interference leading to the cancellation of the performance of what would eventually become the Deutsche Sinfonie is recounted in most literature on Hanns Eisler. Scholars tend to refer to one another when doing

Angels in Paris

19

Evidence suggests that Eisler had first conceived of the Deutsche Sinfonie in March 1935. Predictably, Eisler was travelling, giving a widely noticed tour of lectures and performances in the United States with baritone Mordecai Baumann in which he advocated a communist response to the rise of fascism. On 20 July, now in Moscow, he wrote to Bertolt Brecht, I have a very interesting idea for a composition, namely that I want to write a large symphony which will have the subtitle ‘Concentration Camp Symphony’. In some passages a choir will be used as well, although it’s basically an orchestral work. And certainly, I will use your two poems Begräbnis des Hetzers im Zinksarg (this will become the middle section of an extensive funeral march) and An die Gefangenen in den Konzentrationslagern. The first sketches I’ve made (in Detroit) are extremely promising. I hope it will be a great work. But I will need half a year of intensive work for it. Of course, this does not rule out in the slightest a new project with you.9

At first sight, then, things would seem straightforward enough. The compositional history of the work was protracted, however, and even its inception is uncertain. By the time Eisler was interviewed by Hans Bunge in 1958, he located the first drafts not in Detroit, but in Chicago. I remember exactly when I was exhausted during a tour in America from telling Americans about Germany’s cultural barbarism every evening … I decided, just to do some work again − in a hotel room in Chicago, one dull

so. I have not found reliable primary evidence to substantiate the story, which doesn’t, of course, mean that it doesn’t exist. The notion that the international music scene was an adversary of Nazi cultural politics is well established. Anton Haefeli, for example, notes that Austro-German migrants were influential in the anti-fascist politicisation of the ISCM (see ‘Die Emigration und ihr Einfluss auf die Profilierung und Politisierung der IGNM’, in Musik in der Emigration: Verfolgung – Vertreibung – Rückwirkung, ed. Horst Weber, Essen: Metzler, 1992, 136–52). 9 ‘Ich habe übrigens einen sehr interessanten Kompositionsplan und zwar will ich eine grosse Symphonie schreiben, die den Untertitel ‘Konzentrationslagersymphonie’ haben wird. Es wird auch an einigen Stellen Chor verwendet, obwohl es durchaus ein Orchesterwerk ist. Und zwar werde ich Deine beiden Gedichte: Begräbnis des Hetzers im Zinksarg (das wird der Mittelteil eines gross angelegten Trauermarsches) und an die Gefangenen in den Konzentrationslagern verwenden. Die ersten Skizzen die ich dazu gemacht habe (in Detroit) sind äusserst vielversprechend. Ich hoffe, dass das etwas grossartiges wird. Allerdings brauche ich ein halbes Jahr intensive Arbeit dazu. Das schliesst selbstverständlich in keiner Weise eine neue Arbeit mit Dir aus.’ Hanns Eisler, Briefe an Bertolt Brecht im Exil (1933–1949), ed. Hermann Haarmann and Christoph Hesse (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 458–9. All translations are mine unless stated otherwise.

20

Musical Journeys autumn day − to compose the Deutsche Sinfonie. It resulted from a whim. Well, the whim lasted for five years.10

Eisler’s memory appears to have failed him with regard to the season, with the American lecture tour having taken place during the winter and spring. Either way, the evidence points towards a considerably longer genesis. By 1936, Eisler had largely completed three movements, the opening ‘Praeludium’, the second, ‘An die Kämpfer in den Konzentrationslagern’, and the fifth, ‘In Sonnenburg’, all to texts by Brecht. Confusingly, Eisler gave the work the opus number 50 in 1937, implying a sense of completeness, even though only a portion of the work had been turned into a performative version. That year, 1937, the year of the failed Paris performance, proved productive, with compositions of the fourth, seventh, eighth, and ninth movements, ‘Erinnerung (Potsdam)’, ‘Begräbnis des Hetzers im Zinksarg’, ‘Bauernkantate’ (to a Silone text which Brecht had helped arrange), and ‘Das Lied vom Klassenfeind’. Another was composed by 1939, the orchestral sixth movement, with more revisions and amendments as time progressed, until a further orchestral tenth movement, based on sketches dating back to 1936, was orchestrated in Malibu on 4 February 1947, as stated on the autograph, which is today held in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. A decade later, in 1957, Eisler decided to add an additional last movement, the epilogue ‘Seht unsre Söhne’, the only one not employing the twelve-tone technique. The work thus accompanied Eisler for over two decades on his migratory journey, with the composer adding and revising movements either side of World War II, on both sides of the Atlantic, and transcending the Iron Curtain. Indeed, the actual chronology of the Sinfonie predates its conception, as Eisler included an earlier piece, the fourth movement of the Orchestral Suite no. 1 op. 23 written in 1930, as the third movement. But the history of the Deutsche Sinfonie does not end there. Following the premiere in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1959, twenty-two years after the intended Paris premiere during which the work and its socio-historical context had changed almost beyond recognition, it was heard for the first time west of the Iron Curtain only in 1983. As I am writing this, publication of the Deutsche Sinfonie as part of the complete edition of Eisler’s works remains outstanding, even if it is performed with some regularity in concert halls globally.11 10 ‘Ich erinnere mich ganz genau, als ich von einer Tournee in Amerika müde wurde, jeden Abend über die Kulturbarbarei Deutschlands den Amerikanern was zu erzählen ... beschloß ich, um wieder etwas zu arbeiten – auch an einem trüben Herbstabend, in einem Chicagoer Hotel – die Deutsche Sinfonie zu komponieren. Der Ursprung war eine Laune. Ja, die Laune dauerte dann fünf Jahre.’ Hanns Eisler, Gespräche mit Hans Bunge: ‘Fragen Sie mehr über Brecht’ (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1975), 226. 11 A critical edition as part of the Hanns Eisler Complete Edition is in progress, according to the International Hanns Eisler Society website; see http://www.hannseisler.com/index.php/en/complete-edition/in-progress (accessed 7 March 2019).

Angels in Paris

21

Migratory Networks Beyond its long and protracted genesis, during which the work changed titles several times, from Concentration Camp Symphony to Anti-Hitler Symphony, the Deutsche Sinfonie bears the hallmarks of migration with regards to several other aspects. Paris was amongst the many locations in Eisler’s life as a migrant during the 1930s and, in the work’s history, occupies a conspicuous, if ultimately silent, position. While the work’s long history complicates any attempt to view it as homogeneous, one can situate it against the context of migratory culture in mid- to late 1930s Paris, in which Eisler played a prominent, if transitory role, mixing with other refugees from Nazi Germany like Walter Benjamin, Lion Feuchtwanger, or Klaus Mann, whose novel Vulkan, based in Paris and begun in 1937, focuses on the migratory journeys of refugees from Nazi Germany as they meet in the French capital. On a perhaps mundane level, they all knew each other. Feuchtwanger and Eisler were friends throughout their lives, as charming documents such as a canon that Eisler wrote for Feuchtwanger’s sixtieth birthday in 1944 testify.12 Much later, in the 1950s, Feuchtwanger was one of the few to publicly support Eisler when the composer was attacked in the GDR for his opera project Doctor Faustus (see Chapter 2), and in 1964 he contributed to the special issue of one of the GDR’s leading journals following the composer’s death.13 In Paris, Walter Benjamin asked Grete Steffin, a common friend, to keep him updated on the composer’s whereabouts and projects.14 The relationship with Klaus Mann was more difficult, in part because Eisler found himself torn between Brecht and the Manns, who regarded each other with suspicion. As he recalled, The [Mann] family didn’t like Brecht, especially Klaus Mann, unfortunately now deceased, who had written a few nasty things about Brecht in a travel book. This wasn’t that well-brought-up, gently dying bourgeoisie with that great insight into its own demise, but an extremely rebellious man. And this didn’t work with the well-bred manners of this family of senators.15 12 Entitled ‘Canon auf den 60. Geburtstag Lion Feuchtwangers’, the manuscript is held by the Lion Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the University of Southern California. 13 Lion Feuchtwanger, ‘Hanns Eisler’, Sinn und Form: Sonderheft Hanns Eisler (1964), 30. 14 See Albrecht Betz, Hanns Eisler: Political Musician (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 260. 15 ‘Die Familie mochte Brecht auch nicht, vor allem der inzwischen ja leider verstorbene Klaus Mann, der über Brecht ein paar bösartige Stellen in einem Reisebuch schrieb. Das war nicht das wohlerzogene sanft dahinsterbende Bürgertum mit großer Einsicht in seinen eigenen Untergang, sondern ein äußerst rebellischer Mann. Und das paßte nicht in die Wohlerzogenheit dieser Senatorenfamilie.’ Eisler, Gespräche mit Hans Bunge, 62.

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These networks are not, at least in Paris in 1937, established or institutionally linked, but transitory, occasioned by written communication as much as by brief chance encounters, with few opportunities for prolonged collaboration. Based in Paris, first mentioned as an idea in 1936, and begun in 1937, Klaus Mann’s novel Vulkan on one level focuses on the migratory journeys of refugees from Hitler Germany. While primarily based in the French capital between April 1933 and January 1939, the narrative also unfolds in Vienna, Prague, Amsterdam, Zurich, and the United States. In several passages at climactic points of the novel, the Angel of Homelessness visits one of the several protagonists, Kikjou, and they take flight together. As the angel journeys to other places of displacement with Kikjou, these flights render the fixity of places into mobile migratory networks. In response, Kikjou sets upon chronicling the history of the migrants. The Angel of Homelessness reimagines dystopia as a motivator for a striving for utopia. Much as Hannah Arendt would argue soon afterwards, it is the refugee, the migrant, whose marginalisation affords a central place in history. In 1943 she suggested that ‘refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples’. 16 Observing the dying moments of his friend and former lover, Martin, who has left Paris to join the international brigade in Spain, Kikjou hears the Angel of Homelessness say to him: ‘The displaced, homeless, ever-foreign has a comparatively good chance to do justice to the Highest Plan. You shall be brave; because the Fatherly concept of your perfection, the Divine Will for utopia is not only very sensible, but also venturous. Be venturous!’17 As the international brigade retreats from Franco’s Spain, the Angel joins them in song as they intone the Internationale. The reference, made at a moment of dystopia, to a promise of communist utopia expressed through song similarly manifests itself in the Deutsche Sinfonie. At a climactic moment towards the end of the first movement, Eisler quotes the Internationale in the trumpets ‘with greatest force’, as the score prescribes, while the trombones simultaneously play the revolutionary funeral march ‘Unsterbliche Opfer’, which memorialises the victims of the 1905 Russian Revolution (see Example 1.1).18 In a score otherwise devoid of easily recognisable quotations – others, such as the B-A-C-H motif in the second movement, are hidden in the musical texture – the gesture to inject a profoundly internationalist reference into a work 16 Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’, Menorah Journal 31 (1943), 69–77. 17 ‘Der Umgetriebene, Unbehauste, Überall-Fremde hat vergleichsweise gute Chancen, dem allerhöchsten Plan gerecht zu werden. Ihr sollt mutig sein; denn die Väterliche Konzeption eurer Vollendung; der göttliche Wille zur Utopie, ist nicht nur vernünftig, sondern auch verwegen. Seid verwegen!’ Klaus Mann, Vulkan (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1981), 545. 18 The influx of Spanish refugees from 1938 as a result of the Spanish Civil War, and the joining of many of them of the French resistance in the 1940s, act as a reminder that Paris was not, of course, a destination only for German-language migrants.

Angels in Paris

23

Example. 1.1  Hanns Eisler, Deutsche Sinfonie, 1st movement, Praeludium, bars 81–6. © by Deutscher Verlag für Musik Leipzig / used by kind permission of the publisher. Mit größter Kraft

Tpts (Bm)

    hervortretend  







 



 

hervortretend            Tbns & Tba      ff       Timp   

fff

Snare

   

ff

  

ff

        Woodwinds, Vlns & Vlas   ff    Bns, Hrns,       Vcls & Dbs 

  

     

  

ff

84         Tpts (Bm)                             Tbns & Tba      Timp       Snare  

poco rit.

Woodwinds, Vlns & Vlas Bns, Hrns, Vcls & Dbs

         

   

   

with a national specifier in its title may seem paradoxical. ‘O Germany, pale mother’, the choir sings, as it foregrounds a sense that the nation has abandoned its people. The quotation of the Internationale, then, points not only to the notion that, against the dystopian backdrop of the rise of fascism, a migratory aesthetic can suggest a utopian future. It also reminds audiences of Eisler’s and Mann’s beliefs that German culture was now, in the mid-1930s, itself diasporic. As many of the migrants struggled with their exilic status and material

24

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difficulties, the logic that they belonged to a diasporic elite that continued German culture abroad allowed for a sense of purpose that foregrounded both collective and individual identity. Klaus Mann’s father, Thomas, expressed this notion succinctly in an interview with the New York Times in 1938, and his words soon became a much-cited slogan: What makes [living as a migrant] easier is the realization of the poisoned atmosphere in Germany. That makes it easier because it’s actually no loss. Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me. I have contact with the world, and I do not consider myself fallen.19

Beyond their shared quotation of the Internationale, the twisted paths of the respective publications of both works also share similarities. The oft-mentioned suggestion that the Deutsche Sinfonie was composed without any prospect of performance is incorrect.20 Eisler intended at least a portion of it for a broad Parisian audience in 1937, as his submission for performance at the ISCM festival testifies. Even so, the work remained, as I have mentioned, unheard, and was shared only in manuscript form amongst colleagues and friends, in migrant circles. Mann’s novel had a dismal distribution upon its initial publication, selling a mere 300 copies, with most of the print run confiscated and destroyed by German forces upon their invasion of Amsterdam, where the publisher, Querido, was based. Mann’s attempts to have the novel published in English translation in the United States also proved futile, with Houghton Mifflin, Alfred Knopf, and Random House all rejecting the work.21 Vulkan, then, was known to little more than Mann’s relatively close circle. In hindsight, it seems an irony of history that Mann had subtitled the book ‘novel amongst emigrants’ instead of ‘novel about emigrants’. Both works only reached audiences well after the end of World War II. Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie was finally premiered in 1959, three years after a heavily redacted version of Mann’s novel was first published to wider audiences, with all passages that smacked of communist sympathies removed. But the long migratory journeys of both works didn’t end there. An un-redacted version of Vulkan was first widely available only in 1991, and an authoritative and comprehensive publication of the score of Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie is as yet outstanding, as I have mentioned above, even though several recordings exist, and it is possible to gather the score piecemeal from various sources. This prolonged history is, 19 Quoted in Anne-Kathrin Reulecke, ‘Voyage with Don Quixote: Thomas Mann between European Culture and American Politics’, in Escape to Life: German Intellectuals in New York. A Compendium on Exile, ed. Eckhart Goebel and Sigrid Weigel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 372. 20 See, for example, Betz, Hanns Eisler, 153. 21 See Frederic Spotts, Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 141.

Angels in Paris

25

of course, a hallmark of many migrant works, reminding us of, amongst other things, the materiality of migration. As Eisler travelled, the Deutsche Sinfonie accompanied him on his journeys as he carried sketches, short scores, and full orchestrations, using manuscript paper from varying locations and adding layers of writing to the pages. And while the musical argument and material remained roughly the same, Eisler changed and reworked the score continuously, as I have detailed above.

Migrant Places On one hand, the Deutsche Sinfonie is therefore a migratory and mobile work in a very real sense. Eisler conceived the work in a hotel room while he was travelling across the United States in early 1935 and intended it for a premiere performance in Paris that never materialised, with various compositional bursts en route and in different locations. The locale where the work is first traceable, the hotel room, emerges as an anyplace, as Eisler himself seemed uncertain whether he was in Chicago or Detroit at the time. The placeless place that is the hotel room is a frequent and at times almost clichéd trope in mobility studies. In their foundational essay that sets out what the authors call the new mobilities paradigm, Mimi Sheller and John Urry name hotels as one of the spaces that orchestrate new forms of social life in the age of mobility. As an anyplace, the hotel confronts and challenges what Sheller and Urry call the static social sciences, because it foregrounds the movements of its guests as they pass from place to place.22 Further, the hotel straddles and questions the private−public divide. Migrant locations share these characteristics, pointing on the one hand to the mobility of those visiting them and, on the other, to the fluid dialectic between the everyday as private and public. This is the case not only historically, but fictionally, too. In Mann’s novel, and also in other literature that dates from the same period, such as Anna Seghers’s Transit and Lion Feuchtwanger’s Exil, narratives unfold in hotel rooms and cafés, public urban spaces, and train stations, and on the move, in between, while people are travelling. Eisler, too, conjures up those places, even as he puts a dark, dystopian emphasis on his narratives, situating several movements of his Deutsche Sinfonie in concentration camps, notably the second, dedicated to the political concentration camp prisoners, and the fifth, which the text locates in the Sonnenburg camp. It is no surprise, perhaps, that mobility studies and research engaging with diaspora has foregrounded the notion of spaces, and sometimes prioritised them over places. Cities are often described as hubs and gateways of departure and arrival, as spaces crystallising questions of identity politics, but rarely 22 Mimi Sheller and John Urry, ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm’, Environment and Planning A 38:2 (2006), 213.

26

Musical Journeys

as places of belonging. In much writing in migration studies, migrants move in and out of cities and engage with them, but they are not fully of them. Hannah Arendt’s famous article on refugees, for example, situates migrants within cities and traces them as they move from one to another. But while she describes the attempts of refugees to belong to the urban spheres they encounter, she posits such endeavours as futile. For her, cityscapes deconstruct themselves not into places in which to linger and with inviting opportunities to shape their makeup, but into skyscrapers from which one can jump and apartments in which one can place one’s head in the gas oven.23 During World War II and in the immediate postwar era, Arendt’s voice carries a legacy of conflict, suicide, and pain, despite the many successful integrations. In more recent years, the wartime experience and its legacy join with other types of mobility to expand our concept of what urban migration can be. For mobilities studies scholars such as Sheller and Urry, the focus on movement rather than fixity is less at odds with the workings of the city, but does contrast with its physical stasis. Methodologically, city dwellers, commuters, tourists, migrants − all those who engage, for whichever period of time and in whichever capacity − contribute towards the micro-geographies of everyday life that make the city. Add to this Benedict Anderson’s concept of the imagined community, and then consider Homi Bhabha’s call for ‘a more transnational and translational sense of the hybridity of imagined communities’, and migrants need not emerge as the other to the city.24 Drawing on the work of Ayşe Çağlar and Nina Glick Schiller, I argue that, despite unequal networks of power that disadvantage them, migrants are what makes a city, and their mobile and heterogeneous voices sound it into being.25 Eisler is a case in point. In many ways, he was the archetypal traveller. He never was in Paris for any length of time, and, when he was in the city, resided in hotel rooms and often met collaborators, friends, and family members in cafés and other public places. Even so, he did not regard Paris as an anyplace, instead recognising the city as a distinct and unique capital of musical culture. Crucially, for him, it was also the capital of migration, which could provide the base of organisations in charge of international anti-fascist musical life. In 1935, Eisler put those suggestions for international collaboration in concrete terms and recommended the establishment of an office coordinating the global musical fight against fascism: The purpose of this congress is: the establishment of an international music bureau that permanently communicates international experiences, organises exchange concerts between individual countries, and endeavours to foster 23 Arendt, ‘We Refugees’. 24 Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 7. 25 Çağlar and Glick Schiller, Migrants and City-Making.

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the collaboration between musical intellectuals and the masses through a series of practical suggestions. Thus established, the new international music bureau publishes a journal that reviews and discusses the most important problems of the musical movement. The political platform of this international bureau is the fight across party lines against cultural reactionaries and for musical progress and freedom. The initiative committee should establish an office here in Paris as quickly as possible to begin its work and draw out a practical action plan. Dear colleagues, I want to put this information and this suggestion up for discussion. I know that it is immensely difficult, but I ask you not to forget that there exist an enormous number of forces internationally that are effectively waiting for just such an international association. I need not explain why Paris, specifically, is the appropriate place from which one can shape this impulse into some organisational form.26

Eisler pitched his suggestion at the thirteenth festival of the ISCM in Prague in 1935. And even though a formal collaboration was rejected by delegates there, his approach has the potential to inform debates regarding diasporic spaces in urban places, as he proposes the city as the connective tissue from which transient and mobile networks might be coordinated. Eisler implies physical architecture as he proposes the establishment of a fixed office and thus suggests instituting a connection not just to transnational spaces, but a presence that is manifest as a tangible and locatable place, intent on engendering change.

26 ‘Der Zweck dieses Kongresses ist: ein Internationales Musikbureau zu etablieren, das ständig die internationalen Erfahrungen vermittelt, Austauschkonzerte zwischen den einzelnen Ländern organisiert und sich bemüht, durch eine Reihe praktischer Vorschläge das Zusammenarbeiten zwischen Musikintellektuellen und den breiten Volksmassen zu fördern. Dieses so neu etablierte internationale Musikbureau gibt eine Zeitschrift heraus, in der die wichtigsten Probleme der Musikbewegung besprochen und diskutiert werden. Die politische Plattform dieses internationalen Bureaus ist der überparteiliche Kampf gegen Kulturreaktion für den Fortschritt und die Freiheit der Musik. Das Initiativkomitee müßte möglichst rasch ein kleines Bureau hier in Paris einrichten, um die Arbeit zu beginnen und einen praktischen Arbeitsplan auszuarbeiten. Sehr geehrte Herrn Kollegen, diese Information, und diesen Vorschlag möchte ich zur Diskussion stellen. Ich weiß, daß es ungeheuer schwierig ist, aber ich bitte Sie, nicht zu vergessen, daß es im internationalen Maßstab eine schon enorme Menge von Kräften gibt, die gewissermaßen auf einen internationalen Zusammenschluß nur warten. Ich brauche nicht zu erklären, warum gerade Paris der geeignete Angriffspunkt ist, vor dem man aus diesem neuen Impuls eine organisatorische Form geben kann.’ Hanns Eisler, ‘Vorschläge für internationale Zusammenarbeit’ (1935), in Musik und Politik: Schriften 1924–1948, ed. Günter Mayer (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1973), 332.

28

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Paris as Migrant Capital It is telling that Eisler believed it unnecessary to justify his decision to name Paris as the obvious location for organising international and mobile networks. While Paris was not the only destination for the refugees from Nazism and fascism – Prague, Amsterdam, Moscow, pre-Anschluss Vienna, Zurich, and London were some of the other European destinations favoured by German-language migrants – it nonetheless held special appeal. Many migrants constructed a line of exilic continuity reaching back to Heinrich Heine, for example, whose towering contribution to German cultural identity had been written during the last twenty-five years of his life in the French capital. Hannah Arendt suggested that the city ‘with unparalleled naturalness, offered itself to all homeless people as a second home ever since the middle of the last [nineteenth] century’.27 She cites a 1913 letter from Walter Benjamin, in which he considers the streets of Paris to feel ‘almost more homelike’ than his native Berlin. Twenty years later, no longer a tourist but a refugee, Benjamin constructed Paris as the global capital of the nineteenth century and the cradle of modern European thought and culture. In a move that perhaps projected his own sense of self onto his adopted city, mobility, rather than homeliness or Gemütlichkeit, was a crucial point for Benjamin’s fascination with Paris. The city’s arcades and passageways encourage strolling freely even in bad weather and are lined with cafés that invite its patrons to observe those passing by. This perhaps clichéd view of Paris acquired some centrality for Benjamin, because, as Arendt pointed out, it encapsulated what, for both of them, was the dialectic between place and space that lay at the heart of Paris. As Arendt put it, ‘these passageways are indeed like a symbol of Paris, because they clearly are inside and outside at the same time and thus represent its true nature in quintessential form’. 28 For Eisler, too, the role of Paris as a centre of migratory culture pre-dated the rise of fascism and the arrival of those displaced by the Hitler regime. As early as 1927, long before he could have imagined that he himself would once be a refugee in the French capital, he conceived of Stravinsky as a migrant and foregrounded, at the same time, the heterotopian space of mobility, the provenance and journey of the migrant, and the place of residing and dwelling. As he put it, this Igor Stravinsky, a Russian, who long before the war went journeying with the Diaghilev ballet as a piano accompanist, is a Paris resident. He is one of the leaders of modern music alongside Arnold Schoenberg and has influenced the entire production of music most crucially. 27 Hannah Arendt, ‘Walter Benjamin’, New Yorker, 19 October 1968; reprinted as ‘Introduction: Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), 25. 28 Arendt, ‘Introduction’, 26.

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With his communist convictions, Eisler did not approve of Stravinsky’s disconnect with Soviet Russia, however. ‘This Russian, who avoids all connection with the new Russia, who is comfortable amongst migrant circles in Paris and cheats the Paris bourgeoisie with his pretend Slavic authenticity, has suffered a breakdown, like all migrant artists.’ 29 Eisler’s attack was no doubt politically motivated, but it is nonetheless instructive to read where, for him, Stravinsky’s failings originated. On one hand, Eisler advised migrants to retain their cultural identity, rather than replacing real ties with a fake authenticity. On the other, he emphasises the importance of remaining in the present, the here and now, on the migratory journey. Retreating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Stravinsky was doing in Eisler’s view of his neoclassical works of the 1920s, had to lead to a breakdown. The fear of retreating into a timeless warp of static exile gripped many migrants. Feuchtwanger’s Exil and Mann’s Vulkan both contain passages clearly intended as warning signs as static refugees sit perpetually in corner seats in smoke-filled Parisian cafés, dumbfounded, wine-fuelled, ever more losing their grip on reality and their place in it. As Johannes Evelein has put it, for the immobile migrant, Paris becomes not the epitome of freedom but a prison from which one hopes to depart.30 For Benjamin and Eisler, then, but also for other migrants who engaged with Paris in their work, such as Klaus Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, the city did not represent a utopia, a safe haven from fascism, a home from home. Stasis spreads, almost pathologically, and its effects worsen the longer it lasts. Lion Feuchtwanger, in Exil, cautions against hiring refugees for menial labour once they have been staying in the city for any period of time. Wallowing in their own misery, they are unable to concentrate on a task at hand. Immobility emerges as the enemy of the migrant. Paris is glorified in the migrants’ imagination, then, but the shimmering image of the city as a cultural utopia has a dystopian reality.

29 ‘Dieser Igor Strawinsky, ein Russe, der lange vor dem Kriege mit dem DiaghilewBallett als Klavierbegleiter auf Reisen ging, ist in Paris ansässig. Er ist neben Arnold Schönberg der Führer der modernen Musik und hat die gestamte Musikproduktion aufs entscheidendste beeinflußt. ... Dieser Russe, der jedem Zusammenhang mit dem neuen Rußland ausweicht, der sich in Emigrantenkreisen in Paris wohl fühlt und den Pariser Bourgeois die slawische Ursprünglichkeit vormogelt, hat, wie alle Emigrantenkünstler, einen Zusammenbruch erlitten.’ Hanns Eisler, ‘Städtische Oper: Strawinsky Abend (1927)’, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1: 1921–1935, ed Tobias Faßhauer and Günter Mayer (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2007), 63. 30 Johannes F. Evelein, Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany: Exemplarity and the Search for Meaning (Rochester: Camden House, 2014), 125.

30

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Resisting Stasis Eisler was determined not to fall into the trap of stasis. Instead, following the shock of finding himself displaced and unable to return to Germany, he sought continuously to remain mobile and shape contemporary developments himself rather than be disempowered by them. The sense that the political and the aesthetic were inextricable only sharpened before the background of migration. Committed to resist stasis, Eisler travelled frantically in the mid-1930s, never resting in one place for any period of time. His itinerary makes for impressive reading even today, when international travel is considerably less arduous. 1935, for example, saw him travel through the United States for a lecture tour throughout the early year that led him from New York to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, St Louis, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, conduct research in the British Library in London in May, speak and conduct at a festival for workers’ songs in Strasbourg in June, address attendees at a further music festival for workers in the same month in Liberec in Bohemia, travel to Moscow and then via Leningrad to Skovbostrand in Denmark to work with Brecht throughout much of August, and participate at the ISCM festival in September in Prague until travelling to Paris and, from there, back to New York, to deliver lectures at the New School of Social Research on ‘Musical Composition’ and ‘The Crisis of Modern Music’.31 As he relayed much later, reporting an argument with Brecht in 1937: I was on the road for a terribly long time and arrived, via Leningrad and Stockholm, back to Brecht from Moscow. I really wanted to work a bit with him again. After eight days a telegram arrived: would I travel immediately to Prague for an international music conference. Because the unification of the communist and social democratic workers’ music societies was in process there. And, of course, I absolutely need to be there. It wasn’t a direct party order, but something similar. … Coming from Prague, I only had enough time to leave from Paris − on board the Lafayette, for which I already had tickets − to sail to New York, because my lectures at the university were about to begin. Brecht was doing Die Horatier und die Kuratier at the time. And wanted to talk this through with me. And it needed setting to music. And I said, I haven’t got time. I could be in Skovbostrand for two days at most. That’s too exhausting. I’d rather travel to Paris and stay there for two days. My brother was there, and I wanted to recover a little. That I would want to relax in Paris for all of two days rather than come to Skovbostrand − at any cost! The exhaustion! − to continue working, well, he found that intolerable. That really annoyed me. Am I some …? Anyway, I couldn’t. ‘Listen, great man. I’m also a great man!’ I cannot wear myself out like that. I need to rest in Paris. 31 I follow the timeline detailed in Grabs, Hanns Eisler, 19–20.

Angels in Paris

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‘And it’s fun!’ I said. ‘I’m not in the mood, for all of two days … maybe if it was for four weeks!’ and so on. And we had a bad argument. I got very annoyed and left his house in great anger. And that evening I travelled to Prague. And a mediator was sent, our splendid comrade [Grete] Steffin, but I refused to engage in any negotiation, because − how do they put it in Berlin? − I was pissed off. I was terribly busy in Prague.32

Mobility itself thus became the consequence of his migration and displacement. And Eisler explicitly called on his fellow migrants to follow his lead. While visiting Bertolt Brecht in Skovbostrand in Denmark in May and June 1937, for example, Eisler set a text by Ignazio Silone in German translation for voice, two clarinets, viola, and cello, which was premiered two years later, in London on 3 April 1939 at the Festival of Music for the People. Subtitled Cantata in Exile, it represents a call to arms against wallowing in one’s own misery and urges action against the stupor of waiting.

32 ‘Ich war furchtbar lang auf der Reise und kam dann von Moskau über Leningrad, Stockholm zum Brecht zurück und wollte wirklich mit ihm wieder etwas arbeiten. Nach acht Tagen kommt ein Telegramm, ich möchte sofort nach Prag fahren zu einem internationalen Musikkongreß. Weil: dort sind Einheitsverhandlungen zwischen der sozialdemokratischen Arbeitersängerschaft und der kommunistischen. Und ich muß da unbedingt hin. Es war nicht ein Parteiauftrag, aber es war so etwas Ähnliches. … Von Prag kommend, hatte ich nur noch Zeit, über Paris − mit dem Schiff “Lafayette”, wo ich schon die Karten katte − nach New York zu fahren, denn meine Universitätsvorlesungen fingen gerade an. Nun machte Brecht damals gerade “Die Horatier und die Kuratier”. Und an sich wollte er das mit mir noch besprechen. Und es sollte das auch komponiert werden. Und ich rechnete aus, da hätte ich keine Zeit. Ich könnte höchstens zwei Tage Zeit dann noch für Skovsbostrand aufbringen. Das ist mir zu anstrengend. Ich fahre lieber nach Paris und bleibe zwei Tage in Paris. Mein Bruder war dorten, und ich wollte mich ein bißchen erholen. Daß ich mich in Paris erholen will zwei Tage, statt − um jeden Preis! auch um Anstrengungen! − nach Skovsbostrand zu kommen, um die “Horatier und die Kuratier” weiterzumachen, das fand er einfach eine Unverschämtheit von mir. Das ging mir zu weit. Ich bin ja schließlich … Das ging nicht. “Verstehe, großer Mann. Ich bin auch ein großer Mann!” Ich kann mich nicht kaputtmachen. Ich muß mich in Paris ausruhen. “Macht mir auch Spaß!” sagte ich. “Ich habe keine Lust, wegen zwei Tagen … Ja, für vier Wochen!” Und so fort. Und es wurde ein sehr böses Gespräch. Ich wurde sehr ärgerlich und verließ das Haus in großem Zorne. Und am Abend fuhr ich dann nach Prag. Und da wurde noch eine Unterhändlerin geschickt, unsere prachtvolle Genossin Steffin. Aber ich habe mich nicht zu Verhandlungen herbeigelassen, weil − wie sagt man so schön in Berlin? − : Es platzte mir der Kragen. Ich hatte in Prag sehr viel zu tun.’ Eisler, Gespräche mit Hans Bunge, 89–90.

32

Musical Journeys Man lebt von einem Tage zu dem andern. Man denkt, dass es nur vorläufig noch schlecht ist, man vorläufig entbehren muss. Vorläufig! Das wahre Leben wird ja erst beginnen. Eines Tages. Man bereitet sich vor zu sterben, mit Bedauern, nie gelebt zu haben. So vergeht die Zeit. Niemand lebt in der Gegenwart. Niemand hat etwas von seiner Arbeit. Niemand weiß, wie lange noch. Auch die Freunde des Regimes leben in Unsicherheit. Auch sie wissen nicht, wie lange noch. Alles lebt in Erwartung. Man soll nicht warten, man muss sagen: Es ist genug! Jetzt ist es genug, von dieser Stunde an ist es genug. Die Freiheit bekommt man nicht geschenkt, man muss sie sich nehmen. Auch in der Unterdrückung kann man frei sein, wenn man gegen sie kämpft. Wer mit dem eignen Kopf denkt, ist ein freier Mensch. Wer für das kämpft, was er für gerecht hält, ist ein freier Mensch. Dagegen kann man im freiesten Land der Welt nicht frei sein, wenn man faul, stumpf, servil, willenlos ist. Nein, die Freiheit bekommt man nicht geschenkt, man muss sie sich nehmen. [One lives from one day to the next. One thinks that everything is bad only temporarily, that one has to make sacrifices only temporarily. Temporarily! True life is yet to begin. One day. One prepares to die, regretting not to have lived. Thus, time passes. Nobody lives in the present. Nobody gets anything out of their work. Nobody knows for how much longer. The friends of the regime, too, live in uncertainty. They don’t know either for how much longer. Everything lives in anticipation. One must not wait, one has to say: it is enough! Now it is enough, from this moment on it is enough. Freedom is no gift, one has to take it. Even in oppression one can be free, if one fights against it. He who thinks with his own head is free. He who fights for what he thinks is just is free. One cannot be free in the freest country in the world when being lazy, dull, servile, listless. No, freedom is no gift, one has to take it.]

Eisler’s speed of production during the mid-1930s evidences his own commitment to live by his credo. If anything, it seems that he experienced his displacement not as a paralysing shock, but as a motivation, even as a catalyst. During the two months with Brecht in Skovbostrand, for example, Eisler worked at an astonishing speed, completing seven further chamber cantatas to texts by Silone. (An earlier chamber cantata to a Brecht poem had been completed two years earlier, in 1935.) All the cantatas are short and move along swiftly, matterof-fact, almost restlessly. While intelligibility of text is writ large, repetitions are avoided, with the aim of keeping audiences on the edges of their seats. That Eisler uses a German translation, which treats the original text flexibly, points towards the dialectic between language specificity on the one hand, intending the cantata for a German-language audience, and mobility on the other, because the intended audience consists of migrants. The texture is open and exposed, and the chamber setting further renders the cantatas mobile, with few musicians required to stage performances.

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German Tradition in Diaspora Like the Deutsche Sinfonie, the cantatas are based on twelve-note rows and their permutations. That the Schoenberg pupil Eisler would turn to dodecaphony might not seem surprising. However, a decade earlier, in 1926, Eisler had fallen out with Schoenberg and, as his Marxist convictions grew, decried his teacher’s avant-garde as bourgeois and, instead, turned to a more accessible idiom.33 That Eisler returned to dodecaphony as a migrant not just as a temporary or rhetoric gesture but with dedication, as a consistent stylistic idiom, is significant. On a basic level, Eisler renders audible his loyalty to a fellow migrant. Beyond his employment of Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic method, Eisler went public, voicing his support in print in late 1935 in the New York-based Marxist magazine The New Masses. Eisler still acknowledges their earlier differences, othering Schoenberg as a bourgeois composer. And yet, in a move that foreshadows Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music, Eisler now positions Schoenberg’s music as mimetic of the dystopian present. Schoenberg is … the greatest modern bourgeois composer. If the bourgeoisie does not care for his music, I can only regret this fact, for they have no better composer. Schoenberg’s music does not sound beautiful to the uninitiated listener, because he mirrors the capitalist world exactly as it is, without beautifying it, and because out of his work arises the visage of capitalism, staring us directly in the face. Because he is a genius and a complete master of technique, this visage is revealed so clearly that many are frightened by it. Schoenberg, however, has performed a tremendous historical service, in that the concert halls of the bourgeoisie, when his music is heard there, are no longer charming and agreeable pleasure resorts where one is moved by one’s own beauty, but rather places where one is forced to think about the chaos and ugliness of the world, or else, to turn one’s face away. … Therefore, we can say that Schoenberg’s production is, historically, the most valuable production of all modern music. … That this man, sixty years old, and no longer in good health, after a life full of the severest privations undergone for the sake of his art, should be driven homeless throughout the world, is one of the most frightful scandals of capitalism in the sphere of culture today.34

Beyond such expressions of personal allegiance, Eisler’s employment of dodecaphony points towards an Austro-German musical scene at the moment of its eradication. As Eisler references Schoenberg’s belief that dodecaphony would guarantee the supremacy of Austro-German music for another hundred years, 33 Eisler’s falling-out with Schoenberg features in all biographies on the composer. Albrecht Betz recounts the break, which Eisler and Schoenberg carried out in a series of increasingly hostile letters, in detail. See Betz, Hanns Eisler, 39–43. 34 Originally published as ‘On Schönberg’, New Masses, 26 November 1935, 18–19; reprinted in German trans. in Hanns Eisler, ‘Über Schönberg’, in Musik und Politik, 273.

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Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich pulls the rug from under this very aesthetic. The Cantata in Exile and the Deutsche Sinfonie therefore position dodecaphony as an effectively displaced and profoundly migratory idiom. As Andrea Bohlman and I have shown with regard to a further work, Eisler’s Reisesonate for violin and piano, this reference to an aesthetic associated with the interwar avantgarde points to a particular music in a particular place that is disappearing as the long compositional history of the Deutsche Sinfonie unfolds.35 In so doing, Eisler not only expresses a memory of profound loss, which Edward Said has pinpointed as one of the characteristics of a migratory aesthetic.36 He also positions dodecaphony as the musical language best suited to expressing his commitment to anti-fascism, as Sally Bick has argued.37 As I show in Chapter 4, the link of dodecaphony and migration extends beyond Eisler. Pietro Cavallotti has pointed out that, for composers like Ernst Křenek and Stefan Wolpe, it became the musical language of exile.38 But Eisler’s strategy goes beyond positing Schoenbergian serialism as a displaced aesthetic. Several Eisler scholars have highlighted that Eisler deliberately positions the twelve-note rows in such a way as to make them intelligible for performers and listeners alike.39 Writing for the exile journal Musica Viva in 1936, Eisler makes plain his didactic attempt to compose dodecaphony in a comprehensible and approachable fashion.40 In addition, rather than confronting the listener with the full force of abstract progressivism, the Deutsche Sinfonie is continuously inflected with consonances and allusions to tonality, which make it potentially accessible to an international audience with no background in Austro-German avant-garde music. Peter Petersen points out Eisler’s strategy in the first movement to double the entire prime row with the major third,

35 Andrea F. Bohlman and Florian Scheding, ‘Hanns Eisler on the Move: Situating Mobility in the Reisesonate’, Music & Letters 96:1 (2015), 77–98. 36 Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’. 37 Sally Bick, ‘Political Ironies: Hanns Eisler in Hollywood and behind the Iron Curtain’, Acta Musicologica 75:1 (2003), 65–84. 38 Pietro Cavallotti, ‘Dodecaphony as the Musical Language of the Émigrés: The Early Exile Years of Hanns Eisler, Ernst Krenek and Stefan Wolpe’, in Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900–2000, ed. Felix Meyer, Carol J. Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne C. Shreffler (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), 2019–32. 39 Examples are Friederike Wißmann, Hanns Eisler: Komponist, Weltbürger, Revolutionär (Munich: Edition Elke Heidenreich bei C. Bertelsmann, 2012); Betz, Hanns Eisler: Political Musician, 127; and Erik Levi, ‘Hanns Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie’, in Hanns Eisler: A Miscellany, ed. David Blake (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 181–202. 40 Hanns Eisler, ‘Präludium und Fuge über B-A-C-H’, Musica Viva 2 (July 1936), 1–3; reprinted in Musik und Politik, 379–82.

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Example. 1.2  Hanns Eisler, Deutsche Sinfonie, 1st movement, Praeludium, choir, bars 44–9. © by Deutscher Verlag für Musik Leipzig / used by kind permission of the publisher.

   

Oh 12





Deutsch - land,

47

  

su - delt 10 9

 



blei - che 11







mit 8

dem 7

Blut 6



 



Mut - ter, 10

      

wie 12



dei - ner bes - ten 5 4 3

 



bist

 



du 11



be

-



Söh - ne, 2 1

thus bridging consonant and dissonant textures (see Example 1.2).41 Erik Levi, in an especially insightful close reading of the Deutsche Sinfonie, has pointed out how Eisler juxtaposes elements of oratorio and cantata style with marching agitprop and strident symphonic allegros, drawing on a wide and eclectic breadth of Austro-German musical predecessors. As Levi details, Eisler repeats segments of the prime rows sequentially, interspersing short tonal passages, so as to enable listeners to grasp the thematic material.42 As perceived aesthetic stabilities turned into personal uncertainties and political battlegrounds, Eisler continuously rehearsed techniques that spread across the history of Western art music. This includes a musical quote, for example, when he spells out Bach’s name, B-A-C-H, in the second movement, which is itself based on the Baroque technique of a passacaglia. The simultaneous engagement with Bach and Schoenberg, which effectively takes a condensed musical history of Germany on the migratory journey, mattered to Eisler, who makes the connection explicit in the Präludium und Fuge über B-A-C-H for string trio, written in 1936 and published alongside an explanatory note in the above-mentioned July edition of Musica Viva.43 The Reisesonate for violin and piano, too, abounds with references to Bach.44 In so doing, the Deutsche Sinfonie opens up a paradox. On one hand, it participates in a specific and locatable Austro-German tradition of art music, positioning itself in a lineage that reaches from Bach’s oratorios to the choral symphonies of the nineteenth century and harks back nostalgically to interwar serialism’s promise of utopia. On the other, the work serves as a continuous reminder 41 Peter Petersen, ‘Misuk’, in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, vol. 4, ed. Dan Diner (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler 2013), 208. 42 Levi, ‘Hanns Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie’. 43 Eisler, ‘Präludium und Fuge über B-A-C-H’. See also Anne C. Shreffler, ‘“Stellung nehmen!” Über ästhetisch-politische Debatten in der deutschsprachigen Exilpresse, 1933–1939’, public lecture at the University of Hamburg, 26 April 2018. 44 See Bohlman and Scheding, ‘Hanns Eisler on the Move’, 90–1.

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that any engagement with German culture in 1937 is caught up in the dialectic between the dystopian presence of Germany on the one hand and a displaced heterotopian vision of anti-fascist resistance on the other. And yet the work is not disjunct. As Erik Levi has pointed out, Eisler achieves unity through technique, using tone rows that favour small and related intervallic proportions throughout the movements, prominently employing perfect fifths and tritones in the first and fourth movements, for example.45 That Eisler employs the Germanic spelling, ‘Sinfonie’, specifies the frame of reference. As Friederike Wißmann has put it, the title Deutsche Sinfonie ‘is programmatic, because the composition is tantamount to a discussion of German history in terms of content and form’. 46 Indeed, the Deutsche Sinfonie stands in firm conversation with the Austro-German tradition. Paradoxically, as I have pointed out above, the only prominent quotation in a work referencing the national in its title is the Internationale. The very title of the work thus jars with the tradition to which it refers. Formally, too, the piece departs considerably from the nineteenth-century blueprint of the symphony; ‘oratorio’ might be a more apt descriptor, even if David Drew has suggested that the instrumental third, sixth, and tenth movements could be read as a symphony within a symphony.47 The Deutsche Sinfonie, then, engages with the Germanic tradition precisely by questioning and potentially undermining it. This critical and complex engagement with German cultural history might be one of the reasons why the Deutsche Sinfonie has largely (and often exclusively) been read as a work of resistance in the Eisler literature. Thomas Phleps, for example, has labelled it ‘a contribution to the aesthetics of resistance’.48 It is true that anti-fascist opposition is a hallmark of the piece. Even so, it is possible to add to this emphasis on the displaced struggle of the embattled artist in exile. By shifting the focus onto the migratory community for which the work was written – it was, of course, never performed in Nazi Germany – the work instead speaks of an empowered and mobile artist. The Deutsche Sinfonie can be seen as a proactive, rather than a reactive, agent that, while conceiving of itself as exiled from fascism, partakes in constructing a migratory culture. In other words, the reference points are not only Nazi Germany and fascist Europe, but rather an alternative, forward-looking context of culture that recognises the existence of nationalist ideologies, for example, but points towards ways of transcending them. Eisler’s activism extends beyond the Deutsche Sinfonie. I agree with Heidi Hart’s suggestion that Eisler’s art songs, for example, can be read not merely as escapist laments, but as interventionist and full of

45 Levi, ‘Hanns Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie’, 185. 46 Wißmann, Hanns Eisler, 125. 47 David Drew, quoted in Levi, ‘Hanns Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie’, 185. 48 Thomas Phleps, Hanns Eislers ‘Deutsche Sinfonie’: Ein Beitrag zur Asthetik des Widerstandes (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1988).

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agency.49 This Adornian reading of a dialectic of mimesis and utopia was not only familiar to Eisler, who was close to Adorno and later, in California, collaborated with him on a book on film music, Composing for the Films. It also fits the other works discussed in this chapter. Despite the tragedies and traumas narrated in Vulkan and Exil, for example, and the engagement with dystopia and catastrophe in Benjamin’s Theses, all three works resist the temptation to retreat into disempowered paralysis and endeavour to act, instead, as agents for change.

Angelus Novus and Jewish Thought It is no doubt striking that, as Peter Petersen has highlighted, the Deutsche Sinfonie remains ostensibly silent on the Holocaust, concentrating instead on the communist anti-fascist resistance.50 In most of the Eisler literature, the composer’s Jewishness is barely mentioned, and certainly not discussed in any depth. And yet, as Andrea Bohlman and Philip Bohlman have argued, his Jewishness was a matter of course for him, and its critical allure represented a constant parameter throughout his own migratory journey and in his view of twentieth-century history more widely. For them, the strategy to refrain from singling out Jewish victims in the Deutsche Sinfonie witnesses to Eisler’s decision to conceive of Jewish history as part of a wider fight for justice rather than essentialise or ghettoise it as distinct. Indeed, they argue that the work combines references to Jewish cantillation and to Bach, hence positing Austro-German musical tradition as Judaeo-Christian.51 The Deutsche Sinfonie, then, while it doesn’t openly address the Holocaust, forms part of what Klára Móricz, Philip Bohlman, Amy Wlodarski, and others have called Jewish musical modernity.52 Petersen is no doubt right to include it as one of his main examples in his entry on the Brechtian term ‘Misuk’ in an encyclopaedia on Jewish history

49 Heidi Hart, Hanns Eisler’s Art Songs: Arguing with Beauty (Rochester: Camden House, 2018). 50 Peter Petersen, ‘Dimensions of Silencing: On Nazi Anti-Semitism in Musical Displacement’, in Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond, ed. Erik Levi and Florian Scheding (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 33. 51 Andrea F. Bohlman and Philip V. Bohlman, Hanns Eisler: ‘In der Musik ist es anders’ , Jüdische Miniaturen 126 (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2012), 10–11 and 57. 52 Philip V. Bohlman, ed., Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Klára Móricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Amy Lynn Wlodarski, ‘Of Moses and Musicology. New Takes on Jewish Musical Modernism’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 137:1 (2012), 171–85.

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and culture.53 Given Eisler’s displacement, it might seem tempting to link him to Ahasverus, the archetypal wandering Jew. Hannah Arendt, who famously posited Jews as the pariahs whose experience crystallises history, unflinchingly advised her fellow migrants to embrace their Jewish identity and turn their outsider status into a virtue of social nonconformism.54 Evelein highlights that Ahasverus pervades German-language migrant literature and points to Siegfried Kracauer’s portrayal of Ahasverus as a tragically heroic figure, condemned to witness and bear witness amongst those who do not see, and yet unable to alter his own destiny of continuous wandering. For some migrants, the quintessential exile was almost too ubiquitous in the age of displacement. In Exil, the author Oskar Tschernigg ridicules Ahasverus’s fate as clichéd and too commonplace to act as catalyst for a specific and meaningful identity.55 The centrality of Jewish thought is perhaps most apparent in Walter Benjamin’s late work, written also in Paris. Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, for example, evolve around the kabbalistic concept of tikkun, which describes the ultimately doomed human attempt to re-assemble the scattered fragments of God’s attributes and wholeness that were shattered by the presence of evil.56 The gathering of fragments in an attempt to fashion a more overarching sense of wholeness, which can be seen as central to the works I mention in this chapter, emerges as part of a wider endeavour towards redemption and healing a broken world.57 Just like Benjamin, Mann, too, while not Jewish himself, invokes tikkun as the novel’s Kikjou is tasked with gathering the fragments of a shattered present and chronicling them into a narrative of remembrance and collective witnessing. Further, Evelein suggests that the motto for Vulkan, Hölderlin’s ‘Hyperion’s Schicksalslied’, likens the poem’s protagonist to Ahasverus.58 As a result, utopia emerges as implicitly nostalgic, tracing the pieces of a shattered past in a fragmentary present. When Vulkan was first published in West Germany, in 1956, one reviewer argued, ‘one cannot assess the novel as a literary work in the strictest sense, for it was jotted down with far too much improvisatory verve, even if the overall composition

53 Petersen, ‘Misuk’. 54 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, Jewish Social Studies 6:2 (1944), 99–122; see also Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), xliii. 55 See Evelein, Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany, 123–5, and Lion Feuchtwanger, Exil (Berlin: Aufbau, 2008), 420. 56 See Margaret Cohen, ‘Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria’, in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 199–220. 57 See Andrew Benjamin, Working with Walter Benjamin: Recovering a Political Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 144–61. 58 Evelein, Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany, 124.

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is carefully balanced’.59 But similarities reach further. As in Mann’s novel, the angel motif makes an appearance in Benjamin’s writing. Both angels, Benjamin’s and Mann’s, are heterogeneous, complex, and diverse, constantly changing in appearance. Tropes of storm and snow, too, are shared, as they weather the catastrophe they encounter. While Benjamin’s angel of history has its gaze firmly fixed on the past, the Angel of Homelessness forces the reader to confront the present. Both, Mann’s and Benjamin’s angels, encounter catastrophe and dystopia, and yet both are propelled towards the future. As Benjamin wrote his Theses in Paris, he gazed at a print by Paul Klee, entitled ‘Angelus Novus’, which he had purchased in 1921. In Part IX of his Theses, Benjamin describes how the print shapes his view of the angel of history. It is worth quoting the passage in its entirety: A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.60

At the same time, the striving for utopia − Mann uses the word specifically, Benjamin uses the label ‘progress’ − is ever present. Fully acknowledging the dystopia of the present, they nonetheless advocate for utopia from the position of the migrant’s heterotopia.

Fragmented Epics Like Exil and Vulkan, Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie straddles the paradox of breadth versus fragmentation and the dialectic between the epic and the improvisatory and between specificity and namelessness. Even though the score calls for large vocal and instrumental forces and its overall structure is expansive, the individual constitutive parts are short in duration, almost sparse at times, with the choir frequently singing in unison instead of four-part counterpoint. The setting prioritises clarity of diction and intelligibility of text but avoids excessive 59 Christian E. Lewalter, ‘Klaus Manns Vulkan’ (review), Die Zeit 14 (1956). 60 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 249.

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textual repetitions, flourishes, or other embellishments. And yet, despite the strong fragmentary aspects that pervade Exil, Vulkan, and the Deutsche Sinfonie, Eisler does call his work a symphony, and Mann and Feuchtwanger call theirs novels, thus referencing distinctly Western musical and literary traditions. The fragmentary is thus framed not as the other to completeness, but as its hallmark. And I believe that it is possible to construct a direct line of migratory aesthetics that frames the conversation between the fragmentary and what one may be tempted to label the epic as a central dialectic beyond 1930s Paris. Linking to the dialectic between migratory spaces and places, between global networks and local individual encounters, Benjamin’s Theses, for example, form a blueprint for Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Compiled in 1940s California in similar aphoristic fashion but with a corresponding overarching theme, Minima Moralia responds to a dystopian present from a place of heterotopia. Reflecting, as the subtitle puts it, from a damaged life, Adorno calls on his fellow migrants to recognise the fragmentation that results from the fundamental disconnect from their surroundings: Every intellectual in emigration is mutilated, without exception, and he had better recognise this himself, if he does not want to be taught a cruel lesson behind the tightly shut doors of his self-esteem. He lives in an environment that must remain incomprehensible to him, regardless of how well versed he is in the organisation of trade unions or the traffic; he is always astray.61

Related to the dialectic of the fragmentary, Vulkan, Exil, and the Deutsche Sinfonie share the constant dialectic between the specific and the non-specific. On the one hand, historical and chronological specificity is ever present: we can map precisely the protagonists’ movements through Paris, for example, and it is obvious, sometimes brutally so, which real-life people they are modelled on. Sepp Trautwein, the protagonist in Exil, for example, whose son is called Hanns, bears recognisable similarities to Eisler, and Jürgen Schebera has speculated that Trautwein was modelled on the composer.62 As composers, both are engaged in organising international anti-fascist resistance in ways that extend beyond music. Trautwein takes over as editor of the fictional exile newspaper, Pariser Nachrichten, while Eisler attempts to erect an international music bureau in Paris. In the process, the completion of major musical works 61 ‘Jeder Intellektuelle in der Emigration, ohne alle Ausnahme, ist beschädigt und tut gut daran, es selber zu erkennen, wenn er nicht hinter den dicht geschlossenen Türen seiner Selbstachtung grausam darüber belehrt werden will. Er lebt in einer Umwelt, die ihm unverständlich bleiben muß, auch wenn er sich in den Gewerkschaftsorganisationen oder dem Autoverkehr noch so gut auskennt; immerzu ist er in der Irre.’ Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 35. 62 Jürgen Schebera, Hanns Eisler: Eine Biographie in Texten, Bildern und Dokumenten (Mainz: Schott, 1998), 127.

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is continuously delayed, with fictional Trautwein’s oratorio The Persians, an engagement with the lessons of history for present politics, mapping the long compositional history of the Deutsche Sinfonie while simultaneously pointing towards Eisler’s unfinished setting of Brecht’s The Horatians and the Curatians. There is some Feuchtwanger in Trautwein, too, for Feuchtwanger had made a much-praised translation of Aeschylus’ Persians some two decades earlier, which had premiered in recited form in 1916 in Munich. Beyond constructing a line of biographical connection, Feuchtwanger’s decision to make Trautwein attempt a setting of Aeschylus’ Persians, the oldest surviving theatre play of world literature, is no doubt significant. In so doing, Feuchtwanger constructs the migrant as the carrier of global culture and civilisation, embedding migratory art in the longue durée of human culture. Despite such specific pointers, the individual migrant is contextualised against the backdrop of others with similar fates, thus furnishing a highly diverse and heterogeneous picture with a sense of community, however frail. A common criticism of Vulkan and Exil is that the characters remain clichés, unable to carry the narrative on their own shoulders.63 Feuchtwanger, for one, predicted such responses. In the afterword to Exil, he defends his decision to focus on the forces that determine the migrants’ fates, rather than on the migrants themselves: What I wanted to create were not so much the human beings and events themselves but rather those forces that, albeit unrecognised or at least not considered by them, direct those human beings, and therefore us.64

Similarly, the Deutsche Sinfonie chronicles specific locations and events − the individual anti-fascist, the Sonnenburg concentration camp − against non-specificity − the displaced or migrant community. Like Feuchtwanger and Mann, Eisler thus encapsulates the paradox of dystopia and utopia, with the second and fifth movements, for example, charting the fight for human dignity and resistance in the ultimate of dystopian spaces, the concentration camps. Johannes Evelein has suggested that, amidst the non-place of the migrant, namelessness emerged as a central theme in the works of numerous contemporaneous displaced authors. The angel in Vulkan continuously changes his

63 See Christina Turner, Der andere Ort des Erzählens: Exil und Utopie in der Literatur deutscher Emigrantinnen und Emigranten 1933–1945 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2003), and Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Literatur als geschichtliches Argument: Zur ästhetischen Konzeption und Geschichtsverarbeitung in Lion Feuchtwangers Romantrilogie Der Wartesaal (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1981), 2–12. 64 ‘Was ich gestalten wollte, waren weniger die Menschen und ihre Geschehnisse als eben jene Kräfte, die, von ihnen sleber nicht erkannt oder doch zumindest nicht bedacht, diese Menschen, also uns, leiten.’ Feuchtwanger, ‘Nachwort’, in Exil, 852.

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name, representing displaced identity.65 The experience of exile emerges as anonymising, as the migrant’s everyday experiences – queuing for an exit visa, waiting for travel documents, escaping advancing enemy forces – reduce them to one number amongst many others with similar fates. For the creative artists amongst them who had made a name for themselves in the Weimar Republic, for example, the loss of name recognition and fame added to the sense that namelessness acted as a constant and manifest reminder of otherness and the erosion of a stable identity. Evelein mentions Anna Seghers’s Transit, whose narrator remains nameless, even gender-less, and the protagonist in Erich Maria Remarque’s Schatten im Paradies, who is so disorientated that his own name takes on meanings of alienation for him.66 In Exil, Tschernigg posits that theirs is a time that doesn’t allow for individual identity: ‘The age of the pure individualist has not yet come or is already past.’ 67 At the same time, the notion that distinct individuality blends into the collective fate of displacement could imply a sense of community, however heterogeneous. Hannah Arendt’s call that migrants should embrace, rather than reject, this sense of otherness in order to foster a new identity, which has the potential to act as an empowering agent for change, corresponds to Eisler’s strategy to render the prisoners in the Sonnenburg camp nameless but construct them as part of a diasporic anti-fascist community. In some ways, then, the paradox between individual identity and collective namelessness is paralleled by the dialectic between the epic and the fragmentary. The Deutsche Sinfonie, for example, foregrounds the individual, constitutive parts of its makeup in almost deliberate defiance of its non-symphonic form, while, at the same time, framing them as empowered and contributing agents to the work’s epic characteristics. In so doing, it acknowledges the dichotomy between the fact that refuge from fascism was a mass phenomenon and a multitude of highly diverse and individual stories at the same time, as if suggesting that the parts are greater than the sum.

Migratory Culture Eventually, Paris fell to German invasion, and the sense of protection and refuge, if it had ever existed amongst migrants, evaporated as Nazi forces and its collaborators exerted their terror over the city. Heterotopia turned into dystopia. Even so, it is perhaps tempting to view the gathering of exiles from fascism in Paris through nostalgic eyes. Feuchtwanger, Mann, Benjamin, Eisler, and countless other protagonists of Weimar culture mingle and collaborate, 65 On the angel figure in Vulkan, see Turner, Der andere Ort des Erzählens, 190–222. 66 Evelein, Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany, 133–7. 67 ‘Die Zeit für den reinen Individualisten, die Zeit des einzigen, ist noch nicht gekommen oder schon vorbei.’ Feuchtwanger, Exil, 420.

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cross-fertilising their creativity in smoke-filled bars, coffee-fuelled, winefuelled, drug-fuelled, with rabid disagreements, but one common purpose, united in their anti-fascism. In the face of the Holocaust, which engulfs the everyday in the world of spreading fascism, Portbou might be narrated as a less horrific place of displacement than Auschwitz. As cultural historians, we are not immune to empathy, and we want to furnish the protagonists on the stage that is our narrative with agency. And yet doing so implies, however unwittingly, the opposite effect. The ascription of an agency of exile so common in much of the writing on political refugees and diasporas conversely becomes tantamount to victimisation, because it essentialises individuals as exiles. Adorno and Arendt write harshly about migrants like themselves, strategies that at times amount to patterns of self-othering. While such approaches no doubt have multiple motivations, they remind us of the diversity and heterogeneity of migration. And since there is no homogeneity, there can be no generalised community. An intertextual approach to a group of named migrants, however, and a small-scale comparison of their outputs across artistic and genre boundaries can yield a migratory aesthetic with identifiable characteristics and hallmarks. Either way, with the fall of France in June 1940, the specific migratory culture related to Paris that I have described comes to a halt. Lion Feuchtwanger had been interned as a German citizen by the French in 1939 following Germany’s declaration of war, then released, then re-interned in 1940. In the chaos of German advancement he escaped and, disguised as a woman, made his way via Marseille and through France to Lisbon, from where Martha Sharp, an American Unitarian, gave up her place on a ship to enable him to sail to New York. Benjamin’s is, no doubt, the most well-known story. Attempting the same route as Feuchtwanger, he found himself in Portbou in Catalonia and, fearing deportation to Nazi forces by the Spanish authorities, committed suicide. Hanns Eisler, of course, had already left Paris in 1938 for New York, as had Klaus Mann, and now reconnected in the United States with Feuchtwanger and several others who had stayed in Paris on their migratory journeys. During these journeys, reconnections and meetings were often happenstance and accompany the spreading migratory routes of my protagonists. A sense of communitas remained present, however, and a memory of rootedness blended with a migratory identity. Eisler recalls a meeting in California with other migrants in the heterotopian space of mobility that is the airport lounge: I flew from San Francisco to Hollywood in dreadful weather and when I came to the airport’s exit one of the comrades that were waiting for me greeted me as follows: ‘Hello Hanns, how’s Schicklerstraße 4?’ … Hollywood has the character of a little provincial backwater full of gossip and intrigue, but this

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And so what I term migratory culture spreads alongside the European diaspora. Today, of course, the traces of this culture can be seen, heard, and experienced well beyond Paris. On its journey, it connected with the places it encountered, and it is today interwoven inextricably into the fabric of our cultural history. This connectedness makes it hard, perhaps, to consider a concept of migratory culture, which might seem to fall into the very trap of essentialisation I have just outlined. And yet, drawing on Bhabha’s third space, for example, the migratory culture we can encounter in Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie, Mann’s Vulkan, Feuchtwanger’s Exil, and Benjamin’s work has the potential to resist such essentialisation. All these works are marked by mobility as much as they evoke and respond to specific fixities; they grow out of a modernist tradition that foregrounds the international as much as they summon the national; they share a commitment to utopia through the narration of dystopia. As the Angel of Homelessness engages with the actuality of the present, the angel of history looks back on the longue durée of modernity. It is true that the Deutsche Sinfonie maps Eisler’s own creative provenance and artistic convictions. The reference points to the Western art music tradition and the alliance with Schoenberg and the interwar avant-garde render the work’s cultural pre-history palpable. As the work’s movements unfold, its starting point remains audible. Paradoxically, while highlighting the mobility that Eisler and so many other European intellectuals experienced in the mid-twentieth century, the Deutsche Sinfonie simultaneously emplaces that very mobility as the locale of an active, empowered, and very real journey against the backdrop of political upheaval and human catastrophe. Indeed, perhaps it is the very resistance to definition that forms the hallmark of migratory culture, its dialectic.

68 ‘Ich flog bei elendem Wetter von San Francisco nach Hollywood und als ich zum Ausgang des Flugplatzes kam, erwarteten mich Genossen, von denen mich einer folgendermaßen begrüßte: “Tag Hanns, was macht denn Schicklerstraße 4?” ... Vor allem hat Hollywood den Charakter eines kleinen Provinznestes voll von Tratsch und Intrigen, doch liegt dieses Tratschnest allerdings in einer herrlichen Landschaft am Pazifischen Ozean mit Palmen und den herrlichsten Blumen.’ Hanns Eisler, ‘Hollywood − von links gesehen’ 1935)’, in Musik und Politik, 302.

2 Facing the Nation

T

he nation and the migrant seem to form an uneasy relationship. Edward Said constructs the migrant as the other to the nation, suggesting that the nation ‘fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages’. 1 Migration studies are frequently anxious about the nation and nationalism as a concept. Nina Glick Schiller and Ulrike Meinhof, for example, advocate a paradigm shift away from what they call methodological nationalism towards transnational approaches that blur the migrant−native divide.2 In a similar vein, Homi Bhabha has called for ‘a more transnational and translational sense of the hybridity of imagined communities’. 3 As I have argued elsewhere, studies focusing on individual migrants or migrant communities tend to eschew engagement with the (host) nation and stress concepts such as diaspora and exile instead.4 The story of the refugees from fascism has been increasingly well documented, with studies usually seeking to highlight the exilic or diasporic status of the displaced.5 Conversely, as Thomas Nail has identified, history continues to prioritise places and is narrated foregrounding national borders, thus excluding the migrant as ahistorical.6 Mainstream music studies, too, afford the nation a central role and struggle to integrate migrants into historicisations of national musics. Scholarship on British twentieth-century music, for example, frequently ignores migrant voices or mentions them only in passing.7 Where

1 Edward W. Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 3rd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 176. 2 Nina Glick Schiller and Ulrike Meinhof, ‘Singing a New Song? Transnational Migration, Methodological Nationalism and Cosmopolitan Perspectives’, Music and Arts in Action 3:3 (2011), 22−39. 3 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 7. 4 Florian Scheding, ‘Who is British Music? Placing Migrants in National Music History’, Twentieth Century Music 15:3 (2018), 439−45. 5 See, for example, Sabine Feisst, Schoenberg’s New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Brigid Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 6 Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 4. 7 Examples are Matthew Riley, ed., British Music and Modernism, 1895−1960 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), and Philip Rupprecht, British Musical Modernism: The

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they are included, authors often isolate their stories from the main narrative, placing them in separate chapters and emphasising their exilic status and their non-belonging.8 While nationalist historiographical approaches to music fixated on place are ill-equipped for addressing creative responses of musical migrants, narratives that dispense with the national altogether fail to grasp the complex nexus of identity politics at play. For migrants constantly encounter nations, perhaps more than those who do not move. On an everyday level, migrants deal with the nation as it manifests itself bureaucratically, from the moment of border-crossing to the applications for work permits, visas, residence, and so on. (The next chapter addresses some of these workings, focusing on how national institutions such as the BBC treated migrants.) On a less mundane but equally obvious level, it is the very existence of nations and their insistence on borders that have created transnational migrants, certainly during the period covered in this book. Modernity is marked by the increase in border structures that go beyond physical objects that follow a line on a map. As Tom Western has put it, ‘borders … are technologies of social circulation; and societies are the products of bordering, rather than the other way around’.9 Migrants, then, confront the nation as part of their everyday experience. And, as this chapter shows, they also grapple with the national theoretically, conceptually, and aesthetically, at times in clear opposition with the nation, at times promoting reconciliation, and, more often than not, in a complex and occasionally paradox manner. For example, Jann Pasler reminds us that, far from being mutually exclusive, seemingly contradictory constructs such as nationalism and cosmopolitanism can in fact build upon one another.10 This chapter follows two musicians on their migratory journeys, Hanns Eisler and Mátyás Seiber, who moves into focus for the first time in the book and thus receives particular attention. Zooming in on specific places and time periods, I recognise not just the long duration of their migrations but also the diversity of their responses to the nations and nationalisms they encountered. What becomes apparent throughout is that their migrations fundamentally shaped the ways in which they approached the national in music and in which

Manchester Group and their Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 8 For example, Annegret Fauser contains the musical immigrants to the United States mid-century in a chapter with the threatening title ‘The Great Invasion’. See Fauser, Sounds of War: Music in the United States During World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 9 Tom Western, ‘Aural Borders, Aural Bordering’, Twentieth Century Music 15:3 (2018), 481−7. 10 Jann Pasler, ‘Camille Saint-Saëns and Stoic Cosmopolitanism: Patriotic, Moral, Cultural, and Political’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66:2 (2013), 541−2.

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they engaged with the nation more widely. As migrants, their understanding and interpretation of the nation as a concept sometimes clashed, perhaps inevitably, with the nation-states and national politico-aesthetic discourses they encountered. At the same time, confronting the nation sharpened their creative tool box as they negotiated their complex artistic and personal identities. Migration is not restricted to the moment of border-crossing, nor can it be seen as a sudden move between two static places, home and exile, national utopia and migratory heterotopia. It is a process that may transcend national borders, but not engagement with the national itself. As this chapter shows, recognising the importance of the national for migrants’ creative responses has the potential to act as a prism into their identity politics more widely. The discussion of debates and works that charter a direct engagement with nationalism and the nation throws into focus the multitude of nationalisms at play, encompassing the chauvinistic and idealistic, the cultural and the historical, the societal and the political, and so on. As Seiber and Eisler embarked on their journeys alongside countless other migrants, their compositional strategies and aesthetic responses show that the nation did not end at the border post. Instead, the places my musical migrants encountered acted as heterogeneous spaces of mobility that allowed for sometimes unpredictable, and often dialectic, engagements with nationalist discourses.

Sounding the Nation Everyone, on reaching maturity, has to set himself a goal and must direct all his work and action towards this. For my own part, all my life, in every sphere, always and in every way, I shall have one objective: the good of Hungary and the Hungarian nation.11

This oft-quoted passage from a letter Béla Bartók wrote in 1903 to his family captures well the febrile mix of turn-of-the-century radicalism with the legacy of romantic nationalism. On 13 January 1904 a composition oozing nationalism from its every note propelled Bartók into the limelight after its premiere in Budapest, with international recognition following soon thereafter. Entitled after Lajos Kossuth, a nineteenth-century Hungarian reformer fighting for independence from Habsburg Austria and leader of the 1848 revolution, and featuring several parodies of the Austrian national anthem, the symphonic poem Kossuth was a sensational success at its Hungarian world premiere.12 Hungary’s ardent nationalism was a well-known trope in the early twentieth 11 Quoted in Judit Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 68. 12 See Benjamin Suchoff, Béla Bartók: A Celebration (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 169.

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century. Writing in 1932, Joseph Roth reflects on this heyday of nationalism in the bestselling novel Radetzky March. ‘This age’, as one of the novel’s protagonists, Count Chojnicki, puts it, ‘wants to establish autonomous nation states! People have stopped believing in God. Nationalism is the new religion. People don’t go to church. They go to nationalist meetings.’13 Conversely, at the first performance outside Hungary, in Manchester in February 1904, a critic noted the prominent parody of the national Austrian anthem but dismissed it as ‘laughable’.14 One year after the premiere of Kossuth, in 1905, Mátyás Seiber, a German-­ speaking Jew, was born in the Austro-Hungarian melting pot that was Budapest. When he was twelve years old, he was admitted to Budapest’s Ferenc Liszt Music Conservatory, where he became one of Zoltán Kodály’s composition pupils. From his appointment in 1907, Kodály’s ambition was to produce composers thoroughly trained in all styles and techniques of Western art music, able ‘to adopt the rich heritage of Western European music, the best of all times’.15 Seiber’s (unpublished) student pieces, such as the 1924 Missa Brevis for unaccompanied mixed choir, do just that. The mass is an exercise in fourpart counterpoint that imitates the polyphonic style of the early Renaissance and, in some parts, recalls Gregorian chant. Similarly, the two- and three-part inventions for piano from 1922 and 1923 are a composition pupil’s well-crafted studies in counterpoint. And yet such exercises in internationalism served a nationalist agenda. Together with a new generation of teaching staff, including Ernő Dohnányi, Antal Mólnar, Leó Weiner, and Bartók, Kodály changed the official teaching language from German to Hungarian. He highlighted the importance of folk music and promoted the construction of a distinct Hungarian musical idiom. Students of his composition class were encouraged to collect 13 ‘Diese Zeit will sich erst selbständige Nationalstaaten schaffen! Man glaubt nicht mehr an Gott. Die neue Religion ist der Nationalismus. Die Völker gehen nicht mehr in die Kirchen. Sie gehen in nationale Vereine.’ Joseph Roth, Radetzkymarsch (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1984), 499; translation from Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta, 2013), 176−7. 14 Quoted in David Schneider, ‘Hungarian Nationalism and the Reception of Bartók’s Music, 1904−1940’, in The Cambridge Companion to Bartók, ed. Amanda Bayley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 179. 15 Zoltán Kodály, ‘Dreizehn junge Musiker’, in Wege zur Musik: Ausgewählte Schriften und Reden, ed. Ferenc Bónis (Budapest: Corvina Kiadó, 1983), 255. In this article, Kodály defended his approach in response to a hostile article published in the daily newspaper Neues Pester Journal on 28 May 1925. The newspaper refused to publish Kodály’s reply. A shortened and slightly altered Hungarian translation was then published in the daily Budapesti Hirlap on 14 June 1925. For an English translation of the Hungarian version see ‘Thirteen Young Hungarian Composers’, in The Selected Writings of Zoltán Kodály, ed. Ferenc Bónis and Zeneműkiadó Vállalat, trans. Lili Halápy and Fred Macnicol (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1974), 70−4.

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and transcribe Hungarian folk music, much like their teacher. ‘We went out, in our small way, to collect folk music’, Seiber later recalled, and ‘notated every bit of folksong we could get hold of’.16 Seiber’s early work Három magyar népdal, a transcription of three Hungarian folksongs for piano from 1922, demonstrates this trend. Indeed, many of Seiber’s first works show influences of the folklorist aspirations of his Budapest surrounds. Like its model, Bartók’s 1908 piano pieces For Children, the little piano suite for children, Kis szvit gyermekeknek, from 1923, exploits the rich rhythmic structures and modal tonality of Hungarian folk music for didactic purposes.17 This does not mean that rural folklore was de rigueur across the newly independent nation. After World War I, Hungary lost over two-thirds of its former territory as a result of the treaty of Trianon, signed in June 1920. This added to the perception amongst Hungarians that theirs was a history of constant suppression. Before long, a growing body of public opinion demanded back the territories lost in the Trianon treaty, especially bemoaning the loss of Transylvania, one of the poorest and most rural areas on former Hungarian soil. Even so, as David Cooper suggests, the population of Transylvania, particularly ethnic minorities, their culture, and their traditions, but also their poverty and social problems, were excluded from public debates, which partly led to Bartók’s disillusionment with conventional Hungarian nationalism.18 Published in 1921, Kodály and Bartók’s collection Erdélyi magyarság, Népdalok (The Hungarians of Transylvania: Folksongs) initially sold almost no copies. Most Hungarians, it seems, showed little interest in such collections, preferring instead the entertaining popular tunes played by Romani bands in Budapest’s wine bars and coffee houses. Budapest’s cosmopolitanism, its multi-ethnic population, and the search for a mono-ethnic folk authenticity amalgamated in a fractious nexus that saw the young nation bounce from one extremist regime to the next. Kodály, however, was determined. In addition to transcribing and quoting folk music, he urged his students to ‘involve the living core of folk music as a germ cell in musical growth’.19 Akin to promoting the Hungarian language

16 Mátyás Seiber, ‘Folk Music and the Contemporary Composer’, Recorded Folk Music 2:4 (1959), 6. 17 Manuscript scores of the mass, piano inventions, folksong transcriptions, and piano suite are in the Seiber Collection in the British Library, shelfmarks Add. MS 62797 and Add. MS 62817. 18 David Cooper, ‘Béla Bartók and the Question of Race Purity in Music’, in Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture 1800−1945, ed. Harry White and Michael Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 19. 19 Sidney Finkelstein, Composer and Nation: The Folk Heritage in Music. 2nd edn (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 10.

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in the conservatory, establishing a Hungarian musical idiom for Kodály was a central pillar in constructing a cultural national identity. (The communist postwar Hungary later followed Kodály’s ideas and introduced learning and singing Hungarian folklore into the curricula of its schools.) But this nationalist musical idiom, he reasoned, had to be firmly embedded in the Western art music tradition, thus enabling a new Hungarian art music identity to compete on the international cultural arena as a strong, independent Central European power. His ambition, then, was to turn out musicians who are not only European, but also Hungarian. … Unless we are content for it to be confined to a small circle of people versed in foreign culture, the musical life of our country must be steeped in folk music.20

Indeed, students were reminded that Hungary had ‘belonged to Europe for over a thousand years’. 21

National Cosmopolitanism While Seiber initially followed Kodály’s notion of including elements from folk into art music in an attempt to construct a distinct Hungarian musical idiom, he soon abandoned the practice of using actual folk melodies. The First String Quartet, for example, incorporates a characteristic feature from Hungarian folklore, the pentatonic scale, into art music. Composed in 1924, it was the first published work by the then nineteen-year-old. As Hans Keller observed, the quartet ‘shows the emerging master in no uncertain terms. The terms are certain because the form is; and the form is certain because the idiom is.’ 22 Melodically, the three movements of the quartet owe much to the pentatonic material on which they are based. However, Seiber avoids quotations of folk music or would-be folklore and formally follows Viennese Classicism,

20 Quoted in Lászlo Eősze, Zoltán Kodály: His Life and Work, trans. István Farkas and Gyula Gulyás.(London: Collet’s Holdings, 1962), 67−8. 21 Kodály, ‘Dreizehn junge Musiker’, 255. In fairness, Kodály did not demand orthodoxy of style or idiom of his pupils and stressed instead that a composition teacher should observe and respect his pupils’ individuality. Seiber’s music and those of his twelve classmates – Jenő Ádám, Lajos Bárdos, Antal Deutsch (he later changed his name to Doráti), Géza Frid, Emil Fuchs, István Hodula, Zoltán Horusitzky, György Kerényi, István Kovács, Tibor Serly, Jószef Stokker, and István Szelényi – was diverse. Szelényi’s early works, for example, reveal influences of Liszt, and Stokker was according to all evidence fascinated by Brahms and late German Romanticism. 22 Hans Keller, ‘Mátyás Seiber’, Musical Times 96:1353 (1955), 580.

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particularly Mozart, as Kodály observed.23 The third movement, for example, is a swift czardas dressed in rondo form and including both the characteristic friss (or friska) and slower lassú parts, the last of which accelerates to the finishing stretta. Maybe strongest is the tripartite inner movement, an atmospheric Lento. Standing in the ABA′ form typical of the Classical slow and character movements, it combines the tranquil, meditative outer sections, whose only conspicuous rhythmic feature is the very Hungarian short accent on the strong first beat of the bar (see Example 2.1), with a Mozartian dialogue of the first violin and the cello, accompanied by the syncopated chords of the middle voices, in the inner section (see Example 2.2). For Kodály, the quartet was evidence that, of all his pupils, Seiber ‘has come closest to the style of pure chamber music’, 24 and that, ‘stimulated by the spirit of folk music, [he] promises to attain his own, independent ways’. 25 Indeed, the quartet has been said to witness to the influence by Kodály, and to be clearly ‘Hungarian’ in character. Colin Mason, for example, calls it ‘an exercise in Mozartian form in the idiom of Kodály; which it reproduces perfectly, with a lively invention of its own’,26 and Hans Keller mentions Kodály’s ‘obvious influence on the very Hungarian and pentatonic string quartet’. 27 In addition to Kodály’s epigonism, however, another influence is manifest in the quartet. Ladislaus Pollatsek noted that Seiber ‘soon parted with Kodály epigonism’ and implied increasing Bartókian traces.28 For example, the chromatic tendency in the quartet creates a dissolving effect and suggests a questioning of major-minor tonality, even though this break is not carried out. As John Weissmann put it, ‘certain dissonances reveal Seiber’s increasing preference for the harmonic innovations of Bartók’. 29 Notwithstanding Bartók’s importance for Seiber, who thought of Bartók as ‘the Beethoven of our time’ and particularly praised his string quartets,30 the work appears under a different light. Rather 23 Kodály, ‘Thirteen Young Hungarian Composers’, 72. Kodály held Seiber in great esteem. After Seiber’s death in 1960, Kodály commemorated his pupil with the choral work Media vita in morte sumus. 24 Ibid. 25 Kodály, ‘Dreizehn junge Musiker’, 257. 26 Colin Mason, ‘The Musical Personality of Mátyás Seiber’, The Listener 57:1453 (1957), 205. 27 Hans Keller, ‘Mátyás Seiber and his Twelve Notes’, The Listener 51:1311 (1954), 669. 28 Ladislaus Pollatsek, ‘Jungungarische Musik’, Der Auftakt 8:2 (1928), 46. 29 John Weissmann, ‘Die Streichquartette von Mátyás Seiber’, Melos 22 (1955), 344. 30 Mátyás Seiber, ‘Béla Bartók’, Monthly Musical Record 75:871 (1945), 195. See also Seiber’s articles ‘Béla Bartók’s Chamber Music’, Tempo 13 (1949), 19−31; ‘Bartók and his String Quartets’, The Listener 54:1393 (1955), 817; and ‘Bartók, Béla (1881−1945)’, in Chambers’s Encyclopedia, ed. Margareth Law and Meredith Dixon (Oxford and New York: Pergamon Press, 1963), vol. 2, 142−3; and his book-length study The String Quartets of Béla Bartók (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1945).

52

Musical Journeys Example. 2.1  Mátyás Seiber, 1st String Quartet, 2nd movement, Lento, bars 9–16. With kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber estate and Trust.

  

[Lento (h = 60–66 circa)]



p dolce

  



p dolce



   

 

[p dolce]



13      

           



  

                

  

p

  

       

          

      

         

    

  

 

   

    

  

    

    

      

                

  

   

            

than pandering primarily to nationalist ideologies, Seiber’s aesthetic approach seeks to combine the national with cosmopolitanism. On a surface level, the work follows Kodály’s folklorism. Like Bartók’s (superior) contemporaneous Third String Quartet, however, Seiber’s quartet is a dialectic attempt to achieve an idiom that acknowledges the national but transcends it. The combination of reference points to the classical form with the abstraction of Magyar folklore and the exclusion of the romanticism of Brahms or Wagner likewise follows Bartók’s approach, which René Leibowitz later referred to as a compromise.31 Seiber’s First String Quartet, then, belongs to the modernist avant-garde, in the same way as Bartók’s Third, which Adorno praised for its artistic individuality and truthfulness and its suppression of nationalist ideologies.32 It is distinctive without being overbearingly nationalist, a characteristic that Adorno has 31 René Leibowitz, ‘Béla Bartók ou la possibilité du compromis dans la musique contemporaire’, Les Temps Modernes 2 (1947), 705−34. 32 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Béla Bartók’, Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur 4:8 (1922), reprinted in ‘Über Béla Bartók: Aufsätze und Auszüge aus Kritiken,

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Example. 2.2  Mátyás Seiber, 1st String Quartet, 2nd movement, Più moto, bars 47–55. With kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber estate and Trust. Più moto (q = 100–104)



  





     

p dolciss. cantato

                



  

             



  

pp

pp





p



   51

















              



p









                  





                           

 







     

      

          

       

mp dolciss. cantato

referred to as exterritorial. ‘Truly exterritorial music, whose material, despite its familiarity, is organised in an altogether different way than that of occidental music, has a power of alienation, which is why it belongs to the avant-garde and not to nationalist reaction.’33 Rather than displaying an inner conflict of Hungarian folklorism versus Austro-German dominance (as in Kossuth) or highlighting Hungarian folkore (as in Kodály’s Dances of Galanta), the quartet ultimately testifies to Seiber’s aim to acknowledge a heritage of nationalist

zusammengestellt von Rainer Riehn’, in Béla Bartók, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: Edition Text+Kritik, 1981), 118−30. 33 ‘die wahrhaft exterritoriale Musik, deren Material, selbst als an sich geläufiges, ganz anders organisiert ist als das okzidentale, [hat] eine Kraft der Verfremdung, die sie der Avantgarde gesellt und nicht der nationalistischen Reaktion’. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik. 8th edn (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 41−2.

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affirmations, but positions itself on the threshold of what one might be tempted to call national cosmopolitanism.

Othered by the Nation The focus on Seiber in his native Hungary in a book concentrating on musical migrants might seem peculiar. There are a number of reasons for this that go beyond remedying Adorno’s complaint that ‘as we know, the past life of migrants is annulled’. 34 First, there’s the perhaps obvious point that Hungary became independent while Seiber was a teenager. Having been born into the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire, he now found himself in a capital city of a nation that aspired to mono-ethnic identity. The border, so to speak, moved underneath Seiber’s feet. This assessment might seem like a semantic quibble. However, as William Smyser, former United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees (1981−86), has shown, the waves of refugees generated by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires in the course of World War I were instrumental in the creation of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in February 1921.35 In an environment dominated by the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a plethora of fiercely nationalistic successor-states, national identity and belonging became fractious and unstable. A further reason to include Seiber while still in his native Budapest is his Jewishness. By 1920, Jews represented nearly a quarter of Budapest’s population and ‘most likely, judging from social class distributions, around half the active urban intelligentsia’.36 Their influential cultural and intellectual presence turned the city into one of ‘the Jewish metropoles of Europe’, as Philip Bohlman has put it, with Jewish musicians enriching the sounds of urban modernity.37 And yet, as Bohlman argues, they were confronted by the constant paradox between the centrality afforded by the transformative power of their cultural achievements on the one hand and the marginalisation and harsh reality of anti-Semitism on the other. As Hungary stumbled from one extremist regime to the next until it ended up as one of Hitler’s closest allies on the Eastern front line, continuously aiming for a strong, united Magyar nation as an influential part of Central Europe, the Jewish population was increasingly ostracised. 34 ‘das Vorleben des Emigranten wird bekanntlich annulliert’. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 52. 35 William Smyser, Refugees: Extended Exile (New York: Praeger, 1987), 3−5. 36 Leon Botstein, ‘Out of Hungary: Bartók, Modernism, and the Cultural Politics of Twentieth-Century Music’, in Bartók and his World, ed. Peter Laki (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 16. 37 Philip V. Bohlman, Jewish Music and Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 214.

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Despite earlier tokenistic efforts of providing equal rights for the Jewish population, including legal acts in 1848 and 1867, anti-Semitism flourished after World War I. Already at the compromise of 1867, Jews and Romani groups had been considered only half-heartedly and discursively excluded as non-national groups. Bartók abandoned the chauvinism of his earlier years by around 1905 or 1906, and with his more cosmopolitan stance fell from grace with Hungarian audiences.38 Even so, he continued to argue that the Magyar nótak played by Romani musicians, largely considered to be the real Hungarian folk music, should be considered inauthentic and excluded from discourses on national folklore. Leon Botstein has suggested that Bartók’s idealised view of the peasant and rural Hungarian culture led him to this othering of Romani musicians as aliens and outsiders.39 And while, in 1940, Bartók famously left Hungary in protest at the proto-fascist regime of Miklós Horthy, David Cooper points out that he never published ‘an unambiguous response to the Nazi-treatment of Jews’. 40 Paradoxically, the call for ethnic purity only increased after 1920, even though ‘the population was now largely, though not exclusively, autochthonous Hungarian, [with] some 90 per cent having Hungarian as their mother tongue’. 41 Before then, Hungary had been much more of a melting pot of Romanians, Germans, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Ruthenians, Jews, and Romani, with Magyars constituting less than half of the population in 1890.42 After Miklós Horthy’s regime seized power in 1920, and backed up by the public opinion that the short-lived Bolshevik revolution in 1919 had been Jewish-inspired,43 anti-Semitism started to grow rampantly. The Horthy regime confiscated land owned by Jews and introduced laws to reduce the number of Jewish admissions to universities. In the two decades to come, Hungarian anti-Semitism turned into a matter of life and death. Ninety per cent of Hungary’s half a million pre-war Jewish population was exterminated in the Holocaust.44

38 Schneider, ‘Hungarian Nationalism and the Reception of Bartók’s Music, 1904−1940’, 180. 39 Botstein, ‘Out of Hungary’, 17. 40 Cooper, ‘Béla Bartók and the Question of Race Purity in Music’, 23. 41 Ibid., 17. 42 Raymond Pearson, The Longman Companion to European Nationalism, 1789−1920 (London: Longman, 1993), 239. 43 Cooper, ‘Béla Bartók and the Question of Race Purity in Music’, 17. 44 See Paul Tabori, The Anatomy of Exile (London: Harrap, 1972), 252. Other authors have suggested different numbers. István Déak argues that, by 1944, 95 per cent of the Jewish population were still alive (‘Admiral and Regent Miklós Horthy’, Hungarian Quarterly 37:143 (1996), 85−6), while Iván Berend and György Ránki estimate that 500,000 people were murdered during the war (East Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Budapest: Akademiai Kiadó, 1977), an estimate Cooper calls ‘conservative’ (Cooper, ‘Béla Bartók and the Question of Race Purity in Music’, 30).

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As a Jew from a family with German roots, Seiber experienced the hostilities of those promoting ethnic purity in Hungary from his earliest childhood. Before this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that, after an initial engagement with folklore and the attempt to combine Western art music with a Hungarian idiom, Seiber’s works increasingly display an unease with nationalism and turn to modernist discourses and avant-garde trends instead. Othered by the nation into which he had been born, Seiber was made to feel like a stranger and a migrant at home. That his engagement with the nation therefore became complex and often distanced is, perhaps, not surprising. From here on, Seiber’s music would steer further and further into the direction of the avant-garde, at the expense of an idiom influenced by folklore. (The last chapter of this book gives more room for discussions on the Jewish musical modernity.) Shortly after the completion of the First String Quartet, in 1925, the jury of a composition contest failed to follow Bartók’s recommendation to award the first prize to Seiber’s Serenade. Bartók left the jury in protest.45 In the same year, Seiber left Budapest to settle in Frankfurt, where he eventually accepted a professorship in jazz at the prestigious Hoch Conservatory.

The Nation Degenerate In 1925 Seiber moved to Frankfurt am Main, one of the Weimar Republic’s cities most open to the musical avant-garde and a frequent host of progressive music festivals and events, such as the fifth festival of the ISCM in 1927 or the Festival der Modernen Oper in 1930. The city’s inspiring atmosphere of artistic progressiveness was accompanied by a left-wing intellectual milieu, dominated by the Marxist Institut für Sozialforschung and its director, Max Horkheimer. After his first year in Frankfurt, Seiber joined the music ensemble of an ocean liner as a cellist, playing popular music for the entertainment of the passengers on their transatlantic journeys. After his return to Frankfurt in 1927, he suggested to Bernhard Sekles, then Director of the renowned Hoch Conservatory, that he could found a jazz class at the institution. New Orleans and Dixieland jazz was performed in the Weimar Republic at the time by European ensembles such as the Berlin-based Weintraub Syncopators and American ones such as Sam Wooding’s Society Syncopators, which toured in Europe from 1925 to 1927.46 Even so, the announcement of 45 See Michael Graubart, ‘Matyas Seiber: 1905−1960’, Composer 86 (1985), 1. 46 For an overview of jazz culture and ensembles in the Weimar Republic, see Michael Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Susan Cook, ‘Jazz as Deliverance: The Reception and Institution of American Jazz during the Weimar Republic’, American Music 7:1 (Special Jazz Issue, 1989), 30−47. For a more regional focus, see Carlo Bohländer, ‘The Evolution of Jazz Culture in Frankfurt: A Memoir’, in Jazz and the Germans: Essays on the Influence of ‘Hot’ American Idioms on

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the new jazz class, the first of its kind on German soil, caused a tremendous scandal. Several articles on the issue were published after Sekles had placed an announcement in all major German newspapers and music journals, in which he proclaimed that it was the conservatory’s ‘duty ... to introduce a jazz class’. 47 On both sides of the argument, the interplay between race and the German nation was at the forefront of the debate. The opponents to the new class were particularly appalled by Sekles’s claim that teaching jazz would have an effect similar to a ‘transfusion of unspoilt, fresh nigger blood’ that would ‘only be helpful because music without any compulsivity does not deserve being called music’. 48 Germans specifically, Sekles argued, despite their overall musical achievements, lagged behind in rhythmical understanding and had a lot to gain from jazz’s focus on rhythm. According to Joachim Tschiedel, the provocative wording was chosen intentionally as a propaganda coup.49 But it resulted in a storm of protests against the conservatory and personal attacks on Sekles and Seiber. Published in 1927, the progressive Prague-based journal Auftakt printed summaries of the discussion with arguments of prominent opponents and advocates of the jazz class.50 Ernst Klein, Karl Holl, and Alfred Einstein spoke in favour of the jazz class, with Einstein suggesting that an engagement with jazz could engender new artworks, and thus benefit German music. The opponents, on the other hand, feared the degenerating effect of jazz on the nation. Hermann von Waltershausen, Director of the Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich, argued that the jazz class sullied the conservatory’s history as a creator of German national culture, and Hans Pfitzner, a former pupil of the conservatory, made explicit the relationship between race and German national identity: I would go all out and establish a class for niggers alongside the jazz band. Anti-Germanness, in whichever form it presents itself, as atonality, internationality, Americanism, pacifism, threatens our existence, our culture from all sides. The world of jazz signifies lowness, cacophony, insanity compared with high art music.51 20th-Century German Music, ed. Michael Budds (Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2002), 167−78. 47 Bernhard Sekles, ‘Jazz Klasse an Dr. Hoch’s Konservatorium’, Deutsche Tonkünstler-Zeitung 25 (1927), 299. 48 Ibid. 49 See Joachim Tschiedel, Bernhard Sekles, 1872−1934: Leben und Werk (Schneverdingen: Karl Dieter Wagner, 2005), 83. 50 ‘Jazz am Konservatorium’, Der Auftakt 7:12 (1927), 317−19. 51 ‘Ich würde ganze Arbeit machen und neben der Jazzkapelle gleich noch eine Klasse für Neger einrichten. Das Antideutsche, in welcher Form es auch auftritt, als Atonalität, Internationalität, Amerikanismus, Pazifismus, bekennt

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Two months before the jazz class was due to begin in the spring term of 1928, on 20 November 1927, the member of the Prussian parliament for the rightwing Deutschvölkische Freiheitspartei, Bruno Danicke, posed the question as to how the government would be ‘prepared to prevent the niggerisation of German music by this conservatory, and how does it intend to safeguard the pupils against the breeding of its sordidly un-German teacher?’52 The Frankfurt jazz scandal even made transatlantic headlines. In 1928 the New York Times picked up on the story, quoting, amongst others, Carl Nielsen, who claimed that jazz ‘is nasty and deathlike music, always the same, because its creators steal from one another’. Nielsen emphasised the danger the jazz class posed to the German nation, positing that ‘jazz is a direct sin against the people’. The article culminates in a quoted remark by Joseph Marx, Director of the Viennese Hochschule für Musik, who believed that ‘German music is far from needing a blood transfusion of this kind.’ 53 The opponents of the jazz class positioned their concerns as a defence of national culture. For its enemies, its establishment combined several contemporaneous currents that they identified as threats to the German nation, notably Americanism, internationalism, and pacifism. Five years before Hitler’s rise to power, the jazz debate thus represents a proxy for political debates that had at their core ‘the fate of the German national identity in modernity’, as Jonathan Wipplinger has put it.54 In 1930 Wilhelm Twittenhof identified three reasons for the rejection of jazz as ‘1. folkish-nationalist, 2. general cultural and 3. musical’. However, he pointed out that the ‘general cultural’ and the ‘musical’ counterarguments were folkish-nationalist in disguise and based on the confusion ‘of the terms “international” and “antinational”’. 55 That Seiber was an immigrant was only sometimes highlighted. Race, however, clearly mattered. Michael Kater suspects that the massive personal attacks on Sekles and Seiber

unsere Existenz, unsere Kultur nach allen Seiten. Jazzwelt bedeutet die Niedrigkeit, die Aharmonik, den Wahnsinn gegenüber hoher Kunstmusik.’ Quoted in ‘Jazz am Konservatorium’, 319. 52 ‘Ist das Staatsministerium bereit, die Verniggerung deutscher Musik durch dieses Konservatorium zu verhindern, und wie gedenkt es die Schülerschaft vor den Erziehungskünsten des triebhaft undeutschen Lehrers zu schützen?’ Abgeordneter Danicke, Preußischer Landtag, Wahlperiode 1925/27, Kleine Anfrage Nr. 1981, quoted in Peter Cahn, Das Hoch’sche Konservatorium in Frankfurt am Main, 1878−1978 (Frankfurt: Dr Waldemar Kramer, 1979), 262. The Free State of Prussia was Germany’s major state during the Weimar Republic. 53 ‘Jazz Bitterly Opposed in Germany’, New York Times, 11 March 1928, X8. 54 Jonathan O. Wipplinger, The Jazz Republic: Music, Race, and American Culture in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 142. 55 Wilhelm Twittenhoff, ‘Musikalische Jugendbewegung und Jazz’, Zeitschrift für Schulmusik 3:3 (1930), 9 and 11.

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were ‘partially motivated by anti-Semitism, because both musicians were Jewish’.56 Despite the protests, Seiber was appointed leader of the jazz class in January 1928. He lectured on the theory and practice of jazz, and jazz instrumentation and arrangement, taught jazz piano, and was also responsible for the newly founded jazz ensemble. Other staff included Eduard Liebhold (saxophone), Friedrich Herold (trumpet), Arthur Sitz (drums and percussion), and Josef Grosch (banjo). The class remained small throughout its existence and never exceeded the nineteen pupils of the 1928/29 academic year. Nevertheless, the jazz ensemble’s success was remarkable. In the first year of its existence, 1928, the ensemble participated in the Frankfurt premiere of Brecht and Weill’s Dreigroschenoper.57 On 3 March 1929 a public concert including performances of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Seiber’s Virginia Stomp was broadcast by Frankfurt Radio.58 Adorno, who had defended the jazz class from its beginnings, praised the performance: The jazz class of the Hoch Conservatory, which has earned its initiator, Sekles, so many fatuous attacks, presented itself to the public under the extraordinarily musical and competent leadership of Mátyás Seiber and legitimised itself in the best possible way.59

According to Carlo Bohländer, the jazz class contributed to the evolution of a local jazz culture,60 and Jürgen Schwab has argued that the jazz ensemble contributed to the formation of a distinct ‘Frankfurt sound’.61

56 Kater, Different Drummers, 21. 57 See Cook, ‘Jazz as Deliverance’, 41. 58 See Cahn, Das Hoch’sche Konservatorium, 263. 59 ‘Die Jazzklasse des Hoch’schen Konservatoriums, die ihrem Initiator Sekles so viele törichte Angriffe eintrug, stellte sich unter der außerordentlich musikalischen und materialkundigen Leitung von Mátyás Seiber der Öffentlichkeit vor und legitimierte sich aufs beste.’ Theodor W. Adorno, untitled article, Die Musik 21 (1929), 625. Adorno later consulted Seiber when he was working on his jazz project. See his article ‘Über Jazz’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5:2 (1936), 235−59; reprinted with variations in Moments Musicaux (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1962), 84−115. The Seiber−Adorno correspondence on the article is held by the British Library, shelfmark Add. MS 62886, fols 132−76. For an examination of these papers see Nick Chadwick, ‘Mátyás Seiber’s Collaboration in Adorno’s Jazz Project, 1936’, British Library Journal 21:2 (1995), 259−88, and Evelyn Wilcock, ‘The Dating of Seiber/Adorno Papers Held by the British Library’, British Library Journal 23:2 (1997), 264−6. 60 See Bohländer, ‘The Evolution of Jazz Culture in Frankfurt’, 168. 61 See Jürgen Schwab, Der Frankfurt Sound: Eine Stadt und ihre Jazzgeschichten (Frankfurt: Societäts-Verlag, 2004), 24−7.

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Educating the Nation Seiber mostly refrained from participating in the heated debate and shirked the nationalist anxieties of his opponents, even if Ernst Schoen highlighted that he ‘takes quite a critical stance towards jazz’.62 Seiber himself cautioned his readers against ‘swearing by the effect of jazz as the only true one’.63 For example, while he advised brass players to play jazz because it could improve their soloistic agility, he warned clarinettists to refrain from playing jazz because using jazz effects such as glissando and slap-tongue could be detrimental to their embouchure.64 For the most part, however, his numerous articles from the Frankfurt period have a didactic emphasis rather than addressing broader cultural issues and point to ‘the many beneficial effects’ of jazz education.65 For example, jazz’s complex rhythmic features could help musicians improve the rhythmic understanding of works by composers such as Bartók and Stravinsky.66 The second benefit of jazz education in Seiber’s view was an improved skill in improvisation, which had been lost in Western art music and could be revived with the help of jazz. Many of his compositions from the Frankfurt years underline Seiber’s conviction of the didactic usefulness of jazz. The Easy Dances, published in two volumes in 1932, and the Rhythmic Studies of the following year, for example, are composed for the teaching of young pianists. Both collections contain short original miniatures based on dance rhythms from the Americas, such as tango, foxtrot, and habañera, but also little pieces introducing selected rhythmic and melodic characteristics of jazz, as those entitled Ragtime, Charleston, Cake-Walk, and Tempo di Blues, and a piece with the title Jazz-Etudiette. Kathryn Smith-Bowers has noted the similarity of the Easy Dances and Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, and Benjamin Suchoff has argued that Mikrokosmos was, in fact, prompted by Seiber’s collections of 1932 and 1933.67

62 Ernst Schoen, ‘Mátyás Seiber: Schule für Jazz-Schlagzeug’, Melos 8 (1929), 322. 63 Mátyás Seiber, ‘Jazz als Erziehungsmittel’, Melos 7 (1928), 286. 64 Mátyás Seiber, ‘Jazz-Instrumente, Jazz-Klang und neue Musik’, Melos 9 (1930), 124. 65 Seiber, ‘Jazz als Erziehungsmittel’, 286. 66 Ibid., 282. Seiber refers to the rhythmic phenomena of syncopation and of ‘Scheintakte’ in jazz music, i.e. a relation of rhythm and metre resulting in polymetric and barline-crossing micro-rhythms. See also Seiber’s articles ‘Jugend und Jazz’, Zeitschrift für Schulmusik 3:2 (1930), 29−32, and ‘Rhythmic Freedom in Jazz?’, Music Review 6 (1945), 30−41, 89−94, and 160−71. 67 Kathryn Smith-Bowers, ‘East Meets West: Contributions of Mátyás Seiber to Jazz in Germany’, in Jazz and the Germans, 133, and Benjamin Suchoff, Bartók’s Mikrokosmos: Genesis, Pedagogy, and Style (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 19−20.

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Seiber’s decision to refrain from participating in the fierce polemic that surrounded the jazz class did not shield him from political events. After Hitler was appointed Reichskanzler on 30 January 1933, the Nazi administration promulgated the Law for the Restitution of the Professional Civil Service on 7 April 1933, which banned all ‘non-Aryans’ from official positions. Hans Rumpf, a lawyer appointed by Frankfurt mayor Friedrich Krebs, was tasked with implementing this act of ethnic cleansing in the Hoch Conservatory over the period when the students were absent for the Easter holiday. On 10 April Rumpf had finalised his list, and Seiber and a long list of other teaching and administrative staff were dismissed on the penultimate day of the break.68 Seiber left Frankfurt shortly afterwards, in autumn 1933, and, after a period spent in his hometown, Budapest, migrated to England in late 1935. In the same month of his dismissal, April 1933, the Nazi administration formally banned ‘nigger jazz’ from broadcast in Germany, and even Adorno, on the opposite side of the political spectrum, proclaimed the end of jazz.69 Indeed, Erik Levi has suggested that ‘of all the principal styles of modernism which were attacked by the Nazi propaganda, there can be no doubt that jazz remained at the forefront during the Third Reich’. 70

Twelve Notes Transnational Against this background, Seiber’s Second String Quartet appears like a swan song. Composed in 1934 and early 1935, it was his last large-scale work before his migration to Britain. As a cellist in the Lenzewsky String Quartet while in Frankfurt, Seiber had had the opportunity to further his insights into the string quartet literature and, as Hans Keller expressed, the work bears witness to his mastery in the genre.71 Of particular interest is the second movement, an Intermezzo with the evocative subtitle Alla ‘Blues’. For Seiber, the main characteristic of the blues was its rhythm.72 Organised in tripartite ABA′ form and

68 Alfred Auerbach, Herbert Graf, Rosy Hahn, Heida Holde-Hermanns, Antoni Kohlmann, Marie Lenheim, Paul Meyer, Toni Oberdörfer, Adolf Rebner, Änni Rosenthal, Hede Salomon, Willi Salomon, Hermann von Schmeidel, Bernhard Sekles, and Ernst Wolff. 69 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Abschied vom Jazz’, Europäische Revue 9 (1933), reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 18: Musikalische Schriften V (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 795−9. 70 Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 119. 71 Hans Keller, ‘Seiber and the Rebirth of the String Quartet’, The Listener 54:1384 (1955), 397. 72 Seiber shares this conception regarding the importance of distinct rhythmic features in blues and the compositional use of this rhythm with several

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Example. 2.3  Mátyás Seiber, 2nd String Quartet, 2nd movement, Intermezzo. Alla “Blues” , bars 1–3. With kind permission of the Mátyás Seiber estate and Trust. Alla ‘Blues’ (q = 88–92)

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positioned as the quartet’s middle movement, the Intermezzo is analogous to the character movement in the string quartet tradition. The employment of jazz in the Second String Quartet’s Intermezzo thus parallels Seiber’s usage of Hungarian folk music in his youth in Budapest. Seiber was, of course, not alone in believing that jazz could provide the same model of inspiration for the art music of his time as folk music had done during the nineteenth century. Weill argued in a similar vein, as did Milhaud, Schulhoff, Hindemith, Křenek, and others, and numerous works of the 1920s and early 1930s reveal an absorption of jazz into Western art music.73 As Seiber pointed out a decade later, When Gershwin, for example, writes a large-scale piece ... called Rhapsody in Blue, in which he uses many typical jazz formulae, then, essentially, the same happens as when Liszt wrote his Hungarian Rhapsodies, where he

contemporaries. The second movement in Erwin Schulhoff ’s 1926 Cinq Études de Jazz WV81, entitled Blues (pour Paul Whiteman), and the middle movement of Maurice Ravel’s 1927 Violin Sonata, Blues (Moderato), also combine shuffled triplets and dotted notes over a steady beat. 73 See Kim Kowalke, ‘Kurt Weill in Europe, 1900−1935: A Study of his Music and Writings’, PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1977, 77, and Jürgen Hunkemöller, ‘Jazz-Rezeption’, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyclopädie der Musik, 2nd edn, ed. Ludwig Finscher, vol. 4 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1994), column 1423.

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incorporated into his music some of the peculiarities of the playing of the Hungarian gypsies.74

Even so, in his moment of migration, Seiber distanced himself from the notion that the quartet was a jazz composition. As he put it, ‘although these clichés serve well enough for the moment to obtain the necessary “local colour”, they don’t exert any profound influence on the direction of the broad stream of the development of musical composition which goes on undisturbed by them’. Now that the Frankfurt years were behind him, Seiber argued that composers should not rely on jazz for inspiration. Rather, they should ‘turn their attention towards the polyphonic music of the sixteenth century [or] the complex system of Eastern or non-European music [of whose rhythmical patterns] jazz with its childishly simplified clichés is but a pale reflection’.75 Despite its subtitle Alla ‘Blues’ , the Second String Quartet’s middle movement does not employ the pentatonic blues scale or include blue notes, for example. Not unlike the abstraction of folk music in the works of the Budapest period, Seiber’s Second String Quartet places the rhythmic characteristics of blues within the context of a progressive avant-garde composition. In the moment of departure from Frankfurt, Seiber does not conjure up nostalgic, romanticising, or nationalist allusions to his notorious jazz professorship. Instead, the work makes a statement of commitment to modernism by employing serial technique. Seiber’s awareness of the achievements of the Schoenberg School is clear in the whole quartet, and the fact that the thematic material of all the movements is based on the same dodecaphonic row provides unity for the work. Nonetheless, the composition does not copy Schoenbergian dodecaphony, and Hans Keller has argued that Seiber ‘reached a stage analogous to Schoenberg’s so-called “classical” twelve-note period’ with his Second String Quartet.76 How well Seiber knew Schoenberg’s work is unclear, although he may have known Schoenberg’s Third String Quartet op. 30, which was published by Universal Edition in 1929. In 1932 Seiber had first combined jazz timbre and serial technique in the Jazzolette No. 2, which begins with a twelve-note row in the trumpet, followed by its strict inversion in the trombone. It is possible that Seiber gained insight into the works of the Second Viennese School via Adorno, who had been a pupil of Alban Berg in 1925. Roman Vlad believes that Seiber was ‘the only Hungarian representative of dodecaphony’. He is right when he argues that Seiber employs dodecaphony in a non-dogmatic way and without any pedantry. … Disposed in a basic constellation, the twelve notes are always present, but their order is sometimes freely varied. In addition, there are 74 Seiber, ‘Rhythmic Freedom in Jazz?’, 169−70. 75 Ibid., 170−1. 76 Keller, ‘Mátyás Seiber’, 581.

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Now it almost seemed as though serialism, not jazz, was the heritage of the Frankfurt years. Either way, the chapter ‘Seiber and Jazz’ was closed with his emigration to Britain in 1935.

English Pastorals and Migrant Fantasies It is interesting to observe the titles Seiber chose for his compositions during the 1940s and into the early 1950s, when he was trying to establish himself as a composer in London’s musical circles. The years 1941, 1942, and 1949 all record completion dates of compositions that seem to refer deliberately to the English pastoral and choral traditions of semi-amateur music making: the Pastorale for recorder and string trio (1941), the Pastorale and Burlesque for flute and string orchestra (or piano) (1942), and the Andantino Pastorale for clarinet and piano (1949). Albeit part of a pan-European tradition, the English focus on the pastoral in the first half of the twentieth century is considerable, particularly in view of the fact that, apart from exceptions such as Arthur Honegger’s Pastorale d’Été (1920) and Sibelius’s Autrefois (1919), the pastoral had almost disappeared from the European stage after World War I. In England, on the other hand, John Ireland’s Concertino Pastorale for strings (1939), Frank Bridge’s Winter Pastoral for piano (1925), and, of course, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony (1921) spring to mind.78 On a technical level, the accompaniment settings are easy enough to be sight-read by amateur groups while the solo parts may require some modest practice but are distinctly non-virtuosic. With all three settings for solo wind instrument and string ensemble or piano accompaniment, the instrumentation, too, was aimed at the English market of semi-amateur music making, a tendency also observable with Seiber’s folksong settings of the time, some arranged for voice and string orchestra, small ensemble, or piano accompaniment, some for a cappella choir. Indeed, Schott included the Pastorale and the Pastorale and Burlesque in a wider series for amateur ensembles, as the tenth volume of Schott’s Series for Recorders and Strings and the sixth volume of Schott’s Woodwind Series respectively. 77 ‘Seiber si vale della tecnica dodecafonica in modo del tutto non dogmatico e senza alcuna pedanteria. … I 12 suoni,disposti in una costellazione basilare, sono sempre presenti, ma il loro ordine seriale viene a volte liberamente variato, così come si verificano frequenti ripetizioni di suoni o di gruppi di suoni nei quali lo schema seriale viene suddiviso.’ Roman Vlad, Storia della Dodekafonia (Milan: Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, 1957), 151. 78 For a detailed discussion of English pastoralism in the first half of the twentieth century see Eric Saylor, English Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900−1955 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).

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Two revisions of earlier works that Seiber published in Britain in 1950 and 1951 respectively support this hypothesis. Seiber transcribed the instrumentation of the Divertimento for clarinet and string quartet (1926−28) for clarinet and string orchestra (or piano) in 1951. Now under the title Concertino, the solo part remained basically unchanged, but the accompaniment is less complex rhythmically. The Sanctus and Benedictus of the Missa Brevis published by J. Curwen in London in 1951 are revised and simplified versions of their equivalents in Seiber’s unpublished Missa Brevis of 1924. The Kyrie and Agnus Dei of the 1924 mass, however, which employ four-part counterpoint and imitation techniques, were replaced in the 1951 mass by shorter and much less complex homophonic writing for two voices (soprano and tenor as well as alto and bass are set colla parte). The difficult and lengthy Gloria and Credo are left out in the 1951 mass. Instead, the score quotes Seiber’s advice that ‘Gloria and Credo may be sung as plainsong’. Regarding ease of performance, idiom, instrumentation, compositional technique, and duration, these pastoral compositions and revisions share considerable parallels with several of Seiber’s contemporaneous folksong settings and transcriptions of ‘old’ music, such as the second Besardo Suite for string orchestra (1942), the Four Medieval French Songs for voice, viola d’amore (or viola), viola da gamba (or cello), and guitar (1945), or the Quatre Chansons Populaires Françaises for soprano and string orchestra (or piano) of 1948. Some of these compositions and folksong arrangements do not bear dedications, while others do; but they were all written for well-known British musicians of the time. The Four Greek Folksongs for high voice and string orchestra (1942), for example, are dedicated to Sophie Wyss, and the Pastorale and Burlesque for flute and string orchestra to Gareth Morris. Both dedicatees premiered these works in London soon after their respective completion dates. The compositions mentioned here not only are easily playable but can also be described as easily digestible. Given Seiber’s avant-garde background and past as mapped out by the compositions pre-dating 1935, the utter absence of rhythmic complexities or atonal tendencies and, instead, insistence on major-minor tonality is remarkable and seems to pay homage (and make concession) to the traditionalist musical preferences and compositional style favoured by the British music establishment at the time. This is very well-crafted and cleverly arranged music composed for English soloists, English amateur groups, and English audiences. And, to all evidence, successfully so. While it is difficult to find evidence of performances of the pastoral compositions or folksong settings outside the United Kingdom during Seiber’s lifetime, British reviews of concerts on British soil often spoke favourably of these pieces. Reporting from the first British concert with works exclusively by Seiber in Wigmore Hall on 3 December 1945, for example, the critic of the Times found that the ‘most attractive works were settings of Greek and Yugoslavian folk-songs’.79 79 ‘Two Concerts of Modern Music: Machine-Made Counterpoint’, The Times, 5 December 1945, 7. Dennis Brain (horn), Gareth Morris (flute), Max Rostal

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Commenting on another concert two years earlier, in June 1943, the London correspondent for the New York Times in a similar vein had written favourably of Seiber’s Four Hungarian Folksongs for baritone and violin, composed in 1936 just after Seiber’s arrival in London. ‘The songs for violin and voice turned out more satisfactorily than one expected, thanks to the very tactful writing, which took into account the disparity in color and weight between singer and instrumentalist.’ 80 Composed around the same time as the pastorals and folk settings is a group of works whose titles again closely link them at a glance. They are the Phantasy for cello and piano (1941), the Fantasia Concertante for violin and string orchestra (1944), and the Fantasia for flute, horn, and string quartet (1945), used as music for the film The Magic Canvas. While the instrumentations are very similar, with accompanied solo instruments or small chamber ensemble settings, the differences from the pastorals and folk settings in other areas could hardly be more striking. Both the Phantasy and the Fantasia require some careful ensemble rehearsing because of their complex rhythmical and harmonic counterpoint, and the Fantasia Concertante is a technically demanding piece for the soloist. In contrast to the pastorals, all three compositions are dodecaphonic. While the pastoral compositions and folk settings were written for British-born musicians, dedications in the case of the fantasies reveal a different picture. As I have argued elsewhere, the Fantasia was written for a film made almost exclusively by migrants and dealing with exile and displacement.81 Seiber dedicated the Fantasia Concertante to his fellow migrant Max Rostal, who premiered the work in 1945. The Phantasy bears no dedication, and the cellist Seiber may well have written it for himself. However, when he re-worked the piece in 1956 as the first movement of the Tre Pezzi for cello and orchestra, he dedicated it to the memory of his recently deceased friend from Frankfurt days, Erich Itor Kahn, who had moved via France to New York in 1941. (In addition to their similar biographies, Kahn’s compositional (violin), Sophie Wyss (soprano), the Dorian Singers, and the Boyd Neel String Orchestra performed Seiber’s Besardo Suite no. 2 for string orchestra, Pastorale and Burlesque for flute and string orchestra, Four Greek Folksongs for a cappella choir, Fantasia Concertante for violin and string orchestra, Notturno for horn and string orchestra, Missa Brevis for a cappella choir, and Six Yugoslav Folksongs for a cappella choir. Walter Goehr and Seiber conducted. 80 Ferruccio Bonavia, ‘London Hears New Compositions’, New York Times, 20 June 1943, X7. Other works performed at the concert organised by the Circle of International Art included, according to Bonavia, a sonata for five instruments by Alessandro Scarlatti, quartets by Elizabeth Maconchy and Wilson-Koschecowich, and ‘some children’s pieces’ by Casella. 81 Florian Scheding, ‘“An Animated Quest for Freedom”: Mátyás Seiber’s Score for The Magic Canvas’, in Destination London: German-Speaking Émigrés and British Cinema, 1925–1950, ed. Tim Bergfelder and Christian Cargnelli, Film Europa 6 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), 230−42.

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development parallels Seiber’s own. While his early works combine modal techniques with folk melodies and later incorporate jazz elements, his compositions from the early 1930s onwards are increasingly marked by serial techniques.82) It is tempting to describe these pieces dedicated to fellow migrants as part of the migratory culture I have outlined in the previous chapter. Indeed, their titles and their singular commitment to Schoenbergian interwar dodecaphony point towards heterotopia as they fantasise about the other place of the migrant, a notion I expand on in Chapter 4. It is no doubt problematic, if not indeed disingenuous, to construct a strict dichotomy between traditionalist and progressive music. Focusing on Benjamin Britten’s operas, Christopher Chowrimootoo has advanced the category of the middlebrow to better mediate what he calls the ‘great divide’ of modernism and mass culture.83 Still, Nathaniel Lew has detailed tensions that existed during the organisation of music for the Festival of Britain of 1951. Intending to celebrate and sound the nation, organisers struggled to reconcile the ambition to create progressive works for the repertoire of British music with lighter music for enlivening the festival.84 Amidst such debates, migrant voices were excluded from the nation in sound. The fact that three of the shortlisted and anonymously submitted entries for the festival’s opera competition – Berthold Goldschmidt’s Beatrice Cenci, Deidre of the Sorrows by Austrian-born Karl Rankl, and A Tale of Two Cities by Australian-born Arthur Benjamin – were by immigrants led to the cancellation of their performances. As Diana Ashman suggests, their foreign roots were ‘potentially embarrassing to the Council, having promoted it under the auspices of the Festival of Britain as part of the celebrations of British achievement and the British way of life’.85 Despite Seiber’s attempts to promote the fantasies, the Fantasia and the Phantasy were ignored in the British press, failing to garner reviews. The BBC rejected Seiber’s request to have the Phantasy discussed in one of its Music Magazine programmes. (I discuss Seiber’s fractious relationship with the BBC in detail in the next chapter.) The film The Magic Canvas was reviewed, but the few extant critiques are insubstantial and hardly refer to the music. What few reactions there were in the British press to the fantasies ranged between

82 See Juan Allende-Blin, Erich Itor Kahn (Munich: Edition Text+Kritik, 1994). 83 Christopher Chowrimootoo, Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018). 84 Nathaniel G. Lew, Tonic to the Nation: Making English Music in the Festival of Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 85 Diana Ashman, ‘Opera for All’, MMus dissertation, University of London, 2010, 30. See also Paul Banks, ‘The Case of Beatrice Cenci’, Opera 39:4 (1988), 426–32. The same fate befell Wat Tyler by communist Alan Bush, which was chosen as a fourth winner some time later. In operatic terms, the Festival of Britain is today associated with Britten’s Billy Budd, which was commissioned outside the opera competition and performed after the actual festival had ended.

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lukewarm and hostile. Most of them described Seiber, or his music, as essentially foreign: in Britain, but not a part of its musical soundscape. A critique in the Times, for instance, did not approve of the Fantasia Concertante on the occasion of its premiere. ‘The actual novelties in this programme were a Fantasia Concertante for Solo violin (Mr. Max Rostal) and strings composed according to the twelve-tone formula of Schonberg [sic], and sounding like all the stuff so fabricated.’ 86 In 1948 Seiber’s application for British citizenship was approved.87 Even so, reporting that the Fantasia Concertante had been chosen by the ISCM for the Palermo festival held in April 1949, the Musical Times constructed Seiber’s status as unstable and distanced him from national belonging, emphasising that he was ‘a foreign composer resident in England’. 88 The apparent doubleness in output baffled critics, who expressed bewilderment when encountering folksong arrangements, pastorals, and fantasias side by side. For his first signature concert on British soil in Wigmore Hall on 3 December 1945, Seiber had chosen a programme intended to showcase his versatility.89 The Musical Times was perplexed, denied Seiber the title ‘composer’ because of an absence of personal idiom or style, and suggested that he is rather a general practitioner … a judgement that is based not on his admirable versatility as a practising musician, but upon the multiplicity of the styles he employs in composition. He will write you a Missa Brevis or an essay in the twelve-tone scale, set a folk-song for you, or dig out an ancient volume of lute music and make a suite from it. Film music, jazz, or imitation romanticism – he commands them all.90

International Nationalism Seiber himself never escaped the nationalist attitudes he so opposed. Ironically, although his serious music is not folkloristic (and he lived much of his adult life as a British citizen in Caterham, outside London), British critics consistently stressed Seiber’s foreign roots and described his music as Hungarian.91 Only towards the end of his life, in 1959, and some thirty years after he had left 86 ‘Two Concerts of Modern Music’, 7. 87 According to a letter he sent to the BBC in December 1943, Seiber probably applied for naturalisation in late 1943 or early 1944. His naturalisation certificate was issued on 9 March 1948, Home Office Reference S8372, Certificate AZ40099, and is held at the National Archives, Kew, London. 88 ‘The I.S.C.M. Festival, Palermo, April 1949’, The Musical Times 89:1269 (1948), 349. 89 See n. 79 above for details of the programme and performers. 90 ‘Two Concerts of Modern Music’, 7. 91 See, for example, Mason, ‘The Musical Personality of Mátyás Seiber’, 205.

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Hungary, did Seiber explicitly address his national musical background so stressed by his critics. In a similar strategy in which he had tackled jazz, Seiber acknowledged that studying folklore can influence and enrich a composer’s outlook and technical repertoire. The study of tonal systems ‘differing from our traditional major-minor tonality [helps the composer] to extend his melodic range and makes him realise how many different possibilities there are for diatonic scales’, while the rich rhythmic world of folk music can guide ‘the modern composer to become aware of new rhythmic possibilities, and to make his metrical schemes more flexible’. Seiber mentioned his folk transcriptions of ‘Serbian, Croatian, French, English, Scottish, Irish, Greek, Russian, Mordvinian and heaven knows how many other nationalities’ and admitted that he enjoyed ‘the sheer delight of handling such beautiful material’. Nonetheless, he emphasised that he never incorporated folksongs into his postwar compositions and denied ‘that the use of such material has affected in any way the musical style of my other, more “abstract” works’. And Seiber went further. He suggested that musical nationalism is, effectively, parochial, positing that ‘the preoccupation with folk material can have a narrowing influence on the composer’s outlook and range’. 92 In the context of mid-century British musical debates, such writing constituted a thinly veiled riposte to the nation’s musical powers, notably Ralph Vaughan Williams. In 1934, one year before Seiber’s arrival in Britain, Vaughan Williams had declared music’s main duty to be ‘the expression of the soul of a nation’. 93 Following the arrivals of refugee musicians from fascist Europe during the 1930s and 1940s, he urged immigrants to refrain from constructing a ‘little Europe’ in Britain and abandon the avant-garde styles they had brought with them from the Continent if they wished to integrate into British musical life.94 As Erik Levi has pointed out, the fact that Vaughan Williams otherwise acted more assiduously on behalf of the refugees from Nazism than perhaps any other prominent British musician only highlights the level of xenophobia that permeated British musical life during the time of Seiber’s immigration.95 Against this background, Seiber’s prose makes for provocative reading. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, in an article co-written with two other migrants, Egon Wellesz and Roberto Gerhard, Seiber had warned Britons that 92 Seiber, ‘Folk Music and the Contemporary Composer’, 7−9. 93 Ralph Vaughan Williams, National Music, The Mary Flexner Lectures on the Humanities 2 (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1934), 123. 94 Vaughan Williams, ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’, in National Music and Other Essays, 2nd edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 154−9. 95 Erik Levi, ‘“ Those Damn Foreigners”: Xenophobia and British Musical Life during the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, in Twentieth-Century Music and Politics, ed. Pauline Fairclough (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 81−96.

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‘the danger of isolationism, always inherent in an island community, [would be] a fatal mistake in a post-war world, the greatest hope of which is international collaboration’. 96 He coined the oxymoron ‘international nationalism’ to describe the music of composers like Vaughan Williams and reduce to absurdity his nationalist ambitions.97 While recognising the existence of regionally distinct musical characteristics in folklore, Seiber makes explicit his disbelief in the possibility of music as a national language, which had formed the core of Vaughan Williams’s call to arms to form an English national musical idiom, questioning the notion of music as a vehicle of national identity and calling it a phony pretence that did not stand up to scrutiny. But Seiber’s retort transcends borders and is equally directed at his erstwhile teacher. Kodály had reaffirmed two years earlier, in 1957, that ‘folk song is one of the mighty corner-stones on which our nation can be re-built’. 98 Seiber makes short shrift of such florid nationalist language. ‘The heyday of nationalism in music has passed.’99 Seiber confronted the national throughout his career. On his long migratory journey, he lived through the different political turmoils that are a hallmark of twentieth-century Europe. Debates and discourses on the national were varied and diverse across different times and places, ranging from Hungary’s fight for independence and chauvinism to fascist calls for ethnic purity to English pastoralism – but they were ever-present. Rather than transcending the national, Seiber’s migration and transnational movement engendered an intellectual response to nationalism itself. For Hanns Eisler, too, migration acted as a catalyst for a complex engagement with the national. As I have shown in Chapter 1, Eisler’s aesthetic strategy in the Deutsche Sinfonie, for example, may seem paradoxical. It reveals a musical turning away from nationalism in search of more internationalist idioms on the one hand, and a recourse to and engagement with Austro-German forms and traditions on the other. This confrontation manifests itself as a dialectical engagement between internationalist outlook and nationalist memory, a strategy Lydia Goehr has termed the ‘doubleness of exile’.100 And if Seiber tussled with the apparent paradox between his nationalist training on the one hand and his cosmopolitan beliefs on the other, Eisler, too, was well aware of this chasm. As he recalled in 1958:

96 Mátyás Seiber with Roberto Gerhard and Egon Wellesz, ‘English Musical Life: A Symposium’, Tempo 11 (1945), 1−6. 97 Seiber, ‘Folk Music and the Contemporary Composer’, 9. 98 Quoted in Eősze, Zoltán Kodály, 84. 99 Seiber, ‘Folk Music and the Contemporary Composer’, 9. 100 Lydia Goehr, ‘Music and Musicians in Exile: The Romantic Legacy of a Double Life’, in Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 66−91.

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During the most difficult days of emigration … I set a Hölderlin poem − well, some eight lines of it [‘Erinnerung’, lyrics taken from Hölderlin’s poem ‘Gesang des Deutschen’] − and Brecht was beside himself and said, ‘Man, you’re being national!’ … It is shamelessly nationalist, because, as a migrant, I did indeed sometimes reminisce about Germany … Look, when I returned from World War I, 1919, I could never have composed a poem like ‘An eine Stadt’ [from Hölderlin’s ‘Heidelberg’], for example, because I was fed up with patriotism. This first needed the biting edge of emigration and the act of reminiscing, the art of memory. That is a truly great art, you know, to remember. … Once you’ve been a migrant for fourteen years and remember this damned Germany you see things differently.101

The Nation Re-Emerging Like Seiber’s, Eisler’s migratory journey was not a straightforward move from one country to another. Eisler was, of course, displaced twice, migrating first from Nazi Germany, then falling victim to McCarthyism in the United States of the immediate postwar era. The composer’s move to East Berlin is almost ubiquitously described as a re-migration in Eisler scholarship, suggesting an endpoint to the migratory journey overall. Such a reading may indicate the desire of scholars to frame Eisler as an Austro-German heavyweight and claim him as ‘one of us’ as much as the assumption that by returning to his ‘native’ soil (for those who assume that the German-speaking lands are all one) he was returning ‘home’. Objectively, of course, such a narrative stands on shaky ground. Eisler did not leave the United States voluntarily, and there is much cause to suggest that he would have liked to have stayed there. With this transatlantic migration, too, the push factor was considerably greater than the pull factor. Even after his involuntary departure, East Berlin was not his first destination of choice, with Eisler trying, unsuccessfully, to settle in Vienna at first. Of course, 101 ‘Zum Beispiel habe ich in den schwierigsten Tagen der Emigration ein Gedicht − also einige, acht Zeilen − komponiert von Hölderlin, wo der Brecht ganz außer sich wurde und sagte: “Mensch, biste national!” … Es ist von einem schamlosen Nationalismus. Weil ich doch tatsächlich in der Emigration manchmal an Deutschland zurückdachte. … Schauen Sie, als ich aus dem ersten Weltkrieg zurückkam, 1919, hätte ich ein Gedicht wie zum Beispiel “An eine Stadt” nie komponieren können, weil mir der Patriotismus zum Halse heraushing. Es mußte erst die Schärfe der Emigration kommen und das Zurückblicken, die Kunst der Erinnerung. Wissen Sie, das ist eine ganz große Kunst, sich zu erinnern. … Wenn man aber mal vierzehn Jahre in der Emigration ist und sich erinnert an dieses verdammte Deutschland, dann sieht man die Sache auch anders.’ Hanns Eisler, Musik und Politik: Schriften 1924−1948, ed. Günter Mayer (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1973), 192.

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the Berlin Eisler moved to in the postwar years was in the same geographical location as the Berlin he had left in 1933, but otherwise it had little in common with it. This was in every conceivable sense − socially, politically, historically, culturally − a different city, and Eisler’s arrival was far from a return. Instead, the migratory journey continued, and framed his engagement with the nascent nation that he found himself in now, the GDR. Eisler, then, participated in the GDR’s cultural-political discourses against the backdrop of his migratory experiences. In view of the hardship Eisler experienced throughout his life because of constant surveillance in well-nigh whichever nation he stayed, it seems ironic that the composition that thrust the composer into the public limelight probably more than any other was a national anthem, composed for the young GDR in 1949.102 Indeed, given its ubiquity in the everyday lives of GDR citizens, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, when it could be heard at public events, daily broadcasts, in school classes, and at youth gatherings, one might speculate that the anthem places Eisler amongst the most performed of all twentieth-century art music composers. Scholars such as Heike Amos, who provides an in-depth history and comparison with the anthem of the Federal Republic of Germany, have dedicated full-scale studies to the socio-political history of ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen’.103 In the Eisler literature, conversely, it occupies only a marginal place and is all but relegated to a footnote to discussions of the composer’s oeuvre overall, even if Friederike Wißmann has dedicated a section in her recent book on the composer to the anthem.104 Perhaps predictably, Eisler wrote the music while travelling, in October 1949, as the composer met the author of the lyrics, Johannes R. Becher, at the Goethe festival in Warsaw. On 7 November the song was premiered in Berlin’s state opera, and a parliamentary decree in February made it the official anthem of the young GDR. Eisler later quipped about the speed of production, suggesting that Becher had been taken aback by the composer’s pace.

102 For discussions of US, UK, and USSR secret service operations on Eisler see James Wierzbicki, ‘Hanns Eisler and the FBI’, Music and Politics 2 (2008), http://quod. lib.umich.edu/m/mp/ (accessed 21 July 2017); Joy H. Calico, ‘Eisler’s Comintern File: RGASPI F. 495, op. 205, d. 252’, in Eisler in England: Proceedings of the International Hanns Eisler Conference, London 2010, ed. Oliver Dahin and Erik Levi (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2014), 93−106; and Erik Levi, ‘A Composer under Surveillance − Hanns Eisler and England, 1925−1962’, in Eisler in England, 9−32. 103 Heike Amos, Auferstanden aus Ruinen: Die Nationalhymne der DDR 1949 bis 1990 (Berlin: Dietz, 1997). 104 Friederike Wißmann, Hanns Eisler: Komponist, Weltbürger, Revolutionär (Munich: Edition Elke Heidenreich bei C. Bertelsmann, 2012), 166−85.

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In the afternoon, we both went to the house where Chopin had been born. Meanwhile, I had found a melody, and played it to him on Chopin’s old grand piano. He was very surprised that this had happened so quickly and said, ‘We’ll have to think it through in Berlin!’105

Eisler’s casual mention of Chopin is anything but that. Rather, Eisler draws a direct line to the heritage of Western art music, reinforcing his point by noting a material connection through Chopin’s grand piano. Indeed, the melody to ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen’ is rich with allusions to Eisler’s musical traditions. The accusation, often levelled by West German authors who sought to discredit Eisler as the GDR’s court composer, that the melody plagiarised Peter Kreuder’s song ‘Goodbye Jonny’ from the 1939 German film Water for Canitoga is only the most lurid in a line of similar claims. Friederike Wißmann points out similarities with Eisler’s own song ‘Der Kirschdieb’ from the Hollywood Liederbuch, while Rüdiger Bitter suggests that the initial four-note motif derives from Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’.106 It is worth exploring the possibility of a Beethoven link further. Elaine Kelly has pointed out the importance of Beethoven’s late work for GDR aesthetic-political debates that portrayed him as a precursor to the socialist cause.107 For Eisler, too, Beethoven was central. As early as 1927, he pointed to the ‘Ode to Joy’ in Rote Fahne, the Austrian communist newspaper of the interwar years: ‘Of Beethoven’s orchestral works, the proletariat will be likely to find the greatest, the Ninth Symphony, the most understandable (and easiest, because it’s so close to them).’108 But Eisler wouldn’t be Eisler if there was not a caveat. ‘Musical understanding has always been the privilege of the ruling class. … Only once the proletariat has seized power can a new musical culture slowly emerge.’ 109

105 ‘Am Nachmittag fuhren wir dann beide zum Geburtshaus von Chopin. Ich hatte inzwischen eine Melodie gefunden, und auf dem Flügel Chopins spielte ich ihm die Nationalhymne vor. Er war sehr erstaunt, dass das so rasch ging, und sagte: “Das müssen wir uns aber noch in Berlin überlegen!”’ Hanns Eisler, quoted in Jürgen Schebera, Hanns Eisler: Eine Biographie in Texten, Bildern und Dokumenten (Mainz: Schott, 1998), 225. 106 Wißmann, Hanns Eisler, 180; Rüdiger Bitter, Von Knallfröschen zur Retorte: Eine deutsch-deutsche Zeitreise (Neckenmark: Novum Pro, 2011), 67. 107 Elaine Kelly, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 99−136. 108 ‘Von seinen Orchesterwerken wird von den Arbeitern das größte, die Neunte Symphonie, vielleicht am ehesten (und leichtesten, als ihnen nahe,) verständlich empfunden werden.’ Reprinted in Eisler, Musik und Politik, 29. 109 ‘Das Musikverständnis war immer ein Vorrecht der herrschenden Klasse. … Erst nach Ergreifung der Macht durch das Proletariat kann eine neue Musikkultur allmählich entstehen.’ Ibid., 45.

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Against this background, it is instructive to observe how Eisler’s melody − intentionally or otherwise − paraphrases Beethoven’s. ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen’ inverts the first four notes of the ‘Ode to Joy’, and then sequences this motif for the next four notes, with the side effect of ending exactly in the same place as Beethoven (see Examples 2.4 and 2.5). The bass line, arguably more interesting than in Beethoven’s melody, moves stepwise until it reaches the subdominant at the same time as Beethoven’s dominant. While the pitches of the ‘Ode to Joy’ and ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen’ thus work harmonically − and could be sung at the same time − the harmonic progressions differ. Regardless of whether such strategies were intentional on Eisler’s part, it is surely no coincidence that such musical (and potentially formalist) complexity stems from a Schoenberg pupil. The fragmentation of Beethoven’s melody into small cells and the immediate inversion of the incipit followed by the tendency to sequence, can indeed be traced back to Schoenberg. And in alluding to his teacher’s method while referencing a Beethoven melody, Eisler makes the musical point that, for him as for Adorno and other Austro-German migrants such as Thomas Mann, Germany was, first and foremost, a cultural concept, circumscribed, in his case, by the Austro-German musical tradition with its pillars Beethoven and Schoenberg. The reference to the ‘Ode to Joy’ can also be seen as the dialectic other to Becher’s blood and soil approach and points to the years that both spent as refugees from Nazi Germany. While Eisler thrived in California, Becher struggled in the Soviet Union and later described the twelve years spent there as the most testing time of my life; I’d almost say it was purgatory, if not indeed hell. … I was so wholly German … that I couldn’t assimilate anywhere and really only spent my time waiting for twelve years until I could return home.110

In the Soviet Union, Becher had written his Deutsche Lehre, in which he argued that Germany’s Nazi catastrophe had happened because Germans were not national enough and that any future Germany needed to return to blood and soil patriotism.111 Conversely, the musical allusion to the ‘Ode to Joy’, with its insistence on an admittedly rather Germanic notion of international brotherhood rather than national unity, reinforces the point that Eisler’s music might not contradict Becher’s text, but counterscores it nonetheless. As Eisler put it, ‘Intelligence doesn’t only refer to the selection of texts, but how you treat them. 110 ‘Die zwölf Jahre, die ich außerhalb Deutschlands leben mußte, waren für mich die härtesten Prüfungen meines Lebens; ich möchte beinahe sagen, es war das Fegefeuer, wenn nicht die Hölle. … ich [war] solch ein ganzer Deutscher, … daß ich mich nirgendwo anpassen konnte, und eigentlich nur zwölf Jahre lang gewartet habe, um wieder heimkehren zu können.’ Johannes R. Becher, Briefe 1909–1958, ed. Rolf Harder (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1993), 325. 111 Johannes R. Becher, Deutsche Lehre, Volk und Vaterland: Schriften zur deutschen Erneuerung 1 (Paris: CALPO, 1945).

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Example. 2.4  Hanns Eisler, ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen’, beginning. © Copyright 1951 by Edition Peters Leipzig. With kind permission of the publisher.

  

Auf







- er - stan - den





aus

Ru





- i - nen





und

der



Zu



 - kunft

zu

 



- ge - wandt!

Example. 2.5  Ludwig van Beethoven, Ode to Joy, beginning.

  

Freu







- de - schö - ner

 Göt







- ter - fun - ken,

 Toch







- ter

aus

E



-

ly

-

  

si - um!

If I identify entirely with the text, empathise − well, that’s abominable. First and foremost, a composer must consider a text in a contradictory manner.’112 Beyond this conception of Germany as a cultural-historic and international space rather than a geopolitical entity confined by national borders, Eisler counterscores Becher’s patriotism rhythmically, too. While in 2/4, the rhythmic setting of the melody renders it ineffective as a march, for example, and arguably departs from some of Eisler’s earlier agitprop. The rousing anacrusis of the Marseillaise and, perhaps more poignantly, of the Internationale is avoided, even though Becher’s text would fit the beginning of the latter melody. Similarities are greater with the gentler ‘Ode to Joy’ or Haydn’s Kaiserhymne, which by then had become the West German anthem, of course. Rather than opting for a strong and stable beginning to singing the nation into being, Eisler prefers a gentle, almost fluid, and potentially mobile approach, juxtaposing the longue durée of Germanic musical culture with the ephemerality of the German nation as geopolitically fixed. As he remarked, provocatively, to Hans Bunge, How long did the unification of Germany last? From 1871 until 1945. You’ve got to admit: that’s a disgrace! … That’s all we had, nothing more. For a nation, if we’re going to use such a grand term, it’s not very much.113

112 ‘Intelligenz bezieht sich also nicht nur auf die Auswahl der Texte, sondern auch darauf, wie man sie behandelt. Wenn ich mich mit dem Text völlig identifiziere, mich einfühle, ihm nachschwebe − na, das ist ganz scheußlich. Einen Text muß ein Komponist erst einmal widerspruchsvoll ansehen.’ Hanns Eisler, Gespräche mit Hans Bunge: ‘Fragen Sie mehr über Brecht’ (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1975), 192. 113 ‘Wie lange war Deutschland geeinigt? Von 1871 bis 1945. Da müssen Sie zugeben: eine Schande! … Mehr haben wir nicht. Für eine Nation, wenn wir in solchen großen Worten sprechen, ist das ein bißchen wenig.’ Ibid.

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Eisler’s ongoing experience as a migrant thus fundamentally shaped this approach. Even in East Berlin, Eisler confronted the national from a place of migratory heterotopia. The socialist promise of the new nation, which resounds in Eisler’s music, was ultimately to disappoint his search for utopia. Eisler remained an outsider, retaining his Austrian citizenship and finding himself increasingly ostracised in the context of East German national cultural politics. He remained, much as he had been since 1933, a migrant, and continued to engage artistically with his contexts from this standpoint. Becher was to fall out of favour, too, being demoted in 1956 while serving as Minister of Culture. Even so, it seems ironic that it was Becher’s patriotic text, rather than the music, that was effectively banned in 1973, owing to its advocacy of a united Germany. My reading of Eisler’s music as a migrant’s view of the nation as socio-cultural memory that counterscores dialectically Becher’s blood and soil approach clearly fell on deaf ears. Once Eisler formulated his views of what it means to be German not in music, but in words, reactions were, perhaps predictably, more hostile.

Folkishness Otherwise Following their collaboration that resulted in the national anthem of the GDR, Becher and Eisler joined forces for a number of further projects. As with Eisler’s GDR work more generally, the literature has been, at best, lukewarm about them. Such assessments include the collection that, again, incorporates the national in its eponymous title, the Neue Deutsche Volkslieder. Friederike Wißmann notes critical voices of eminent Eisler scholars such as Tobias Faßhauer and Hartmut Fladt, who struggle with Eisler’s programmatic simplicity and the positive, optimistic message.114 Much as in the national anthem, Becher’s lyrics indeed wear their nationalism on their sleeve, and the parochial triumphalism has not worn well. This really is, in Philip Bohlman’s words, the nationalism that we ‘love to hate’, so much so that it feels like a guilty pleasure for me to admit that I rather like ‘Wenn Arbeiter und Bauern’, for example, with its catchy tune and infectious rhythm, the rousing melody interspersed with forceful and yet unaggressive instrumental interludes.115 Becher’s triumphalism oozes out of the preface to the collection: The folksong shall find a place in the hearts of the people that are building a new life. We hope that this new folkish singing will transcend the borders that remain in the midst of our fatherland and will soar to become a song of all Germans. 114 Wißmann, Hanns Eisler, 181−2. 115 Philip V. Bohlman, Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of a New Europe, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1−22.

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And elsewhere: It seems necessary to me to give songs to our Volk, real folksongs, that are easy to learn and sing. When one observes the development of our literature, one notices, from a certain moment onwards, a separation into art literature on the one hand, and, on the other, a kind of literature that is mostly not termed literature. Since poets no longer seriously engaged with folksong, either the Volk sang the somewhat old-fashioned melodies, or it was given a cheap replacement in the form of pop songs. Amongst other things, the novel aspect of our literature means giving to the Volk that which is of the Volk, that is new songs that correspond to the new feelings and thoughts which move our Volk and, above all, our youth.116

Reception of the collection ranged between positive and euphoric,117 but it failed to problematise the uneasy historic connection to efforts in the Third Reich to promote the folksong as a vehicle for the new social order, and, indeed, the semantic similarities to Nazi prose with the constant repetition of the word ‘Volk’ and the continuous emphasis on youth as a torchbearer of the national fulfilment of Germany’s promise. The latter point particularly was highlighted on the occasion of the collection’s premiere. Amongst the most beautiful gifts awarded to the German youth at the Deutschlandtreffen are surely the fifteen Neue Deutsche Volkslieder, created

116 ‘Das Volkslied soll einen Platz finden in den Herzen der Menschen, die ein neues Leben schaffen. Wir hoffen, dass dieser neue Volksgesang über die Grenzen, wie sie noch immer mitten durch unser Vaterland gezogen sind, sich hinwegsetzen wird und sich erheben wird zu einem Lied aller Deutschen … Mir scheint, daß es notwendig ist, unserem Volk Lieder zu geben, wirkliche Volkslieder, die leicht erlernbar und nachsingbar sind. Es ist so, wenn man die Entwicklung unserer Literatur betrachtet, daß von einem gewissen Zeitpunkt an ... die Literatur sich geschieden hat in Kunstliteratur und in eine Art von Literatur, die meistens nicht als Literatur betrachtet wird. Da sich die Dichter nicht ernsthaft mehr des Volksliedes annahmen, sang das Volk entweder die alten, zum Teil veralteten Weisen, oder ihm wurde ein billiger Ersatz geboten in den Schlagern. Unter anderem besteht das Neue unserer Literatur auch darin, dem Volk in der Literatur zu geben, was des Volkes ist, das heißt neue Lieder, die den neuen Gefühlen, den neuen Gedanken entsprechen, wie sie unser Volk und vor allem die Jugend bewegen.’ Johannes R. Becher, Auf andere Art so große Hoffnung: Tagebuch 1950 (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1951), 151, quoted in Wißmann, Hanns Eisler, 32. 117 See Manfred Grabs, ed., Wer war Hanns Eisler? Auffassungen aus sechs Jahrzehnten (Berlin: Das Europäische Buch, 1983), 166.

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Musical Journeys by the poet Johannes R. Becher and the composer Hanns Eisler and dedicated to the German youth.118

While somewhat more restrained, Eisler’s obituary by Alexander Abusch effectively employed the same rhetoric, again foregrounding the promise of a national folkish utopia fulfilled by the German youth by quoting the last line of Becher’s text from ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen’. Your work … sings how the sun will shine more beautifully than ever before above Germany. It sings in praise of dialectics, in praise of learning, in praise of communism. Your work will transcend the borders of the nation. The workers of all nations that sing your songs revere them. Your work sings to our youth and our folk of a socialist future for our entire nation.119

Abusch, who later replaced demoted Becher as Minister of Culture, referenced the dialectic and the international as crucial aspects in Eisler’s works and acknowledged that it was impossible to restrain his output into one nation alone. As Elaine Kelly has shown, nationalism and internationalism were not imagined as mutually exclusive, but represented stages on a continuum for many GDR intellectuals.120 Even so, Abusch’s decision to call on Eisler’s dialectic approach, or his ‘lust for dissent’, as Gerd Rienäcker has termed it,121 is a diplomatic reminder of the clashes between Eisler and the East German nation. Mentioning internationalism and border-crossing, moreover, places Eisler as 118 ‘Mit zu den schönsten Gaben, die der deutschen Jugend zum Deutschlandtreffen überreicht wurden, gehören gewiss die fünfzehn Neuen Deutschen Volkslieder, die der Dichter Johannes R. Becher und der Komponist Hanns Eisler geschaffen und der deutschen Jugend gewidmet haben.’ ‘Neue Volkslieder für die Jugend’, Neues Deutschland, Berlin, 24 May 1950, quoted in Grabs, ed., Wer war Hanns Eisler?, 166. 119 ‘Dein Werk … singt davon, dass die Sonne schön wie nie über Deutschland scheinen wird. Es singt das Lob der Dialektik, das Lob des Lernens, das Lob des Kommunismus. Dein Werk wird die Grenzen des Staates überschreiten. Von den Arbeitern aller Länder wird es geehrt, in dem Deine Lieder gesungen werden. Dein Werk klingt unserer Jugend, unserem Volk voran in die sozialistische Zukunft unserer ganzen Nation.’ Alexander Abusch, ‘Rede in der Trauerfeier’, Sinn und Form, Sonderheft 12 (1964), 12. 120 Elaine Kelly, ‘Communist Nationalisms, Internationalisms, and Cosmopolitanisms: The Case of the German Democratic Republic’, in Confronting the National in the Musical Past, ed. Elaine Kelly, Markus Mantere, and Derek Scott (London: Routledge, 2018), 78−90. 121 Gerd Rienäcker, ‘Hanns Eisler über Intelligenz und Dummheit in der musikalischen Interpretation: Ansätze zu einer Interpretationsästhetik?’, in Hanns Eisler (= Querstand 5−6), ed. Albrecht Dümling (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2010), 250−64.

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an effective outsider to the purely national cause, however much Abusch’s prose attempts to contain Eisler’s international − read: migratory − journey firmly within the nation. The awkward decision to envelop two sentences on the international appeal of Eisler’s work within more stereotypical praise for a socialist Germany does indeed speak loudly of the composer’s unease with the national as folkish in concept. Perhaps predictably, Eisler frequently sought to challenge ‘folkishness’, as he termed it, expressing his scepticism about the possibility of the concept. Rather than framing it within the national, Eisler subsumed an understanding of the folk under a Marxist understanding of class. If at all, he argued, folkishness as an aesthetic concept could only be conceived of once there was a folk, and a folk, in turn, could only be formed after the end of class divisions. ‘We need to see this as a process and we must know, that there is no such thing as folkishness as such.’ 122 As Károly Csipák has pointed out, for Eisler, folkishness implied the takeover of art music by the proletariat from the bourgeoisie.123 This might allow for a popularisation of the heritage of art music on the one hand and the production of up-to-date, topical, and easy to understand music on the other. But Eisler goes further. He demands that all workers should be educated to achieve musical understanding and insight. Because of widespread musical illiteracy and the impossibility of overcoming this, however (workers don’t have enough time for in-depth musical education), any attempt at folkishness must result in contradictions and aporia. Indeed, Wißmann has noted the chasm between Becher’s texts and Eisler’s music with regard to the GDR’s aesthetic realpolitics. Musically, she contends, Eisler did not fully follow the Bitterfelder Weg, prioritising instead the aesthetic quality of the artwork.124 The eponymous conferences held in Bitterfeld in 1959 and 1964 had called for a socialist art accessible to ordinary workers. Even so, at least externally, Eisler was a faithful party soldier, and supported the GDR against its adversaries. It might seem paradoxical that, in his letter to West Germany in which he aimed to justify his socialist position to West German composers, Eisler referred specifically to the very folkishness that he otherwise regarded with scepticism. And yet his prose ends with a punchline, which interprets concerns with a nationally confined folkishness as secondary to the international content of the workers’ class struggle. Yet again, we hear the voice of the migrant:

122 ‘Wir müssen das als einen Prozess sehen und wissen, dass es nich die Volkstümlichkeit gibt.’ Hanns Eisler, quoted in Grabs, ed., Wer war Hanns Eisler?, 317. 123 Károly Csipák, ‘Zur Entwicklung des Begriffs der Volkstümlichkeit bei Hanns Eisler’, in Avantgarde und Volkstümlichkeit, ed. Rudolf Stephan (Mainz: Schott, 1975), 17−35. 124 Wißmann, Hanns Eisler, 183.

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The Nation Unsounded If ‘Auferstanden aus Ruinen’ and the Neue Deutsche Volkslieder present paradoxical cases, it seems perhaps an even crueller irony of history that Eisler’s most ambitious conceptual confrontation with the national during his time in East Berlin resulted in one of the profoundest professional disasters of his career. The oft-mentioned tragedy surrounding Eisler’s ultimately thwarted attempt to write an opera refers, again, to the dialectic between the national as primarily a geo-political entity versus the national as cultural-historical space.126 Eisler’s impulse to engage with German history through one of her most quintessential legends has frequently been framed against the specific backdrop of the GDR’s cultural-political discussions of the 1950s that found their pinnacle in the 1959 conference held in Bitterfeld on the requirements for a national art in the socialist state.127 It is easy to see why. The formalism debate coincided with the publication of Eisler’s opera libretto in 1952 and was arguably the catalyst that led to its widespread rejection. Initially, of course, reactions had been positive, not just in private communication with Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, but on GDR soil, too. In one of the state’s most influential journals, Sinn und Form, Ernst Fischer assessed the libretto with some 125 ‘Unser Streben nach Volkstümlichkeit… wird von euch oft mißverstanden. Versteht man doch bei den gebildeten Ständen unter Volkstümlichkeit: Naivität, Gefühlsduselei, auch Sitten und Gebräuche, wie sie unserer Zeit nicht leicht entsprechen. Wenn wir uns aber dessen bewusst werden, dass die fortgeschrittenste Schicht des Volkes, sein Herz, die Arbeiterschaft ist, dann bedeutet Volkstümlichkeit etwas durchaus Anderes. Denn Arbeiter sind nicht naiv, lernen rasch, haben eigentümliche Sitten und Gebräuche, verschieden durch nationale Besonderheit, aber international im Inhalt.’ Hanns Eisler, ‘Brief nach Westdeutschland’, Sinn und Form 6 (1952), 14−24. 126 For a summary of the Faustus debate see Gerhard Müller, ‘Eisler und die FaustusDebatte’, in Hanns Eisler der Zeitgenosse: Positionen – Perspektiven. Materialien zu den Eisler-Festen 1994/95, ed. Günter Mayer on behalf of the Internationale Hanns Eisler Gesellschaft (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1997), 60−6. 127 For an authoritative discussion of sonic nation building in the GDR, see Elaine Kelly, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

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pathos: ‘Doktor Faustus might become what has been missing for a century: the German national opera.’ 128 Only a year later, the tide had turned. Between 14 and 17 May 1953, four articles and readers’ letters in the newspapers Neues Deutschland and Sonntag displayed aggressive language, accusing Eisler of a ‘reactionary and anti-national conception … that objectively serves to destroy the national dignity and national conscience of the German people’. And even though Eberhadt Klemm would later pronounce Eisler ‘the greatest composer of German proletariat, the founder of theory and practice of socialist realism in German music’,129 the composer was sidelined, and, as Joy Calico has argued, his fate even looked potentially dire in the context of the postwar purges in the Warsaw Pact countries.130 Amidst such chauvinistic prose, the charge that Eisler had failed to overcome the ‘influences of homeless cosmopolitanism’ deserves closer attention, for it points straight at Eisler’s migratory journey, and suggests that a migratory viewpoint shone through in the libretto. On one hand, the rejection of internationalism chimes with the tail end of the Zhdanovshchina, whose shadow still loomed large seven years after its inception. On the other, it points uncannily and, one can presume, unwittingly to the fact that the Faust project predates considerably the foundation of the GDR and, indeed, the proclamation of Andrei Zhdanov’s doctrine. Reaching back to discussions Eisler had had with Thomas Mann during their time together in Los Angeles, Johann Faustus, yet again, speaks of the position of the migrant. Peter Davies has suggested, convincingly, that the Faustus debate went beyond the enforcement of socialist realist formalism and has interpreted the harsh treatment of Eisler as a sign of weakness by a government that perceived it as a serious threat to its rule.131 Amidst the often-comical reference to historical German artists (Wagner) as well as mythical pre-national characters (Charon), Faust emerges as a waverer, unable and perhaps unwilling to be swept along with the wave of peasant (read: national) revolution. Eisler’s primary concern, namely the quest for a German identity, thus emerges as one that is fundamentally not based on blood or soil, but on an unstable and pre-national cultural history, and portrays not a communal concept of the national, but a highly individual struggle with it. Such approaches to what it means to be German align with those of Thomas Mann − it is hard to miss the similarities between Adrian Leverkühn and Johann

128 Ernst Fischer, ‘Doktor Faustus und der Deutsche Bauernkrieg’, Sinn und Form 6 (1952), 73. 129 Eberhardt Klemm, Hanns Eisler für Sie porträtiert (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1973), 31. 130 See Calico, ‘Eisler’s Comintern File’. 131 Peter Davies, ‘Hanns Eisler’s Faustus Libretto and the Problem of East German National Identity’, Music & Letters 81 (2000), 585−98.

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Faustus132 − and also those of Eisler’s erstwhile collaborator Adorno. As Max Paddison has argued, the American years not only reinforced Adorno’s refusal of the security of absolutes and a move towards incorporating the fragment as a structural element, but also led to a re-evaluation of the German Enlightenment and his own identity as a German, which emerges as fragile and unstable.133 Rather than championing GDR cultural identity politics, the Johann Faustus libretto positions itself in a place of the heterotopia of the migrant, at the centre of the nation but not completely of it, squarely and in full view of the national debate but constantly challenging it.

132 See Michael Gilbert, ‘“ Ich habe von einem Esel gelernt”: Eisler Pro and Contra Schönberg’, in High and Low Cultures: German Attempts at Mediation, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 72. 133 Max Paddison, ‘Adorno and Exile: Some Thoughts on Displacement and What it Means to be German’, in Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities, and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond, ed. Erik Levi and Florian Scheding (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 135−53.

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or twentieth-century music in the global West, institutions matter. They act as mediators and distributors of music, as commissioning bodies and as enablers of musical production. The economic power as well as cultural and socio-political capital afforded to and by musical institutions has widely been acknowledged by musicologists. Many studies respond to, or are based on, implicitly or explicitly, the pioneering work of scholars like Georgina Born, who has contributed perhaps the most powerfully formulated and in-depth assessment of musical institutions. As Born reminds us, institutions function as crucial actors in Western cultural organisation, re-inscribing and maintaining genre boundaries and seeking to legitimise their own cultural production, intent on preserving their status.1 Institutions, then, are not only enablers. They are also gatekeepers. They represent hubs of culture which artists who seek to promote their creativity must negotiate. If cultural institutions matter for musical life in general, they certainly do so for migrants. For immigrant artists, especially those arriving in a country as refugees or displaced persons, gaining a foothold in artistic circles is as vital as it is urgent. Migrant musicians rely on institutions not just for employment and economic opportunity. In aiding dissemination of their music, for example, cultural organisations can also be entry points for gaining social capital and acceptance. Nadia Kiwan and Ulrike Meinhof have emphasised the importance of hubs for migrants, which have the potential to provide fixed points along the network of migrant flows, creating a nexus of transnational and transcultural migration.2 Kiwan and Meinhof differentiate between spatial, human, and accidental hubs, encompassing key locations of departure and arrival such as capital cities, established international migrant networks and local migrant communities, and those created as a side effect of migration research itself. Of most interest for this chapter is the category of strategic hubs – concert organisers, non-governmental organisations, and cultural institutions – which, according to Kiwan and Meinhof, play a crucial role in helping migrant voices to be heard.

1 Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 2 Nadia Kiwan and Ulrike Meinhof, ‘Music and Migration: A Transnational Approach’, Music and Arts in Action 3:3 (2011), 3−20.

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There is no doubt that the most influential institution for music in Britain in the mid-twentieth century was the British Broadcasting Corporation. No musicological study on music in Britain over the last century or so is complete without paying at least some attention to the role of the BBC, an assessment that transcends boundaries of genre, class, and race.3 Right from its inception in 1922, the BBC deliberately and intentionally shaped the nation’s tastes, as Jenny Doctor has put it.4 As Tom Western has shown, the BBC was fully aware of its powerful position and conceived of itself as not just a preserver, but a creator of the nation in sound.5 Attempts to purify the nation from outside sonic interference were combined with institutional efforts to construct and reinforce what Josh Kun has termed an aural border.6 Based on Kun’s research, Western’s concept underpins this chapter’s discussion of the BBC as an institution struggling with the politics of sound. For it was perhaps inevitable that migrant voices had the potential to destabilise the status and endeavours of the institution, which therefore sought not necessarily to exclude them, but to control and contain them. In this chapter, then, I concentrate on the BBC’s paradoxical treatment of immigrant musicians. My focus is the case of Mátyás Seiber, introduced in the previous chapter, who arrived in the United Kingdom in 1935 and sought, like well-nigh all composers of the period, to establish a foothold in the BBC. I dissect in detail his involvement with the corporation and am interested in the seemingly inconsistent ways in which it benefited from Seiber’s expertise on the one hand and responded to his lobbying to have his works accepted for broadcast on the other. The corporation’s role was ambiguous, and an investigation of Seiber’s involvement with the BBC provides a representative insight into the paradoxical manner in which it handled his serious music and that of other immigrants. In addition, I portray the diversity of Seiber’s musical activities during the first years after his arrival in the United Kingdom, considering his involvement in London’s concert life, his teaching in Morley College, and several other activities. Seiber’s case illustrates well the workings of the institution in practice. As acts of bordering and silencing contrasted with offers of real opportunity, my focus on Seiber shows how the BBC functioned as a strategic hub for

3 Discussions of the BBC in scholarship on music in Britain are too wide-ranging for me to provide a bibliography here. One example of a study investigating popular music at the BBC during the period covered in this chapter is Christina L. Baade’s excellent book Victory Through Harmony: The BBC and Popular Music in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), which addresses class, race, and genre as key parameters. 4 Jenny Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922−36: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 5 Tom Western, ‘Securing the Aural Border: Fieldwork and Interference in Post-War BBC Audio Nationalism’, Sound Studies 1:1 (2015), 77−97. 6 Josh Kun, ‘The Aural Border’, Theatre Journal 52 (2000), 1−21.

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immigrants. Synchronously, I notice an inherent contradiction at play between the place of the BBC and the spaces it engenders. As a national public broadcaster, the BBC is an institution whose architectural and material presence renders it deeply fixed in a basic sense and, more abstractly, whose role it is to nationalise sound and secure the national aural border. At the same time, of course, radio waves are fundamentally and conceptually ephemeral. As is well known, the BBC operated an international and wide-ranging network of propaganda services during World War II, for example, which were effectively run by immigrants, thus transmitting a highly hybrid multitude of voices to global audiences while, at the same time, restricting these same voices from broadcasting to British listeners. This dichotomy itself is mirrored, as this chapter shows, in the BBC’s treatment of immigrant voices, which veered constantly between marginalisation and access, and which forms a backdrop to the wider context of what it meant to be an immigrant musician in 1930s and 1940s Britain. At the same time, it bears an uncanny similarity to the paradox of migration itself. On one hand, non-fixity is an inherent characteristic of migration. As it transcends places, migration creates creative spaces that destabilise essentialised national historiographies, as Homi Bhabha and many others have shown.7 But on the other, far from being perpetually confined to spaces of transnational uprootedness, migrants are also in places. They interact with them, negotiate them, contribute to them, and shape them.

Migrant Connections Migrant connections eased Seiber’s arrival, as they did for so many fellow migrants. Britain had not been his first-choice destination. Having been dismissed from his professorship at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt shortly after Hitler had seized power in an act of ethnic cleansing, Seiber had unsuccessfully tried to establish himself as a music journalist based in Admiral Miklós Horthy’s proto-fascist Hungary. For example, he unsuccessfully asked Sándor Jemnitz, one of the most respected Hungarian critics of the period, to get his Second String Quartet considered by the jury of the Hungarian section of the ISCM. But he was made to feel unwelcome in the country of his birth. Even when Seiber eventually moved to London in autumn 1935, Jemnitz rejected his offer to write reviews of London’s concert life for Népszava, the social democrat newspaper for which Jemnitz was music critic.8 Seiber, then, was not only displaced from Hungary physically, but silenced more profoundly. After World War II, Seiber’s name was effectively absent from Hungarian scholarship and criticism. Tellingly, one of the few Hungarian articles on Seiber, published 7 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). 8 I am grateful to Rachel Beckles Willson for examining the available Seiber−Jemnitz correspondence and for passing on this information.

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twenty-five years after this death, is entitled ‘The Forgotten Mátyás Seiber’. 9 During Seiber’s lifetime, only one short article on him was published in Hungary.10 Given Seiber’s relative success in the 1950s, during which he acted as First Vice President of the ISCM, for example, a Cold War agenda of ignoring former citizens who had migrated to the capitalist West may well account for this neglect. Instead, Seiber escaped to London, a flight that almost certainly rescued him from imprisonment in one of the Third Reich’s concentration camps. Seiber’s move to London was, of course, not his first migration from one country to another. However, while the outlook of moving to Frankfurt may have seemed promising and optimistic, the migration to Britain was, as it would turn out, a matter of life and death. The fact that 90 per cent of Hungary’s Jewish population was exterminated in the Holocaust leaves no doubt that Seiber’s life would have been endangered had he stayed in Central Europe. In migration studies parlance, as far as his move to Britain is concerned, the push factor considerably outweighed the pull factor. Upon his arrival, migrant connections provided the first port of call, as he found shelter with a friend from Frankfurt, fellow migrant Ernst Schoen, former Director of Frankfurt Radio, who offered Seiber a room in his apartment in north-west London. In economic terms, previous connections also proved useful. Soon after his arrival, his contacts with Schott’s German branch and Michael Tippett’s intervention with the Director of Schott in London, Hugo Strecker, and the Executive Manager, Max Steffens, secured him a post as a musical advisor. This was no unusual move. Several migrants found employment with music publishers. Ernst Roth, formerly at Universal Edition in Vienna, joined Boosey & Hawkes, and later became Managing Director and Chairman. Under Roth, Boosey & Hawkes published Bartók’s Second Violin Concerto, the Divertimento, and Mikrokosmos, amongst others. Alfred Kalmus, who had studied with Guido Adler and been Director of Universal Edition, went to London in 1936, and there founded Universal Edition London and the Anglo-Soviet Press. Kalmus helped promote the music of the Second Viennese School and, after the war, composers such as Boulez, Berio, and Stockhausen, but also British names like Birtwistle and Seiber’s pupil Hugh Wood. The third former Universal Edition exile was Erwin Stein, one of the first Schoenberg pupils and an enthusiastic advocate of dodecaphony. Like Roth, he joined Boosey & Hawkes in London and supported the music of Webern and his former teacher, whose Pierrot Lunaire he conducted twice during the war. For the time being, the post provided some small and music-related, if irregular, income for Seiber, and with the Schoens he knew some familiar faces. 9 János Breuer, ‘Az elfelejtett Seiber Mátyás’, Muzsika 28:10 (1985), 14−15. 10 György Ránki, ‘Seiber Mátyás 50 éves’ [Mátyás Seiber, 50 Years], Új Zenei Szemle 6:6 (1955), 45.

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To judge by his addresses, Seiber remained close to migrant circles for a considerable time. Despite early struggles, he eventually enjoyed relative economic prosperity in Britain and moved steadily up the property ladder. After his initial stay with the Schoens at 32 Belsize Park (London NW3), he moved to a small nearby flat at 156 Chiltern Court, a 1911-built estate in Baker Street, in April 1936, followed in December 1941 by a bigger one in 9 Belsize Square. London’s north-western areas, where Seiber lived from his arrival in 1935 until late 1947, particularly Belsize Park, Swiss Cottage, Hampstead, and Golders Green, were highly popular with European intellectuals. A common joke at the time suggested that shouting ‘Herr Doktor!’ in Golders Green would make countless European intellectuals in exile appear in surrounding windows and doors, and Hungarian émigré György Mikes wrote a satirical guide for foreigners entitled How to be an Alien, published first in 1946 by André Deutsch − another Budapest immigrant − that soon became a bestseller. On 12 April 1946 he married Lilla Bauer, a fellow Hungarian migrant, at London’s Marylebone Town Hall.11 In late November of the next year, 1947, the Seibers left north-west London and, in line with the well-trodden path of British middle-class suburbanisation,12 moved to a semi-detached house at 169 Stafford Road, Caterham, Surrey, just south of London, and from there they moved to a detached house, number 51 in the same road, in late May 1953. From the 1930s onwards and throughout the war years, numerous London organisations were set up to help refugees from fascism, and several more sought to provide employment such as teaching and performance opportunities. For example, Myra Hess, Adrian Boult, and Ralph Vaughan Williams formed the Musicians’ Refugee Committee, a support network for immigrant musicians. The committee’s main aim was to obtain work permits and oppose the policies of the powerful Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM), which, headed by George Dyson, Director of the Royal College of Music, had successfully lobbied to keep German and Austrian refugees from any form of musical employment. Vaughan Williams’s engagement no doubt seems surprising, given his well-documented lobbying against foreign musicians and his efforts to limit broadcast time of works by non-British composers on the BBC, on which I elaborate below.13 Adrian Boult’s role in the BBC’s ban on alien composers also suggests that his support of migrant musicians was not unconditional. Such paradoxes illustrate well the confusing cultural identity politics of the time, in which well-intentioned support of immigrants contrasted with 11 See ‘Marriages’, The Times, 13 April 1946, 1. 12 See Francis Thompson, The Rise of Suburbia (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982). 13 See Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’, in National Music and Other Essays, 2nd edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 158.

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efforts to withhold equal opportunities between native and migrant musicians. In the press, too, voices of support could be heard. The composer Ethel Smyth, who had studied in Leipzig in 1877, expressed her conviction in 1933 that Germany’s ‘lapse from civilization shown by the expulsion from Germany of Jewish musicians … is merely a passing phase of national madness … of which, ere long, all Germans will be ashamed’. 14 Several support organisations were also set up by migrant communities, such as the Free German League of Culture, the Austrian Music Association, the Free Hungarian House, and several more.15 Exile governments such as those of Hungary, Poland, France, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia organised cultural events and concerts that gave refugees a platform. And a number of bodies existed that did not primarily have migrants in mind, but, unlike hostile institutions such as the Royal College of Music, proved welcoming and open to their involvement, such as Morley College and the National Gallery concert series. All of these had their roles to play – and I mention several of them throughout this chapter – but there is no doubt that the most significant institution in this context was the BBC, which provided more employment opportunities than any other institution. Just like Mosco Carner, Berthold Goldschmidt, Pál Ignotus, Hans Keller, Eduardo Martínez Torner, György Mikes, Franz Reizenstein, András Révai, György Tarján, and Leo Wurmser, for instance, Seiber belonged to a large group of migrants whose abilities as musicologists, musicians, composers, and conductors were well respected and influenced the BBC’s broadcasts during the war, particularly in the overseas services.16 Much archival material exists that points to the BBC’s adeptness at procuring permits for relatively well-paid work for immigrants.17

14 Ethel Smyth, ‘Germany To-Day’, The Times, 27 April 1933, 8. 15 I have written about the cabaret performances at two of them, the Free German League of Culture and the Hungarian Londoni Podium, in ‘“I Only Need the Good, Old Budapest”: Hungarian Cabaret in Wartime London’, in Twentieth-Century Music and Politics, ed. Pauline Fairclough (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 211−30. 16 Carner (15 November 1904 – 3 August 1985) studied composition, piano, cello, and clarinet at the Vienna City Conservatory and musicology at Vienna University as one of Guido Adler’s last students. After posts as opera conductor at Opava and Gdańsk, he migrated to London in 1933. In his writings, Carner promoted the Second Viennese School, particularly Berg. 17 My main sources for Seiber’s role at the BBC are the Seiber related files held at the BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC) in Caversham, Reading. They include the four files RCont1 Matyas Seiber – Artists – File 1 (1941−1951), RCont1 Matyas Seiber – Artists – File 2 (1952−1961), RCont1 Matyas Seiber – Copyright (1943−1962), and RCont1 Matyas Seiber – Composer (1941−1962). Where quotations are not referenced in this chapter, they are taken from these files.

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Migrant Voices in the Margins From the mid-1940s onwards, Seiber could often be heard on the BBC’s European Service, the Home Service, and the Third Programme. The corporation regarded his musicological knowledge and expertise highly. Initially, however, employment was casual and saw Seiber on the margins of productions. In December 1941, for example, Seiber played the accordion for the German Service on a programme broadcast on 3 December, and in June 1942 he assisted Walter Goehr in conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in rehearsal for a programme broadcast on 10 June on the European Service. The notion of marginality matters here, for the records suggest that the BBC was at first reluctant to engage Seiber for home broadcasts. Only after two years, and some eight years after his migration, could he be heard by British listeners for the first time, when he spoke on the Home Service on 3 July 1943, in a so-called Interval Talk, for the fee of ten guineas. Comparable to programme leaflets in concerts, these short talks provided brief information on the pieces broadcast immediately before or afterwards. From the summer of 1943 onwards, Seiber gave several more Interval Talks, such as one on 24 January 1945 on Stravinsky’s Capriccio for piano and orchestra and Kodály’s Dances of Galanta. The bulk of his work, however, continued to be for foreign audiences. Including programmes in German and Hungarian, Seiber’s broadcasts for the European Service centre on Bartók (broadcast 5 October 1945), Kodály (amongst them an interview with Kodály, broadcast 10 and 16 October 1946), and Hungarian and other folk music (for instance on 6 December 1943, Seiber conducted twenty-five amateur singers from the London Hungarian Club, and in 1947 he authored a series of six programmes entitled ‘Hungarian Music Diary’), but also featured British composers, such as Benjamin Britten (12 July 1945) and Michael Tippett (31 January 1946). On 18 September 1943 Seiber suggested to Alec Robertson of the BBC’s Music Department some more extended programmes, on subjects such as Hungarian folk music, Bartók’s First and Second String Quartets, Kodály’s Háry János Suite, and sixteenth-century lute music such as that by Jean-Baptiste Besard, all with musical illustrations either on records or played live in the studio. Several BBC departments fell in with Seiber’s offer, and he subsequently gave extended talks in various programmes on the Home Service and Third Programme on subjects including Besard’s lute music (broadcast 14 March 1944 and 30 June 1949) and Mozart and light music (14 May 1944). Listeners seem to have liked what they heard. One listener, E. M. Hawkes, suggested in a letter to the BBC that Seiber’s ‘admirable talk’ on Mozart and light music be reprinted in the BBC’s journal The Listener. Seiber obliged.18 The main focuses in his talks, however, were Bartók, Kodály, and dodecaphonic music. For example, he spoke on Kodály’s Háry János Suite (22 May 1944) and Concerto for 18 Mátyás Seiber, ‘Mozart and Light Music’, The Listener 31:805 (1944), 673.

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Orchestra (24 February 1946), Bartók’s and Beethoven’s string quartets (28 December 1946), Bartók’s music generally (20 November 1949), tonality and atonality (8 April 1948), and again on twelve-tone music (24 June 1949). In 1946 he reported for the BBC from the first postwar ISCM festival in London, and in November 1951 and January 1952 he authored and spoke in a programme series dedicated to Schoenberg. While Seiber’s work for the BBC provided welcome music-related income and networking opportunities, it marginalised him as a composer. London’s concert life proved a similar challenge. In some ways, although Seiber initially experienced difficulties in finding permanent employment and mostly kept himself afloat with ad hoc jobs, he was soon involved in the capital’s musical circles.19 As in the case of the BBC, however, Seiber’s role was largely restricted to lectures, arrangement duties, or the writing of programme notes. Performances of his serious compositions can be traced only extremely rarely. Seiber’s first public appearance illustrates well the extent to which migrants like him led a double life, participating in public life on the one hand, and seemingly afforded centrality, but without being fully integrated, speaking from the margins. In 1938 London hosted the ISCM festival, providing a platform for the international musical avant-garde. The two-day conference ‘Music and Life 1938’ that aimed to discuss ‘the problems of contemporary music’ was organised by the British Section of the ISCM, the London Contemporary Music Centre (LCMC), in the course of the wider festival.20 It seems almost ironic that, with the exception of Ernst Hermann Meyer, who presented a memorandum on contemporary musical research, the conference organisers chose to isolate non-British speakers by placing them all in the same session on 28 May. The assigned session title, ‘Problematic Tendencies in Contemporary Music’, adds to a sense that foreign contributions to musical life were imagined as difficult and challenging. After Hanns Eisler (‘Twelve Note System’), Franz Reizenstein (‘Hindemith’s New Theory’), Mordecai Sandberg (‘Micro-Tonal System’), Alois Hába (‘Non-Thematic Composition’), and Erik Chisholm, the only British member of the panel, Seiber, the last speaker of the day, lectured on ‘Swing’. In its report about the conference, the Times mentioned only Chisholm, perhaps the least eminent of the session’s speakers (the article complained that his paper, ‘Folk Song in Contemporary Music’, ‘managed to go

19 In order to gain an insight into London’s concerts of that period, I have, amongst other sources, used the collection of programme leaflets from concerts in London by Ernst Henschel, who migrated to Britain in 1938, and the sixteen-volume collection by Myra Hess. Both are held by the British Library (shelfmarks Henschel and Cup. 404.c.1/1−11, respectively). Concert announcements and reviews in the Times have also been consulted. 20 The congress was held on 28 and 29 May 1938 in Queen Mary Hall; a programme leaflet is held by the British Library (shelfmark X.800/33521).

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round all the world but never mention English folk song’21), and ignored the foreign panellists. Seiber’s subsequent appearances were similarly marked by marginality. The next three programme leaflets that include his name list him once as the author of a short programme note (on Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, performed in Wigmore Hall on 21 February 1942 by the London Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Walter Goehr), and twice as an arranger. In 1939 he contributed to the pageant Music and the People, which was performed in the Royal Albert Hall on 1 April and conducted by Alan Bush as part of the ‘Festival of Music for the People’. The programme booklet does not feature Seiber in the list of composers, instead relegating him to the role of arranger and orchestrator of Episode 2 of Part 1 of the pageant, ‘The Massacre of the Innocent‘, composed by Victor Yates, and ‘The Gétry Ballet’, and a section of Episode 6 of Part 2, ‘Changing Europe’, with music by Norman Demuth. Seiber did not keep the arrangements amongst his personal papers. The second time he appears as an arranger in a programme leaflet is for a National Gallery concert on 21 February 1941, where fellow Hungarian immigrants Louis Kentner and Ilona Kabos performed Seiber’s arrangement for two pianos of ‘Popular Song’ from William Walton’s suite Façade, which he had made in or before 1939, when Oxford University Press published it. It is hard not to read these concerts as anything other than examples of a context in which migrants may have been allowed to mount the musical stage, but only to arrange, orchestrate, or perform native British music. For the time at least, their own voices remained silent. To a certain degree, this sense of isolation worked both ways. Most music by migrant composers could be heard in migrant circles themselves. The Music Section (André Asriel, Ernst Hermann Meyer, Peter Stadlen, and Ingeborg Wall) of the Free German League of Culture, for example, organised ‘Modern Chamber Music’ programmes that included (unidentified) compositions by Seiber in several concerts from 1941 onwards, alongside works by Ludwig Brav and Berthold Goldschmidt.22 Likewise, one of the first concerts including a 21 ‘Music and Life Congress: Public Attitude to Modernism’, The Times, 30 May 1938, 21. 22 See the concert announcement in Freie Deutsche Kultur (London) 1:3 (1942). Jutta Raab Hansen mentions three further concerts in 1942, one in 1941, one in 1943, and one in 1944. See Raab Hansen, NS-verfolgte Musiker in England (Hamburg: von Bockel, 1996), 286. Seiber seems not to have been involved in activities of the Austrian Musicians Group, which later changed its name to Anglo-Austrian Music Society (AAMS) and still exists under this name. For an account of the history of the FGLC see Ulla Hahn, ‘Der Freie Deutsche Kulturbund in Großbritannien: Eine Skizze seiner Geschichte’, in Antifaschistische Literatur: Programme, Autoren, Werke, ed. Lutz Winckler (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1977), vol. 2, 131–95, and Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove, Politics by Other Means: The Free German League of Culture in London 1939−1946 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010). The volume is

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Seiber composition was organised under the auspices of the Association of Free Hungarians in Great Britain and the London Hungarian Club and held in London’s Queen Mary Hall on 18 December 1943. Entitled ‘A Concert of Hungarian Music’, it featured pianist Ilona Kabos, violinist Eda Kersey, clarinettist Frederick Thurston, and the Blech String Quartet with performances of Bartók’s Contrasts for violin, clarinet, and piano, Kodály’s Second String Quartet, Leó Weiner’s Second Violin Sonata op. 11, and Seiber’s Divertimento for clarinet and string quartet, composed some one and a half decades earlier. Migrant organisations were particularly successful with their cabaret programmes, which combined political messages with light entertainment and attracted audiences in their thousands.23 Such events, popular though they may have been amongst migrant communities, were largely secluded from native British audiences, however, and did not aid integration into the country’s musical life more widely.

Banning Migrant Voices Perhaps it was inevitable that the BBC’s uneasy compromise of employing immigrants for its European Service while largely excluding them from significant contributions to the Home Service would some day be scrutinised. Many in the British musical establishment had long been critical of the BBC’s lack of programming of British music, as they perceived it, especially during Edward Clarke’s time at the corporation. Well networked internationally, Clarke had been an advocate of the European avant-garde, especially Schoenberg, until his seemingly accidental resignation in 1936. In 1940 an open letter signed by a who’s who of the British musical establishment severely attacked the BBC for not playing enough music by ‘our own native [British] composers [and] by using so much foreign copyright music sending considerable sums of money out of the country‘.24 Adrian Boult, conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, was an expanded version of a book chapter by the same authors, ‘The Continuation of Politics by Other Means: The Freie Deutsche Kulturbund in London, 1939−1946’, in‘I didn’t want to float; I wanted to belong to something’: Refugee Organizations in Britain 1933−1945, ed. Anthony Grenville and Andrea Reiter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 1−25. 23 See Scheding, ‘“ I Only Need the Good, Old Budapest”’. On the FGLC’s cabaret programmes specifically, see Reinhard Hippen, Satire gegen Hitler: Kabarett im Exil (Zurich: Pendo-Verlag, 1986), 107−23; Hugh Rorrinson, ‘German Theatre and Cabaret in London, 1939−45’, in Theatre and Film in Exile: German Artists in Britain, 1933−1945, ed. Günther Berghaus (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 47−77; and Jörg Thunecke, ‘“ Das hübscheste sind die Lieder”: Allan Gray’s Contribution to the FDKB Revue Mr Gulliver Goes to School’, in Theatre and Film in Exile, 79−97. 24 Frederic Austin, Granville Bantock, Thomas Dunhill, Theodore Holland, John Ireland, Sidney Jones, Constant Lambert, Martin Shaw, Ethel Smyth, and Ralph

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tasked to write a reply. Aiming to justify the BBC’s programming, he referred to ‘an average of ten performances of British works of a serious character (excluding works of smaller genre, songs, etc.) each week’ that had been played during the previous six months, an equivalent of 18 per cent of the total output of serious music, and, since the outbreak of the war, numerous songs, choral and piano works, as well as thirty-nine pieces of chamber music, eleven of which were repeated.25 In the field of light music, as Boult also stated, pieces by British composers amounted to 43 per cent. The signatories of the complaint, however, were not satisfied and remarked that ‘out of every twenty-two hours of serious music provided today eighteen hours are given over to the foreigner! It is inconceivable that any fair-minded listener will consider this to be an adequate recognition of native music.’ 26 The BBC caved in. Boult agreed that ‘no sums of money, considerable or inconsiderable, are passing out of this country as copyright royalties to anyone in enemy countries or in countries occupied by the enemy’.27 Shortly afterwards, a short note informed the public that the BBC would exclude ‘music by composers of Nazi sympathies and old works that can be interpreted in terms of modern Germany’, such as Brahms’s Triumphlied and Wagner’s Siegfried, from its programmes. Furthermore, all vocal works from now on had to be sung in English.28 By the time the measure was made public, in November, the decision had in fact been taken several months earlier, in June 1940, during the exchange of open letters.29 It coincided with a request by the ISM to refrain from broadcasting music with German and Italian copyright. Interestingly, the ISM recommended that such decisions should not be communicated publicly. The Performing Right Society, too, voiced its support. Indeed, the ban enacted by the BBC internally far exceeded what had been made public. Rather than blacklisting only Nazi-affiliated music, the BBC banned all music copyrighted in Germany or Austria. The fact that exceptions were made for British composers with music copyrighted abroad suggests the corporation’s preparedness to apply double standards and indicates that the copyright argument was a pretext for more ideological arguments. Instead, rather than a blanket ban, internal and confidential lists were compiled and circulated amongst editors Vaughan Williams, ‘The BBC and British Composers’, The Author 50:4 (1940), 111. 25 Adrian Boult, ‘The BBC and British Composers’ (first reply), The Author 51:1 (1940), 9. 26 Frederic Austin, Granville Bantock, Thomas Dunhill, Theodore Holland, Martin Shaw, and Ethel Smyth, ‘The BBC and British Composers’ (reply to A. Boult’s first reply), The Author 51:1 (1940), 10. 27 Adrian Boult, ‘The BBC and British Composers’ (second reply), The Author 51:2 (1940), 29. 28 Ralph Hill, ‘Radio Music’, Radio Times, 1 November 1940, 7. 29 Regarding the BBC’s dealing with ‘enemy aliens’ and the ban on Austrian and German composers see WAC, RCont1 27/3/5 – Music General – Alien Composers.

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that named specific composers whose work were not to be broadcast. Initially this included 73 Austrian and 239 German composers; later, in August 1940, the numbers increased to 117 Austrians and 248 Germans. Disturbingly, about a quarter of all banned composers were refugees from fascism, as Jutta Raab Hansen has shown.30 In many cases, the BBC blacklist included the same names that could be found on Nazi lists of degenerate music. Kurt Weill, Ernst Toch, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Arnold Schoenberg, Felix Weingartner, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hanns Eisler, and Paul Hindemith, for example, were migrant composers who were blacklisted at some point. Several more lived in Britain, such as Egon Wellesz, and, absurdly, some were actually employed by the BBC, such as Berthold Goldschmidt. That composers such as Alban Berg and Gustav Mahler featured on the list testifies to an approach that was, at best, insensitive. At worst, the inclusion of Jewish composers in an exercise which claimed to aid the fight against Nazi Germany testifies to an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in British musical life, which Annegret Fauser has noted with regard to Edward Dent, for example, who wrote casually anti-Semitic letters to Alban Berg during the 1920s.31 Internal records show that several BBC editors criticised the ban on alien composers but obeyed it loyally. The BBC loosened the ban somewhat in March 1941 and allowed several programme editors to use works of ‘enemy composers’ if they could prove that there were no alternatives available by British composers or composers of ‘friendly nations’, or non-copyrighted works. Paradoxically, while Italian composers were removed from the blacklist with the end of the war, the ban on German and Austrian composers continued to exist and was only gradually removed. On 3 July 1945 Kenneth Wright wrote in an internal note: it is not anticipated, however, that there will still be a general release on works by German and Austrian composers. … It is hoped, however, to revise the list, so that works by composers who died before the Nazi regime, or who were not connected with the regime, will be free for inclusion.32

Presumably, the change in policy implied in Wright’s note was a gradual process. I have been unable to discover a record in the BBC’s archives that suggests that the blacklisting ever officially ended.33 30 See Raab Hansen, NS-verfolgte Musiker in England, 197. 31 Annegret Fauser, ‘The Scholar behind the Medal: Edward J. Dent (1876–1957) and the Politics of Music History’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139:2 (2014), 235−60. 32 WAC, RCont1 27/3/5 – Music General – Alien Composers – File 5: 1945. 33 A former employee of the BBC who wishes to remain anonymous informed me that the list was in existence during the 1970s. Shocked to find a relative on the list, the employee threatened to resign, upon which the name in question was removed

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Such practices of silencing migrant voices happened in a public discourse in which, on the whole, Britain publicly presented herself as hospitable to refugees. For example, in 1933, a group of twenty prominent British scientists urged the government to make it clear that those whose intellects are to be accounted as among the finest in Germany to-day and who, simply because they happen to be Jews, are being dismissed from their posts, would find here safe refuge and opportunities for continued scientific activity.34

The British administration was more cautious in its declaration, but did not officially close the door to immigrants: We do not … admit that there is a ‘right of asylum’ but when we have to decide whether a particular political refugee is to be given admission to this country, we have to base our decision … on whether it is in the public interest that he be admitted.35

Internally, matters were different. Between 1933 and 1945 almost seventy composers went to Britain, as did some four hundred musicians.36 Amongst them were Berthold Goldschmidt, for example, who went to Britain in 1935, and Leopold Spinner, a pupil of Paul Pisk and Anton Webern who emigrated in 1939 and now worked as a lathe operator in a locomotive factory and as a music copyist to make ends meet. Musicians had never been the most welcome refugees, and in March 1938, in the wake of the Anschluss and the year of the ‘Degenerate Music’ exhibition, the Foreign Office decreed ‘minor musicians and commercial artists of all kinds … as prima facie unsuitable’ for entry.37 As from the blacklist. I have not been able to verify this account but see little reason to doubt it. 34 A. B. Appleton, Joseph Barcroft, F. W. Rogers Brambell, H. M. Carleton, F. A. E. Crew, W. A. Fell, Alan W. Greenwood, John Hammond, Julian S. Huxley, D. Keilin, F. H. A. Marshall, W. C. Miller, Geo. H. F. Nuttall, Michael Pease, F. R. Petherbridge, Cresswell Shearer, Arthur Walton, J. T. Wilson, H. E. Woodman, and John R. Barker, ‘Jews in Germany’, The Times, 26 April 1933, 12. 35 Quoted in Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, eds, Exiles and Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997), 387. 36 See Erik Levi, ‘The German Jewish Contribution to Musical Life in Britain’, in Second Chance: Two Centuries of German–Speaking Jews in the United Kingdom, ed. Werner Mosse, Julius Carlebach, Gerhard Hirschfeld, Aubrey Newman, Arnold Paucker, and Peter Pulzer (Tübingen: Mohr, 1991), 279, and Raab Hansen, NS-verfolgte Musiker in England, 19. 37 Circular of the Foreign Office, 27 April 1938, PRO FO 372/3284/9, quoted in Bernard Wasserstein, ‘Britische Regierungen und die deutsche Emigration

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Germany’s annexation of Austria eradicated hopes that the Nazi regime would be short-lived, and Britain faced a refugee crisis, attitudes hardened further. In 1939, 63,000 refugees entered the United Kingdom, bringing the total number to over 80,000.38 Now the British government hoped that the migrants would not stay and sought to assure the British public that they would not become a drain on public resources.39 With the beginning of the war in 1939, a tightening in British immigration policy took place, with the Churchill government effectively seeking to prevent refugees from entering the country in the first place. Now attention turned to those already on British soil, and it is clear that the government explored effective ways of removing them from public life and, ideally, from the country. After the fall of France in 1940, all foreigners, particularly Austrians, Germans, and Italians, became suspect, and tribunals were set up to establish whether any of them might be covert agents seeking to prepare the ground for Nazi invasion. Tribunals were set up across the country to assess the cases of 73,800 refugees. Despite recommendations to intern only 600 of them, less than 1 per cent of the total number, and despite public assurances that foreigners would not be interned in late 1939, Churchill decided to have all male adult Germans, Austrians, and Italians interned in the summer of 1940.40 Colin Holmes estimates that ‘22,000 Germans and Austrians finished up in camps, as did 4,300 Italians.’ 41 Several were forcibly moved to Canada and Australia, a deportation in which about 175 German and almost 500 Italian refugees lost their lives on 2 July 1940, when the Arandora Star was bombarded and sunk by German U-boats on its way to Canada.42 Amongst the interned was Karl Rankl, for example, a pupil of Schoenberg and Webern, who had immigrated to Britain in 1939 and now found himself imprisoned amongst 15,000 others in one of the three internment camps on the Isle of Man. A famous story has it that Norbert Brainin, Sigmund Nissel, von 1933−1945’, in Exil in Großbritannien: Zur Emigration aus dem Nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1983), 54. 38 See Paul Tabori, The Anatomy of Exile (London: Harrap, 1972), 335. 39 For an overview of the dealing with the refugee crisis during World War II in Britain see Colin Holmes, ‘British Government Policy towards Wartime Refugees’, in Europe in Exile: European Exile Communities in Britain, 1940−1945, ed. Martin Conway and José Gotovitch (Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), 11−34. 40 See Peter and Leni Gillman, ‘Collar the Lot!’ How Britain Interned and Expelled its Wartime Refugees (London: Quartet Books, 1980), François Lafitte, The Internment of Aliens (London: Libris, 1988), and Richard Dove, ed., ‘Totally un-English’? Britain’s Internment of ‘Enemy Aliens’ in Two World Wars (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). 41 Holmes, ‘British Government Policy towards Wartime Refugees’, 20. 42 See Mark Donnelly, Britain in the Second World War (New York: Routledge, 1999), 48.

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and Peter Schidlof, three-quarters of the later Amadeus Quartet, met as internees. Peter Stadlen, another imprisoned refugee, recalls his internment in the camp in the Huyton district of Liverpool and his subsequent deportation by the British authorities to Australia, which was eventually reversed after one and a half years, thanks to Ralph Vaughan Williams’s interceding.43 While Stadlen highlights the experiences of other displaced musicians, he downplays his own hardship and paradoxically agrees with his own internment, ‘because above all else, I wanted Hitler to lose the war, and, after all, eventual spies might very possibly have posed as refugees’. 44 Stadlen’s gratefulness towards Britain, the country that had saved his life, may explain this reluctance to denounce the political actions of his host’s former government. His casual and almost apologetic narrative seems to be marked by self-censorship, and the account contrasts with Hans Gál’s report of his internment in his diary, which became available in English translation some seven decades after it was written. Gál’s detailed descriptions of poor healthcare, inadequate food and shelter, fear, and uncertainty about loved ones conjure up a vivid picture of displacement camps in mid-twentieth-century Britain.45 Much scholarly work remains to be done as archival records have only recently become available and are incomplete. It is unclear, for example, whether Seiber’s case was assessed and, if so, whether he was amongst the interned. The relevant archival documents may be inaccessible or are perhaps lost; but the internment of other Hungarian migrants, such as author György Mikes in 1940 on the Isle of Man, for example, suggests that the authorities did not exclude Hungarians from their operations. By the summer of 1942, most internees had been released. Even so, the environment for immigrants was toxic and affected their everyday experiences of life as refugees.

Home versus Foreign While it is unclear whether Seiber’s case was assessed by a tribunal for internment as an enemy alien, he was not included on the BBC’s list of blacklisted composers. Even so, the treatment he received by the institution suggests a practice of tacit and selective blacklisting, which scheduled his works for 43 Peter Stadlen, ‘Österreichische Exilmusiker in England’, in Österreichische Musiker im Exil, ed. Monica Wildauer (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1990), 125−33. 44 ‘da ich vor allem wollte, dass Hitler den Krieg verliert und weil doch etwaige Spione sehr wahrscheinlich als Flüchtlinge posieren würden’. Stadlen, ‘Österreichische Exilmusiker in England’, 128. 45 Hans Gál, Musik hinter Stacheldraht: Tagebuchblätter aus dem Sommer 1940, ed. Eva Fox-Gál (Bern: Lang, 2003). For an English translation, see Hans Gál, Music Behind Barbed Wire: A Diary of Summer 1940, trans. Anthony Fox and Eva Fox-Gál (London: Toccata Press, 2014). My review of the translated version was published in Music & Letters 97:2 (2016), 360−2.

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broadcasts to foreign listeners but prevented them from reaching British audiences. Although it was his desire to have his music broadcast in Britain to promote his credentials as a composer, the BBC almost exclusively transmitted Seiber’s works on the European Service, where numerous works by migrant composers could be heard. These broadcasts on the European Service afforded migrants a considerable role in Britain’s propaganda war abroad; but they could hardly promote those same composers in Britain. To be considered for the Home Service, composers had to submit their works to a reading panel. On the surface, the BBC’s process of selecting new works seems straightforward and unbiased. If the panel approved a work, it was suggested for broadcast. Nonetheless, the number of works by immigrant composers accepted by the panel between Hitler’s takeover in 1933 and one year after the war, 1946, was negligible. During these years, only six non-chamber compositions by foreign composers were accepted and broadcast. Two of them were orchestrations or arrangements of other works, Hans Gál’s orchestration of Schubert’s Divertissement (broadcast 8 November 1939) and Seiber’s arrangement of Four Greek Songs for soprano and string orchestra (1 February 1945), while the other four can be categorised as light music: Ernst Toch’s Bunte Suite (broadcast 8 January 1934; Toch migrated to the United States in the same year), Fritz Hart’s Fantasy: Cold Blows the Wind (25 September 1936), and Karol Rathaus’s Serenade (30 October 1936) and suite The Lion in Love (13 May 1938). Large numbers of composers went entirely unheard. Works by composers like Berthold Goldschmidt, Franz Reizenstein, Ernst Hermann Meyer, Leo Wurmser, Artur Willner, and Walter Goehr were rejected.46 During World War II, then, the BBC may have employed scores of migrants, mostly in the European Service, but did not broadcast a single original orchestral work by an immigrant to British audiences. Seiber’s case is in many ways representative of those of other immigrant composers. For example, Franz Reizenstein’s and Berthold Goldschmidt’s efforts to have their works accepted for broadcast were declined in a similar manner.47 After the success of Seiber’s Second String Quartet at the ISCM festival in New York in 1941 – it was, as Seiber reported to the BBC, successful enough to receive a second performance during the festival – Seiber hoped that 46 See Raab Hansen, NS-verfolgte Musiker in England, 174−6. It should be noted that because of paper rationing during the war, and presumably because not all documents were considered worth archiving, the BBC’s records are very sketchy. As programmes were often changed at the last minute, timetables published in the Radio Times do not give conclusive evidence as to which musical works were actually broadcast. Even so, the broadcast of music by an immigrant composer was such a rare occurrence that it is not likely that many such occasions have been forgotten. 47 See WAC, RCont1 Berthold Goldschmidt – Composer – File 1 – 1940−1962 and WAC, RCont1 Franz Reizenstein – Composer – File 1 – 1940−1954.

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the BBC might be interested in a broadcast of the quartet on the Home Service.48 This made sense because the quartet had been submitted by the British section of the ISCM as the official British entry alongside Britten’s Les Illuminations, even though Seiber was, at the time, not a British citizen. Strikingly, while the work was considered appropriate to represent the nation in sound abroad, the BBC’s panel prevented it from reaching British listeners.49 When Seiber submitted the Divertimento for clarinet and string quartet, with an endorsing note citing performances in Bad Pyrmont, Bern, Budapest, Frankfurt, Munich, and Paris, the BBC lost the autograph score and only returned it to Seiber after over a year. The corporation had different guidelines for what it wished Britain to sound like abroad and at home, to foreign and native audiences. European broadcasts, for example, proved consistently more diverse, with more immigrant voices on air. In June 1943 Seiber’s Serenade for wind sextet was rejected for broadcast on the Home Service, despite a broadcast on the European Service of the same work three months earlier. In his efforts to have his works broadcast to British listeners, it is noticeable that Seiber submitted ever lighter music until, in 1944, he proffered, somewhat cynically, his incidental composition Transylvanian Rhapsody for salon orchestra, portraying himself almost like a Hungarian cliché. Like all other submissions, the rhapsody, which had previously been broadcast on the European Service, was rejected as unsuitable for broadcast on the Home Service. While Seiber was invited to talk about Jean-Baptiste Besard’s lute music on the Home Service, and did so on 14 May 1944, his own arrangements of a selection of Besard’s collection, the two Besardo Suites, were likewise rejected. Even non-broadcast publicity proved unattainable. Seiber’s efforts to have his Phantasy for cello and piano reviewed in one of the corporation’s music magazines were unsuccessful, even though a recording of the piece was due for release by Decca the following year. On 3 December 1945 the first concert with works exclusively by Seiber was held in London’s Wigmore Hall. In a letter of 20 November 1945, Felix Aprahamian of the London Philharmonic Society invited

48 The programme of the ISCM concert in the New York Public Library on 21 May 1941 (Anton Webern’s Fourth String Quartet, Rene Leibowitz’s Second Piano Sonata, Paul Dessau’s Les Voix de Paul Verlaine à Anatole France, 7 Piano Pieces by Artur Schnabel, and Seiber’s Second String Quartet; see ‘Contemporary Festival’, New York Times, 4 May 1941, X8) was repeated in its entirety on 26 May 1941, except for a piano sonata by Viktor Ullmann replacing the Leibowitz sonata (see ‘Programs of the Week’, New York Times, 25 May 1941, X6). 49 It received its British première eight years later, on 5 March 1949, in a LCMC concert in the RBA Galleries, London, where the Amadeus Quartet performed it alongside Benjamin Frankel’s Fourth String Quartet. Eric Harrison played Tippett’s Piano Sonata and P. Morgan’s Suite for Piano in the same concert (see ‘Concerts & c.’, The Times, 5 March 1949, 8).

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members of the BBC Music Department to attend the concert. An internal note suggests that nobody went. By this point, Seiber, like other migrants, had only infrequently featured in London’s concert life, as I have described above. Of course, venues were stifled during World War II, with concert halls closed because of the blackout during the blitz. One institution welcoming migrant musicians was the National Gallery, where Myra Hess organised a series of affordable lunchtime concerts (the admission price was one shilling). They were continued throughout the war and until early 1946 in the main hall of the empty National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, with all paintings having been moved to safety in Manod Quarry in North Wales. As labour restrictions and refusals for work permits during the war made it almost impossible for non-British citizens to find paid work as musicians, ventures such as these concerts represented rare opportunities for migrant musicians and composers to perform and have their music heard. ‘In the concert hall’, as Erik Levi puts it, ‘only relatively few German and Austrian exiles managed to secure employment in various orchestras up and down the country. Younger and lesser known artists were prevented from accepting engagements until they obtained naturalisation papers after the war.’ 50 Seiber gave a pre-concert talk on 7 May 1945 on Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet, which was performed by the Zorian String Quartet, but London audiences could hear several of his compositions there, too. Programme leaflets reveal that these concerts were often dominated by recent arrivals from the European Continent, featuring performers such as Maria Lidka, Ilona Kabos, Louis Kentner, and Walter Goehr.51 With the launch in 1946 of the BBC’s Third Programme, which aimed specifically to reach highbrow audiences, Seiber hoped that his music might now have gained a platform for broadcasts and re-submitted his Second String Quartet. His hopes were disappointed, however, and the quartet was rejected. So, too, was the Fantasia Concertante for violin and string orchestra, which had been selected as the British entry for performance at the ISCM festival in Palermo in 1949. In a letter dated 4 April 1949 to Herbert Murrill, then in the 50 Levi, ‘The German Jewish Contribution to Musical Life in Britain’, 291. 51 Besides the above-mentioned Walton arrangement, Seiber pieces performed at the National Gallery were the Serenade for wind sextet (LPO Wind Ensemble, 4 June 1943), the Phantasy for cello and piano (Edward Silvermann and Margaret Good, 19 July 1943), Six Yugoslav Folksongs (Morley Choir conducted by Tippett, 11 November 1943), Four Hungarian Folksongs for two violins (Maria Lidka and Stefan Krayk, 27 September 1944), and the Sonata da Camera for violin and cello (Lidka and William Pleeth, 19 February 1946). In 1944 Seiber and Goehr collaborated on an arrangement of J. S. Bach’s Art of Fugue for orchestra. The arrangement was premiered by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Goehr, in London in 1944. See Seiber and Goehr’s booklet J. S. Bach, ‘The Art of the Fugue’ – a Guide to the New Concert Version by Walter Goehr and Matyas Seiber (London, 1944).

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BBC’s Music Department, Seiber gave expression to his anger, issuing a fairly open accusation that he was being discriminated against. I think it is a rather sad state of affairs that a work cannot be broadcast even in the Third Programme because there is supposedly too small an audience for it. I always thought that this is exactly about which the ‘Third’ need not worry! … Here is the strange case that a work [the Second String Quartet] which was good enough to be selected first by the British, then by the International Jury and performed at an ISCM Festival; a work which is played by the Roth Quartet in America, by the Gertlers in Brussels, by the Tatray [sic] quartet in Budapest, by the Lenzevsky Quartet in Germany, cannot be broadcast in the country where I live and work. … Heaven knows, I have written enough works, which, far from being ‘radical’ or ‘dissonant’, are immediately attractive and effective. … But not even those works are ever being broadcast here, although again, they are more frequently played abroad. … I don’t think I am given to suffering from persecution mania, but I feel something must be wrong somewhere, otherwise I cannot explain this continual neglect of my works by the BBC.

A week and a half later, on 13 April 1949, Murrill sent a diplomatically worded response, stating that ‘that there is no resistance here against the broadcast performance of your works [and] we try not to discriminate against any particular style or composer’. But the decision stood. Mosco Carner, meanwhile, lobbied the head of the Music Department, Steuart Wilson, to broadcast Seiber’s cantata Ulysses on the Third Programme and complained that ‘the BBC has taken hardly any notice of Seiber’. All the same, the cantata, undoubtedly the biggest success of Seiber’s career on the international stage (see Chapter 4), was rejected by the panel on 21 September of the same year. And there is evidence that resistance to it was robust. Members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra who had already started rehearsing the work, for a concert organised and sponsored by the LCMC, were ordered to cancel their involvement because of its rejection by the reading panel. As far as the BBC was concerned, it seems that, for whatever reason, Ulysses was not to reach a British audience.

Internal Bordering While the BBC Music Department considered Ulysses too progressive for broadcast, members of the Drama Department lauded it widely and specifically stated that it triggered its commission from Seiber for the incidental music for the radio play Faust. In addition to authoring music-related programmes and appearing on air, Seiber repeatedly composed music for radio plays for the BBC’s Home Service and Third Programme, performances of which he often also conducted for broadcast. Economically, composing incidental music was profitable. For Faust, he received 600 guineas from the BBC’s Drama

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Department. Faust is one of over thirty pieces of incidental music that Seiber wrote for the BBC, which also include compositions such as The Saga of Grettir the Strong (broadcast 27 July 1947), Johnny Miner (23 December 1947), The Two Wicked Sisters (19 July 1948), The Christmas Child (19 December 1948), and The Marvellous Shoemaker’s Wife (2 July 1954). Indeed, Seiber’s broadcast production was almost entirely focused on light and serious music in the decade following his migration in 1935, and the BBC’s continual rejection of his more progressive works even in the postwar period gave him little cause to change his output. Anti-modernist attitudes were common beyond the BBC, of course. Despite the efforts of younger composers like William Walton and Benjamin Britten, Elgar’s late Romantic pathos and the Celtic nationalism of Arnold Bax largely epitomised British musical style at this time, and little had changed since London’s Royal College of Music had refused Britten a grant to study with Berg in Vienna in the early 1930s. The anti-modernism of institutions such as the Royal College of Music, paired with the lack of performance opportunities, led many composers to leave Britain soon after their arrival, amongst them Kurt Weill, Ernst Křenek, Ernst Toch, Karol Rathaus, Erich Katz, and Hanns Eisler, mostly for the United States. Others, such as Berthold Goldschmidt, Egon Wellesz, Hans Gál, Franz Reizenstein, Karl Rankl, Peter Stadlen, Louis Kentner, and Seiber, remained and eventually became British citizens. The rejection of music that had been performed and broadcast (on occasion) before their migrations had devastating effects on many composers. Hans Gál, in England since 1938, and Berthold Goldschmidt stopped composing for long periods, and Egon Wellesz, who had studied under Guido Adler and Schoenberg, had been Professor of Music at the University of Vienna, and was seen as one of Austria’s leading composers, did not write any music from his migration in 1938 until 1943. Seiber’s first years in Britain were likewise characterised by a reduction in composing progressive works. The emphasis, instead, lay on light and incidental music. Despite this volume of production, Seiber’s own attitude towards his incidental music suggests that he did not regard these pieces as representative of his ambitions as a serious composer. An analysis of his autograph scores reveals clear differences between the handling of incidental and serious musical material. In contrast to the compositions that Seiber called ‘my more “abstract” works’, 52 of which there are numerous sketches and carefully handwritten fair copies in his meticulously organised papers, the body of his light, incidental, or functional music is incomplete. He obviously did not consider such works worth keeping or archiving for his own records. In contrast to the precise script in the autographs of the serious works, in the surviving manuscripts of his incidental works the handwriting is often slack; most scores were evidently written 52 Mátyás Seiber, ‘Folk Music and the Contemporary Composer’, Recorded Folk Music 2:4 (1959), 9.

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down in a rush. While his serious works tend to include start and completion dates in the fair copy, there are no dates in the scores of the incidental music. Indeed, information on Seiber’s light music in the surviving autograph scores is sparse, without mention of the commissioner or commissioning body, which incident, film, or radio play the music was composed for, or the date, place, or occasion on which the work was premiered − despite the successes that the composition of incidental music brought him, such as the song ‘By the Fountains of Rome’ to lyrics by Norman Newell, which Edmund Hockridge recorded in 1956 and for which Seiber received an Ivor Novello Award in the same year in the category ‘outstanding song of the year, musically and lyrically’. Despite Seiber’s own categorisations, it may seem two-dimensional and overtly monolithic to draw a sharp line between incidental and serious music. Grey areas of overlap do exist, and boundaries between light and serious music cannot be clear-cut. Faust is an example of this blurring between highbrow and lowbrow. By far Seiber’s largest composition for radio in scale, the radio music for Faust, a series of six programmes with a duration of over six hours altogether, was broadcast on the Home Service in November 1949, billed as a radio drama. If he wanted recognition as a serious composer, however, Seiber needed a stand-alone piece on the Third Programme, and correspondence suggests that he felt that Faust might fit the bill: not too progressive, but serious enough. He arranged two excerpts of the radio music, the songs ‘There was a King in Thule‘ and ‘My Peace is Gone’, for soprano and piano or harp for the publisher Augener and turned a further number of extracts into a FaustSuite for soprano, tenor, mixed choir, and orchestra, which was published by Edizioni Survini Zerboni of Milan. Much to his shock, however, the BBC informed Seiber that he had to submit the Faust-Suite to the reading panel for consideration, even though the material had already been broadcast by the corporation. Predictably, the panel considered it unsuitable for broadcast, judging it too long. A shortened version was also rejected soon thereafter. Seiber furiously requested a private meeting with Wilson, and sent him a waspish letter on 27 September 1949 in which he, once again, brought up the Ulysses case. I find here a strange discrepancy between the various sections of the BBC; on one hand I hear that a whole series of broadcasts is planned on Joyce, including his later and much less comprehensible works, whilst on the other hand the musical side shrinks even from this passage which compared with the later works is perfectly straightforward. And this 30 years after ‘Ulysses’ was written, by which time I should have thought it has been universally recognised as a great work. I really cannot understand this. Then, the music. I can only repeat that there is nothing extraordinary or difficult about it; it is not one of those devilish, twelve-tone-ish and ‘atonal’ pieces. It is perfectly tonal, expressive and romantic music. I suppose I should be really quite proud that the LCMC support my work as strongly as you write; most members of their Committee have actually heard the work whilst people inside the BBC

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who seem to be against it, have not. And this is something I am afraid of: When you have your run-through it will be probably be attended again by the same people who ab ovo don’t like the piece, and so I am starting off with a great disadvantage, and with a prejudice against my work. So here again: the Drama Dept. chose me because they thought that certain qualities in my music would make good broadcasting, whilst the Music Dept. doubts whether my music is ‘broadcastable’. … Why not give me a chance, at last?

It is noticeable that Seiber employs a white lie. Ulysses is, in fact, dodecaphonic, even if it is tonally inflected. (I discuss the piece in some detail in Chapter 4.) Seiber’s prose seems to pay lip service to an environment which made composers like him feel that there existed an anti-modernist bias. Seiber made this feeling explicit in an article, which, perhaps ironically, had been published some years earlier in the BBC journal The Listener: Today, our society is anything but stable, and a serious composer often feels that his music is not needed, that his aims in composing run contrary to the wishes of society. So he has the choice either of continuing to express what he wants to express with the danger of isolating himself more and more and ending in a vacuum − or of turning to the composition of music for his living, in which case the writing of serious music often becomes a hobby − a very unhealthy state of affairs. What the composer needs is … to have a purpose to write for, to know that this work is wanted.53

For the first time, fifteen years after his migration and three years after he acquired British citizenship, Seiber’s insistence proved successful. Ulysses was eventually broadcast on 27 April 1950 and the Faust Suite on 17 and 18 February 1952, both on the Third Programme. Herbert Murrill wrote Seiber a short congratulatory note but made sure to include a back-handed compliment, with a whiff of anti-Semitism: ‘You are a very energetic salesman!’ Internally, the opposition persisted, with Murrill stating in a note to Leonard Isaacs, Head of Music for the Third Programme, on 11 September 1950 that he still considered the panel’s ruling on Ulysses to have been correct. After the BBC’s refusal to consider any of his compositions for the Proms in 1951, Seiber gave up his efforts to have his works broadcast by the BBC. In a letter to Isaacs written on 21 November 1951, he categorically stated that he would never again ‘submit to this humiliating procedure’. An internal BBC note of two days earlier, 19 November 1951, from Isaacs to the reading panel on Seiber’s Third String Quartet, Quartetto Lirico, which later received the South African Award of the ISCM at the 1955 Baden-Baden festival, sums up the BBC’s attitude towards Seiber’s progressive music: ‘I have the greatest respect for his workmanship and

53 Seiber, ‘Mozart and Light Music’, 673.

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the quartet’s shapeliness on paper is undeniable. But its sounds are such that I cannot swallow them – he does not seem to mind what it sounds like.’

Instituting Centrality Despite these battles, Seiber actively supported the performance of new music, and his advocacy of Bartók and Schoenberg in print and on air can be read as a promotion by proxy of his own artistic language. And against the background of the power held by institutions such as the BBC over the country’s musical life, it seems poignant that Seiber decided to found, and co-found, new musical bodies. In 1945 he founded the Dorian Singers, an ensemble specialising in the performance of pre-Classical and contemporary music, and in 1943 he co-founded the Committee for the Promotion of New Music, which changed its name to Society for the Promotion of New Music in 1970. Part of the LCMC, the committee aimed to organise public performances and promote acceptance of contemporary music. Even though it was founded on 22 January 1943 as a British organisation under the auspices of the Musicians’ Union, its scope was pronouncedly cosmopolitan and internationalist. Its founding statutes specify the organisation’s aim to ‘get in touch with all composers … who are living in this country’. 54 The words ‘British’, ‘Britain’, and any other terms referring to nationality are avoided. Even though Seiber and Chagrin, who acted as secretary-organiser, were the only non-British-born members in a committee of twenty-one, they exerted considerable influence, as did Mosco Carner and Walter Goehr, who joined the organisation soon after its foundation.55 Indeed, Benjamin Wolf has argued that the committee was effectively founded by Chagrin and, for the most part, run by him in its early years.56 But the committee was not set up as an émigré aid organisation like the Musicians’ Refugee 54 Parts of the founding statutes are quoted in Mátyás Seiber, ‘The Committee for the Promotion of New Music’, in Music of Our Time, ed. Ralph Hill and Max Hinrichsen (London: Hinrichsen, 1944), 181. 55 Francis Chagrin (15 November 1905 – 10 November 1972) was born in Romania and studied in Paris under Boulanger and Dukas. In 1936 he migrated to London. During the war Chagrin worked for the BBC French service. His works include light compositions for theatre and film and some serious music, amongst them two symphonies. Besides Seiber and Chagrin, the founding members of the committee were, in alphabetical order, William Alwyn, Barbara Banner, Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten, Edric Cundell, Roy Douglas, Howard Ferguson, Arnold Goldsborough, Sidney Harrison, John Ireland, Leonard Isaacs, Gordon Jacob, Constant Lambert, Muir Mathieson, Sidney Northcote, Clarence Raybould, Thomas Russell, Michael Tippett, and William Walton. Ralph Vaughan Williams and Arthur Bliss acted as Honorary Presidents. 56 Benjamin Wolf, ‘Promoting New Music in London, 1930−1980’, PhD dissertation, Royal Holloway University of London, 2010, 261.

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Committee or the Free German League of Culture. Instead, several members of Britain’s musical establishment acted as founding members, even though some of them seem to have acted as patrons rather than being involved in the organisation’s day-to-day running. These included figures who elsewhere were lobbying for a restriction of migrant voices on the nation’s soundscape, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, who acted as Honorary President and once referred to the committee as the ‘Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to New Music’. 57 John Ireland and Constant Lambert, signatories of the open letter requesting that the BBC limit broadcast time of composers born outside Britain, were founding members, as was Leonard Isaacs, later head of the BBC Third Programme. It is noticeable that the committee’s selection process in many ways mirrored that of the BBC, and on some levels it seems to have been more rigorous. Submitted compositions had to go through one of five juries and, upon the latter’s recommendation, the committee’s main reading panel. If both bodies recommended the piece, it was performed in fortnightly concerts held initially in the Polytechnic’s Fyvie Hall in London. Following the concerts, members of the audience were invited ‘to express freely their impressions and to offer constructive criticism’. 58 The committee then recommended the best-received pieces to concert-giving organisations, record companies, and the BBC. And yet, despite the organisational similarities, the diversity of works chosen for performance contrasted sharply with those selected for broadcast by the BBC, specifically regarding migrant composers. Wolf argues that works selected in the 1940s and 1950s testify to the committee’s commitment to diversity and cover a wide array of styles and idioms from romanticist tonality to serialism. Combined with the increasingly well-established connections with university music departments and other institutions, the committee, as Wolf points out, offered a well-defined career path for postwar composers.59 The concert programmes in the early years of the committee regularly provided a stage for migrant musicians (Seiber mentions cellist Sela Trau, violinist Max Rostal, and pianists Ilona Kabos and Franz Osborn, amongst others), but also migrant composers (such as Berthold Goldschmidt, Louis Kentner, Erich Katz, Franz Reizenstein, Vilém Tausky, and Seiber himself ).60 A list of nine works suggested for recording to Decca in 1944, for example, which includes Franz Reizenstein’s Prologue, Variations, and Finale for solo violin and Seiber’s Phantasy for cello and piano, as well as a look at the works selected for performance by the committee, bears witness to the committee’s commitment to be inclusive of both 57 Quoted in Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 257. 58 Seiber, ‘The Committee for the Promotion of New Music’, 183. 59 Wolf, ‘Promoting New Music in London, 1930−1980’, 161−88. 60 Seiber, ‘The Committee for the Promotion of New Music’, 182.

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British and non-British composers. Decca accepted the recommendation and, sponsored by the committee, released a recording of Seiber’s Phantasy for cello and piano in 1945 with cellist William Pleeth and pianist Margaret Good. And Seiber invited the musical establishment to spread the word: All composers should come to know of the Committee’s work and thus realise that their colleagues are prepared and anxious to help them in their struggle for recognition. This knowledge, it is hoped, will create a greater feeling of fraternity amongst composers and the consciousness that together they have a part to play in society.61

Seiber’s involvement in the Committee for the Promotion of New Music afforded him the institutional power that he was subjected to elsewhere. In so doing, it presented him with socio-cultural capital that translated into a more central involvement in Britain’s musical circles. Seiber’s case, of course, is not isolated, and several migrant musicians moved from marginality to an increasing centrality, and in many cases it was institutions that acted as catalysts for such social mobilities. Hans Gál, for example, lectured at the University of Edinburgh following his internment as an enemy alien in 1940, and Egon Wellesz taught at the University of Oxford. Such examples show, however, that, in many cases, it was the teaching and scholarship of migrants that afforded them centrality, rather than their compositions. Erik Levi has highlighted how Wellesz, while well respected in Britain as a scholar of Byzantine music, was almost entirely ignored as a composer and his works were, instead, overwhelmingly premiered and recorded in Austria, the country of his birth.62 This situation is mirrored in British music scholarship, which overwhelmingly excludes immigrant composers from narrativisations of British music, as I have shown elsewhere.63

Portfolio Careers Seiber, too, made his name in Britain principally as a teacher rather than a composer, even if he arguably started his teaching career at the margins of institutional life. As the former teacher at one of Germany’s most prestigious German conservatories, he had hoped to land a similar position in Britain. His intermittent teaching for the British College of Accordionists, then based 61 Ibid., 183. 62 Erik Levi, ‘Egon Wellesz – British or Austrian Symphonist?’, Twentieth-Century Music 15:3 (2018), 458−66. 63 Florian Scheding, ‘Who is British Music? Placing Migrants in National Music History’, Twentieth-Century Music 15:3 (2018), 439−92.

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in Store Street in London’s Bloomsbury, would no doubt have seemed like a comedown. Founded in 1936 by Albert Davison and Otto Meyer, Chairman of Hohner Concessionaires Ltd (a company selling accordions and scores and teaching material for the instrument), the college aimed primarily to foster the sale of accordions. It sought to provide ‘a cultural and academic opportunity for accordionists to improve their abilities and musicianship through examination’, 64 and employed a panel of teachers and examiners that included, besides Seiber, James Reilly and Conway Graves.65 In a letter to the editor of the Musical Times, F. O. E. Hill, a pupil in 1938 and 1939, remembers Seiber’s teaching: I was one of a small class and under his guidance we played his clever arrangements for three accordions; we also learned a good deal about composition. … During this period Seiber wrote all his compositions for the accordion under the nom de plume G. S. Mathis.66

Seiber had used this pseudonym, Geo S. Mathis, on a handful of occasions before his flight from Hitler, for example for the educational Virginia Stomp in the appendix of his Schule für Jazz-Schlagzeug.67 He reserved the pseudonym for functional and educational compositions, in the hope that his name as a serious composer of avant-garde music would not be associated with those pieces. In Britain, as Seiber began to accept commissions of orchestrations, arrangements, and incidental music, the usage of his pseudonym grew rampantly. Hohner commissioned numerous arrangements for accordion ensembles in late 1930s and early 1940s Britain, and Seiber became a prolific, if incognito, contributor to the accordion repertoire. His commissions ranged from an arrangement of Mozart’s Rondeau alla Turca from the Piano Sonata K.331, entitled Turkish March (c.1938), for one accordion, to an arrangement of 64 ‘A Brief History of the College’, available on http://www.accordions.com/bca/ history.htm (accessed 24 July 2018). Seiber’s first name is misspelled ‘Matthyas’. 65 A trumpeter and violinist, James Reilly (1886−1956) led one of the first jazz bands in his native Canada, in Guelph, 1920−25, and won medals for solo playing in Ontario. As Captain at the Canadian Royal Military School of Music, Reilly also founded the Elmdale Harmonica Band, which won several national competitions. Like Seiber, Reilly had migrated to London in 1935. Like Seiber, the accordionist Conway Graves published an accordion tutor (The First Step: How to Play the Piano Accordion, London: Keith Prowse, 1934) and arranged numerous canonical works for the instrument, from Bach to Bizet. 66 F. O. E. Hill, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Musical Times 111:1534 (1970), 1219−20. Hill mentions a composition by Seiber for accordion orchestra, entitled Spring, which he describes as ‘a kind of tone poem’, and remembers a public performance of the piece, in which he participated. I have been unable to locate a copy of the score. 67 Virginia Stomp for clarinet or saxophone, piano, and drums, in Schule für JazzSchlagzeug (Mainz: Schott, 1929), 62−9.

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the overture of Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia for three accordions with double bass and timpani ad libitum. (c.1938). In addition, he authored a ten-volume tutor for amateur accordionists, The Mathis Method of Piano Accordion Playing, which was published in London in 1938 by Hohner, also under the pseudonym Geo S. Mathis. Other commissions for incidental and popular music included his arrangements and pieces for salon orchestra for Schott, London, such as his own light composition Evening in the Puszta: Hungarian Fantasy (c.1936) and an arrangement of Eric Arthur Smith’s Dance of the Midgets (c.1939), amongst others. Seiber’s fortunes changed when Michael Tippett invited him to join the staff at Morley College in 1942. Founded in 1889 as an institution providing evening classes for working adults, Morley College had acquired a reputation for its music department, particularly with Gustav Holst’s appointment as Director of Music from 1907 to 1924. (Arnold Goldsborough and Arnold Foster succeeded Holst.) After German bombs had destroyed the college’s main building on 15 October 1940 and student numbers had dropped significantly, from 3,300 in 1939 to 2,000 in 1940, Arnold Foster resigned from his post. In the same month, October 1940, the principal, Eva Hubback, appointed Michael Tippett to rebuild the college’s musical life. Tippett re-established the choir, which quickly grew from eight singers in 1940 to thirty by the 1941/42 season and to over seventy after the war.68 After the South London Orchestra had disbanded because of the disappearance of its rehearsal accommodation in Morley College, a new orchestra was founded, and tickets for the monthly concerts in the college’s small Holst Memorial Room became increasingly sought after. The several ensembles (various choirs and orchestras existed, such as the Morley College String Players and the Morley College Orchestra) soon acquired a considerable reputation, above all with performances of pre-Classical music (particularly Purcell, Gibbons, Dowland, Monteverdi, and J. S. Bach), and participated regularly in London’s concert life, for example on numerous occasions in the National Gallery, Friends’ House in Euston Road, and Wigmore Hall. Along with additional engagements for the BBC, such outside earnings were a welcome support of the college’s shaky finances.69 68 See Ian Kemp, Michael Tippett: The Composer and his Music (London: Eulenburg, 1984), 43. 69 In a letter to Evelyn Maude on 15 August 1943, Tippett mentions that the Morley Choir ‘will earn 20gns from BBC for the Seiber recording’ (Michael Tippett, Those Twentieth Century Blues: An Autobiography, London: Hutchinson, 1991, 154). I have not been able to identify evidence for this particular broadcast, but figures were similar when Seiber conducted twenty-five amateur singers from the London Hungarian Club for the BBC in December 1943 with fees of 20 guineas for Seiber and 10 guineas for the choir. The programme, which included two groups of Hungarian folksongs, was broadcast on 6 December 1943, 10.30−11am, on the European network.

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Tippett introduced several new music classes and invited numerous immigrants to fill vacant positions and join ensembles. As Ian Kemp puts it, ‘Morley became strikingly cosmopolitan.’ 70 Its support of such large numbers of ‘enemy aliens’ did not go unnoticed. Tippett recalled that Vaughan Williams sent a disapproving letter to Eva Hubback, ‘but she stood firmly behind me and the reputation of Morley’s music grew apace’. 71 Walter Bergmann, an expert in Baroque music and figured bass who taught recorder classes and conducted, Walter Goehr, and Seiber were amongst the teaching staff.72 Migrant musicians such as Norbert Brainin, Paul Blumenfeld, Peter Gellhorn, Maria Lidka, Siegmund Nissel, Suzanne Rozsa, Peter Schidlof, Jani Strasser, Ilse Wolf, and Leo Wurmser joined the college’s orchestras or vocal ensembles – some temporarily, others permanently – or acted as soloists. In 1944 Tippett announced that Seiber, who was already giving lectures which were arranged to link up with the monthly concerts, would start a composition class.73 It is clear that Tippett regarded the musical migrants as a treasure trove and sought to draw on their training and expertise. In a letter to Benjamin Britten from May 1943, for example, he speaks highly of Seiber, while also mentioning the latter’s hopes for employment in his host country: I’ve suddenly realised the place for Seiber. Give him autocratic control of a composer-craftsman group to meet regularly, … to discuss all matters arising out of the craft of composing at the present time. Analysis of major works, criticism of younger stuff etc. Open to anyone young or old interested in self-education of that order. Seiber has long wanted and hoped for this.74

Morley College concerts frequently included contemporary music. With its focus on new and pre-Classical music, the college’s enterprising programmes 70 Kemp, Michael Tippett, 43. 71 Tippett, Those Twentieth Century Blues, 115. 72 Bergmann (24 September 1902 − 13 January 1988) studied piano and flute in Leipzig and law in Halle and Freiburg. Having been imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1938, he emigrated to London. After his arrival, he was interned on the Isle of Man. As an editor at Schott, Bergmann promoted Baroque music, particularly Telemann, which he also performed as a harpsichordist. Goehr (28 May 1903 − 4 December 1960) had been a pupil of Schoenberg and conductor for Berlin Radio. After his migration, he promoted his former teacher’s music and that of Eisler amongst younger British composers and, as a conductor, premiered several contemporary works by British composers. Goehr himself composed incidental and chamber music and a symphony. 73 Michael Tippett, ‘Music at Morley College’, in Music of Our Time, ed. Ralph Hill and Max Hinrichsen (London: Hinrichsen, 1944), 148. 74 Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, ed. Thomas Schuttenheim (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 193.

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represent an exception in London’s concert life, which was otherwise dominated by Classical and Romantic canonical works. Tippett tried out several of his new compositions in the Holst Memorial Room, such as the Concerto for Double String Orchestra, Schoenberg featured on concert programmes, and Stravinsky’s Les Noces was repeatedly performed in the college, which also hosted the British premiere of Dumbarton Oaks. Crucially, in addition to employing migrants, the programmes made no discernible distinction between British and non-British composers, offering the arrivals a public platform that was otherwise largely unavailable in the British capital. Leo Wurmser’s Clarinet Quintet (on 15 January 1944) and Seiber’s Pastorale and Burlesque for flute and string orchestra (5 December 1942) as well as Ulysses (14 May 1949) were premiered by Morley ensembles. The migrants were well aware of the exceptionality of Tippett’s non-xenophobic attitude, an awareness that is perhaps best summarised by Ilse Wolf. ‘We all fled to Morley, even half-bombed-out, because it was a haven where we could feel happy.’75 Rather than ghettoising migrant musicians, however, the open-minded atmosphere also drew prominent figures of contemporary British musical life to the college, and thus acted as a hub for migrants to establish and foster connections beyond their peers. For example, Seiber probably first met Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears at Morley College, as well as the Amadeus Quartet, three of whose members played in the college’s ensembles (Brainin, Nissel, and Schidlof ). Seiber composed his Third String Quartet, the Quartetto Lirico, for the Amadeus Quartet, and wrote several works for Pears, amongst them the tenor part of Ulysses. And it is the latter work, Ulysses, which forms part of the focus of the next chapter.

75 Quoted in Roger Lucas, ‘Ilse Wolf: “A Way of Life”’, More 1:2 (1975), 4.

4 Singing Exile of Progress and Nostalgia

‘M

odern Western culture’, Edward Said has famously argued, ‘is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees.’ 1 Said references Hannah Arendt’s point that those on the most marginal fringes of societies, refugees, occupy a paradoxical centrality and suggests that migration, as a human condition, influences, reflects, and can be traced in the arts, for example. Indeed, it seems to be a truism that music dealing with migration, speaking of it, performing it, or bearing traces of it abounds. With Homer’s Odyssey, the dawn of European literature breaks with the story of a migrant, and that of music, too, for the Odyssey was recited. And it seems safe to assume that migrants, or those who experience exile or some sort of displacement, whether physical or virtual, might be driven to reflect on their situation creatively. But it is equally obvious that it would be too simplistic to label every work by a migrant composer migratory music, just as it is clear that conceptual engagements with migration, exile, and diaspora are not the sole domain of migrants. How, then, does migration manifest itself in music? How, if at all, can it be traced, and what are the premises for tracing it? As I have argued elsewhere, much writing engaging with the music of migrants or diasporic communities takes the migratory premise for granted and sometimes fetishises it.2 Besides the implicit danger of thus disempowering artists as human beings unable to rise beyond their migratory status, assuming music to be diasporic because its author is or was a migrant at the time of the creation of the work (and consequently arguing that it confirms the author’s migratory status) is problematic logically. It takes the outcome of analysis for the process of analysis. Even though such a debate may appear old hat, it is worthwhile to briefly discuss the relation between a migrant composer’s biography and the analysis of their works on a theoretical level to form a methodological basis for this chapter, before focusing on some specific compositions. Given the well-established premise of contextuality and performativity in musicological discourses over the last thirty years or so, musical analysis has more and more turned to addressing the existence or appearance of music within its performative

1 Edward W. Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 173. 2 Florian Scheding, ‘Who is British Music? Placing Migrants in National Music History’, Twentieth-Century Music 15:3 (2018), 439−92.

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contexts, frequently positing hybridities and cautioning against essentialisations.3 Much of musicology has shifted from ontological to phenomenological approaches. Indeed, our discipline has largely agreed on the notion that the interrelatedness of the metaphysical conditions of music, such as its connectedness with cultural practices in which it does or does not directly participate, ‘is a striking metonym for music’s ontologies’. 4 Much of the New Musicology, historical though it now is as a movement, understood music as a speech act, a performative social process, with a changing meaning constructed by, and depending on, its contextual setting. In some sense, I apply this principle to the present study, and acknowledge that if one wants to understand whether an artwork reveals traces of migration, one has to understand in which context, with whom or what, it dialogues and how it goes about doing so. Understanding then means understanding why a particular argument or move is made. Such an approach seems crucial when addressing migration’s aesthetic manifestations. For, as Jill Bennett has argued, migratory aesthetics may not be a unified or identifiable style, but rather a strategy that foregrounds transitional politics. As a series of performative speech acts, migratory art is full of surprises and unexpected collisions, saturated with the potential to invert tradition and question our understanding of it.5 If migration destabilises meaning and provides a critique of authenticity in the process, it also performs individual and collective identities, as Simone Krüger and Ruxandra Trandafoiu have put it.6 Intentionality, to reference another well-trodden field of debate of the New Musicology, therefore matters here, for the intended meaning of the composer cannot be the principal factor in this analysis. An artist can always say ‘more, less, or something else than he would mean’, or, even though we know about the intended meaning through sketches, letters, publications, personal notes, and so on, convey it unsuccessfully, or reconsider, or mean more or less than analysis can reveal or one can detect, or mean something that words cannot express, or mean something and 3 For an overview that led to this development and some of the surrounding methodological debates see Jim Samson, ‘Analysis in Context’, in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 35−57. See also Nicholas Cook, ‘Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance’, Online Journal of the Society for Music Theory 7:2 (2001), available online at http://www.societymusictheory.org/mto/issues/mto.01.7.2/ mto.01.7.2.cook.html (accessed 18 August 2018). 4 Philip V. Bohlman, ‘Ontologies of Music’, in Rethinking Music, 34. 5 Jill Bennett, ‘Migratory Aesthetics: Art and Politics Beyond Identity’, in Art and Visibility in Migratory Culture: Conflict, Resistance, and Agency, ed. Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 107−26. 6 Simone Krüger and Ruxandra Trandafoiu, ‘Introduction: Touristic and Migrating Musics in Transit’, in The Globalization of Musics in Transit: Music Migration and Tourism, ed. Simone Krüger and Ruxandra Trandafoiu (New York: Routledge, 2013), 15−16.

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not be aware of it, or not mean anything.7 Intentionality, that is the ontological notion of the intention of the author, differs from meaningfulness, that is the phenomenological notion of the meaning of the artwork. This does not, of course, render the intention of the composer irrelevant. Indeed, recent historicist tendencies in our discipline have questioned the commitment to anti-intentionalism of the New Musicology and argued for a more moderate approach.8 The author’s intention, then, be it conscious, subconscious, or unconscious, is one aspect of the material that nurtures the artwork’s ontological genesis, its coming into existence, but need not necessarily affect its phenomenology. This means that the question as to whether it was Eisler’s, or Seiber’s, or Anhalt’s intention to transmit or convey to us traces of exile or migration in their compositions, whether in a concealed or more obvious manner, is not irrelevant to the analysis of their works, but it isn’t the primary factor either. As mentioned above, the migrant status of an artist is not a sufficient condition to assign migratory labels to their output. The presupposition of biographical experiences as the sole determinant of creative output is as absurd as it would be to suggest that every minute experience faced by creative artists is likely to shape their art. Admittedly, migration is not a minute experience. Still, at every life stage, composers can keep composing the same way, or change their approach or style, or stop composing, or return to composing, for any number of reasons, or without any reason that readily reveals itself. Speculations that a composer might not have composed a particular piece of music if he or she had not had to go into exile necessarily remain hypothetical. The absurdity of linking the exile situation of a composer with the ‘exileness’ of the music becomes particularly apparent in cases when the composer eventually re-migrates or naturalises in the host country. Seiber’s naturalisation in 1948, for instance, did not interrupt the hybridity of his creative processes and imply that, suddenly, nothing composed after this date is affected by his migratory journey. While the act of migration, then, is a necessary condition to call someone a migrant, a composer’s biography is not the starting point or basis from which to approach the work, even if migration is the hallmark of the biography. In other words, while every piece of music written by a migrant is just that, a composition by a migrant, not everything composed by a migrant bears traces of migration. The creative work of migrants is as little trapped in migration as that of non-migrants exhausts itself in stasis. If the biographical data of a composer do not suffice as an indicator for migratory traces in a composition, what does? What is migratory, diasporic, or exilic music, and in what contexts? Can analysis trace migration? Is ‘exile/diaspora/migration music’ an appropriate term at all? When faced with migration, 7 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, rev. edn, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 158. 8 See, for example, Nina Penner, ‘Intentions in Theory and Practice’, Music & Letters 99:3 (2018), 448−70.

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generalisations are all but impossible, so much so that Mieke Bal introduced the notion of migratory aesthetics as a non-concept that circumscribes possible relations with the migratory rather than pinpointing them.9 Michael Beckerman has suggested that traces of exile manifest themselves deep in the middle of musical texture.10 What I do in this chapter, therefore, is investigate some immanently compositional processes and narratives and listen intently for traces of migration. I do this in two stages. First, I debate a work that seems to wear its engagement with exile and displacement on its sleeve, Seiber’s setting of parts of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In addition to the novel’s evocative central themes as the quintessential story of homelessness and wandering, compositional details evidence an attempt to unify ostensible opposites. Indeed, the endeavour to bridge what Homi Bhabha has called the ‘difference within’, to fill a void, is a hallmark of Seiber’s setting. References to an unusually wide array of compositional techniques, past and present, abound. If these varied references to traditional styles may indicate an eclectic approach and engender hybridity, the work is held together by the consistent use of serialism, which is itself imbued with semblances of tonality. As Brigid Cohen has shown, such dialectic strategies that portray a commitment to modernism are not unique to Seiber and transcend artistic and genre boundaries. Indeed, she has suggested that, for several artists, migration engendered a renewed commitment to modernism and, alluding to Said, opens her potent book on Stefan Wolpe with the suggestion that much of modernism itself was the work of migrants.11 Lydia Goehr has called the dialectic interplay between interwar modernism specifically and a much wider set of reference points the doubleness of exile and suggested that it marks the works of several migrants.12 Following my investigation of Seiber’s Ulysses setting, I turn to several other Seiber works, before eventually addressing a work by a further musical migrant, István Anhalt, who moves into full focus in Chapter 5. What emerges is that as migrants, both composers, Seiber and Anhalt, re-focused their employment 9 Mieke Bal, ‘Lost in Space, Lost in the Library’, in Essays in Migratory Aesthetics: Cultural Practices between Migration and Art-Making, ed. Sam Durrant and Catherine Lord (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 23−35. 10 Michael Beckerman, ‘Ježek, Zeisl, Améry and the Exile in the Middle’, in Music and Displacement: Diasporas, Mobilities and Dislocations in Europe and Beyond, ed. Erik Levi and Florian Scheding (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 43−54. 11 Brigid Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. See also Cohen, ‘Diasporic Dialogues in Mid-Century New York: Stefan Wolpe, George Russell, Hannah Arendt, and the Historiography of Displacement’, Journal of the Society for American Music 6:2 (2012), 143−73. 12 Lydia Goehr, ‘Music and Musicians in Exile: The Romantic Legacy of a Double Life’, in Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 66−91.

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of certain compositional avant-garde idioms, notably that of the Schoenberg School. Rather than participating in the feverish reconstruction of the musical avant-garde following World War II in Paris, Darmstadt, and elsewhere, however, the music by Seiber and Anhalt emerges as displaced, locatable in a space of migratory heterotopia. While reading these strategies as statements of conviction to modernism, I identify signs of melancholy to an interwar Central European cultural milieu and argue that these are references from the heterotopia of migration to a space akin to what Svetlana Boym has termed reflective nostalgia. For Boym, reflective nostalgia goes beyond individual consciousness, instead providing a ‘relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory’.13 Analogously, the works I discuss in this chapter turn perceived aesthetic stabilities into stagings of musical openness and flexibilities − synchronically progressivist and yet nostalgic, cosmopolitan and displaced and yet saturated with geographically and historically locatable individual and collective memories. They thus engender a migratory culture that extends beyond specific diasporic communities of the kind discussed in Chapter 1 and, instead, point towards a broader, more collective phenomenon of musical responses to migration in the mid-twentieth century.

The Archetypal Wanderer Seiber’s cantata Ulysses for tenor, mixed choir, and orchestra is his best-known work and the one that achieved the widest recognition. Reginald Smith Brindle named it a textbook example of serial composition, and, while Roman Vlad’s suggestion that the composition had guaranteed Seiber ‘the attention of the musical world’ may seem somewhat of an overstatement from a twenty-first-century perspective, it does imply the status Seiber held as a composer in the mid-twentieth century.14 At its premiere at Morley College in London on 27 May 1949, performed by Peter Pears and the Morley Choir and Kalmar Orchestra directed by Walter Goehr, it was received with considerable interest and reviewed with cautious approval.15 Soon afterwards, it garnered several international broadcasts and performances, mostly in Western Europe. The first German broadcast, for example, was on 30 June 1951 on the German

13 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xvi. 14 Reginald Smith Brindle, Serial Composition (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 14; Roman Vlad, ‘Mátyás Seiber: Ulysses, Besardo Suite N. 2, Due Canti dal Faust di Goethe’, La Rassegna Musicale 22 (1952), 58. See also John Weissmann, ‘Mátyás Seiber: Style and Technique’, The Listener 45:1151 (1951), 476; L. Ábel, ‘Seiber és az “Ulysses”‘, Irodalmi Ujság 9 (1958); and Seiber pupil Hugh Wood, ‘The Music of Mátyás Seiber’, Musical Times 111:1531 (1970), 888−91. 15 See ‘Central Hall: Ulysses’, The Times, 28 May 1949, 2, and ‘Morley College Concert Society’, Music Survey 2:1 (1949), 57.

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Südwestfunk. Despite such initial successes, the work soon disappeared from concert programmes, maybe because plans to release it as a recording did not materialise.16 The score was out of print for nearly half a century and unavailable as performance material.17 While discussed beyond their circles, the work clearly struck a chord with Seiber’s fellow migrants. Mosco Carner and Hans Keller, for example, wrote of Ulysses with admiration, labelling it a masterpiece.18 The topos of exile is identifiable from different angles in Seiber’s cantata. First, there is the choice of the subject matter. Albert Camus and James Joyce were two of Seiber’s favourite authors, and it is no coincidence that both were migrants whose works encircle estrangement, displacement, and exile in modernity.19 Camus’s La Peste, for example, is staged in an urban setting but portrays the disintegration of civil communitas and contemplates the isolation of the protagonist in a city ridden by the plague. Pre-empting Camus’s topos of the isolated urbanite is Joyce’s Ulysses, a work first published in Paris by an Irish-born writer who lived in Trieste, is buried in Zurich, and wrote in English, acknowledging the loss of the native Irish language of his birthplace. Joyce’s novel is maybe modernism’s most prominent example that deals with exile and displacement, concerning both literary form and narrative content. The title of the book indicates a journey with a desperate longing for arrival at someone’s true but ultimately lost home. As the son of a Hungarian Jewish immigrant and an Irish protestant, the protagonist of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, is othered by his fellow Dubliners. who accuse him of indifference to the Irish national cause and subject him to anti-Semitic ridicule. Born in Ireland’s capital, Bloom is, in many ways, a true Dubliner, who has never left the city by 16 June 1904, the day the book’s narrative unfolds. Even so, he is a foreigner at home, an experience that is 16 The National Sound Archive, London, holds two recordings of Ulysses, one with tenor Gerald English and Rudolph Schwartz conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Dorian Singers, the other with tenor Alexander Young and Erich Schmid conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Ambrosian Singers. Both recordings are undated, but the latter was broadcast by the BBC on 9 May 1966. On behalf of the British Council’s Music Department, its director John Cruft gave financial reasons for the council’s decision to record Seiber’s Elegy for viola and small orchestra and the Three Fragments from ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ rather than Ulysses (see Cruft, ‘Recording Seiber’, Musical Times 102:1415 (1961), 42). In 2015 the Lyrita label issued a BBC recording from 1972 with Alexander Young, the BBC Chorus, and the London Symphony Orchestra directed by David Atherton. 17 For the present study I have consulted the autograph score held by the British Library, shelfmarks Add. MS 62810, Add. MS 62811, and Add. MS 62861, and a vocal score published by Schott in 1948. 18 Mosco Carner, ‘Matyas Seiber and his Ulysses’, Music Review 12 (1951), 105−12; Hans Keller, ‘Mátyás Seiber and his Twelve Notes’, The Listener 51:1311 (1954), 669, and ‘A Master’s Piece’, The Listener 80:2062 (1968), 450. 19 See Dezső Keresztury, ‘Mátyás Seiber’, New Hungarian Quarterly 2:2 (1961), 172.

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paradoxically not shared by his wife, Molly, the daughter of an Irish military officer and a Spanish mother, who spent her childhood and youth in Gibraltar and only migrated to Ireland as a young adult. Given these central themes in Ulysses, the appeal for Seiber to set into music a passage from the work will scarcely seem surprising but went beyond the biographical. As far as Seiber was concerned, themes of displacement and foreignness were the all-encompassing subjects of the human condition in modernity. As he put it, ‘the longer I read the book the more I became aware of its tremendous implications, of its symbolism, of its masterly capture and expression of the totality of human experience’. 20 Ulysses proved attractive beyond its narrative, with Seiber highlighting ‘the parallels to musical construction’,21 including ‘the formal aspect …, the verbal virtuosity, the relevance of certain recurring motives’.22 In Chapter 2, I have outlined a peculiar doubleness in Seiber’s artistic output between two groups of compositions: pastorals and folk arrangements dedicated to British performers on one hand and dodecaphonic fantasias dedicated to fellow migrants on the other. A group of tonal works marked by traditional compositional techniques and a distinctly traditionalist idiom contrasts with dodecaphonic works whose hallmarks represent strong links to interwar Austro-German expressionism. These two groups of pieces represent Seiber’s attempts on one hand to acculturate in terms of musical idiom in the cultural context of the geographical present, and on the other to resurrect and resume a line of compositional technique and artistic style of the past. I highlighted the extent to which the more traditionalist compositions of migrant musicians like Seiber were better received in London’s musical life. In an environment dominated by Vaughan Williams’s nationalist style (and, after his death, the middlebrow avant-gardes of Tippett and Britten) these pieces could be contextualised more easily than the more progressivist pieces, which retained an aftertaste of being essentially alien, sounding vociferously the heterotopian place of exile and functioning as music out of place. At the same time, Seiber’s decision to resume his dodecaphonic technique not only harks back to the interwar period but also links him to several of his fellow migrant composers like Egon Wellesz and Leopold Spinner, for example. Eclecticism and fragmentation emerge as migratory hallmarks. The artistic biography of a successful composer like Kurt Weill, to name another example, reveals ‘a diversity of style that far exceeds that of even the most pluralistic of his earlier works’ during his time in the United States, a characteristic that David Drew and J. Bradford Robinson relate directly to his migration.23

20 Seiber, ‘A Note on “Ulysses”’, Music Survey 3−4:2 (1950−51), 263. 21 Seiber, ‘Thoughts on “Ulysses”’, Musical Events 12:12 (1957), 20. 22 Seiber, ‘A Note on “Ulysses”’, 263. 23 See David Drew and J. Bradford Robinson, ‘Weill, Kurt’, Grove Music Online, available online at http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed 9 March 2018).

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At the aesthetic moment of the opening of this dichotomy between the fantasies and the pastorals, the doubleness of exile as an aesthetic quality is traceable and manifest on a conceptual level. As a group, these works, little though they share, frame the void of exile. Together, they form a fragmented unity. Exile is there where the music is not, simultaneously unheard and in the middle. Seiber’s next aesthetic move seems almost predictable: to bridge the gap, to fill the void between the opposites constituting this conflict, to make what exile had rendered a seemingly unintelligible alterity translatable. James Joyce’s paradoxical principle of stylistic eclecticism and fragmentation of the narrative as a source for unity and wholeness had to hold appeal for Seiber, as did the construction of an avant-garde work through continuous recurrence to a wide array of traditionalist forms. By tackling exile head on, topically, formally, and conceptually, Ulysses sought to attempt a musical reconciliation designed to fill the void exile had created.

Reconciling Opposites In Ulysses’s penultimate chapter, often referred to as the Ithaca episode, the protagonist Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) arrives late at night at his address in 7 Eccles Street, Dublin, accompanied by Stephen Dedalus (Telemachos), to find that his house is not his home any more. The Ithaca chapter was Seiber’s favourite, and he chose extracts from it for the cantata.24 Seiber’s choice of text is worth highlighting for a number of reasons. Further to the topical homecoming without a home, the Ithaca chapter’s central theme lies in the reconciliation of seemingly irreconcilable opposites. Extremes like earth and cosmos, microcosm and macrocosm, the inorganic and the organic are all mediated as parts of one whole, of one ‘evolution increasingly vaster’.25 Of two different generations, Bloom, the Jew with Eastern European roots, and his Irish Christian junior, Dedalus, experience sudden friendship and an overwhelming unity with the universe. Evoking the paradox of birth and death, they emerge ‘silently, doubly dark, from obscurity’ into the vastness of the ‘heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit’ and return to eternity, ‘a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its future spectators had entered actual present existence’. Formally, too, this reconciliation of opposites reveals itself. The chapter consists of an interplay of questions and answers. In one of the novel’s most condensed moments, it combines meditations of extreme rationalisation and objectivity similar to a Jesuit catechism (‘Sirius, 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet’) with a carefully composed yet highly evocative lyricism (‘it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a 24 Seiber, ‘A Note on “Ulysses”’, 263. 25 All extracts are taken from James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 819−23.

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heavenbeast, not a heavenman … it was Utopia’). To quote Seiber, ‘although written in prose, it seemed to me more poetic than most poetry’.26 In addition to the choice of text, the attempt to unify ostensible opposites, to fill a void, manifests itself in the compositional strategy and is a hallmark of Seiber’s setting. On the one hand, the cantata is packed with references to Western music history, while continuously acknowledging music’s geography, its local differences, on the other. In Ulysses, place might be unstable, but it matters. In 1944, two years before Seiber began composing the cantata, Michael Tippett reported to Francesca Allinson in a letter that Seiber had written to him of ‘the true choral tradition of our musical heritage’.27 Given the centrality of the choir and the sophisticated choral writing, the work deliberately sets itself against this English tradition while, at the same time, making references to the contrapuntal writing of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, particularly the isorhythmic motet. The cantata bears no dedication, but the tenor part was written with Peter Pears in mind, and he sang the solo part in the work’s premiere. Seiber had met Pears in Morley College during the war and, as Tippett informed Benjamin Britten in a letter from early 1943, ‘Seiber thought [Pears’s] the best voice he’d ever heard!’28 With woodwinds, brass, and strings, the instrumentation is that of a fairly conventional orchestra, but the addition of harp, celesta, piano, and percussion creates an atmospheric timbre. The late romanticist and impressionist tone colouring, which Herbert Schneider observed on the occasion of the work’s Austrian premiere in Graz in 1955, is combined with a great clarity in texture.29 This sound world pre-empts the chamber character in instrumentation and ensemble writing of Seiber’s second Joyce setting, Three Fragments from ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ for speaker, mixed choir, and chamber ensemble (flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, violin, viola, cello, piano, and percussion), composed a decade after Ulysses, in 1957.30 But it is also remarkably reminiscent of the warm lyricism of Berg’s mature style, which itself draws on the late 26 Seiber, ‘Thoughts on “Ulysses”’, 21. 27 Michael Tippett, Those Twentieth Century Blues: An Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1991), 157. 28 Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, ed. Thomas Schuttenheim (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 191. Seiber also wrote his other Joyce setting, Three Fragments from ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (1957), with Pears in mind and dedicated the song cycle To Poetry (1952) to Pears. 29 Herbert Schneider, ‘Seibers “Ulysses” erzielt tiefe Wirkungen’, Melos 22 (1955), 88. Miltiades Caridis conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir of Graz, and tenor Sebastian Feiersinger sang the solo part. 30 A comparison with Seiber’s second Joyce setting sheds much light upon the composer’s compositional development, although there is not the space to expand on this here. Michael Graubart reports that Seiber was furthermore contemplating setting a part of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake ‘towards the end of his life’. See Michael Graubart, ‘Matyas Seiber: 1905−1960’, Composer 86 (1985), 4.

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romanticist timbres heard by Schneider. Berg’s heritage indeed looms large in several Seiber works, most notably the Third String Quartet, the Quartetto Lirico, with its very open idiomatic references to Berg’s Lyric Suite. In addition to the impressionist and late romanticist allusions, the cantata makes references to an unusually wide array of compositional techniques, past and present. The second movement of Ulysses, for example, consists of an introductory part followed by a passacaglia (which briefly turns into a chaconne when the bass melody moves to the upper voices), a form that, with its perpetual variations above the ostinato bass, serves to illustrate ‘the idea of constant yet infinitely varied movements of stellar motions’, as Roman Vlad has observed.31 The association of a passacaglia with night in the movement may have been inspired by Schoenberg’s atonal ‘Die Nacht’ from Pierrot Lunaire, which is subtitled ‘Passacaglia’. The central third movement, the only fast one of the work, is a scherzo preceded by an introduction which is the inversion of the introduction of the second movement and thus ‘reminiscent of similar tricks in the word settings of mediaeval polyphonists’, to use Mosco Carner’s words.32 The second section of the movement is a fugue, which is followed by a slower middle section (a tenor arioso) and the cancrizans of the fugue in the fourth section, before the final epilogue recapitulates the introduction. The fourth movement, a Nocturne, is based on a recurring series of four block chords, and the final epilogue (the fifth movement) refers back to the prologue, the first movement.

Twelve-Note Symmetries If these varied references to traditional techniques may indicate an eclectic approach, the work is held together by the consistent use of serial techniques. Seiber saw serial composition as a means of liberation from traditional tonality and argued that dodecaphony was not a system or an end in itself, but a method of working; not theory, but practice.33 All the movements are based on dodecaphonic rows which are permutations of the same cell (E, G, G# and its alternation E, Ab, G) and follow the principle of symmetry. For example, the second half of the basic row of the third movement (F, D, D