Patrick Bade
The Fall of Paris and the Rise of New York

Patrick Bade | The Fall of Paris and the Rise of New York | 02.21.24

Visuals displayed and music played during presentation.

♪ Music plays ♪

♪ A lady known as Paris, romantic and charming ♪ ♪ Has left her old companions and faded from view ♪ ♪ Lonely men with lonely eyes are seeking her in vain ♪ ♪ Her streets are where they were ♪ ♪ But there’s no sign of her ♪ ♪ She has left the Seine ♪ ♪ The last time I saw Paris, her heart was warm and gay ♪ ♪ I heard the laughter of her heart in every street cafe ♪ ♪ The last time I saw ♪

Now when Oscar Hammerstein Jr. heard that Paris had fallen to the Germans in June, 1940, like many, many American artists and intellectuals, he was absolutely devastated and he wrote that poem, the words of that song, spontaneously. And he took the poem to Jerome Kern, who felt the same way and he wrote that lovely melody to go with it. And of course, it won the Oscar for best song in 1942. So, artist, intellectuals had been coming to America from 1933 onwards. It starts off as a trickle and by 1940, of course, it had become a flood, particularly, after the fall of Paris. For many of these desperate people, New York, when it came into view and the Statue of Liberty, it must have seemed like the promised land and after Paris fell, I’m sure you know all about this and I recommend very much the wonderful novel by which describes this exodus from Paris.

Everybody fled from Paris, and those who had particular reason to fear the Germans, either because of their race or their political views, or their artistic or sexual tendencies, they fled to the South and of course, they were desperate to get visas to get to safety across the Atlantic. You see people queuing here in Marseilles outside the office of Varian Fry, who is dishing out the necessary papers. In this photograph, we see Varian Fry on the left and Hiram Bingham IV, the tall man on the right. And these two men took it upon themselves really to save European intelligentsia and the artistic elite from the barbarity of the Germans. In the middle here, you’ve got Chagall and his wife, Bella. And, here again, it’s Varian Fry. I know you’ve had lectures about him, so you know about him and here he is with three notable artists. Well, Andre Breton, more of a poet and an intellectual, but really the founder and the creator of the surrealist movement, Andre Masson left, and Jacqueline Lamba who was also a surrealist artist and a couple also saved by Varian Fry.

This is Franz Werfel and his wife Alma, formerly Alma Mahler. In fact, Varian Fry was not at all keen on the formidable Alma, but he got them the necessary visas and they got across the Pyrenees and they took the route that most of these people took, across Spain to Portugal, and then from Portugal across the Atlantic. But it was a close one thing for Werfel and Alma, they got separated from their luggage at one point and in fact, the Nazis were desperately searching for that luggage because in one of her suitcases, Alma Mahler had the score to Bruckner’s third symphony and Bruckner was an idol of Hitler and he desperately wanted that score. But almost miraculously, they were reunited with their luggage in all the chaos of everybody fleeing to the southwest of France and at one point when things seemed darkest, they arrived at Lourdes and Franz Werfel who was Jewish, whereas Alma was very Catholic, he went to the shrine of St. Bernadette and although he was a Jew, he made a vow to Bernadette that if he escaped to safety, he would write a book about her and that book, of course, was the Song of Bernadette, which was a massive, massive bestseller.

It was top of the bestseller list in America for ages and ages and it was turned into a popular film with Jennifer Jones. It’s a little bit unfair, really ‘cause that’s what people today, at least in the English speaking world, that’s what they remember Franz Werfel for. And his work as a poet, and of course as a novelist, apart from the Song of Bernadette, has largely been eclipsed by that huge success. So here is the surrealist artist, Max Ernst looking a bit dubius as he arrives, I presume this must have been after December, 1941 and that would’ve made him an enemy alien as a German. So he actually was immediately arrested after arriving. But thanks to the support of Peggy Guggenheim and others, he was eventually released. I’m really picking up quite arbitrarily a few people from this extraordinary flood of artists and intellectuals who arrived on the shores of America as a result of the Nazi persecution. On the left, the extremely influential art historian.

Of course, he was a kind of God when I was an art history student at the Courtauld. This is Erwin Panofsky. He had actually already had a foothold in America 'cause he held academic positions in America as well as Europe. So he was not one of those ones who fled in panic in 1940. Hannah Arendt and her husband were, they were also saved through the intervention of Varian Fry. This is Mies van der Rohe and he had arrived a bit earlier, he arrived in 1937. He was the head of the Bauhaus and he was really the leading figure of modernist architecture. He was not Jewish, and he would actually have been perfectly happy to stay in Nazi Germany and work for the Nazis. He submitted designs for official commissions and so on. But Hitler didn’t like him and it became evident by 1937 that he was never going to work again if he stayed in Nazi Germany. So he came to America and he was appointed head of the Illinois Institute of Technology, and he really became the most influential architect in post second world war America.

This is the Seagram Building dating from the 1950s, which was the prototype for endless glass tower blocks built since. This is a very extraordinary photograph of artists who took part in an exhibition put on by the Pierre Matisse Gallery. Pierre Matisse was the son of the great Matisse, the artist who actually, well, were very elderly at this point and stayed in occupied France and actually survived the war there. But just look at this lineup, Matta, Zadkine, Tanguy, Max Ernst, Chagall, Leger, Breton, Mondrian, Masson, Ozenfant, Lipchitz, Tchelitchev, Kurt Seligmann, and Eugene Berman. Not all of those are Jewish. Probably about half of them, I suppose. Others like Max Ernst, of course. And Mondrian were just there because their art, not their race was persecuted by the Nazis. And here is a similar lineup. Some of the same people, of course in the apartment of Peggy Guggenheim, who had also been helped out by Varian Fry and helped many artists arriving in America. This is George Grosz and he was one of those people who saw the writing on the wall very, very early on.

He was one of the first people to leave when the Nazis took over at the beginning of 1933 and here you can see him posing in New York. And well, of course it was a good thing to do from the point of view, his personal safety, because he’s this very acerbic, very political art of the that he represented was particularly loathed by the Nazis. So he certainly would’ve had what the Nazis called a amalfobode. He would’ve been forbidden to create in Germany. But I dunno, he was one of those artists, I think, who needs something to kick against and when he went to America, he needed quite well, he got positions in art colleges, and somehow the edge goes from his art when he arrives in America. He never really, again, produces anything as powerful as he did in Weimar Germany, in the lead up to the Nazi takeover. This is a painting he did towards the end of the second world war called Hitler in Hell, this dates from 1944.

Now, Mondrian was another person who obviously had sensitive antenna to what was going on. And as early as 1938, he was no longer feeling comfortable in Paris. I think France was surrounded on three sides by fascist regimes, there’s Mussolini’s Italy to the South, there’s Franco’s Spain to the West and Hitler’s Germany to the east and he decided as early as 1938 that it was time to leave. And initially he came to Britain and he was there until 1940. But with the fall of France and the Nazis on the doorstep and the blitz and so on, he thought, ah-huh, I’m getting out of here too. And he arrived in New York, and he’s one of those rare exiled artists who absolutely thrived in America. So many of them, when they got there, of course, they were very relieved and they were very grateful to be taken in. But many of them felt like fish out of water. He didn’t, he was really a fish, a very happy fish in the pond of New York. And he found New York incredibly stimulating.

And his arrival in New York brings about quite a major change in his work, like this one, Broadway Boogie-Woogie of 1938 and he was thrilled by New York visually. He liked the discipline of the grid pattern of New York and the other thing he really loved from his high up apartment looking down onto the street, was the site of all the yellow taxi cabs and I think that is reflected in this picture. This is the very, very final work that he worked on, which is called Victory Boogie Woogie. In fact, he died at the very beginning of 1945 before victory was declared. But these titles, Broadway Boogie-Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie, I mean, he was such a sort of, when you see a picture of him, a sort of nerdy kind of man, it’s funny to think of him being a passionate lover of jazz and big band. So Chagall had to be really persuaded to leave Europe. He was very worried about going to America.

I think probably most Europeans, their idea of America in the 1930s was formed from films and particularly gangster films and they probably were rather alarmed at the thought of going to America. He certainly was and he had to be. He said, plaintively, do they have trees? Do they have cows in America? And he had to be assured, yes, there are trees and there are cows in the United States. And his work during the war reflects his feelings about what was going on back in Europe. You might think it’s strange that as a Jew from an Orthodox background, that he fixated on Christian imagery in this period during the second world war. But you can see he shows Christ with a prayer cloth as a loin cloth and obviously Christ was a Jew. But he sees the passion of Christ, the torture of Christ as a metaphor for the persecution of the Jewish people. In the background, you can see pogroms. And here on the right is a variation in a way on the very traditional theme of the Virgin and child.

But again, a Jewish village being burnt in the background. This is Leger, who was not Jewish, but he was very left wing, he was a communist. So that was another reason to get out 'cause communists could also land up in concentration camps. And here is his celebration in 1945 of victory of a Nazi Germany in a picture called France Reborn. This is an exhibition that was put on in 1942, as you can see in Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery of surrealist art. She was married for a time to Max Ernst who was a leading surrealist artist and she was a great collector and proponent of surrealist art and surrealism in a way, it had shot its bolt by 1940, but it’s very, very important for the birth of American art, the New York School of the late 1940s and the 1950s and you can see you’ve got another wonderful lineup here, haven’t you? Willem de Kooning, Adolf Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, and Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still. All these very well-known, Barnett Newman and so on, leading figures of the New York School.

You could say that up to this point, American art are wonderful, though it often was in the 19th century and the early 20th century was by European standards, somewhat provincial following the lead of Europe. But with these artists, you can say it’s New York artists who take the lead and after the war, of course, it’s very much European artists who are following the lead of these artists, many of them described as abstract expressionists. Oh, there was a quote I meant to give you right at the beginning of this lecture from the critic Harold Rosenberg, New York critic. And like so many, he was absolutely aghast at the thought of Paris, the cultural capital of the western world falling to Nazi barbarity. And his quote was, “The laboratory of the 20th century has been shut down.” And what he could have said, might have said, a couple of years later, was that a new laboratory of the 20th century had been opened up in New York. That New York in the 40s really took over the role of Paris.

Now, I said there’s a real connection between the fundamental ideas of surrealism and the artists of the New York School, the abstract expressionist artists. Surrealism is very, very influenced by the ideas of Freud and the idea of the unconscious and the desire to allow the unconscious to bypass the conscious to express itself and so there was what, Andre Breton called automatism, and they tried all sorts of experiments with drugs, with hypnosis, with little games, really, to trick the conscious so that the unconscious should come out. And one of the leading proponents of automatism was Andre Masson and this is a painting by Masson on the right hand side and on the left is an early painting by Jackson Pollock. And you can see, well, it’s so close, it’s very, very strongly influenced by Masson or close enough to be nearly a plagiarism of Masson. And then the idea of action painting where it’s really kind of glorified doodling, this really comes straight out of the theory of automatism. This is Jackson Pollock again. And you might be surprised to know that the painting bottom left is by Mark Rothko.

It’s an early work of Mark Rothko and again, it is very, very close indeed to the kind of automatist doodling of Miro. Miro, although he wasn’t actually in America, he took refuge on the Yorker at the end of the Spanish Civil War and kept his head down there. But he was given a show at Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941 and you can see Rothko picking up on that before moving on to the colour field painting by the end of the 1940s, for which he’s best known. So Rothko was also, of course, an immigrant. He was born in, is it Lavia or Lithuania? I’ve got it in my notes somewhere. He was born in Latvia in 1903 and came as a child to America. And another artist who fled from an earlier persecution and an earlier genocide was Arshile Gorky. You see this very, very poignant photograph of him here as a child with his mother. And they fled the Turkish Armenian genocide. She actually died of starvation in that and he then arrived as a young boy in New York.

I think to me, he’s one of the most exciting painters of the New York School, as is another immigrant. This is of the quite extraordinary Willem de Kooning who was Dutch, who was born in Rotterdam and actually came to America as a young man. And although he’s always linked, he’s sort of lumped together with the abstract expressionism. You can see that this painting on the right hand side is not abstract at all, it’s figurative. It’s a painting of woman rather frightening, possibly misogynistic, I dunno what you think about that. They’re pretty terrifying images of women that he produces. But with great painterly verve and expressiveness. Now, I remember many years ago having a conversation with an Italian man about Mussolini and he said something that really struck me. He said, if Mussolini and Hitler had been sent on a junior year abroad to America, the second world war would never have happened because one site of New York, and they would’ve known that there was no way that Italy and Germany could possibly defeat the economic might of America. Plus, of course the vast size and resources of the Soviet Union.

So this is to me, an absolutely thrilling picture of New York as it was, as when all these people arrived there. And in fact, I still remember the very first time I saw New York, coming in on the bus from the airport and in Queens seeing these vast cemeteries and then seeing this majestic Manhattan skyline behind it in the distance, absolutely unforgettable heart stopping moment. And the latest mega building complex in New York that was just completed in 1939, of course, is the Rockefeller Centre. And America was really on a high of self-confidence at the end of the 1930s, it had already become the leading nation in the world economically and that was celebrated in the World’s Fair of 1940. It’s tended to be forgotten. I suppose, for obvious historical reasons. People had other things on their mind in the rest of the world in 1940 than the New York World’s Fair. But so there’s then, as now of course, America was very divided between people who wanted America to take a stand against Hitler. You can see a demonstration here, unite to stop fascist terror.

But there was a very large section of American society that was isolationists. It’s very much the same argument of course, that we’ve got at the moment about Putin. Do you just let him get on with it? It’s not our business in America, like these people. Hitler, he’s not attacked us, why attack Hitler? But of course, the decision was not an American decision in the end. It was the Japanese declaration of, well, it wasn’t a declaration of war, was it? It was an undeclared attack on Pearl Harbour on the 7th of December, 1941 that brought America into the war. And amazingly, it wasn’t America that declared war on Germany. It was Germany in a utter hubris and madness. I mean, Hitler, well, thank God in a way, was obviously totally bonkers 'cause he’d already attacked the Soviet Union and to then declare war on America. Apparently Churchill, he said he got one of the best night’s sleep in a long time when he heard the news. Because that meant, up to that point, Britain had lost the second world war.

There was absolutely no way that Britain could succeed against the axis powers, even really with Russia on side. But once America and Russia were in the war against Germany, any sane person would’ve understood that it was a foregone conclusion. Now for most Americans, unless you were a young man conscripted into the army or the Navy, the war was a very distant thing. It was something you heard about on the radio, you saw in news reels or read in newspapers. And so I’m going to play you now, it’s a news bulletin. Actually, it was an interruption of a broadcast of a concert. And ironically, it was a concert of the music of Verdi conducted by Toscanini and they interrupted the concert to give the news that Mussolini had been forced to resign. Apparently when Toscanini came back on the podium, he was jumping up and down with joy and raising his arms in triumph. Of course, he was a bitter, bitter enemy of Mussolini. So here is the announcement. This is how people in America heard this very important piece of news in 1943.

[Clip plays]

• [Reporter] We delay returning to the symphony programme for this brief roundup of the important developments in Italy. Rome Radio announces premier Mussolini has resigned. King Victor Emmanuel has accepted Mussolini’s resignation, has assumed command of the Italian Armed Forces.

[Clip ends]

So, and of course, the other way, I suppose that the war affected life in New York was that the streets were full of young men in uniform, either naval or army uniforms. So New York was one of the few capitals involved in the war where the lights were still blazing. All the European cities involved in the war were in blackout darkness. And there were some blackout drills carried out in New York soon after the German Declaration of War. People worried that the Germans might make an attempt to bomb New York. I’m sure they would’ve done if they could, but they never actually had that capability. But the lights soon came on again and they blazed all the way through the war, particularly on Broadway. Here are the images of New York during the second world war, and I’m going to devote the rest of this talk to performing arts in New York. Starting off with straight theatre and the two big hit must see shows. At the end of 1939 and 1940 were Philadelphia Story starring Catherine Hepburn and Little Foxes starring Tallulah Bankhead.

For Catherine Hepburn, it was her comeback role. She, along with such wonderful stars, as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Greta Garbo, Marlon Dietrich, she was labelled box office poison and she was more or less in a periodical. And this was a very notorious article that temporarily ended the careers of some of those stars, including her. And so she left Hollywood and she came to New York and this play, Philadelphia Story, of course, is absolutely a vehicle for her and it was a sensational success. It was premiered in March, 1939, and it ran for a year and altogether there were 417 performances and then of course it was turned into a movie and her Hollywood career was revived. The Little Foxes provided perhaps the greatest role for Tallulah Bankhead. She plays the ruthless and evil Regina Giddens and it was 'cause a great triumph for her.

Sadly, it didn’t lead to a revival of her Hollywood career, which had fizzled out a few years earlier, rather in gloriously 'cause when they came to make the movie, they chose Betty Davis as a more reliable box office draw than Tallulah Bankhead. That was also a play that ran for a full year. This is Ethel Barrymore. She was a member, of course, a great theatrical dynasty. Both her brothers were famous actors, particularly John Barrymore. And she had been a very glamorous star at the beginning on Broadway at the beginning of the century, and then went on to Hollywood to take all the woman roles. She was dubbed the First Lady of American Theatre and she also had a triumph and a very long run in Emlyn Williams play, the Corn is Green and this is one of my absolute favourites, this Blithe Spirit, Noël Coward. It’s such a witty, funny, delightful play.

To my mind, one of the most perfect English comedies, maybe the best English comedy since The Importance of Being Earnest and so that started off in London in 1941. And in fact, it continued. It had the record as of the longest running straight play in London history until that was broken, of course, by the Mousetrap, which is still going. But it started off in 1941 and it was still running in 1946. And it also had a very long run on Broadway of 657 performances here with Clifton Webb and Peggy Wood. And beyond the war, of course, going on to 1947. I know David’s talked quite a lot about, well, he’s given a whole talk on A Streetcar Named Desire. I won’t say much about it. This is the original Broadway cast, which was Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy, again replaced by Vivian Lee in the movie. But I just wanted to throw in this piece of bizarre, if slightly irrelevant information.

A Streetcar Named Desire was, again, a huge hit on Broadway and was taken up in other cities in London and Paris. And so this is the 1949 Paris first run of A Streetcar Named Desire. Un tramway nommé désir is the title in French and the translation was made by the great Jean Cocteau and the role of, God, what’s her name, in A Streetcar Named Desire, that will come to me in a minute. It was a comeback role for Arletty. Arletty was one of the biggest stars of the French cinema. She had been accused of what the French called, that is she had a German lover during the occupation and she spent her time in prison and she was put on trial and she became completely anon person as far as the French were concerned for a while. So this was a very tentative, very tricky comeback for her, and a good role in a way to make a comeback for a woman with a tainted reputation. And Jean Cocteau exploited this and did an interesting twist on the famous last line, Blush, Blush, of course, is her name.

Blush, right at the end of the play when she’s taken away and excuse my fake southern accent, but it’s probably no worse than Vivian Lee’s. “I’ve always depended upon the kindness of strangers,” she says as she’s taken away and the French version of Cocteau was, which has a double meaning, quite different from Tennessee Williams meaning, of course. Literally, its I’ve always followed strangers. But you could also translate it as I’ve always gone with foreigners and now it’s often forgotten how important Operetta was during the second world war everywhere. I mean, so, you’re thinking of the soundtrack of the second world war. It might be as far as classical music, it might be Beethoven, da-da-da, dun. but it’s more likely to be Glen Miller and the big band sound that people associate with the second world war. But actually everywhere people loved and were listening to Operetta.

In Moscow, in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, in London, in Cairo, in Tel Aviv and New York. They were all listening to the Merry Widow. A rather extraordinary when you think that Franz Lehár was still alive, of course, and in Nazi Austria in a rather precarious position as his wife was Jewish. But under the personal protection of Joseph Goebbels. But the Merry Widow, she got around, I can tell you in the second world war. There was a London production that then toured North Africa in the wake of the Eighth Army and landed up in Tel Aviv. Somebody should write a play or make a film about that. It’s so extraordinary, the idea of it, isn’t it? You can imagine Tel Aviv that was full of refugees from Middle Europe and wonder what they felt really sitting in on a performance of Merry Widow. They were probably all humming along with the tunes. And Merry Widow ran in New York pretty well all the way through the second world war with the Polish tenor, Jan Kiepura and his wife Marta Eggerth, who you see on the screen.

Musicals, well, this is of course the great age, you can really say that the New York Musical or Broadway Musical comes into its own as a genre in the 1940s. The first real great masterpiece, I would say is Rodgers and Hart, Pal Joey. But in a way it was slightly premature. It was too edgy, too morally ambiguous for people who were used to Janet McDonald’s kind of, kitschy suite type musicals of the 1930s. And it didn’t actually have a great reception initially, although it really came into its own later in later revivals. And here is the original cast with the young and very beautiful Gene Kelly. Ethel Waters in Cabin in the Sky. I mentioned this the other day, this a black musical that was then picked up by MGM and turned into a movie. Very much I think as a kind of sop to Afro-Americans, who in a way, many of must have felt, well, what’s this war got to do with us? And if we are going to risk our lives to fight injustice in Europe, what about the injustice here in the United States?

But of course, the really big one is you could say the masterpiece and the one that completely changes everybody’s ideas about what a musical can do was Oklahoma and this was in 1943. This was the first collaboration of Rodgers and Hammerstein rather than Rodgers and Hart. When Rogers, he initially wanted to do it with Hart, but Hart, 'cause he was very much a kind of urban Jew. He felt that the world of cowboys was not for him. So he passed on it and it must have been a slightly a bitter feeling for him when it turned into this absolutely extraordinary triumph. And here you can see the handsome Alfred Drake. So I’m not going to play anything from this tonight because I’m going to devote a whole talk to Alfred Drake. I’ve asked permission to do this from his daughter, my good friend, Sam Popper. When I get back to London at the end of February, we’re going to meet up and we’re going to talk about this and she’s going to give me lots of information for that talk, I’m looking forward to that very much indeed.

Alfred Drake, of course, a major, major star on Broadway in the 1940s and 50s. And just towards the end of the war, December, 1944, the first huge Broadway success of Leonard Bernstein, On The Town and it’s about three sailors on leave in New York. They have a day in New York and I love this piece. It was a very personal thing, but I greatly prefer it to anything else really by Leonard Bernstein. I think it is got a wonderful kind of freshness about it. And I’ll play you an excerpt from the original cast recording. This is New York waking up in the morning. And I think, gosh, this is so sophisticated, New York audiences during the second War. But I think there was a kind of, you could say altogether that the American musical, the Broadway Musical had grown up. It had become adult, both in its subject matter, but also musically. I mean, the dissonance in this excerpt. You think the audience who enjoyed this were audiences who were familiar with Stravinsky.

♪ Music Plays ♪

♪ I feel like I’m not out of bed yet ♪ ♪ Oh! ♪ ♪ Oh, the sun is warm ♪ ♪ But my blanket’s warmer ♪ ♪ Sleep, sleep, in your lady’s arms ♪ ♪ Sleep in your lady’s arms ♪ ♪ Ya got the time, bud? ♪ ♪ Three minutes to six ♪ ♪ All night I was walking the baby ♪ ♪ Wah! ♪ ♪ Oh, his eyes are blue ♪ ♪ But her eyes are bluer ♪ ♪ Sleep, sleep in your lady’s arms ♪ ♪ Sleep in your lady’s arms ♪ ♪ What time is it now, bud? ♪ ♪ Aw, six o'clock, will ya!? ♪ ♪ New York, New York! ♪ ♪ It’s a helluva town! ♪ ♪ We’ve got one day here and not another minute ♪ ♪ To see the famous sights! ♪ ♪ We’ll find the romance and danger waiting in it ♪ ♪ Beneath the Broadway lights ♪ ♪ But we’ve hair on our chests ♪ ♪ So what we like the best are the nights ♪ ♪ Sights! Lights! Nights! ♪ ♪ New York, New York, a helluva town ♪ ♪ The Bronx is up, but the Battery’s down ♪ ♪ Thе people ride in a holе in the groun’ ♪ ♪ New York, New York, it’s a helluva town! ♪

As far as classical music was concerned, there were rich pickings in New York at this time. The photograph I’m showing you now actually was taken in Berlin in the early 1930s. And so at the end of the Weimar Republic, and you’ve got five of the greatest conductors of the 20th century. Bruno Walter on the left, Toscanini, who was on a visit, he was a guest. Erich Kleiber who is in charge of the Staatsoper. Otto Klemperer, he’s the tall one and looking a bit wary is Furtwängler on the right hand side. So, in Berlin in 1930, you had a very good chance of hearing a great music making on any night of the week. Well, after 1933, of course three, well, no, of anyone left was Furtwängler. Because Toscanini wouldn’t go back to Nazi Germany. Bruno Walter was forced out, as was Otto Klemperer ‘cause they were both Jews and Erich Kleiber left because of his disgust with the Nazi regime.

And so in New York, god, again in the 40s, you had what a choice of wonderful great conductors. Fritz Reiner, top left and Fritz Busch, middle top. They were both refugees from Nazi Germany, as was William Steinberg. Pierre Monteux, he had posts in Paris as well as America before the war. But of course, as a Jew, he had to leave France and he spent the entire war in America. George Szell on the left hand side, Erich Leinsdorf on the right hand side. So it was a huge bonus in bonanza, particularly at the Metropolitan Opera which had always had the great singers. But until the 1940s, it hadn’t always had the great adapters. Two Brits, who rather surprisingly were in America at this time. Sir Thomas Beecham, a disgraceful charmer, what can you say?

In some ways, I think as the Boris Johnson of British music. An absolute cad, really, a totally amoral character, was very happy to schmooze with the Nazis in the 1930s, but fled from Britain the moment things got started to get tough during the Blitz and spent the war in safety in America, making wise cracks of the… The Brits are very funny people. They’ll forgive anybody or anything if the person can make a good joke and Thomas Beecham made all sorts of funny comments about wouldn’t it be great if the Nazis could bomb the Albert Hall 'cause it’s such an ugly building and so on. Not appreciated actually by everybody. And then, in a way, it’s the opposite story with Barbirolli who established himself in New York in the late 30s, and who then came back to Britain at the height of the war, the height of the battle of the Atlantic. He crossed the Atlantic in great danger to come back to war torn Britain and revive the Hallé Orchestra.

But of course, the big guy was Toscanini. He was the biggest beast in the jungle and when a secondary world war broke out in 1942 for the honour of conducting the first broadcast performance in America of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. And I know Dennis has done a whole talk about this symphony, but because it had it been written largely in the besieged city of Leningrad, and then Shostakovich and his score were flown out of the stricken city. It had its very first performance beyond the Euros and then the score on microfilm was smuggled out of Russia, across Persia and to Europe and premiers were given around the world and every great conductor in America desperately wanted to conduct the broadcast. And a kind of war broke out between Stokowski and Koussevitzky and Rodziński. And who else wanted it, everybody wanted it.

Of course, as I said, Toscanini, he was the big beast and he got to do it. Interestingly, he hated it and he never performed it again. And also, Shostakovich, who was listening in on the radio, hated Toscanini’s performance, which he thought was excessively brutal. Here is an excerpt of the famous first movement of the seventh symphony in that broadcast of 1942, conducted by Toscanini. And so Toscanini was persuaded to conduct a patriotic all American concert and I’ll click this, the introduction. Here, this is announcer from that concert.

[Clip plays]

• [Announcer] Arturo Toscanini has just conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra, . And there is Mr. Gould, who has been called from the audience by maestro Toscanini. They shake hands.

[Clip ends]

Now following that, he then gave the only performance of his life of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. And this is Benny Goodman who does the famous opening clarinet solo. And I’m just going to play you the opening. Partly put, Benny Goodman must have looked back on this concert with horror for the rest of his life 'cause he actually cracks on the famous whale of the… So it must be to have the honour performing with the world’s most famous conductor and then to make a boo boo like that must’ve been excruciating for him. But it is actually, all things said, an absolutely terrible performance. Toscanini obviously, he ain’t got rhythm, that’s for sure. He really doesn’t have the idiom of Gershwin. He conducts it like a military band. Oh, this is (indistinct).

This, yes, over at the Metropolitan Opera. I’ve talked about this in different lectures, but it’s such an extraordinary story, really. The debut of Astrid Varnay. and this was a performance of Die Walküre of Wagner that was scheduled for the 6th of December, 1941 with a dream cast. Helen Traubel as Brunhilda, Lotte Lehmann was the greatest Sieglinde of all, was supposed to be in the cast. Melchior, Friedrich Schorr, fantastic golden age cast. But at the last minute, Lotte Lehmann was taken ill, and of course, this is wartime New York. Where do you find a Sieglinde? So there was this 22-year-old girl called Astrid Varnay who’d never sung on stage in her life before pushed out onto the stage to sing with all these great singers and she had a triumph. I mean, she’s always an interesting singer, and I had many recordings of her at different stages of her career.

But my feeling is she never, ever again sang quite as well as she did on this night. She’s absolutely sensational and extraordinary and of course, she should have had front page headlines in the New York Times the next day. But she was upstaged, of course, by Pearl Harbour overnight. Here is a little bit of that actual performance. Now, I’m talking now about a performance at the beginning of 1941, of Fidelio, Fidelio, of course after the war, was the opera that was chosen to reopen all the rebuilt German opera houses and it was considered relevant 'cause it’s an opera about triumph over tyranny and oppression and this must have been a particularly emotionally charged performance in New York at the beginning of 1941, conducted by Bruno Walter, who was a refugee from Nazi Germany.

The Florestan was René Maison, who was a refugee from occupied Belgian. The Rocco was the great Ukrainian bass, Alexander Kipnis, you see in the middle. And the Fidelio, the Leonore, was Kirsten Flagstad her native country, Norway had just been invaded by the… My phone is going, I hope it’s not a message to tell me that there’s a technical problem but anyway I’m going to leave it. So she was about to make the very Leonore like decision to go back and to spend the war with her husband in Norway. So I think all the people involved in this performance must have been incredibly emotionally involved and I’m going to play a little bit of the prison scene with Alexander Kipnis and Kirsten Flagstad and you’ll hear that they’re wonderful speaking voices. Doesn’t seem to be working. Sorry, something strange happening there. I’m going to move on because I’m running out of time and I want to finish with one of the most remarkable concerts that took place in New York during the second world war.

And as you can see, this was on the October the 25th, 1944 at the great Carnegie Hall and it was the only public performance of the famous Florence Foster Jenkins. She had been performing in for years annually. She gave an annual concert, but privately and the audience came by invitation and she’d become something of a legend in New York society. So, and people knew about her, they’d heard of her, so that when the concert was advertised, it very quickly, completely sold out with cues of people wanting to come in and she didn’t disappoint. And so, this is what she sounded like singing the Queen of the Night’s aria from the Magic Flute. I think that must have lifted the spirits of a war weary nation towards the end of 1944.

So what have you got to say.

Q&A and Comments

Thank you, Bernard, for information about a documentary and a link if people want to watch that. Picasso’s War, excellent accounts of those years with regard to the establishments of MoMA and this is Francine who is able to study length eclipse of the sun. Some permanent exhibition. Is that Max Anne’s, isn’t it, I think that is. Chagall’s painting of Christ. The Loincloth is clearly a talise worn by Jewish men, yes. Don’t forget Hans Hoffman, who I think arrived in the 30s. Well I forgot, there are dozens if not hundreds of people I could have mentioned and didn’t. Hindi just saw a wonderful exhibit of Rothko. Yes, at the Louis Vuitton, it’s on in Paris. Karen, in my twenties, I moved to Manhattan after college, met Arthur Ashman, a dentist whose wife’s family were accustomed to my father’s kosher meat market in Rochester, who had, in his words, saved de Kooning’s mouth. His apartment was filled with drawings, how wonderful to have. Very good that you offer services in return for de Koonings.

This is Sally, whose first site of New York is from , an amazing site. Yes, I’m sure it was. And why did it? It’s because her films in the late 30s. What is amazing to us is that bringing up Baby, which is one of the funniest, most brilliant comedies ever made, was a complete flop and she had a series of unsuccessful films in the 30s, and as I said, she was labelled box office poison. Yes, Blanche DuBois and one of my momentary memory lapses. Stellar is her sister, of course. I know I don’t own that poster of On the Town, wish I did. I think it must be your speakers, yes, you’re right Rita. No, Wendy, I said both are, I mean both are right. With Pal Joey, as I said, was a little bit too far ahead of its time and it only came to its own later. Oklahoma was the one that really changed everything. Right, yes. I suppose, this is a very personal thing, I actually prefer On the Town to West Side Story, which also has similar orchestration. 1949 movie On the Town with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. Yes, thank you.

Thank you very much Jerry. Right, Russian born Vernon Duke Dukelsky composed a score for Cabin in the Sky and this is the coup of Toscanini coming to Tel Aviv with a birth… Yes, of course, it was world news. It was a tremendous gesture of Toscanini. I mean, I think Toscanini, whatever you think of him, as a man and a musician, he was a very important opponent of fascism and of course, a great supporter of what was then the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra. Natasha, my good friend Natasha, thank you so much. Thank you Ruth, and you agree with the critics on the Toscanini’s performance of Shostakovich. Well. Shostakovich himself didn’t like it. That says a lot, doesn’t it? Thank you very much, Micky.

Q: What are the differences and similarities between operator? A: Shelly that is a whole lecture in itself. I don’t think I’ve got time to really explain that, but the musical in some ways evolves out of the operator and there are parallels between the two.

Yes, there were a couple of movies about Florence Foster Jenkins, yes. Margaret you are meant to say ouch. Yes, well, is it a sad or a happy story 'cause she died days after that performance. And some people say she died because she was so shocked that she finally realised people were laughing at her and other people say no, she knew it and she actually died happy. No, it’s not your computer or an old recording. She was off pitch. She’s never near the pitch on any single mode. Yes, I’m glad, I’d be worried if you didn’t, if you all thought Florence Foster Jenkins was wonderful and the book about Varian Fry by Julie Orringer. One of the versions, one of the films about Florence Foster Jenkins had Meryl Streep. Indeed, how would I classify it? Well, yes, it’s rather a special case, isn’t it? I mean, it’s almost operatic, but it somehow doesn’t quite pigeonhole into a particular genre.

Thank you all and very kind remarks and see you again on Sunday.