Patrick Bade
Czech Jewish Composers

Patrick Bade - Czech Jewish Composers

- The Czech Jewish communities in the late 19th, early 20th century. And I used the plural, communities with an s on the end because they were never the kind of unified entity that was demonised, of course, by the Nazis later on. It was very varied communities. I mean, they were trilingual. So you have the upper bourgeoisie, totally assimilated German speakers. You have the lesser bourgeoisie, shopkeepers and so on who might be Czech speakers. And you have the often decried, inverted commas, Ostjuden, poor Jews, who were likely to speak Yiddish. This is Vilém Tauský. He was a Czech conductor who arrived as a refugee during Second World War. One of those people, of course, who made an enormous contribution to British musical life, particularly the discovery of Czech composers like Janacek. And also he was very well known in the area of lighter classical music. And he was very long lived. And towards the end of his life, I attended an occasion at London Jewish Cultural Centre where he was interviewed and he was talking about his life. And a quarter century earlier he had written an autobiography, it came out in 1979 and somebody asked him a question. Why was it that in his autobiography there was no mention of his contemporary Czech Jewish composers, Hans Krása, Viktor Ullman, and so on. And his explanation was an interesting one. He said, yes, of course I knew all those composers. I worked with them, but they were all dead. They were all murdered. He assumed that their music was totally disappeared, would never be heard again. And so there was simply no point in talking about them in his autobiography. Because nobody would have a clue of what he was talking about. But in fact, all that was just beginning to change just around the time that he published his autobiography.

The key event was actually in 1975, with the rediscovery and the presentation of Viktor Ullman’s Opera, Der Kaiser von Atlantis. I’ll be talking about that towards the end of my talk today. It was a revelation. I remember seeing it myself as a teenager, a broadcast from Amsterdam on the TV and being absolutely amazed by it. And that prompted other people to search around for music by these composers. All five of the composers that you see on the screen here were murdered in the Holocaust. Four of them, Hans Krása, Viktor Ullman, Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas, they were all in Theresienstadt and they were transported and murdered, we think, on the 18th or 19th of October 1944. Just a terrible, of course, I mean, in human terms, it’s impossible to grasp this. But in cultural terms, there was this wonderful flowering of Czech musicality, Czech Jewish musicality. The four older of these composers, you see him, Erwin Schulhoff at the top. They’re all born in the 1890s. Bottom right is Gideon Klein, who’s a generation younger. He was born, I think, in 1918. So this group of composers should have formed a very important group within the development of 20th century music. But were as brutally cut off by the Holocaust. I’m going to start with… Actually also born in the 1890s, but he’s a little bit apart from those composers because he had a very early success and his musical style, I suppose, was somewhat more traditional. This is Jaromír Weinberger.

And his opera Schwanda the Bag Piper, which looks back very much to Smetana and the rather, sort of, cosy folkloric style of The Bartered Bride. This promoted by the ubiquitous Max Broad, and his name will come up many times in this talk. He’s such an important figure, really, for Czech culture in the early 20th century. And he persuaded German opera houses to put on Schwanda, and it was done in all the major German opera houses. And it was tremendous worldwide success. It was a huge success in New York. It was a success in London under slightly dubious circumstances. London, when the Nazis took over in Germany in 1933, they had a kind of fire sale of all the opera productions that were, as they then put it, unerwünscht, they weren’t wanted anymore, either because they were so radical, like Wozzec, or because the composers were Jewish like Weinberger. So Covent Garden picked up a very cheap production from Berlin, which was presented in London in 1934. And that was also a huge popular success at the time. And of course the big hit number from it is the polka. And I’m sure all of those of you of a certain age will remember this piece from your childhood. Now, a huge success like this, when he was only about 30 years old, should really have ensured him a prosperous and happy life. But of course, political events intervened. And his next major premier had very unfortunate timing. It was an opera called, Frühlingsstürme, Storms of Spring. And that was presented with a fabulous cast. And it should have been a huge set. It was, Talber and Jarmila Novotná singing together. And that was in Berlin in January, 1930, the month that the Nazis took over.

And of course they very quickly shut it down. And he had another premiere in Vienna. But again, that was at the end of 1937, a disastrous timing, the opera called Wallenstein, and after that he moved to America, where he just doesn’t seem to have really found his feet or any kind of success. And eventually he committed suicide in 1967. So my next composer, very different character. This is Erwin Schulhoff, born in 1894, also into a wealthy German speaking family. He was very much a man of his time. He was very left wing in his politics. The two great influences, really, cultural influences, on him were Marx and Freud. And he was very open to new aspects of modern culture, particularly to, I mean, he was flirting with the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg. He was also very interested in jazz and American popular culture. And he said, I’m boundlessly fond of nightclub dancing. So much so that I have periods when I spent whole nights dancing with one hostess after another out of pure enjoyment of the rhythm, and my subconscious filled with sensual delight. Therefore, I acquire phenomenal inspiration for my work, as my conscious mind is incredibly earthy, even animal, as it were. So that was making this distinction, very Freudian distinction, between his conscious and his unconscious mind. As I said, he had very left wing politics. And when of course when the Nazis came to power he had to leave Germany and then he had to leave Austria. And then he actually applied for Soviet citizenship, but didn’t manage to get out in time. So when the Nazis arrived in 1939, he was arrested and he was already a sick man, but being in a concentration camp can’t have helped any. And he died of tuberculosis in 1942. So I’m going to play you a characteristically jazz influenced piece.

This is, he called, his Hot Sonata, and it’s for piano and a saxophone, which of course was an instrument that was particularly abhorred by the Nazis as a symbol of all those, sort of, Jewish and black cultural trends that they most disliked. This is Pavel Haas who was Moravian. He was from Brno and his father owned a shoe shop. So he came from, you could say, the lesser bourgeoisie. And he was a Czech speaker and he was a pupil of Leoš Janáček and should really… He was a favourite pupil of Janáček and very much influenced by him. Janáček is such, a sort, of one-off composer. But I think if Pavel Haas had lived, he would’ve been the the man to really continue the musical aims of Janáček. And you can certainly hear Janáček’s influence in his music. There are two very fine… I mean, he was a very self-critical composer, so he destroyed a lot of what he wrote in his short life. So there aren’t that many works by him. But there are two very fine string quartets. I’m going to play you movement to the second quartet, which I find very charming, which actually has a programmatic or a pictorial element. It’s the four string instruments are actually describing the clumsy, slow, movement of an ox-drawn cart in the countryside. He should have had his great breakthrough, in 1938, he wrote an opera called The Charlatan, which had a Czech text rather than a German text. It was put on in Prague. It was a tremendous success, won a prize, the Smetana Prize. And in a previous generation what would’ve happened was that it would’ve been picked up in one of the many German opera houses and then gone on to spread around the world, maybe land up in New York. But of course, that route, after 1933, that route for Czech Jewish composers was completely cut off. So as you can see, he married, had a child.

Tragically he divorced his wife when the Nazis came, in order to protect her, as she was not Jewish. Of course their child was half-Jewish as far as the Nazis were concerned. The wife and the child did survive, but he didn’t, he was sent to Theresienstadt and he was murdered along with the others in October, 1944. Now this is Hans Krása, from a very wealthy, highly acculturated family. When I tell you that he was 10 years old, as a birthday present, he was given a priceless Amati violin. So that tells you something, both of the economical, cultural background. He was by regarded by some people as being a little bit of a dilettante because with that kind of wealth, he didn’t really need to earn a living. He was certainly very… And all these composers were incredibly open to lots of ideas, and you can describe them as eclectic. They’re picking up ideas from here and there. And he went to Vienna and he studied with Schoenberg, but you can hear many other influences and you can hear that he also listened to Stravinsky, like everybody, he’s flirting a little bit with jazz. He’s interested in cabaret. And he started to make an international reputation for himself. He had premieres outside of Czechoslovakia, in France and America and other places. And he had a tremendous success in Czechoslovakia in 1935 with a piece called Anna’s Song, which became a real popular hit. And he made use of the melody of this song in a very attractive piece that he wrote. It’s just called Chamber Music for Harpsichord and Seven Instruments. So there’s a revival of interest in the harpsichord in the inter-war period that is, of course, particularly associated with the great Polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska. But here I’ve got an opportunity to play you another very important harpsichordist of the 20th century.

And this is Zuzana Ruzickova, who you see on the left hand side. And she has a very interesting story. She was, I mean, they would’ve known one another cause, although she would’ve been a young girl, in Theresienstadt, she took part in performances of Brundibár that I’m going to talk about in a minute. She’s one of the few, I suppose, that survived. She had already started to train as a pianist before the war, and she aspired to be a concert pianist. But her hands suffered damage and her health suffered damage, and after the war she was advised that she should really give up any hope of being a virtuoso concert pianist. And instead she took up the harpsichord. And she was great pioneer of performances of baroque music on the harpsichord. For the Czech firm of Supraphon, she was the first person to record the entire keyboard works of Bach on Harpsichord. And I was still at school when I came across a CD, not a CD, it was long before CDs, it was an LP. It was in Smith’s and it was on sale. It was five shillings, I can still remember. And it was Bach harpsichord concertos, played by Zuzana Ruzickova that introduced me to Bach keyboard music, and I became a big fan. And I was really delighted, it must be about three or four years ago, I happened to switch on Radio Three, and there she was, she was being interviewed on the radio. Sounding such a delightful, such a charming old lady. And she lived to be nearly a hundred. I think she’s died quite recently. But here she is playing the harpsichord in this piece called Chamber Music by Hans Krása. This is the most attractive mixture, I think, of Neoclassicism and bluesy elements. Krása also wanted to write an opera, and in the late twenties, he worked on a libretto in which, once again, Max Broad had a contribution.

And it’s based on a Dostoevsky story called Uncle’s Dream, in which an elderly wealthy man is tricked into marrying a penniless young girl. In fact, the marriage doesn’t take place in the end, but he agrees to marry her. I’m going to play two excerpts from this opera. Once again, at the time it was a great success in Prague in 1935. But again, of course by 1935 it wasn’t going to be taken up. An opera by a Jewish composer, was no longer going to be taken up by the German opera houses. I’ve often played this excerpt to guests in my house without really telling them anything about it. I’d just like to see their reaction to it. And in this scene, the young heroin Zena is asked to sing for the elderly gentleman, and she chooses to sing the great aria Casta Diva from Bellini’s Norma. And she accompanied herself on the piano. It starts off perfectly as you’d expect with Casta Diva. And then gradually all the people in the room start chatting as often happens, I suppose, you know, in a private evening when somebody is performing music or singing. And gradually it sort of builds up into a real kind of cacophony with all these different comments going on until the poor girl eventually loses patience. And she just breaks off and she says, ‘Can I go now?’ ‘Can I get down now?’ And I’m going to play another duet, a conspiratorial duet. Two other characters who want to try and prevent this wedding taking place. They’re trying to interfere with the plans of Zena and her mother. And this has… You can tell he’s been listening to Kurt Weill and he’s interested in cabaret and it has a kind of jaunty cabaret like character to it. So with the arrival of the Nazis in March, 1939, in Prague, it’s sort of surprising, you sort of think, well why didn’t people like Krása, who’s wealthy and well connected, why didn’t he get out? But you know, I think it, they felt so at home in Prague, these people, they were so part of the culture, that they left it too late.

And so the ones who already had some kind of reputation were rounded up and they were then sent to Theresienstadt. I’m sure you know all about this, I’ve talked about Theresienstadt before and I’m sure Trudy and others have talked about it. It was this great 18th-century military establishment that was turned, inverted commas, into a town for the Jews. It was Nazi propaganda that Hitler had given a town to the Jews. And it was used to try and convince the world that the Jews were not being abused or annihilated, and that this was some kind of glorious cultural holiday camp. And there was this famous film by Kurt Gerron, Hitler Gives the Jews a Town, was the title. And there are of course many ex… The film, it survives partially, and it gives us a picture to some extent, a very sanitised picture of what life was like. Sporting events and concerts, classical concerts, jazz concerts, cabaret and so on. And of course, the famous performances of the Children’s Opera Brundibár by Hans Krása. There was quite a fashion for children’s opera in the 1930s. And you think Peter and the Wolf, Prokofiev and so on. And a competition was held in Czechoslovakia for a children’s opera. Krása wrote this piece as an entry for the competition. But events overtook him. He gave it to a friend who was the chief of an orphanage for Jewish children. Krása was arrested, taken to Theresienstadt. And it was his friend, who in the orphanage, gave the very first attempted performance of the piece. And then the orphanage was shut down and the teacher was also sent to Theresienstadt, and he brought the score with him. And a whole series of performances were put on. And one of them was partially filmed during one of those notorious Red Cross visits to Theresienstadt. You think, you know, they must have wanted to be fooled, The Red Cross.

How could they possibly have been fooled by this charade? But apparently they were. I’m sure on YouTube if you want to, you can see that footage. Cause the terrible thing is that each time one of these performances was put on, after the performance the children were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz and murdered. And very few of the children who took part in these performances survived the end of the war. But here is an extract from a modern performance of Brundibár. The Nazis were very keen to encourage the cultural activities in the camp. And all these composers continue to compose. They had to compose, of course, for the resources available. And I’d like to play an excerpt from another piece by Krása, which I find particularly touching. It’s called Tanec, Dance, and it’s written for a string trio. There’s no evidence that it was actually ever performed in the camp. And the supposition is that it was written for three string players who happened to be there, and most likely they got deported before the premier of the piece could take place. So it was only first performed long, long, after the war. And I find it a very touching piece. It’s wistful, it’s dance like, it’s a very touching mixture, I think, of the nostalgic and the happy. So as I said, a mixture of wistful and joyous. You just think, how amazing to be able to write something like that under those circumstances. So one of the most terrible stories of all is of Viktor Ullman, who was also somebody who’d achieved a certain international success in the inter-war period. He had rather a turbulent personal life. He was married three times and he had four children. And when he was deported to Theresienstadt with his third wife, he took his youngest child, not seen in this photograph. And his oldest child, the one on the left, with him.

They got to Theresienstadt and they found wives number one and two already there waiting for him. And then I suppose he was the longest surviving. One by one, they were all deported and murdered, the two little children you see to the right of the photograph, they did survive, but they were actually sent as kinder transport children to England. They were, I don’t know how old they were, two, three years old, very small children. Of course they arrived in the country where they couldn’t understand a word and they didn’t know what was going on. And they were so distressed that the people who received them in England thought that they were psychologically disturbed or mentally ill. And at this very early age, they were put into an asylum. And I think that’s where they spent the rest of their lives. But Ullman was extremely productive while he was in Theresienstadt. The music continued to pour out of him. The fifth piano sonata, you can see on the left, you can see that it says, from my youth, it says, so it’s autobiographical and you can see it’s dedicated, In memoriam, Theresienstadt. So she had already gone, she was already dead. And then the Seventh Sonata, you can see it’s written in French to his children, Max, Jean, and Felicia. This says here, Theresienstadt, 22nd of August, 1944. So just under two months before he was murdered.

And he ironically inscribed, wrote at the bottom. So that means the rights, performing rights, I think what the German’s called, or gallows humour. It’s a rather macabre joke he’s written on it. The performing rights for this piece remained with him for his life. And he knew, of course, at this time, there wasn’t going to be much more of that. But this is an excerpt from that seventh sonata, which is a set of variations on what he called a Hebrew theme. This is the youngest composer. He belongs to a different generation. This is Gideon Klein who was born in 1919. And so, because the other composers had all reached maturity. So we have a real sense of the direction that they were going in, and what their contribution might have been. But with a composer who died in his early twenties, we can really only speculate. I’m going to play you an excerpt from a piece he wrote in the camp, which is very accomplished in a rather neoclassical style. I don’t think at this point he’s… You can say this is something with enormous promise, but I don’t think you can say that he had at this point developed a particularly individual style. My last excerpt is from the opera, Der Kaiser von Atlantis, it gets performed quite a bit these days, and there are numerous recordings of it. And it was the piece that alerted the world to the achievements of all these composers. And it’s an extremely powerful piece. It’s an allegory. To us it seems very obvious what this opera is really about. It’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis, the emperor of Atlantis, who unleashes his endless war on the world and death upon death upon death. And eventually death goes on strike because he’s been overworked and refuses to let anybody die. And of course that is a real disaster. And death will not resume his work until the emperor himself dies. And so obviously we see the Kaiser as representing Hitler.

They got as far as final dress rehearsals for this before the whole thing was shut down and abandoned. And there’s some disagreement really among the experts about why it never had its proper first performance. If finally the Nazis paid enough attention to realise what it was all about and saw it as being an attack on Hitler and closed it down, or if it was just that things had just got to that stage where they were pretty well giving up on everything. But I’m going to play you a moment I find very fascinating and very moving. It’s a chorale and it takes the well-known tune of which was originally composed by Martin Luther in the 16th century and then taken up by Bach in the 18th century. One of these days I want to do a whole talk about the use of this piece, particularly by German Jewish composers, and what it meant to them. Cause the Bach chorale is in effect, it’s a unofficial German national anthem, at least for Protestant Germany, not for Catholic Germany. And so a great many German Jews who strongly assimilated and strongly identified with Germany, they wanted to be Germans. So this is an important piece for them. Mendelssohn quotes it in his Reformation Symphony, uses it in . Offenbach very wittily and naughtily parroted it in on of his operettas. And here it’s got new words which are accepting the inevitability of death, welcoming death, in fact. Right. Well let’s see what we have for questions.

Q&A and Comments:

‘The Prominente transport left to Eisenstadt on the Czech national day, October 28, 1944.’ Camille and Emma Hoffman. Your grandparents were on it. He was a writer and a diplomat, and it’s just too heartbreaking to think about, really, so close to the end of the war. It’s just horrendous. ‘I must be of a certain age, as you said, because, I remember the delightful production of Schwanda the bagpiper, at Sadler’s Wells in the 1950s. My then fiancee had a role.’ Thank you, Lilian. I don’t why it’s not done these days. I’ve never actually seen it on stage. I’m glad you like the saxophone piece. Wonderful piece.

This is Abigail here. She’s reading Genius and Anxiety, and you like it cause he analyses all the great writers, poets, musicians, both Jewish, non-Jewish, gives us their backstory. ‘He’s particularly suited to this task coming …’ Yeah, yeah. It’s certainly an impressive book. What can you say? ‘Schulhoff’s sax piece is fabulous.’ Yes, I agree with you. ‘…

Harsh impressionist music.’ In one sense, yes, because the piece I played you is very descriptive. Of course the term impressionist in music is a slightly problematic one. And it doesn’t sound like the music of Debussy for instance.

How was the music of these… It’s an extraordinary story. It was in the library of Theresienstadt. It is amazing. I mean, one of the ironies is that before Ullman went to Theresienstadt he entrusted all his unpublished music to somebody to look after. And that all disappeared. We don’t have anything of it. So actually we have far more music of Ullman that he wrote in Theresienstadt than he wrote before, you know, in freedom, before the war.

Carol Anschul, yes… Great conductor, met your father in Auschwitz. Each time Anschul visits my home in town, Bratislava to conduct, they connected. I think he was the one… Everything I know about him suggests that he was a remarkable human being and of course a very great conductor. Thank you very much for that. The synagogue is in Prague that I began with. The Jerusalem synagogue, yes, in Prague. Yes, all these composers have CDs, but you know, it’s not easy to find them. There was a wonderful series that Decca brought out called Entartete Music.

Michael Haas, very innovative, but apparently it didn’t make a lot of money and they eventually shut down the series and now, some of those things, if you go online and you look for them, you know, Pavel Haas’ opera Charlatan, you actually have to pay an awful lot of money to get the CDs.

I don’t have a blog, but, Erica, you should have been sent a list of everything I played today.

Which opera company… That recording is from the Entartete Musique series, but I can’t remember which particular opera company it was.

I don’t know if Karl Haas, I mean, Haas is a very common name and it can be a Jewish name or it doesn’t have to be a Jewish name. Right.

This is somebody telling me his grandfather David Malakovsky was murdered in Theresienstadt. I mean, Theresienstadt, there was a very high death rate. Of course it wasn’t the holiday camp, the Nazis pretended. But it wasn’t actually an extermination camp. It wasn’t intended for industrial murder.

This is Phil Steel, Theresienstadt, the director showed the Red Cross spotless gleaming bathrooms. Unfortunately inspectors… You think, how could they fall for it? How could they possibly fall for it? It was such a blatant deception. Really is depressing.

This is Mira, her parents were in Theresienstadt. ‘My father, Eric Lesley was one of the artists who constructed the set of Brundibár.’ That’s wonderful. That’s interesting. And drew painted in the ghetto. There are a lot of… That’s another thing. I mean, so many drawings and paintings survive of it. And of course the very famous drawings and poems of the children. I’m sorry you didn’t under… The music, it seems to me, the music is actually, mostly, very accessible music. One of the things after the war, I think… Again, I think it’s a reaction to the Nazis, just as there was a, sort of, very hardcore modernism after the Second World War that was in a way a reaction to what had happened before. And a lot of babies got thrown out with the bathwater, it seems to me, culturally, after the second World War.

Q: ‘Did the composers write on manuscript paper?’

A: The paper was certainly in short supply and there are manuscripts by Ullman, where he’s reusing paper and of course using both sides of the paper. Right. Let me see.

Joe. ‘In 1988 when I was assistant director, we did a series of concerts commemorating the musicians of Theresienstadt.’ Right? Yes. Thank you.

You say, which name? You will have been sent a list of all the operas. But I think you’re probably talking about Der Kaiser von Atlantis. The Emperor of Atlantis. Again, it’s a kind of a mystery that so much of this music survived.

Yes, ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’, the English translation is A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. Which is a great hymn of reformation. Don Carlos, very relevant to all of this, of course, with the . List of music, you should have, I think, I hope you were sent the list of everything that I played. If not, just ask and we will send it to you. And yes, there have been various exhibitions of the children’s drawings and the poems, and they were set to music by Franz Waxman. He wrote a requiem for the children of Theresienstadt. And that’s a very beautiful piece and I strongly recommend it to you.

• [Host] Patrick, I have just checked the email that went out this morning and the links to your presentation and the music are on the reminder. So if people would just scroll down to under the bios on the email that were sent this morning, they’ll find two links to your talk today.

• Thank you very much, Judi. That’s very good. Well, I think I better stop now. Thank you all for your comments and it’s really moving and wonderful when there are these personal connections. Thank you. And I’ll be talking on a much happier note of course on Wednesday when I talk about Strauss’ Opera, Arabella.

• [Host] Thank you so much Patrick, and thank you to everybody who joined us today.

• Thank you, Judi.

• [Host] Thank you. Bye-bye.

• [Patrick] Bye-bye.