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After lying forgotten for decades, a revelatory tranche of musical history is reaching our ears at last: the work of composers whose lives and careers were devastated by the Nazis. War, displacement, prejudice and ideology all played roles in their suppression, but the long-term result was the skewing of how we view 20th-century music. <\/p>
Some of these figures have been gloriously rehabilitated: Erich Korngold<\/a><\/strong>, Mieczys\u0142aw Weinberg<\/a><\/strong> and the Czech composers incarcerated in the Terez\u00edn<\/strong> concentration camp<\/strong><\/a> \u2013 Gideon Klein, Pavel Haas, Hans Krasa and Viktor Ullmann. But they are the tip of the iceberg.<\/p> There is much more to find, and among those who have made their discovery a personal mission is Simon Wynberg, artistic director of the Artists of the Royal Conservatory (ARC) Ensemble in Canada. Wynberg, an Edinburgh-born \u2018recovering musicologist\u2019 as he describes himself, first became interested in obscure repertoire as a guitarist. <\/p> When the Royal Conservatory asked him to create an ensemble comprised of members of its faculty, he decided it was essential for them to have a unique identity: they would find and promote superb composers suppressed by the Third Reich. Each album in their series of recordings, currently on the Chandos label, is devoted to one, including Szymon Laks, Paul Ben-Haim, Jerzy Fitelberg and Walter Kaufmann.<\/p> The first of many ironies, Wynberg points out, is that this music was often not at all what the Nazis would have termed \u2018entartete\u2019 (\u2018degenerate\u2019) had it not been written by Jewish composers. Indeed, their styles were often rather traditional \u2013 which is why the backlash against tonal music in the post-war decades proved especially painful. Often these musicians were damned by prevailing ideologies not once, but twice. <\/p> The next irony is that the music is not difficult to find: the problem is that too few people have been looking. \u2018Much of it is hidden in plain sight,\u2019 Wynberg says. \u2018It\u2019s not as if you\u2019re hunting through the relations\u2019 attics.\u2019 <\/p> For the Kaufmann recording, he went to the library of the Jacobs School of Music at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, where Kaufmann was a professor: there, boxes of manuscripts were simply waiting for someone to explore them. \u2018If you Google Walter Kaufmann, you\u2019ll find a huge amount of biographical information,\u2019 says Wynberg, \u2018yet nobody has done much with the music. It\u2019s the same with Jerzy Fitelberg: there\u2019s plenty of information, but nobody has gone through the scores \u2013 and they\u2019re sitting in the New York Public Library.\u2019<\/p>Mission: to promote superb composers suppressed by the Third Reich<\/h3>
‘Much of this music is hiding in plain sight’<\/h3>