This week, the Phoenix Symphony will be performing 'Brundibar,' by Hans Krása, a one-act opera written in 1938 and more recently turned into a best-selling book with Sendak's illustrations.
But Krása, like so many other German composers under the Third Reich, died in a concentration camp.
'It's a fascinating picture of culture just before and at the beginning of the Nazi era,' says Michael Christie, the symphony's music director. 'It's a great musical snapshot of history.'
It is also part of a seasonlong look at the issue of composers either killed or exiled by the Nazis, including music by Erwin Schulhoff, Marcel Tyberg, Pavel Haas, Mieczyslaw Weinberg and Kurt Weill.
The symphony also will highlight the music of Felix Mendelssohn, whose works were banned in Germany during the Nazi era because his family was Jewish.
'We thought it would be a good series, hearing music by composers who didn't survive and those that fled,' Christie says. 'We are looking at it from the musical side and working with the ASU Jewish Studies Program for lectures into this very deep topic and the very big questions that have to be asked.'
A damaged culture
The Nazis had racial theories, but they also had esthetic theories, and the two were intertwined in ways that defy rational thought. In 1937, the regime staged an art show featuring what it called 'Degenerate Art,' which included work by some of the best artists of the time, making fun of abstract and Expressionist art. But less well known is the exhibit a year later of 'Degenerate Music,' which staked out the Nazi claims for the supremacy of German music over all others, and the degeneracy of Jewish, Negro and Slavic music, to say nothing of the avant-garde.
Those musicians who were able fled the country before war broke out, but those unlucky enough to be caught were either forced to silence their music through 'internal exile' or were sent to concentration camps.
Of those who stayed behind, many thought of themselves as fully assimilated Germans, rather than as Jews.
'But the Nazis had their own way of defining who's a Jew,' says Hava Samuelson, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at ASU. 'When they were executed at Auschwitz, many didn't identify themselves as Jewish.'
It's a tragic story, she says, 'not just because people died; we all die. But what happened to Jewish culture.'
The irony is that not only was Jewish culture damaged, but even more so, the German culture that Nazism was promoting ideologically.
Redirected path
As music entered the 20th century, there were several branches of Modernism that duked it out. The two main branches were French irony and wit, and German Expressionism, the end of a long line from Bach through Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and into Schoenberg and Hindemith. A third strand incorporated nationalist and folk elements, including jazz; a fourth strand went off the deep end into serialism.
The Germanic strand of music was denser orchestrally, richer harmonically and more overtly emotional. But by imprisoning, and then killing, so many of its composers, the Nazis saw to it that this strand of Modernism was amputated from the mainstream of the 20th century.
'Music steered away from a connection of heart and sound, and became much more about the other side of the brain,' says Joel Revzen, artistic director of Arizona Opera and a lecturer in the symphony's Rediscovered Masters series.
'Their music was rich and dense with a lot of emotional depth, and a lot of that was lost.'
Going Hollywood
What survived of it came, of all places, to Hollywood, where, under the guiding hand of such exiled German composers as Erich Wolfgang Korngold, it became the template for movie music in the 1930s and '40s. If you want to see where Mahler went after the rise of Hitler, you have to look to MGM, Paramount and Warner Bros. LA is where not only Korngold, but also Arnold Schoenberg settled.
A few, like Weinberg, went in the other direction and settled in the Soviet Union.
'The desire to control the message was central to both the Nazis and the Soviets,' says Robert Oldani, who teaches music history at ASU. 'It is a desire to portray what was the government's idea of acceptable. In Germany, it was the 'blood in the soil' and the 'perfect Aryan' that was supposed to be conveyed through the music.'
In the Soviet Union, it was the triumph of the proletariat and the defeat of Western 'formalism.'
'In both cases, you see the same kind of extreme changes in the meanings of the words,' Oldani says.
And it is the words, whether 'formalism' or 'Jewishness,' that takes precedence over the music.
Only now, more than a half century after the Holocaust, is some of the music being rediscovered.
'Our concentration on this music over the season will allow us to recognize in a meaningful way what these composers did,' Christie says." (source)
