International Centre for Suppressed Music

Activity report April 2008 – June 2010

JMISOASUniversity of London

President Sir Simon Rattle

Director Michael Haas

Academic Director Erik Levi

Michael Haas working with Berthold Goldschmidt in Berlin

Activity Report

April 2008 – June 2010

What might have evolved as the language of music in Western Europe had composers, at the most crucial stage of their careers in the 1930s, not been forced from their homeland is a subject that is now being addressed with increasing intensity world-wide. The International Centre for Suppressed Music established in September 1999, by the Jewish Music Institute, (JMI) at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, is in the forefront of research, education, publication, recording, performance and communication of information on this vast range of music.

Executive Committee
Michael Haas,RecordProducerof 'Entartete Musik' Series, Decca
Erik Levi,Reader, Royal Holloway University of London, Author,Music in the Third Reich
Lloyd Moore, Composer
Martin Anderson, Writer and Publisher (Toccata Press)
Jutta Raab Hansen, academic and author,Musical Exile in Great Britain (in German)
Peter Tregear, Academic, Conductor and Singer, Monash University, Australia
Simon Fox, Record Producer
Betty Sagon Collick, Consultant JMI
Geraldine Auerbach MBE, Director, Jewish Music Institute, SOAS

Advisory Board:
Brendan G. Carroll, International Korngold Society
Albrecht Dümling, Musica Reanimata and 'Entartete Musik' Exhibition Curator, Berlin
Christopher Hailey, Franz Schreker Foundation LA and Schoenberg Institut, Vienna
Martin Schüssler, Rathaus Foundation, New York, Berlin

Patrons:
Leon Botstein,James Conlon, Lawrence Foster, Matthias Goerne, Barry Humphries, John Mauceri

ICSM Activity Report April 2008 – June 2010

International interest in music lost and suppressed during the Nazi years grows from year to year with an endless circuit of conferences, new committees and organisations being founded along with new university departments, performances, publications and exhibitions.

It is in the wake of this activity that the ICSM should be recognised as having been one of the first university based committees to be formed and certainly the first English language university based committee. This offers a number of advantages that initially were not apparent. One is that English is now the common second language of most academics and musicians allowing for the widest geographical and cultural spectrum.

International Conferences

With the opening of the former Eastern Block, this advantage has been considerable and was made immediately apparent with the co-sponsored conference by ICSM and Salzburg Universityheld 2006 in Salzburg during the Easter Festival, entitled ‘Music and Resistance’. (The papers were published as the Vienna Jewish Museum’s Year Book in June of 2008). Papers were presented by English, Spanish, Italian, Polish, German and Austrian musicologists and performers and showed clearly that this was a far broader subject than the more immediate field of ‘Exile’ research being carried out predominantly by German language historians. In addition, with each year that the Cold War recedes into history, the entrenched ideological positions of east and west which had often kept music already suppressed by the Nazis from being reintroduced became more discernable.

The music for the socialist masses that grew from the Communist block combined with music that showed a wanton disregard for the masses springing from the West’s avant-garde resulted in a period of 40 years during which very little new music received more than public acknowledgment. Little was won for the permanent repertoire. This inevitably led to a reappraisal of music being composed before the cold war as musicians recognised that it was impossible to develop on a diet of highly familiar and frequently recorded ‘classics’.

That Suppressed Music was a subject far more international than the historic facts surrounding 12 years of Nazi dictatorship and war would have suggested was made abundantly clear with the conference held by the ICSM and the Institute for Musical Research at the University of London in April 2008: “Music, Oppression and Exile:The Impact of Nazism on 20th Century Musical Development”.

The conference ran from 8 to 11 April 2008 and presented a supporting programme of 4 concerts and accompanying public lectures at Cadogan Hall in Chelsea. It was opened by Leopold de Rothschild and explored musical life in Europe before Hitler, the mechanics of Third Reich musical policy, the dispersal of music and composers and musical life in Europe after Hitler. Pictured right are conference chairs and keynote speakers Erik Levi London, Jehoash Hirshberg Jerusalem, Albrecht Dumling, Berlin and Michael Haas London /Vienna.

The amount of research presented for appraisal was overwhelming and ultimately, there was no solution for the conference organisers but to allow parallel sessions throughout most of the 4 day period.A full report can be followed on:

Collaborations

The conference additionally provided an important opportunity for collaboration with many collegiate organisations with which ICSM is a partner in the ‘European Platform’. These include Musica Reanimata in Berlin, Voux Etouffe in Paris Exil.Arte in Vienna as well as a new organisation - The Orel Foundation in Los Angeles.

Exil.Arte is an Austrian organisation and was brought into being following the closure of the Orpheus Trust by its founder Dr. Primavera Gruber. Exil.Arte is now run by Prof. Gerold Gruber of Vienna’s MusicUniversity along with co-director Michael Haas, who is also director at the JMI’s International Centre for Suppressed Music at SOASLondonUniversity. Exil Arte is now the basis of the European Platform bringing together a number of organisations like the ICSM in other centres and a ‘Platform’ meeting was held in London in April 2008, in Paris in January 2009 and have also been held in Berlin and Vienna.

Delegates at the Platform meeting Paris: Amaury de Closel Conductor (Paris), Betty Collick Geraldine Auerbach MBE Sally Whyte (London) Emil Brix (Vienna)– now Ambassador of Austria to the Court of St James

Because of the logistics of funding, German, Austrian and indeed American universities are more generously able to support research, conferences and performances than British based institutions. For this reason, much of the work at the ICSM is in cooperation of partners, whether they be fellow committees based in Europe or the USA, or publishers, museums and recording labels. ICSM is home to some of the highly regarded players in the recovery of suppressed music and for this reason we have continued to be a welcome partner and collaborator and our own projects in the past of concert series seminars and conferences have been stimulation points for our partners abroad.

The Jewish Museum of Vienna has been one of many important partners in recent years. Michael Haas who is not only a director of ICSM but co-director of Exil.Arte ( has been music curator at the Museum since 2002 where he has been able to mount exhibitions on the composers Hans Gál, Egon Wellesz, Franz Schreker, Erich Zeisl, Erich Korngold, Hanns Eisler and Ernst Toch.

(pictured rightthe guest speaker at the opening if the Hanns Eisler exhibition )

There were conferences organised around the Gál/Wellesz and Eisler conferences together with the University of Vienna. Extensive media coverage and accompanying concerts did much to re-introduce these composers to the Austrian public. The exhibition on Korngold was attended by over 40,000 visitors and became one of the most successful event in the history of the museum.

In 2009, Haas was awarded the Theodor Koerner Prize by the City of Vienna for his exhibition on Hanns Eisler. The Prize was accepted by the Museum’s director from the President of Austria and later passed on to Haas in London at the home of Lady Solti pictured below with Dr Karl Weinberger of the Jewish Museum Vienna (left) and Michael Haas (right)where Barry Humphries launched the Spoli Fund as a means of providing future financial support for the activities of the ICSM.

In addition, to working as music curator, Haas helps run and advise on repertoire for the Chamber Music Festival at Schloß Laudon, Vienna’s Baroque Palace– a week-long festival in August around the Aron Quartet with ‘Exile Music’ as its repertoire core. The ICSM receives a full page advert in the festival programme in exchange for Haas’ programme notes.

Haas is also writing a book for Yale University Press on suppressed music while producing a series of “Exile Composer” recordings for the Austrian label ‘Gramola’.

In July, he has been asked by Festival director David Pountney to chair the Bregenz Festival’s conference on Mieczysław Weinberg – the composer at the centre of this year’s events. In addition to being invited to lecture at the Orel conference at UCLA, Haas has lectured on suppressed music over the past 12 months at venues as diverse as the National Concert Hall Taipei to Universities in Stellenbosch and Johannesburg in South Africa.

The Orel Foundation was long overdue given the huge amount of American scholarship in the field of suppressed music. It was the initiative of the conductor James Conlon whose ‘recovered voices’ series at Los Angeles Opera would bring for the first time to American audiences works that over the past 20 years had started to feed into European programming. It has an impressive web-site: and at its most recent international conference at UCLA in April 2010, ICSM director Michael Haas was invited to present a paper on Hans Gál, which was read by Prof. Gerold Gruber (Haas was in Vienna Austria preparing for the opening of the Ernst Toch exhibition at the Jewish Museum)

From Vienna to Weimar

Erik Levi, reader in music at Royal Holloway and Academic Director of ICSM, was invited to advise the Aurora Orchestra on their programmes for From Vienna to Weimar- its four-day residency at the new and exciting London music venue near Kings Cross, Kings Place which took place in January 2010.

He worked as Artistic Advisor on this programming withICSM committee memberLloyd Moore focussing on the music and film of the inter-war years. There were five concerts, a late night cabaret, a study day and a daily screening of Weimar period classic films.

Together Erik and Lloyd devised what was probably the most comprehensive presentation of this repertoire ever mounted in London with sixteen composers of the period featured, including Berg, Eisler, Gál, Goldschmidt, Krenek, Schoenberg, Schreker, Weill, Wellesz and Zemlinsky.

Artists were the brilliant young Aurora Orchestra under its Director Nicholas Collon, award-winning baritone Christian Immler accompanied by Helmut Deutsch, and special guests, the acclaimed Artis-Quartett of Vienna, sponsored by the International Centre for Suppressed Music.

The song recital superlatively given by baritoneChristian Immler (right) accompanied by Helmut Deutsch, introduced the audience to a wealth of beautiful songs by émigrés to Britain Hans Gal and Berthold Goldschmidt as well as Eisler, Schreker, Korngold, Krenek and Zemlinsky.

The Artis Quartet of Viennaperformed string quartets by Egon Wellesz, another émigré to Britain as well as Weigl, Berg and Zemlinsky.

The three concerts given by the young Aurora Orchestra including a remarkable programme of Hindemith (Kammermusik No.1), Korngold (Much Ado About Nothing), Weill (Violin Concerto with soloist Clio Gould) and Schreker (Chamber Symphony) performed to a near-full house.

There was also a pulsating late-night cabaret concert with soprano Loré Lixenberg (of Jerry Springer: The Opera fame) featuring music by Spoliansky, Hollaender, Weill and Eisler. Conductor Nicholas Collon confessed to being fascinated by the music of this period which was borne out in his brilliant and idiomatic conducting of it.

A very well-attended Study Day helped put the music into historical and cultural context: Erik Levi (Royal Holloway University, London) examined the stylistic plurality found in the music of the period; Peter Franklin (Oxford University) explored allegories of evil and redemption in three operas by Korngold (Das Wunder der Heliane), Pfitzner (Das Herz) and Schreker (Der Schmied von Gent); Douglas Jarman (Royal Northen College of Music) considered Viennese modernism during this period and Guido Heldt (University of Bristol) surveyed the film music of the Weimar era. Sadly, there was not much press coverage, but Peter Millican, Director of Kings Place, was delighted with the series as a whole and wants to host a similar event in 2013.

In April 2010 Erik Levi was theConvenor of the International Hanns Eisler Conference at the Institute of Musical Research, Senate House, University of London. This was particularly well attended, despite many speakers being held up by volcanic ash and a number of very interesting papers were heard.

Erik also has a number of important publications to his name. His Book on Mozart and the Nazis How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon is due for publication by Yale University Press in the Autumn of 2010. You can see details on their website at

Erik is hard at work editing conference papers for publication including those from theICSM Impact of Nazism Conference – which will be published (in English) by Böhlau Verlag Vienna, as part of a series of publications for our partners in Vienna Exilarte. Other conference publications he is editing are from the Study Day ‘From Vienna to Weimar’ Kings Place London January 2010 and 20th Century Music and Politics paper ‘Those damn foreigners – xenophobia in British musical life’ April 2010

He has edited with Florian Scheding a book calledMusic and Displacement (Scarecrow Press)

based on a conference that they convened of the same name.

He has also had published chapters: ‘A political football: Shostakovich reception in Germany’ in Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich (Cambridge: CUP, 2008) ISBN-13: 9780521603157, pp. 287-297; ‘Janáček and the Third Reich’, in Geoffrey Chew (ed.), Janáček and the Literaturoper (Brno: Masarykova Universzita, 2009), 69 -80.

He is sought after to write programme and liner notes as well as reviews of CDs and concerts. He has recently written liner notes for Zemlinsky String Quartets and Complete Songs [Brilliant Classics], Zemlinsky Der Traumgörge [EMI] and programme notes for Kurt Weill Lost in the Stars BBC Concert Orchestra/Charles Hazelwood QEH June 2009

Committee member Martin Anderson has been very active in producing both books and recordings on Toccata Press/Toccata Classics. These are listed below:

Toccata Press

  • Martinů and the Symphony: 500-page survey of the orchestral music and analysis of the six symphonies – published in April (
  • Adolf Busch: The Life of an Honest Musician: 1,423-page (two-vol.) biography of virtually the only prominent German musician to refuse to play in Nazi Germany (with two CDs: Busch as performer and as composer): to be launched at SOAS in September (
  • Stravinsky the Music-Maker: the complete writings of Hans Keller on Stravinsky and the drawings and etchings of his wife Milein Cosman of Stravinsky – in preparation for publication in autumn 2010. A Foreword from Hugh Wood underlines their origins as Jewish refugees (
  • Truth and Music collects the 30+ articles Hans Keller wrote for Music and Musicians from 1957 until his death in 1981; publication autumn 2010 (
  • Ludvig Irgens-Jensen: A Norwegian Composer and his Music by Arvid Vollsnes: the ICSM interest here is that Irgens-Jensen wrote songs for the Norwegian resistance under Nazi rule – when the King first appeared on the palace balcony after the Germans had been driven out, the crowd sang LIJ’s Kongen (‘The King’); with CD sampler of the music. In preparation for publication early in 2011 (
  • Martinů’s Letters Home: Fifty Years of Correspondence with Family and Friends: in preparation with a view to publication early in 2011 (
  • Per Skans’ monograph on Weinberg, left unfinished on Per’s death, has been taken up by David Fanning, who is completing it and will deliver the MS this autumn.

Toccata Classics

  • Gernsheim Piano Quintets Nos. 1 and 2 (TOCC 0099): first recording of Jewish German Romantic – banned by the Nazis, of course – released in February (
  • Jadassohn Piano Trios Nos. 1–3 (TOCC 0107) likewise; first recording (
  • Thieriot Chamber Music Vol. 1 (TOCC 0080) – Ferdinand Thieriot (four years younger than Brahms and like him a student of Edouard Marxsen in Hamburg) has an ICSM interest in an unusual way: his music was taken to the USSR as war booty and forgotten in a basement in Leningrad, where it was rescued from flooding. It was only recently restored to Germany. First recording (
  • Weinberg Violin Sonatas Nos. 1 and 4; Sonatina; Sonata for solo violin No. 1 – master ready; clearing proofs of booklet, etc. Launch at ISCM in the autumn. Includes some works not previously recorded; the three volumes will be the first complete recording of the violin music ( .
  • Leone Sinigaglia (1868–1944) Violin and Cello Sonatas, etc. (TOCC 0025) – Italian Jewish composer who died as he was being arrested by the Nazis in Turin (
  • Günter Raphael: Violin Sonatas (TOCC 0122): Pauline Reguig et al. (
  • Oppel piano music Vol. 1 – Oppel is one of the composers in Tim Jackson’s ‘Lost Composers’ project; this first CD in the complete piano music was recorded by Tim’s wife, who stayed at Geraldine’s during the recording. Oppel was also ‘suppressed’ in an unusual way: four years after his death in 1941, as the Russian army was pushing towards Berlin, his family hid his music under the garden shed and fled westwards; it was only after the Wall came down in 1991 that his son was able to return and dig it up. First recordings (
  • Schnittke Discoveries (TOCC 0091) – five Schnittke works for various forces unknown on CD before now (
  • Vissarion Shebalin Complete a cappella choral cycles (TOCC 0112) – composer condemned alongside Shostakovich et al. in the 1948 decree; first recordings (
  • Shostakovich Songs for the Front (TOCC 0121): during the siege of Leningrad DDS arranged 27 songs (from popular numbers to opera arias) for voice, violin and cello; the performers climbed on the back of a truck and drove among the troops defending the city, giving al fresco mini-concerts.
  • Shostakovich: Symphony No. 9 in piano duet version (first recording) plus other piano duet/duo pieces (TOCC 0034) – first release in the first complete recording of all the DDS stuff for piano duo/diet (including only the original arrangements of the symphonies, quartets, etc., not those by other hands)
  • Lyatoshynsky Romances for low voice and piano (TOCC 0053) – setting Shelley’s Ozymandias, on the impermanence of power, was almost suicidal in Stalin’s USSR of the 1930s. First recordings (
  • Jakubėnas chamber (TOCC 0013) and choral (TOCC 0028) by this Schreker student, forced to flee his native Lithuania after the Soviet take-over; first recordings
  • Nikolai Peyko (1916–95) Complete Piano Music (TOCC 0104 and 0105) – unknown Soviet composer, student and then colleague of Shostakovich; first recordings

Committee member Jutta Raab Hansen has completedthe translation (English - German) and revisedversion of Elena Gerhardt's memoirs Recital , London 1953; to be published by the publisher von Bockel in 2010 or beginning of 2011 - which will be the 50th anniversary ofElena Gerhardt's death in 1961. She was a German lieder singer from Leipzig, well known in Great Britain and USA who left Nazi-Germany in 1934. Her husband, Dr Fritz Kohl,manager of the Leipzig broadcasting station MIRAG (Mitteldeutsche Rundfunk AG), followed her in 1935, acquitted by the Supreme Court in Leipzig, after the Nazis had accused him in 1933. Both died in London and never went back to Germany.