Nothing
illustrates the enormous and horrifying paradox that was Nazi Germany better
than their relationship with music and the Jewish musicians who
played—often—the great works of German / Austrian composers. But let The
Guardian tell the story:
In
1943 the Nazis struck upon two entwined ideas. One was to stage Brundibár, a children's
opera composed in 1941 by Hans Krása, invite a delegation from the
International Committee of the Red Cross to see it, and let these distinguished
guests be the judges of what they saw. The children sang, the orchestra played
and the Red Cross was delighted, underwriting Terezín with its international
authority and a clean bill of health. Within days, almost the entire cast of
children had been shipped "East" to the gas chambers.
The
second scheme was to produce a documentary entitled The Führer Gives a City
to the Jews,
for which Terezín was cleaned up and grotesque sequences filmed in which
apparently happy inmates, in reality doomed to die, play football and cultivate
market gardens. And of course there is music: the Terezín Orchestra plays, under
the baton of its founder and conductor, Karel Ancerl. Here, his genius is
exploited for a nauseating propaganda purpose – "but he could not do
otherwise," recalls Anka. But she knew him differently, for who he really
was, her memories both intimate and epic.
Better,
consider the story of Herz-Sommers, as The New York Times describes
it:
Music
spared Mrs. Herz-Sommer a similar fate. One night, after she had been in
Terezin for more than a year, she was stopped by a young Nazi officer, as Ms.
Stoessinger’s book recounts.
“Do
not be afraid,” he said. “I only want to thank you for your concerts. They have
meant much to me.”
He
turned to leave before adding: “One more thing. You and your little son will
not be on any deportation lists. You will stay in Theresienstadt until the war
ends.”
And so
Herz-Sommers had the paradoxical privilege of being allowed to live, though she
had to escort her mother to the deportation center for the “East” in Prague
(small wonder—she called it the worst moment of her life), and see her husband
in 1944 transferred from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and then to Dachau, where
he died.
Perhaps
because of the music, she never turned bitter. The Times quotes
her thus:
“It
was propaganda,” she later said. “We had to play because the Red Cross came
three times a year.”
But
for Mrs. Herz-Sommer, who played more than 100 concerts in Terezín (the Czech
name for Theresienstadt), the sustaining power of music was no less real.
“These
concerts, the people are sitting there — old people, desolated and ill — and
they came to the concerts, and this music was for them our food,” she later
said. “Through making music, we were kept alive.”
“Making
music” I assumed to be the act of interpreting somebody else’s music, but I was
only half right. Because there was music being composed, too—and a special
music it was. Because Czechoslovakia had a special, dual musical heritage. Yes,
they were deeply influenced by Germany, studied there and played its music. But
there had also emerged a distinctly Czech school: Smetana, Janácek, and of course Dvorak,
who straddled both worlds. Here’s what The Guardian has to say:
Listening
to the new Nash CD, and earlier recordings of the Terezín works by the La Roche
Quartet, the Pavel Haas Quartet of Prague (Haas died in Auschwitz in 1944) and
the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, one gets a very strong sense that not
only were great composers murdered in gas chambers, but also that a whole
greater than the sum of its parts was summarily eradicated: a distinctively
Czech school of music – bursting with talent, energy, innovation, yearning and
wit – poised to flourish and reinvent the national music in the world of
postwar modernity.
Of
course it never happened, but those few composers who did survive – mostly
gentiles such as Bohuslav Martinu – offered a hint of what might have been but
never was, with his extraordinary blend of Bohemian romance and modern rigour.
However, the saplings of that truncated Prague Spring did very briefly grow,
could be heard and were heard – en route to the gas chambers.
Thus, a
whole nascent musical tradition was lost. But what had it been? How did the
music from Theresienstadt sound? Tantalizing to think about, and especially so
when considering the words of one particular composer, Victor Ullmann, who died
in the camps in 1944. Here’s
what Wikipedia had to
say about him:
The
particular nature of the camp at Theresienstadt enabled Ullmann to remain
active musically: he was a piano accompanist, organized concerts
("Collegium musicum", "Studio for New Music"), wrote
critiques of musical events, and composed, as part of a cultural circle
including Karel Ančerl,
Rafael Schachter, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása, and other
prominent musicians imprisoned there. He wrote: "By no means did we sit
weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon. Our endeavor with respect to
arts was commensurate with our will to live."[3]
I turned,
as always, to YouTube,
and sure enough, it was there: the Third String Quartet, written in 1943. And how did it sound?
Well, it’s
music I admire more than like. It’s also music that is tightly reasoned,
well-crafted, highly serious; this composer let’s you see why one of the
foremost composers of the time, Arnold Schoenberg,
thought so highly of Ullmann. It’s music that refuses to sink to bathos or
cheap sentiment.
