Can you imagine what it would be like to attend a classical music concert and never have the opportunity to hear your favourite composer in any program? Are you a fan of Mendelssohn, Hindemith, Mahler, or maybe even Korngold? Well, unfortunately, if you fall under the latter category, you’d be hard pressed for luck (in 1930s Germany that is).
For most of us, listening to classical music is a means of escapism, solitude, and pure aural pleasure. But imagine being stripped of your listening privileges. Imagine being subject to severe punishment for, let’s say, popping in your favourite CD of London Symphony Orchestra’s Mahler no. 5 while cruising down the Gardiner Freeway as suddenly, you hear a police cruiser addressing you from a loudspeaker: “Pull over. No Mahler!” Fortunately, this is not the case.
Degenerate Music (Entarte Musik) was a term coined by Hitler’s Nazi regime, banning and disgracing music composed by Jewish and Jewish origin composers, Modernist music composers such as Hindemith, and any composer found guilty of supporting an opponent of the Nazi regime. In 1933, Hitler’s Third Reich introduced the Reich Music Chamber (Reichsmusikkammer), an institution enforcing registration of all musicians in Germany. This led to the demise of many composers simply because of race or religion and by 1938, composers such as Schoenberg and Mahler were made primary examples of composers not to be listened to in the Entarte Musik Exhibit.
Luckily, with the passing of Hitler’s regime, some of history’s best (and most suppressed) composers were able to flourish and as a result of this, we now have an incredible body of diverse repertoire from this period of time.
On Thursday, July 29, Toronto Summer Music showcases works by Erich Korngold, a Jewish child prodigy from Vienna who fell under the category of “degenerate composer”. Toronto’s Andrew Burashko and the Art of Time Ensemble will play Korngold’s Suite for piano, two violins and cello, followed by six new songs inspired by the Suite.
*Erich Korngold was the winner of two Academy awards for film scoring for Anthony Adverse (1936) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).
“I have at last learned the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year, and I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely a human being (at least the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me) but I am a Jew.”-Arnold Schoenberg
