Music was banned by the Nazis, or as memory returns to us

Michael Haas is the man hidden behind the discographic series “Entartete Musik” (“Degressive Music”) published by Decca, which was a milestone in the 1990s for the reinvention of a hitherto forgotten repertoire. forbidden music,Jewish composers were persecuted by the Nazis is a much larger work than its title suggests, yet it seems only a glimpse of a vast field of study that remains unexplored.

Michael Haas is an expert on the subject of Jewish musicians and in particular the period 1850-1950 which witnessed their affirmation and persecution. Her work, with more than 450 tightly written pages, struggles to contain all that it has to share on the subject. The title is also quite misleading, though not wrong. The sections which strictly concern the Hitler period and the period immediately following the war represent only a hundred pages, which is a large quarter of the work. The first three quarters provide a rich context for the gradual integration of Jews into German-speaking countries throughout the 19th century, the cultural assimilation into which they were immersed, their contribution to enriching it, and the continued rejection by anti-Semitism. .

The cover suggests that the book will be a compilation of some sort of ravaged career, as that of Franz Schreker, son of a Jewish father who converted to Protestantism and an aristocratic mother, who died of natural causes in 1934 but is still considered the composer’s first victim. Nazi, whose opera was withdrawn from theaters. If all viewing of their work was banned, some such as Leo Fall, the operetta composer, would have died in 1925, while others forced into exile could pursue lucrative careers in the United States, such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold, or develop an important corpus such as Ernst. Křenek.

The real subject is not the history of these composers in the face of Nazism, but how the entire population that was marginalized by society gradually managed to integrate by mastering the keys of the dominant culture, then contributing decisively to it (Heinrich Heine for poetry, Mendelssohn and Mahler for music), and even though all were forced into silence or exiled.

And there, the subject moves from history to memorial: what matters is no longer the life and music of the deceased composer what his life path was like, the social trajectory that suited him. And it’s become a broad field of study, one that speaks to present and future generations in a much more lively way. All the documentation collected by archival centers such as the Musical Conservatory of the Jewish Museum in Vienna, or the Exilarte Center co-founded by Michael Haas, has a completely different meaning: if today you had a father, a grandmother, a great-grandfather a foreign origin, one that sets you apart from the norms around you, so what this generation of artists suffered from is relevant, and the individual answers each one finds to save oneself physically and morally echo your own family history.

Prohibited music is dense and abundant work, which can be consulted like research work. A tribute to minorities who integrate and enrich the communities that welcome them, a mine of information about the mechanisms for destroying this criminal integration, a reminder that it happens close to home, but also a hope that if we remember what our forefathers did and suffered, we might be able to better prevent a return to these catastrophic times.

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