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Reviving Music Silenced by the Holocaust By JONATHAN YATES
James Conlon is a conductor on a mission. He has become arguably the foremost advocate for the composers who lost their lives in the Holocaust, or whose careers were derailed by the Nazis. While he does so to right the injustice perpetrated upon them, his motivation is more artistic than political. He sees an immense group of works that have gone unperformed—music of great merit and variety, which also differs significantly from that of the composers of name who survived. Indeed, he feels that, in its diversity, it offers a fascinating alternative and companion to the familiar music of the first half of the century. Yet, through the systematic suppression of the Nazis, nearly all of this music had been relegated to near obscurity. "Even I, as a practicing musician, had barely ever heard of any of these composers on any concerts anywhere," Conlon notes.
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| James Conlon (Photo by Charles Higgins Jr.) |
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The Queens, N.Y.-born Juilliard alumnus has thus made it his goal to see that these works are played as widely as possible, so that they might finally gain the audience they've lacked for decades. In 2003 he initiated a multi-year project, "Recovering a Musical Heritage," involving The Juilliard School and several other New York City institutions. The first critically acclaimed series featured operatic, symphonic, and chamber music of Alexander Zemlinsky, Viktor Ullman, Hans Krasa, and Pavel Haas.Conlon returns this month for the second installment, which focuses exclusively on the music of Erwin Schulhoff, whose remarkable versatility will be showcased in concerts of his orchestral music (at Alice Tully Hall on April 30) and of his orchestral, solo, and chamber music (at the 92nd Street Y on May 1 and 2).Conlon's profound sentiments for this group of composers germinated from his attraction to Zemlinsky's music, which he discovered more than a decade ago. Zemlinsky had managed to escape from Vienna in 1938, and subsequently lived on the West Side of Manhattan until his death in 1941. But his music shared the fate of many of those composers who died in the Holocaust: Its romanticism was shunned by those who subscribed to the dominant dodecaphonic aesthetics of the mid-century. Conlon has recorded nearly all of Zemlinsky's orchestral works, as well as three of his eight operas."From that, I became interested in some of the other names that I was seeing that popped up during his life," Conlon recalls, "and then one thing led to another. What it made me realize is that, generally speaking, we are all very ignorant of this entire piece of musical history. I don't mean that there aren't some people who are knowledgeable—musicologists, people who have studied the history, who know about this. But the average music lover has never had any opportunity to even know what went on."Accordingly, Conlon wants to change the music public's consciousness. "I am devoting the year 2004 to helping everybody just become aware of these composers. If their enormous body of works has fallen by the wayside, it's not because they were of no value," he says. "We assume that when we don't know something, it's because it's not worth knowing. I want to attack this assumption, and I'm saying the opposite. We don't even know a great deal of what's out there because it was suppressed. It was the intent of the Nazis that these composers, these artists, these writers and their work would be destroyed. Those peoples' lives cannot be brought back, but their works can be—and that's what this project is about doing."Erwin Schulhoff, the focus of this year's New York project, was an engrossing figure who lived in Prague and perished in the camp at Wulzburg, Bavaria. His compositional career comprises a remarkable range of styles, in which one can trace influences of many of the sociopolitical movements of the eruptive time between the two World Wars. The concerts will encompass the full gamut of his approaches as well as the extreme variety of genres in which he was comfortable. The works range from solo pieces for instruments as diverse as piano and contrabass to compositions for large orchestra, and include chamber music for conventional and unconventional ensembles."Schulhoff has two or three absolutely unique characteristics," Conlon says. "In this group of composers, he is the one to have been deeply attracted to jazz, to have integrated it not as a curiosity or as an experimental piece or two in the jazz element. He embraced what he understood to be jazz, and worked for several years in this idiom—by the way, well in advance of Gershwin. Then, at the end of his life, there is a whole Marxist period. That is a very interesting phenomenon, because he used Marxism as a muse. A lot of the music that came out of the Soviet Union was propaganda, party politics, something to feed the system. In contrast, Schulhoff was an idealist and wrote his music out of sincere convictions."
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Recovering a Musical Heritage: Music of Erwin Schulhoff
Juilliard Orchestra
James Conlon, Conductor
Alice Tully Hall
Friday, April 30, 8 p.m.
92nd Street Y
Saturday, May 1, 8 p.m.
Sunday, May 2, 3 p.m.
For ticket information, please see
the calendar.
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But those two periods alone fail to define Schulhoff adequately, Conlon says. "It is fascinating to see this man who was a Dadaist in the early teens, then moved on to his jazz style in the 1920s, went through a neoclassic period, and also a period where he embraced the new Czechoslovakia. It was a new nation after the First World War, and he integrated those kinds of [folk] elements just as Janacek had, and then [he] turned to Marxism, in what turned out to be his final period. It shouldn't have been—he might have lived on and done something else. It just so happens to be the period in which he was killed."As remarkable and varied as the New York City project is, it is only one scene in the vast landscape of Conlon's activities centered on this music. His many recording projects include a CD of Schulhoff's orchestral music with the Bayerischer Rundfunk Orchestra of Munich, which includes a "jazz suite" that will be performed in Alice Tully Hall (and which will be available at the concerts). The orchestras of Boston, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, as well as the New World Symphony and the National Orchestra, have all agreed to perform at least one work of this group of composers when Conlon appears with them over the next two seasons. He hopes that other individuals and institutions will become excited by these performances and produce similarly themed projects, a phenomenon that has already begun to take place."I want as many orchestras and schools participating in this as possible, big and small," he said. "I think, each time I do this, it will take on a different form. It is not limited to any one organization, individual artist, or group. I want this project to blossom wherever it can. I want the message to be out there; I believe in the strength of the message. We have to guard against suppression or censorship of art on ideological or racial lines. Voices must not be silenced."Jonathan Yates is a graduate diploma candidate in conducting.
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