Forensic musicologists race to rescue works lost after the Holocaust
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Today on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, there are fewer people than ever alive who actually remember it. One is a composer who lives in California.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "5 SONGS OF LOVE AND YEARNING: NO. 4. AH, WHO CAN CURE ME")
REBECCA NELSEN: (Singing) Ah, who can cure me?
SHAPIRO: Walter Arlen is 102 years old. He escaped to Vienna during World War II and survived. But many Jewish composers did not. Reporter Tim Greiving visited Arlen at his home in Santa Monica.
TIM GREIVING, BYLINE: There's something elfin and even a little mischievous about the man who goes by Walter Arlen, who invited me into his house near the ocean, where he lives with his husband of 65 years. Arlen never made a living as a composer, but he grew up in a cosmopolitan cradle of culture - Vienna before the war. He was born there Walter Aptowitzer in July 1920.
WALTER ARLEN: I grew up in an atmosphere of great joy.
GREIVING: And great privilege. His grandfather founded a large department store there in 1890.
ARLEN: And it grew and grew because he was a very good businessman. And there was always music because my grandfather believed in having music in the store, and he was the first one in Vienna who had loudspeakers installed all over the store.
GREIVING: Aptowitzer's mother played piano. His uncle played fiddle. And he was 8 when his parents took him to his first opera, "Tosca" by Puccini.
ARLEN: And it bowled me over.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PUCCINI: TOSCA / ACT II - "TOSCA E UN BUON FALCO!"")
GIUSEPPE TADDEI: (As Scarpia, singing in Italian).
ARLEN: And that was the beginning of my wanting to be a composer.
GREIVING: Aptowitzer took piano lessons and sang in school. He was praised for his talent and encouraged to write music. It was a happy childhood.
ARLEN: Until Hitler came, and that's when it changed overnight. That was in 1938. On a Sunday, he came in. And up in the air, the sky was full of airplanes. That was the occupation of Austria.
GREIVING: At the time, Aptowitzer was 17. His father was imprisoned by the Nazis and his mother placed in a mental hospital. The boy responded by writing this piece.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ES GEHT WOHL ANDERS")
CHRISTIAN IMMLER: (Singing in German).
GREIVING: The title translates as "Things Turn Out Differently." Aptowitzer escaped Austria and moved in with relatives in Chicago. Others in his family were not so lucky. His grandmother died at the Treblinka extermination camp, and his father was taken to Dachau. His mother eventually died by suicide.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ES GEHT WOHL ANDERS")
IMMLER: (Singing in German).
GREIVING: In Chicago, Aptowitzer changed his name to Walter Arlen. He staved off depression by composing songs, studied music at UCLA and became a classical critic for the LA Times. I also write for the LA Times, but I had never heard of Arlen until I was introduced to him by Michael Haas, a musical historian who arranged for Arlen's work to be recorded along with many other Jewish composers.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SONG OF SONGS")
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing) Very dark am I, though comely, O daughters of Jerusalem.
GREIVING: This oratorio, "The Song Of Songs," was composed by Walter Arlen in the early 1950s.
MICHAEL HAAS: It is music that could only have been composed by a Viennese composer uprooted and transplanted to America, trying to work out all of his issues.
GREIVING: Michael Haas also authored the book "Forbidden Music" about the Jewish composers who were banned by Hitler. And even though most of Arlen's music was written after the Shoah, Haas says it belongs to this unique and uniquely traumatic place in time.
HAAS: You know, these horrible things that he had to witness and live through and just the stories that he has to tell about just trying to get out of Austria and the things that happened to him and to his family - the only way he could deal with it was to write music and then shove it in the desk drawer.
GREIVING: In 2006, Haas co-founded the Exilarte Center in Vienna, which locates and restores music that was lost during the Holocaust. The impetus started during his tenure as a Grammy-winning producer for Decca Records.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WEILL: DIE DREIGROSCHENOPER - ZUHÄLTERBALLADE")
RENE KOLLO: (As Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, singing in German).
GREIVING: Haas has recorded music by Kurt Weill, the German-Jewish emigre who wrote "The Threepenny Opera."
HAAS: Researching Kurt Weill, I kept stumbling across names of other composers who were just as famous as Kurt Weill, but they didn't have any kind of success after emigrating.
GREIVING: Haas knew about some other Jewish composers who fled Hitler's Europe, like Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
(SOUNDBITE OF ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD'S "MAIN TITLE (FROM "KINGS ROW")")
GREIVING: Korngold was a classical prodigy who got out of Austria in the 1930s and achieved fame, scoring Hollywood swashbucklers like "The Sea Hawk." But Michael Haas began to discover an entire hidden world of composers who either died during the Holocaust or who became exiles and either gave up music or, like Walter Arlen, wrote music that no one ever heard.
HAAS: The more we recorded, the more we suddenly discovered that the music had been, to some extent, also deliberately suppressed after the war not because the composers were Jewish but because the music did not represent the kind of post-war, anti-fascist statement that society felt was crucial in reeducating, you know, publics after the war.
GREIVING: Haas points to the music of the late Robert Furstenthal, who also left Vienna when he was 17 and whose desk drawer compositions forever sounded like the glory days of his Austrian childhood.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DER SONNENGESANG DES HEILIGEN FRANZ VON ASSISI, OP. 29: III. SORA LUNA - BRUDER MOND")
PHILIPPA HYDE, EMMA ROBERTS, RORY CARVER AND FELIX KEMP: (Singing in German).
HAAS: He was the account auditor for the U.S. Navy, for heaven's sakes, in San Diego. And he said, when I compose, I return to Vienna.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DER SONNENGESANG DES HEILIGEN FRANZ VON ASSISI, OP. 29: III. SORA LUNA - BRUDER MOND")
HYDE, ROBERTS, CARVER AND KEMP: (Singing in German).
GREIVING: The forensic musicologists at the Exilarte Center have rescued hundreds of works by these composers. They've also tracked down their heirs and estates, more than 30 estates all around the world. Robert Thompson, president of Wise Music Group, refers to the Exilarte team as the monuments men of composers and manuscripts.
ROBERT THOMPSON: But I realized that the missing part of it was getting this music out into the world so that it could be performed.
GREIVING: Wise Music Group, which owns the historic publishing company G. Schirmer, partnered last year with Exilarte to help resurrect this forgotten and exiled music in public concerts. Publishing royalties go to the Exilarte project and composer royalties to the families and estates, or, in the case of Walter Arlen, who expects to turn 103 this July, the composer himself.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SONG OF SONGS")
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL GROUP: (Singing inaudibly).
GREIVING: Over the decades, Arlen composed some 65 works. It's music that was trapped in the amber of his memory, music of a Vienna he dearly loved and was forced to leave. Professionally, Arlen distinguished himself as a music critic. So how would he have reviewed his work?
ARLEN: My own music - if I hadn't liked it, I wouldn't have written it.
GREIVING: And if he had not survived, we never would have heard it.
For NPR News, I'm Tim Greiving.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SONG OF SONGS")
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL GROUP: (Singing inaudibly).
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