Los Angeles becomes hub for Holocaust restitution
mainI was thrilled to read on overnight mails that the Colburn School, where I shall be lecturing in February, is establishing a program on composers who were suppressed by the Nazis and whose music has never been restored. The program will be led by conductor James Conlon; I hope to offer him a few suggestions. Read more here.
LA already has a Holocaust Museum, whose president is the grandson of two displaced composers, Arnold Schoenberg and Eric Zeisl. E Randol Schoenberg is a prominent attorney in art restitution cases. LA has become the last frontier for Holocaust justice.
A noble idea. It’s funny, too, how some people transcended it all. Certainly some people fled, some people went along, whether to get along or because they truly espoused the Nazis’ ideology. Some never recovered.
Years ago, Fred Calland, then a correspondent for national Public Radio–long retired and perhaps gone to the Great Public Radio Network in the Sky–did a segment on All Things Considered on tenors sustaining the final C in Manrico’s cabeletta, Di Quella Pira. The winner was a Josef Hoffmann (spelling?) who could have been the reigning Heldentenor of his day but got mixed up w/the Nazis.
I do NOT believe in “reparations.” We need to establish that at various times I the WORLD never mind US, various people have been terribly, unconscionably wronged & NO amt of money could ever right those terrible wrongs–slavery in America, e.g. But Maestro Conlon’s efforts are worthy and I hope, perhaps, it could even be expanded into a webcast. Not everyone was as fortunate as the Von Trapps. Some people went along, as people always do, to save their own hides. But this was a particularly odious period in world history and we will never know how many people–Jews and otherwise–had their careers and even lives snuffed out because of the Nazi regime.