Who behaved worse after 1945 – the Vienna Philharmonic, or the Berliners?

Who behaved worse after 1945 – the Vienna Philharmonic, or the Berliners?

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norman lebrecht

March 12, 2017

From my essay in The Literary Review, on Fritz Trümpi’s new book about the two Nazified orchestras.

… Compare this to how the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra treated its former concertmaster. Szymon Goldberg, a Polish Jew, was recruited to Berlin in 1930 by the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Expelled from the orchestra in 1934, he roamed Europe and Asia, finally winding up in a Japanese internment camp on Java. In 1945 he wrote to the Berlin Philharmonic, asking for his job back. They refused. Ten years later he applied for compensation. His request was refused again. It was 1970 before the orchestra acknowledged that Goldberg, a violinist of high pedigree, had been unfairly dismissed.

It is case histories like these that illuminate the persistence of Nazi practices decades after the war….

Read the full review here.

That’s Goldberg in the concertmaster’s seat.

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