Berthold Goldschmidt is remembered in Germany on Holocaust Day

John Borstlap says:

Excellent programme. It should not be forgotten that it is not only composers like Goldschmidt and Walter Braunfels who suffered a second excommunication from music life after 1945, but that also today there is no single serious and talented composer in Germany who dares to ignore the established Klangkunst prescription and writes according to musical, instead of purely sonic, values. Goldschmidt is nowadays, like Braunfels, ‘liberated’ from entirely undeserved obscurity, exercised first by criminal nitwits and after WW II, ‘progressive’ nitwits, but it is a historical liberation which leaves the current lockdown on new music intact – it is ‘safe’ because it is all about ‘the past’. But it can function as the beginning of the German struggle to get away from the postwar moralistic taboo that a postwar contemporary composer HAS to be a Klangkünstler to avoid the suspicion of being a fascist, however catastrophic the result, because the German tonal tradition was considered associated with decadence and fascism. While everywhere else in the world new music explores other paths, from the most primitive via the most vulgar to the more effective revivalist trends, in Germany there still is an immense ‘Berührungsangst’ around its own wonderful tradition – Bruckner was an antisemite, Wagner inspired the Second World War and the Holocaust, Strauss collaborated with the regime, etc. etc. so their music is antisemitic, warmongering, etc. etc. but you can still perform it because it is safely locked-up in the glass box of history. Use it as contemporary examples brings all those associations suddenly close-by.

As Alex Ross very aptly said in his ‘The Rest is Noise’: ‘The great German tradition, with all its grandeurs and sorrows, is cordoned off, like a crime scene under investigation.’

Basia Jaworski says:

It’s about a time, indeed!

About Goldschmidt (and he others):

https://basiaconfuoco.com/2018/09/04/between-two-worlds/