‘My name is known, but nobody performs my works’

John Borstlap says:

Botstein is wrong when he says that Rathaus’ music cannot be ‘classified’. It reflects the typical still tonal music of the twenties and thirties, and is Middle-European in nature, Germanic in its expressionism. A herd of composers wrote such everything-in-a-pan music, mostly very mediocre and pale, but Rathaus clearly is far above that level and more a composer like Schreker (who also enjoys a posthumous come-back) or Shostakovich. That 3rd symphony (with Shos touches) is strong and impressive music, although the leaden pathos is not in proportion to the music itself, and the piano music is clearly influenced by Scriabine, Szymanowski and Bartok, with a touch of expressionism (Schoenberg, Berg), and it is all very well made and very expressive. His film music did not much good to him, obviously. But one can clearly speak of a ‘second murder’ after WW II, the murder of music, under the pressures of the times and the idiocy of ‘avantgarde’.

I still don’t forgive Botstein’s character murder of Stefan Zweig for not upholding ‘Jewish identity’ but instead advocating a European, inclusive humanism. That kind of ‘identitary fanatism’ kills-off any humanist message of Jewish culture it may have. And Rathaus should be revived not because he was Jewish but because he was a truly good composer, representing different trends of the 20th century.

More about Rathaus here:

https://polishmusic.usc.edu/research/publications/polish-music-journal/vol6no1/karol-rathaus/

With the gradual and ongoing excavations of 20C ‘forbidden music’, forbidden for different reasons, the scale of the cultural holocaust that happened after WW II still has to be assessed.

BrianB says:

I never even thought of him as a composer but as an editor of a version of Boris Godunov widely performed by the Met in the fifties and sixties.