Vienna Phil commemorates its expelled concertmaster
OrchestrasGustav Mahler’s brother-in-law Arnold Rosé held the first concertmaster’s seat in the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for 52 years.
When Austria merged with Nazi Germany in March 1938 Rosé was summarily expelled. He was fortunate to find refuge in london, where he died in 1946. His daughter, Alma, less fortunate, was murdered in Auschwitz.
Yesterday, the chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic Daniel Froschauer led a deputation to Rosé’s former home to affix a memorial plaque. ‘These are fates that must not be forgotten,’ said Froschauer.
More here.
It doesn’t make up for the injustice, but it’s still heartwarming to see this.
Fatal mistake of Alma Rose:
“She went on her own to the Netherlands where she believed she could resume her musical career.”
To make music, a sea, preferably lot`s of it, was needed. Her father survived in London, but her brother in the US did even better.
Good – but how awful that it’s taken until 2023. And what memorial for the five members murdered in the death camps?
They have attended to those also…
https://www.thestrad.com/news/vienna-philharmonic-commemorates-holocaust-victims-outside-former-concertmasters-house/16291.article
The reason you cannot fully separate art from politics is here to see. The Vienna Philharmonic replaced their Jewish musicians and kept playing humanistic works from Beethoven and Mozart as their former colleagues were thrown to the Nazis.
And here was Rosé, on whom awards and honors of the highest nature had been bestowed, the absolute backbone of the Vienna Philharmonic, and the very personification of the great Viennese and German (recalling that he was also concertmaster at Bayreuth) musical traditions, a stature also emphasized by his famous string quartet, which fortunately made some treasurable Beethoven recordings.
For such a man to have to flee for his life and freedom like a common criminal — that alone should have shown every Viennese (and every German for that matter) that this was madness, insanity. But so many found ways to live with it and accept it.
Imagine if Mahler had lived into his 90s, perhaps living out his last years in Los Angeles, playing tennis with Shoenberg and conducting Le Sacre du printemps at the Hollywood Bowl.
Here he is in 1910, with Mahler alive of course, playing Brahms, more or less without vibrato.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dROF2zdiLsw
“His daughter, Alma, less fortunate, was murdered in Auschwitz.”
Alma died in Birkenau on April 5, 1944, but the exact circumstances remain uncertain.
The biography of Alma by Richard Newman and Karent Kirtley (Alma Rosé: Vienna to Auschwitz, 2000) devotes a chapter to her death, “Death in the Revier”. They conclude her death was due to botulism from spoiled food.