Composers interned by Italy finally get a hearing
NewsThree Jewish refugees who were imprisoned in the Ferramonti camp in Calabria from 1940 to 1943 are being supported by a new initiative from the publishers Universal Edition.
Press release:
The Viennese music publisher Universal Edition supports the academic project Musica Internata of the Italian Conservatory in Rovigo and presents works by composers who were caught in Italian camps during the Second World War.
Recent research has revealed that some musicians were able to remain musically active while imprisoned in fascist camps. One of these research projects is now being supported by the Viennese music publisher Universal Edition:
The Musica Internata project at the music conservatory in Rovigo focuses on researching, studying, digitising, editing and performing music by composers who were imprisoned in the “campi del Duce” set up by Mussolini between 1940 and 1943.
As part of international studies involving students and academics from all over the world and various disciplines, works created during the Second World War are to be researched, reconstructed and made playable again through academic editions and accompanied by book projects or museum exhibitions to provide insights into the lives of the prisoners.
A bibliographical department for scores and international musicological studies on persecuted music has been set up at the Rovigo Conservatory. The Conservatory collaborates with the CDEC (Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea), an important institution for Jewish studies based in Milan.
The project currently focuses on researching the lives and works of three Jewish composers who were imprisoned in the Ferramonti camp in Calabria: Isko Thaler, who was of Polish origin and studied under Franz Schreker, Leon Levitch and Viennese Kurt Sonnenfeld (1921-1997, pictured), whose personal library was handed over to the conservatory by his heirs in 2021.
Universal Edition is supporting the research project by presenting the digitised works on its website and making them accessible to a wider academic community as well as interested amateurs and professional performers.
This initiative echos that of the Viennese Exil Arte Center and the Dutch Leo Smit Foundation:
https://exilarte.org/
https://leosmitfoundation.org/en/home
There’s also the important work of Francesco Lottoro in finding and preserving music of composers who suffered in the WWII era; also the work of the musicology department of the University of Hamburg. What amazes me is that there is no single source that consolidates all the information. I’ve occasionally spent hours scouring these and other sites, including the ones John Borstlap mentions, and compiling the information; my list stands — with the addition of the three names in NL’s news item, new to me — at 1458 composers (including composers of popular music), of whom 310 are confirmed murdered.
It’s a good initiative and especially in the context of the far-right/quasi neo-Nazi Freedom Party of Austria receiving more votes than any other party in the recent Austrian elections.
And speaking of racism, I also think of the silence of the music world about the exclusion of fully Asian people from the Vienna Philharmonic that went on for decades. The State Opera orchestra formation of the VPO hired its fully Asian person only 2 years ago and she is now sitting last chair second violin. If she completes her tenure of three years, she will likely be admitted to the VPO.
To give you a sense of how long this has gone on, in his memoirs, published in 1970, Otto Strasser, a former chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic describes the problems blind auditions caused:
“I hold it for incorrect that today the applicants play behind a screen; an arrangement that was brought in after the Second World War in order to assure objective judgments. I continuously fought against it, especially after I became Chairman of the Philharmonic, because I am convinced that to the artist also belongs the person, that one must not only hear, but also see, in order to judge him in his entire personality. […] Even a grotesque situation that played itself out after my retirement, was not able to change the situation. An applicant qualified himself as the best, and as the screen was raised, there stood a Japanese before the stunned jury. He was, however, not engaged, because his face did not fit with the ‘Pizzicato-Polka’ of the New Year’s Concert.”
Shameless as always, Strasser…Wasn’t there an Asian tubist at one point, found inadequate, now with one of the US’s top orchestras?
Yes, Yasuhito Sugiyama. He didn’t pass his trial year in the State Opera Orchestra and thus didn’t complete the three year tenure to enter the VPO. He quickly won the Cleveland Orchestra audition which caused further questions about why he was dismissed in Vienna.
More info about Sugiyama’s dismissal in Vienna:
http://www.osborne-conant.org/sugiyama.htm
We’re to see it as purely coincidental that the VPO had a long, unspoken tradition of excluding Asians.
For all the New Year tinsel, still stuck in the Austro-Hungarian empire