A friend recently handed me a compact disc titled "Entartete Musik." I approached this CD with a certain degree of apprehension and suspicion, for I had never heard of such music. But to my absolute joy and delight, I found the music intellectually stimulating and musically inspiring.

Entartete Musik translates into "degenerate music," a title that describes the Nazis' attitude towards a dozen or so Jewish composers' works that were banned because of the composers' racial and religious background or bias. At a closer look, these composers might have played an important part in the development of European music, given the chance. Thankfully, these works are now available for the appreciative listener.

I highly recommend this CD (cover of the US edition partially pictured in the title of this section).

The following is an article included in the circular of the CD:

There is a mistaken assumption that Hitler smashed a musical avant-garde that was seamlessly resumed after his defeat. Because the Third Reich had exploited the emotional power of music, the post war avant-garde tried to achieve 'objectivity' and neutralisation of expression in order to prevent music ever being so misused again. Unwittingly, it continued the suppression of the same banned works and composers, who now found themselves rejected as reactionaries.

One of the most celebrated of these composers in recent years is Berthold Goldschmidt, whose opera Der gewaltige Hahnrei, was premiered in 1932 to great acclaim, only to be banned a few months later. In exile, as with most other composers, his native musical language took on the slight accent of a host country—in his case England.

Another pre-war progressive was Ernst Krenek. His opera Jonny spielt auf more than any other, embodied the Nazi concept of 'Entartete Musik.' An offensive half-ape, half-Negro playing a saxophone and with the star of David on the lapel of his tuxedo, named Jonny, became the logo for music they didn't like. The opera was an enormous hit all over Europe and was the first to confront audiences with sights and sounds familiar through the modern world around them: cars, whistles, jazz bands, sirens, electric bells—with the final jubilant chorus suddenly interrupted by an air raid siren: a frightening premonition, making its place at the end of our sampler all too appropriate.

Jonny spiel auf was used to launch the 'Entartete Musik' series alongside another, contrasting, opera—Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Das Wunder der Heliane. Both operas were premiered in 1927, though Korngold's father, Vienna's most important critic, tried to collaborate with the National Socialists to prevent Jonny detracting from Heliane's success. Korngold's opera took music to levels of expressiveness not even reached by Strauss or Puccini. The aria 'Ich ging zu ihm' is one of the more reflective moments in this work. During his exile in Hollywood, Korngold created a cinematic style which would shape the future of film music, as can be heard in the excerpt from his soundtrack Between Two Worlds.

The irony of the Jonny vs. Heliane 'fight' is that the progressive, subversive Jonny was written by the monarchist, Roman Catholic Krenek, whereas the author of Heliane—a whirlpool of noble Germanic sentiment—was the Jewish Korngold. Both composers were Viennese of Czech extraction, roughly the same age, established in Berin and exiled in Southern California where they died, probably never having met one another. Between these styles lies almost the entire world of new music banned by the brand mark 'entartet.'

Both Krenek and Goldschmidt were students of Franz Schreker, whose students are an index of pre-war Berlin progressives. His operas were large-scale and their plots deeply psychological, magical and erotic. Die Gezeichneten surges to ever longer lines and more arching, breathless melodies and the 'Procession of Masques' from Act II, included on this disc, gives an idea of the explosion of feeling that flows through the entire work.

Another conservative with his foundations in Germanic culture was Walter Braunfels, who would have been regarded as a model German composer if his parents had not been converted Jews. His musical language was rooted in nature, mysticism and beauty, and Die Vögel is full of glorious melody and comedy.

Hanns Eisler's partly serial work Deutsche Sinfonie was begun in fascist Germany and continued during his exile in America, before finally being finished in Communist East Germany after his deportation from America. The symphony was forgotten, but can now receive proper recognition as a monument to the tragic fall of a great culture to despotism: a work whose sense of loss and sadness is tempered with contained anger.

Viktor Ullmann's opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis is a cabaret opera about Death going on strike. It was composed in the camp of Terezin (Theresienstadt) and got as far as rehearsal before being suppressed and Ullman and his librettist Peter Kien being murdered. Indeed the text to the Emperor's final aria was written on the back of the transport lists of prisoners from Terezin to Auschwitz. The excerpt included on this disc, an encounter between a soldier and a young girl, is poignant in its simplicty and heartbreaking as lyrical lines are broken by the drummer—a reminder of the destructive power of war. Our recording was the first of the published restored score which many had believed irretrievably lost.

This was also the case with Erwin Schulboff's opera Flammen. It is perhaps less an opera and more a massive dramatic tone poem with singers setting up each orchestral interlude. It sweeps from Mahler to jazz, creating its own distinctive language while employing elements of Post-romanticism. Schulhoff was another Czech composer who, like Ullman, Haas and Krása, died in a concentration camp.

Pavel Haas's music is mystic and oriental. The movement 'The Moon and I' from the Second String Quartet has a haunting beauty that is distinctively Czech and colourful. His murder in Auschwitz deprived the world of the logical continuation of the style of his teacher Janácek.

The objective of the 'Entartete Musik' series has not just been to excavate the ruins of a musical civilization like Pompeii after Vesuvius, but to try and add to a more complete picture of how music in Europe was developing. The avant-garde during this time included a fusion between popular and serious music, with atonality or twelve-tone music aiming to heighten our musical and emotional senses—not bypass them altogether.

Michael Haas, Executive Producer
An Introduction to Entartete Musik
Decca CD 452 664-2

Well, there you have just a few examples of the phenomenal wealth to be found in the music world of today. It is an adventure that never ends, and I for one intend to keep on discovering! ENJOY!