MUSIC : It Wasn’t Music to Their Ears : An exhibition opening Thursday re-creates the Nazis’ 1938 denouncement of ‘degenerate’ composers

In 1988, two German musicologists doing research at the Dusseldorf library stumbled upon evidence of a little known music exhibition that had been assembled 50 years earlier by Adolf Hitler’s propaganda machine.

Newspaper archives revealed how Joseph Goebbels, minister of enlightenment and propaganda in charge of film, music, theater and visual arts, with much fanfare had inaugurated in Dusseldorf a festival of music--the Reichsmusiktage , or the Reich’s music days--in celebration of German culture.

But along with the chamber music programs, lectures and performances by the Hitler youth singers and the Berlin Philharmonic, Goebbels and his cohorts also organized that summer of 1938 a small exhibition denouncing the composers of so-called “entartete musik” or “degenerate music.” It was part of the larger purge of cultural elements offensive to Nazi ideals, which included the infamous 1937 degenerate art exhibition (subject of a current reconstruction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

Jews Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Erich Korngold, Franz Schreker, Ernst Toch and Hanns Eisler were ridiculed and maligned in “Entartete Musik.” So was Alban Berg. Also on display at Dusseldorf’s Tonhalle were pictures, posters, manuscripts and memorabilia pertaining to Paul Hindemith, the famed German pedagogue and composer who had married a half-Jew and whose opera, “Neues vom Tage,” had enraged Hitler, and Austrian Ernst Krenek, a Catholic deemed politically undesirable because of his progressive musicality and outspoken views against the Third Reich. A special section of the exhibit denigrated jazz.

Fascinated with these findings, Peter Girth, then general manager of the Dusseldorf Symphony--he had held a similar post with the Berlin Philharmonic--and Albrecht Dumling, music critic for Der Tagesspiegel in Berlin, worked obsessively to reconstruct the exhibit. Their re-creation, which was included in a German 50-year retrospective on “degenerate art,” has to date traveled to 22 European cities, attracting large crowds in Vienna, Frankfurt, Zurich, Leipzig and Berlin.

Now, “Entartete Musik” comes to America, opening Thursday for a month-long stay at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. (The exhibit then goes to Chicago’s Ravinia Festival.)

“There were many reasons to describe an artist as ‘entartete’ and being Jewish was only one,” reflected Girth, who these days serves as general manager at the State Opera House in Darmstadt.

“Stravinsky and Prokofiev were labeled Bolshevik and unsuitable; still others were politically undesirable. And then there were those who collaborated with Jewish composers.”

“The Nazis wanted music to be positive and nice-sounding and based on melodies that everyone could sing,” added Dumling, speaking by phone from Berlin.

“The Nazis could not stand anything critical. They hated jazz because it did not belong to the German race. They hated syncopation and atonal music and anything dissonant.

“They researched the biographies of each artist, and were delighted, for instance, to find that Bruckner was pure Aryan from the peasant side. They wanted no mixture and no French or English blood. The life history of a composer became very important to them.”

Banned and persecuted in their homelands, several composers--and writers and musicians, including Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter and Fritz Busch--fled to America where they met with varying degrees of success.

Weill, hailed in Europe for his “Die Dreigroschenoper” (“The Threepenny Opera”), went on to earn considerable acclaim as a Broadway composer, while Korngold’s film scores made him the toast of Hollywood. Refugee Schoenberg, reviled by the Nazis for his atonal compositions--and fired from his teaching post at Berlin’s Prussian Academy of Arts--settled in Southern California, as did Eisler who later was deported for his communist sympathies. Emigre Krenek, now 90 and living in Palm Springs, remains an important figure in Europe, but has been largely neglected in Southern California.

“Much of the musical life of America is based on these emigrants,” Dumling reflected. “What was a loss for Germany was a positive effect for America.

“We worked so hard on this exhibition because it’s important, especially with the reunification of Germany taking place, not to forget the past so it will not happen again. And it is good for Americans to know that Germans are still looking back.”

During a recent phone conversation, Krenek said he first became aware of “antagonism” towards his music in 1927, when his most celebrated opera, “Jonny spielt auf” (“Johnny Strikes Up”) was produced in Vienna.

“In ‘Jonny,’ the Nazis objected that I brought in an American black man as the main character,” Krenek recalled. “They also objected to the music saying it was tainted jazz music, which it was not. At that time I didn’t know jazz very well, but we knew American entertainment music like Gershwin and Cole Porter. Perhaps there was some influence from that.

“In Vienna they sometimes threw stink bombs in the opera house, but nobody paid any attention to it because the Nazis were still a minority,” Krenek continued. “They asked people in Vienna to demonstrate at the Staatsoper against me--’the Czech half-Jew.’ But I am a Catholic born, baptized and I remain one to this day.”

(A caricature of “Jonny’ depicted as a saxophone player wearing instead of a carnation the Jewish Star of David was featured on the cover of the 1938 exhibition guide. The same figure, superimposed on a profile of Nazi favorite Anton Bruckner, became the catalogue cover for the reconstructed version 50 years later).

“Weill was a Jew and the Nazis thought he was a degenerate particularly because he had collaborated with progressive playwrights and communist sympathizers such as Bertolt Brecht,” offered Yale University music history professor and Weill scholar Steven Hinton, who taught music history for nine years in Berlin and will speak at an exhibition-related symposium Saturday.

“Weill was dedicated to the musical theater and when he came to America he did his utmost to continue his work in theater and to adapt to the American environment.

“Hindemith was a much more borderline case,” continued Hinton, who has edited the complete edition of the composer’s works. “Hindemith was ultimately branded because of what he wrote in his early years. They objected to “Sancta Susanna” and “Neues vom Tage,” which Hitler saw and hated.”

Occidental College music history professor Christopher Hailey cautions against “lumping” the emigre composers together. Varying and numerous factors, he pointed out, determined what the Nazis considered to be un-German.

Operas were singled out, Hailey said, because texts were thought to be immoral and politically suspect; Schoenberg was attacked because his music was considered too difficult for German audiences.

“ ‘Entartete Musik’ focuses on composers whose works were supposed to exemplify all that was really wretched,” Hailey continued. “But ironically, many people writing that good German music were students of Schoenberg, Hindemith and Schreker.

“We must give some thought to what our culture owes to this tragic chapter in European culture. When you see the influences these emigres have had not only as teachers but also as film and Broadway composers, then you see how their influence continues. This exhibit is not only a historical document, but a way for us to discover more about ourselves.”

On view will be 20 large text-panels chronicling musical life under the Nazis, as well as books, memorabilia, manuscripts and photographs housed in glass showcases. Narrated tours are offered, and at listening stations, musical programs of the era can be heard. There also are video presentations of period films and Nazi newsreels.

However, because of financial constraints, the exhibit is more limited in scope than the earlier European version. Los Angeles Philharmonic executive vice president and managing director Ernest Fleischmann, who viewed “Entartete Musik” at Berlin’s Akademie der Kunste nearly three years ago before inviting the musicologists to assemble something for American audiences, said he found the experience “eerie and very strange.”

“It was chilling seeing all those documents and pictures,” Fleischmann recalled. “And it was a chilling reminder that such a thing could happen. I only wish we could have had this exhibit last year. It would have been a reminder of what happens when a government starts making artistic judgments.”