B. Goldschmidt; German Composer Driven Out by Nazis

Berthold Goldschmidt, the last surviving composer purged by the Nazis for his “entartete Musik” (degenerate music), has died. He was 93.

Goldschmidt, who died in London Thursday, had lived there since fleeing Germany in 1935.

Born in Hamburg, he was one of Germany’s most promising young musicians, and it was music that saved him from the death camps.

His early success as a composer included “The Magnificent Cuckold” in Mannheim in 1932. It was to be the last opera by a Jewish composer performed in Germany before the Nazis’ rise to power.

Hauled in for questioning by the Gestapo, he established a rapport with the interrogating officer, who had an interest in music and advised him to leave Germany quickly.

The change of location also meant a change in audience. Only last year, Times music writer Dan Cariaga noted that Goldschmidt’s “compositional career permanently existed outside the mainstream.”

Shunned as unfashionable after World War II, his music saw a major revival of interest in the 1980s. His opera, “Beatrice Cenci,” written in 1951, was given its first complete performance in 1988 by conductor Simon Rattle and the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein commissioned his Third Quartet in 1988 for the opening of a museum about the Holocaust. . “The Goldschmidt Album” was recently released under London/Decca’s Entartete Music label.