Saving a music’s place

Though James Conlon would never compare himself to those righteous Christians who worked to save Jews during the Holocaust, he has in recent years performed a related service.

The 54-year-old conductor, chosen last month to succeed Kent Nagano as music director of Los Angeles Opera, has since the mid-1990s given new life to works by composers whose music was banned and often destroyed by the Nazis.

Starting Tuesday night, as part of a series titled “Silenced Voices,” Conlon will conduct three Los Angeles Philharmonic programs featuring some of this music. The first concert, a semistaged performance of Viktor Ullmann’s short opera “The Emperor of Atlantis,” will take place in the opulent main sanctuary of Wilshire Boulevard Temple. Composed in 1943 in the Nazis’ showplace ghetto of Theresienstadt, the work requires only 21 instrumentalists and seven singers.

Then, on Friday night, Conlon will begin two weekends of concerts at Walt Disney Concert Hall with the full Philharmonic. The first of these programs pairs Ullmann’s Symphony No. 2 with Mahler’s First Symphony; the second, beginning Oct. 29, will offer Erwin Schulhoff’s “Jazz Suite for Orchestra” before works by Mendelssohn and Dvorak.

Conlon is not the only musician exhuming and promulgating such scores. But his relative fame, far-flung connections and strong convictions about the artistic value of this music have made him its best-known advocate today.

Variously referred to as entartete Musik (literally, “degenerate music” in German) -- a term co-opted from the Nazis -- or Holocaust music, such works have a legitimacy beyond labeling, Conlon insists.

“These compositions are not about Nazi repression,” he said in one of a series of recent telephone conversations. “Most of this music was written in the 1920s and ‘30s, and it’s about the same things that concern any piece coming out of the German musical tradition: color, structure, form, affect and intellectual organization.”

Although Conlon acknowledges the difficulty of distancing this music from the events that followed, he urges audiences to try experiencing such works as listeners who first heard them might have. “We look back on events and know what happened,” he said. “But these people didn’t know.”

Yet separating the music from history is a challenge. Ullmann was gassed at Auschwitz in 1944, and Schulhoff died of tuberculosis in a Bavarian concentration camp in 1942. Other composers often mentioned alongside them -- Hans Krasa, Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein -- met similar fates.

Many others fled the Third Reich, never to recover their reputations, livelihoods or will to create. Even the luckiest -- Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Erich Wolfgang Korngold -- had to remake themselves without recouping their renown.

Beyond wrecking these people’s lives, the Nazis also destroyed their legacy, at least for a time. Western art music -- or, more colloquially, classical music -- was fundamentally altered by World War II and the Holocaust. Musical trends that were emerging when Hitler cemented his power were forcibly abandoned. After Germany’s defeat, European composers seemed determined to start fresh. They were uninterested in recovering what had been lost.

According to Bret Werb, a musicologist on staff at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, postwar attitudes may have exacerbated the neglect. “More and more academics are looking at it as if the reaction to the Holocaust caused the break,” he says.

Conlon likens the music’s rediscovery to unearthing buried treasure. “If someone found 2,000 paintings from a period of, let’s say, 20 years, I think we would have to reevaluate the history of art during that period,” he said. “I’m not saying every one is the Mona Lisa, but all of them taken together give you a sense of the zeitgeist, a feeling of the emotions.”

The music gains a profile

The recovery process has occurred gradually. “The Emperor of Atlantis,” for instance, remained unperformed until 1975. But in the early 1990s, Michael Haas, an American-born record producer working for the Decca/London label, created a series on CD called Entartete Musik. Vigorously marketed, it eventually consisted of 29 titles, documenting some of the most important works of the period, including full-length operas. (Regrettably, save for one disc -- Ute Lemper sings Berlin cabaret songs -- the series is out of print.)

For the first time, Haas’ series trained a spotlight on these compositions as a genre. “Its impact was immense,” says Werb. “It really gave this music a profile.”

Conlon’s recordings of similar material have received less attention, but his discs devoted to Ullmann, Schulhoff and Franz Schreker, and the promise of more to come, attest to his commitment.

Born in New York in 1950, Conlon played piano and violin as a youth but says he always wanted to be a conductor. He studied at Juilliard and made his professional conducting debut leading “Boris Godunov” at the Spoleto Festival in Italy in 1973. His Metropolitan Opera debut came three years later, and he was in the pit at Covent Garden three years after that. The same year, 1979, he succeeded James Levine as music director of the Cincinnati May Festival, beginning the longest of the lengthy professional associations that distinguish his career.

American conductors often cultivate European podiums to earn respect back home as well as overseas, but Conlon lived in Europe for two decades. From 1983 to 1991, he was music director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic in the Netherlands, and in 1989 he took on additional duties in the German city of Cologne, where he served as chief conductor of the opera until 1996 and as principal conductor of the Cologne Philharmonic until 2002.

From 1995 until July, he was music director of the Paris National Opera. And he has just begun a three-year contract as music director of the Ravinia Festival, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony. His contract with Los Angeles Opera runs from July 2006 through June 2009.

What might appear to be a lull in Conlon’s schedule is actually a shift in priorities. He and his family have returned to America, where he’ll concentrate on guest conducting in the near term. That flexibility has allowed him to undertake his most sustained effort yet on behalf of composers such as Ullmann and Schulhoff, whose music appears on most of the programs he will conduct this season.

Among the most anticipated are concerts in Miami, Boston, Munich and Amsterdam and at Ravinia with Garrick Ohlsson playing Ullmann’s Piano Concerto. According to Ohlsson, he and Conlon first performed together in the mid-1970s, but they crossed paths earlier as students at Juilliard, where Conlon’s gifts were already apparent.

“The thing I like most about Jimmy is his scrupulousness and preparedness,” Ohlsson says. “There’s no ‘We can wing this.’ I’m particularly pleased by how he’s always exploring things outside the standard repertory. And he won’t present things he doesn’t believe in.”

Nine acclaimed albums

Indeed, Conlon’s enthusiasm is largely responsible for Ohlsson’s learning Ullmann’s concerto. “I listened to it and was pleased enough,” the pianist recalls. “But he said that as I got to know it, the more I’d love it, which is the magic word. There’s nothing like having someone you like tell you they love something. Then he threatened that if I liked the Ullmann, I’d like the Schulhoff even more.”

Conlon says he never set out to advocate such music; rather, serendipity brought him to this place.

The journey began around 1993, when he first encountered the music of Vienna-born composer Alexander Zemlinsky, a major figure in fin de siecle cultural life who is probably best remembered now as a brother-in-law of Schoenberg. The infatuation was instant, and the conductor was soon pushing Zemlinsky on his players in Cologne.

It was an easy sell. Resolutely Old World, the music is lushly attractive. Yet it hardly mattered until EMI issued a series of CDs, partly funded by Ford Motor Co. From 1996 through 2002, Conlon and the Cologne Philharmonic recorded nine acclaimed albums of Zemlinsky’s scores, including three of his eight operas. Those discs changed everything.

Suddenly, a figure relegated to the periphery (first for being Jewish, then for not being avant-garde) was important again. And Conlon, ready or not, had found a cause.

He began exploring works by the composer’s pupils and contemporaries, starting with Schreker. “I was fascinated that Zemlinsky had so much influence,” Conlon said. “Korngold was a student, and so was Krasa; Ullmann was an assistant.”

Because of the way he discovered music by Ullmann, Schulhoff and others, Conlon bristles at those who would characterize his efforts in strictly political terms. “This is not a project narrowly focused on concentration camp music,” he said. “It is about several decades and two generations of music that has fallen from our view.”

He regards the Nazi era as “a rupture in a great discourse.” And he clearly wants to make the splintered past whole again. “We picked up after the war,” he said, “but without knowing the possibilities.”

Some of those oversights can be redressed now. And Conlon intends to involve L.A. Opera in that effort once he becomes music director. Southern California already has strong claims on such material; the region was a haven for persecuted musicians in the 1930s and ‘40s.

“It’s a question of when rather than if,” the conductor said of programming operas the Nazis suppressed. “We will definitely do some.”

If there’s an impediment to his plans, it’s the size of his wish list. “As in most things,” he said, “there are too many things to do.”

Korngold’s “Die Tote Stadt” -- “Boy, that’s a dream of mine” -- and Weill’s “Die Burgschaft” figure prominently in this schedule of the mind. So does the latter’s sprawling biblical pageant, “The Eternal Road,” and operas by Zemlinsky and Schreker.

Can Conlon get American audiences to share his enthusiasm for this music? By any measure, it’s too early to tell. But the conductor is not about to let up; works by these once-reviled, then neglected composers must be listened to repeatedly, he maintains.

“This is not about tokenism,” he said. “It’s about being open to the feelings that such music expresses and, gradually, having a relationship with this music. There is a real voice, a collective voice, that is fascinating here. And it’s an enormous piece of the puzzle that is classical music in the 20th century.”

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Fascination with an era

James Conlon’s discography is large and wide-ranging. Here are several titles representative of his recent enthusiasms for Holocaust music. In some cases, the CDs are officially out of print yet available from Amazon.com or similar websites.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann, “Concerto Funebre and Symphonies Nos. 2 & 4.” (Cologne Philharmonic; Capriccio): Hartmann, a gentile, remained in Germany during the Nazi years, and much of his postwar music reflects the tensions of those years, including the two stark symphonies on this CD.

Franz Schreker, “Prelude to a Major Opera, Intermezzo (Opus 8), Prelude to a Drama, Romantic Suite” (Cologne Philharmonic; EMI): Schreker’s vividly atmospheric scores, like Zemlinsky’s and Korngold’s, seem touched by the stardust of a bygone age. These are full of imagination.

Erwin Schulhoff, “Symphonies Nos. 2 & 5 and Suite for Chamber Orchestra” (Bavarian Radio Symphony; Capriccio): Written before the Nazis’ worst excesses, these pieces reveal Schulhoff’s love of exuberance. The Fifth Symphony might well be a classic Hollywood film score.

Viktor Ullmann, “Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2, Six Songs (Opus 17)” and “Don Quixote Dances the Fandango” (Cologne Philharmonic; Capriccio): Most of these works were reconstructed by Bernhard Wulff from short scores left by Ullmann. Only the songs, affectingly sung by Juliane Banse, were composed before the composer’s imprisonment, yet along with anguish, a questing quality characterizes everything here.

Alexander Zemlinsky, “Lyric Symphony” (Cologne Philharmonic; EMI): Zemlinsky’s best-known work is often unfairly compared to Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde.” But this sprawling symphony from the early 1920s is a masterpiece in its own right.

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 2 p.m. Saturday, next Sunday and Oct. 31; 8 p.m. Oct. 29 and 30

Price: $15 to $125

Contact: (323) 850-2000

Also

What: “The Emperor of Atlantis”

Where: Wilshire Boulevard Temple, 3663 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday

Price: $20 to $95

Contact: (323) 850-2000