politics of musical antisemitism

[cyril robinson <lunar...>]

I have been doing a study of Jewish music in France. Following is a short 
excerpt from a translation I  made of the period just prior to WW II. 
Musicians were very much part of the right-wing movement embracing and 
embellishing to Wagner's theories:


         At Paris, Madeline Grey sung three songs of Silbersee, accompanied 
by an orchestra directed by Maurice de Abravel, interpreter and friend of 
Weill since 1922. A Jew of Sepharard origin, expelled from 
Germany,  Abravel became musical director of the ballets of Balanchine. 
After the third song, Ballade de César, the audience?s applause was 
interupted by two spectators, the most excited crying, «Vive Hitler».  The 
appause of some of the audience doubled, and in the confusion Madeleine 
Grey repeated the song. New applause, new cries, «Vive Hitler,» from an old 
man of commanding presence, which those in the know recognized as Florent 
Schmitt. He justified his intervention in saying: We, in France, have had 
enough of poor composers without them sending us all the Jews from 
Germany.» In other words, he approved the cultural politics of Hitler as 
against «degenerative» music and disapproved Weill?s welcome in France.

         The incident was taken up by the press that went along with the 
nationalist commentary ? to antisemitic sarcasm?. Émile Vuillermoz was 
almost the only one to defend Kurt Weill.

         One finds in all French writings such prejudices formulated by 
Wagner adapted here to the local reality: French fatherland and culture 
must be defended and protected against the foreign virus (Dumesnil), 
monopoly of Jews on French musical life; Paris. intellectual capital of the 
people elected to carry germs of decadence (Rebatet). This unfortunately 
also reflected a large slice of opinion, not only in France but in 
Switzerland and not only Germanophile: Henry Gagnebin, a student 
of  D?Indy, became in 1925 director of the Geneva Conservatory,  publicly 
replayed  in November 1933 (just after the laws  removing from German 
Jewish artists all possibility of professional activity) to see«Hitler 
Germany as giving a severe blow in arresting  [486] internationization of 
music, throwing out jazz and ending the success of Schonberg and his school.»

         With the exception of the cinemagraphic version of Pabst?s L?Opéra 
de quat?sous [Opera of four pennies] presented in Paris  in 1931, the 
theater of Brecht and the music of Weill only had a luke-warm reception by 
the majority of the French public?.

                 In the religious and political cleavage of France in the 
30s, one f inds several French Jewish composers who, from 1934 
on,  associate themselves with the cultural program of the Popular Front. 
Daniel Lazarus (1898-1964) wrote a Symphonie avec hymne, (1934), which 
commemorated the entire history of the Jewish people in an opera, 
Trumpeldor (1935), on the Zionist hero, Joseph Trumeldor (1880-1920), the 
person for whom the play was named. Darius Milhaud collaborated with Auric, 
Ibert, Roussel, Koechlin, and Lazarus, in another collective work, 14 
Juillet, on a text of Romain Rolland, and  on other works on the occasions 
of the Universal Exposition of 1937 and the inauguration of the musée de 
l?Homme. The fall of the Blum government in 1938 led to a politic of the 
right and paradoxally at the moment when Nazi antisemitism attained a new 
increase with Crystal Night that the Vatican (under the;pontificate 
of  Pius XII) condemned  L?Action française. The right-wing press with 
Gregoire, Candide, Je suis partout  [I am everywhere] ?gave free rein to 
its antisemitism, including in the musical domain, not only with Lucien 
Rebatet or Dominique Sordet, but once again Émile Vuillermoz, André Coeuroy 
and even Paul Lanormy. The confusion and even the hate became 
well-accepted. A little before the French creation of Jeanne au bûcher 
[John at the butcher] of Claudel and Honegger with Ida Rubinstein, at 
Orleans in 1938, a libel was distributed denoncing the conquest of Joan of 
Arc by a Jewess Rubinstein, after that of Orleans by the enemy, with the 
collaboration of  the organization of  Free Masons, Jean Hervé, based on a 
musical composition of a Jew, Arthur Honegger. Already at the time of Roi 
David, a crtique had concluded against all evidence that the author of such 
a work «could be only a Jew».


Cyril D. Robinson
520 N. Michaels St.
Carbondale, IL 62901
Tel: 618-549-0028
FAX: 618-453-6733
Archivist: Jewish Music Archives
Radio host: Cyril's Cabaret WDBX 9l.l FM
http://www.chipublib.org/008subject/001artmusic/jewish/jewishmain.html


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