Re: politics of musical antisemitism

[Alex Lubet <lubet001...>]

wow, interesting.  Thanks.

At 12:02 PM 11/24/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>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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Alex Lubet, Ph. D.
Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Music
Adjunct Professor of American and Jewish Studies
University of Minnesota
100 Ferguson Hall
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612 624-7840 (o)
612 699-1097 (h)
612 624-8001  ATTN:  Alex Lubet (FAX)

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