James Conlon champions the music the Holocaust silenced
Dennis Polkow
“I don’t like injustice,” conductor James Conlon declares in a very matter-of-fact manner. “My parents brought me up that way: if there is an injustice and you can undo that injustice, you should.”
The injustice that Conlon refers to is that so much music written by composers who perished in the Holocaust remains virtually unknown.
Lest anyone voice the common cliché that there are no lost masterpieces out there, Conlon is quick to bring up recent examples such as the looting of national treasures and archaeological sites in Iraq and the destruction of ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, “a contemporary, documented picture of enormous masterpieces of art being literally exploded right before our eyes on CNN,” says Conlon.
“Humanity, unfortunately, has consistently destroyed its neighbors through wars since the beginning of time,” Conlon observes. “Every one of those civilizations that got destroyed, the art got destroyed with it.”
The eloquent and American-born Conlon is about to begin his first season as music director of the Ravinia Festival, joining a short, prestigious list of conductors that includes Seiji Ozawa, James Levine and Christoph Eschenbach.
One of the most sought-after conductors on the planet, Conlon has worked primarily in Europe for much of the last twenty years, triumphantly taking on the impossible task of having brought stability to a Paris Opera so volatile that it swallowed music directors alive, including Daniel Barenboim, who was fired from that post in 1989 before becoming music director of the Chicago Symphony. With Barenboim’s departure from the CSO after next season, Conlon is on everyone’s short list to succeed him as its music director.
Ask Conlon about such speculation, and he responds with what sounds like a very rehearsed answer: “That’s a hypothetical question. The only time I think about a specific position is when somebody comes and says, `We’ve decided that we want you.’ Then I start to think about it.”
For the moment, at least, Conlon and area audiences will have to be content for him to conduct the CSO at its longtime summer home at Ravinia, where he has guest conducted since the late 1970s.
As with every position he has accepted throughout his career, Conlon is about to make a big splash at Ravinia right from the start. In addition to celebrating Mozart’s 2006 250th birthday by performing all of his piano concertos across no less than three seasons, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the publication of “Don Quixote” by performing both popular and virtually unknown pieces related to the character, reviving concert opera at Ravinia by presenting the crown jewel of Italian opera, Verdi’s “Otello,” offering a major world premiere, a multi-season Mahler cycle, and the long-term project nearest to Conlon’s own heart, presenting music of Holocaust-era composers who were banned by the Nazis.
The composers who perished in the Nazi Holocaust were, according to Conlon, “struggling composers who struggled just the way Mozart, Schumann, Wagner and almost any composer you care to name struggled.”
Added to that struggle, however, were the additional obstacles of “massive genocide, suppression and repression of artistic freedom from an enormous, uncontrollable machine that rolled over their lives,” adds Conlon. “They were struggling anyway, and that finished them. And that also finished them for successive generations because those successive generations never knew the music.”
Unearthing these lost musical treasures of the Holocaust has become a virtual obsession for Conlon, who begins his first season as music director of the Ravinia Festival on June 23 with a concert of music by Mahler and a virtually forgotten composer who perished at Auschwitz, Viktor Ullmann. Mahler and Ullmann will remain a season-long emphasis.
The pairing of Mahler and Ullmann is not a coincidence and will, Conlon hopes, serve as a reminder that music that we now think of as great–namely Mahler–was not widely performed or known just a few decades ago.
“To me, the most amazing paradox is that this man [Mahler] who only saw the first decade of the twentieth century seems to have already found an expression that would resonate with everybody as that century unfolded,” Conlon assesses. “It’s like the animals who felt the tsunami coming and left the beach areas before it came. It has been said that artists and neurotics can sense the anxiety of a time and express it before anybody else. Mahler was a great genius and artist, and I think that also applies. This is a man who foresaw intuitively so much. It is music of our time, yet written over a hundred years ago.”
Still, the popularity of Mahler is a relatively recent phenomenon that happened during the second half of the twentieth century.
“Mahler was celebrated as a conductor everywhere he went,” says Conlon, “but not necessarily as a composer. In Europe, there was an initial discomfort and reluctance to play his pieces. The First World War also played a role in preventing Mahler’s music from becoming instilled. And don’t forget that because Mahler was Jewish, his music did not get performed in the German-speaking countries in the 1930s and ’40s. Even today, you still occasionally run into people–usually of an older generation–who feel that Mahler is a phase, a mode, a craze that will disappear.”
Ironically, it was conductors such as Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer who fled the Nazis and came to the States who brought Mahler with them and who were the first to introduce the music into America. Mahler was slow to catch on at first because the atonal twelve-tone system of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern had taken firm hold of the post-World War II generation of composers.
“We passed through a period at least twenty-to-thirty–perhaps forty–years of a certain type of orthodoxy,” says Conlon. “That is what happens when an orthodoxy prevails. Arbitrary judgments are made about the language, the mode of expression or even the modes of behavior that need to be practiced or not practiced in order to constitute a meaningful member of the community. We do that in the secular world, the religious world and the artistic world. My personal belief is that that type of orthodoxy–certainly in the artistic world–always leads to an uprooting or a strangling of the extraordinary spirit of creativity that exists in humanity. Orthodoxy is an attempt to narrow the field to one given viewpoint, however valuable that viewpoint might be.”
Mahler’s acceptance was finally able to transcend the fact that it was not serial or twelve-tone music, but that acceptance came about gradually.
For Conlon himself, now in his mid-fifties, that epiphany came about when he was an 18-year old conducting student at Aspen singing in the chorus that was part of the Mahler Second “Resurrection” Symphony. “The day that work became real to me is a day I will never forget,” recalls Conlon, who will conduct the same monumental work with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus at Ravinia on June 24.
“The person whose charismatic personality would popularize Mahler in the U.S. was Leonard Bernstein,” says Conlon. “So it took successive generations of people convinced in the value of Mahler’s music to actually impose it. Once it was imposed, it took, and has stayed with us. It is not an accident that everybody now plays it, everybody now listens to it, that everybody who conducts wants to conduct it. This music has already found its place as a universal message that will speak to all times. It certainly spoke to the latter part of the twentieth century.”
Conlon sees a parallel to composers from the Holocaust era, and feels that anytime there is a composer–or a group of composers–whose music has not been played for the wrong reasons, the music needs committed performances from persons who believe in the music.
“Yes, there is a moral aspect,” Conlon admits, “but it takes on an historical artistic aspect as well in that we, ourselves have been deprived–not just the victims–of this period of art. If you suddenly found 2,000 paintings from a period of art that was unknown or considered irrelevant, somebody, somewhere would display them and say, `Come and look at these and feel the ethos of the time.’ That is what I am doing.
“There is a worldview contained in the collective voice of these composers–not all the same, nor should they be–that will invoke feelings not just about the political reality of the time and the Holocaust, but about what art was doing at that time. Remember that most of this music is not about the Holocaust. This music is about what artists were feeling and grappling with and trying to express at that time. The Holocaust mowed them down or forced them to flee. The artistic garden was uprooted and we have lived with the consequences of that catastrophe the entire latter half of the twentieth century. But we should know the facts, and the facts are that this art is there, and this art should be heard.”
For Conlon, it is not enough to simply know the names of these composers and that they were Holocaust victims. “The way that we `know’ music,” he says, “is by live performance.”
If Conlon’s mission is successful and little by little this music gets performed and has committed performances by people who love it, “those pieces that have a universal message and that survive their time and their story will rise to the surface,” says Conlon. “My contention is that there are literally hundreds of such pieces and that they’ve got to get out there.”
Where would we be, Conlon wonders, if Mendelssohn had not insisted on reviving Bach, a century after the music had been virtually forgotten after his death? “When might it have happened?” Conlon ponders. “Would it have happened? Likewise, if Arab Muslim scholars had not saved Aristotle and Plato, we would not necessarily have had them in our Western civilization. It is not important, in the end, how long it is before something is unearthed and disseminated, it is only important that it is disseminated.”
Viktor Ullmann is the first of at least three Holocaust-era composers that Conlon will spotlight for a year, each over multiple seasons, which will also coincide with a multi-season emphasis on Mahler, whom Conlon says was far more important to the lost generation of these lost composers than was ever known.
“By illuminating them,” says Conlon, “at the same time, we illuminate him. So Mahler’s influence and importance–although it is enormous and grandiose today–is even larger than we think. And the CSO is one of the greatest Mahler orchestras, so a multi-year Mahler cycle will be an essential part of that. You hear Mahler all the time, and James Levine did a Mahler cycle in 1979 that I participated in, but it is rare to hear a cycle done in order so that the audience will be able to follow it over several years.”
Another interesting Chicago Symphony connection is that the orchestra has Holocaust survivors in its ranks and past music directors such as Fritz Reiner and Sir Georg Solti ended up conducting in the States after having fled the Nazis.
“There is actually a citation from the Mahler First Symphony in the Ullmann Second Symphony, which is why I am pairing them together,” Conlon explains. “That work is one of the two compositions Ullman was working on when he was transported to Auschwitz, so it remains his last word, so to speak.”
The fact that we have any Ullmann scores at all is the result of his having methodically kept all of his music together while he was in concentration camps.
“There was a library at Theresienstadt–which the Nazi officers loved and took advantage of–and Ullmann correctly calculated that the librarian would survive, and he did,” Conlon relates. “He was his friend and he had consigned all of the music to him. Ullmann had asked him to send the music to certain addresses after the war in the event that those particular people would survive. Fortunately, one of those persons did survive, the music was sent to him and all of that music ended up in London and remained in an attic until the 1970s.”
After the war, Ullmann’s Piano Concerto was found in Prague but was not performed until 1992. Conlon and pianist Garrick Ohlsson gave the American premiere of the work last year in Aspen and Conlon, Ohlsson and the Chicago Symphony will perform the work at Ravinia on July 1.
“When he went to the concentration camp,” says Conlon, “he didn’t have everything with him. There are, for instance, two string quartets that have been performed and reviewed favorably, but they have never been found. The third string quartet, which was written at Theresienstadt, is an absolute masterpiece.”
One of the most fascinating Ullmann scores that has survived is a one-act opera called “The Emperor of Atlantis,” which blatantly parodies Hitler and the Nazi regime and which Conlon will conduct at Temple Shalom on June 30. That idea is Conlon’s, who says that presenting the work in a synagogue is “a very powerful way to send its message.”
“It is a fairy tale and a political satire,” assesses Conlon, “and is one of the most powerful, life-affirming works and is spellbinding in its theatrical genius. It has a Brechtian way of synthesizing classical elements, citations from meaningful music symbols of the German and Czech traditions that would be immediately recognizable to the inmates and the musicians themselves. You can also smell Berlin of the twenties in some of the nightclub music.”
Though the work was extensively rehearsed at Theresienstadt, the theme was too close to the bone for the camp officials, and the performance itself was cancelled. All of those involved were ultimately exterminated by the Nazis, with the ironic exception of the singer who portrayed the role of Death, who survived into the 1980s, according to Conlon.
Conlon will pair the work with the Sextet from Richard Strauss’ final opera “Capriccio,” an idea that came to him in the middle of the night by complete accident.
“I was looking at `Capriccio’ for other reasons,” Conlon recalls, “and when I saw the date of the premiere, it went off like a bomb because I saw that it was being rehearsed in September and October of 1942; Ullmann entered Theresienstadt on September 8, 1942. `My God,’ I thought, `here is this man [Ullmann] with all of these gifts going into a concentration camp, and here is one of the world’s greatest composers [Strauss] at the end of his career and his life about to create his last operatic masterpiece–and a sublime work it is–rehearsing it at the same time with every advantage and every piece of glory that was his due, but at least he had them.
“The contrast was so strong that it set my mind on fire. To hear this music juxtaposed is so extraordinary, because you see how the entire world was on two tracks at that point. Here you have the highest achievement of one of the most sublime, artistic traditions in our civilization–that of the Germanic tradition of classical art–yet at the same time, capable of the atrocities that were going on. That makes a powerful statement of its own.”
“Unfortunately,” Conlon further reflects, “history has taught us that the presence of great art in great civilizations has not necessarily protected those civilizations from turning the wrong way. It is a lesson we should learn and we shouldn’t be afraid to turn a mirror on ourselves as well.”
(2005-06-15)