Rescue Mission

Opera News
February 2008

This month, Los Angeles Opera continues "Recovered Voices" - a multi-season exploration of music by composers suppressed by the Nazis - with a double bill of Alexander Zemlinsky's Der Zwerg and Viktor Ullmann's Der Zerbrochene Krug. BROOKS PETERS visits with the driving force behind the series - conductor James Conlon.

James Conlon is not a man to waste time. One of the first things he did when he took over as music director of Los Angeles Opera in 2006 was to announce an ambitious four-year project, entitled "Recovered Voices," exploring the music of persecuted composers, including Alexander Zemlinsky, Viktor Ullmann, Ernst Krenek, Franz Schreker, Walter Braunfels and Erwin Schulhoff. These seminal figures in twentieth-century music are nearly forgotten today, because they were deemed by the Nazis to be entartete (degenerate), in most cases merely because they were Jewish. An entire generation of influential and well-established talents was banned from performances, their works burned, their careers ruined and, at worst, their lives snuffed out. Some, including Schulhoff and Ullmann, died in concentration camps. Others, such as Krenek and Zemlinksy, were forced into exile and died in an atmosphere of neglect and isolation. Two others, Kurt Weill and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, reinvented themselves in America by writing for Broadway and Hollywood, although their reputations as classical composers suffered. Arnold Schoenberg was luckier than most: he managed to escape oblivion and to remain a key figure in atonal music.

But many of those who did not survive represented music that was more in line with traditional European tonal music, leaving a vacuum at the core of its legacy. Zemlinsky's operas, for example, exuded a brash, erotic lyricism that was a natural progression from the works of Wagner and Strauss. An Austrian, who was the lover of Alma Schindler (until she threw him over for Mahler), he taught Korngold, Schoenberg and Berg. His influence was undeniable, but today - outside of conservatories and endeavors such as recent stagings at Bard College's Summerscape Festival program - he is virtually unknown. Yet slowly these overlooked figures are being resurrected, their works rediscovered, reappraised and given a second chance to stand on their own merits.

This past March in Los Angeles, Conlon conducted an evening of works by seven of the entartete artists - a double bill that included a complete performance of Zemlinsky's Eine Florentinische Tragödie (A Florentine Tragedy) and a pastiche of selected works by Ullmann, Krenek, Schulhoff and others. In February and March of 2008, again at L.A. Opera, he leads staged productions of Zemlinsky's Der Zwerg (The Dwarf) and Ullmann's Der Zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug), directed by Darko Tresnjak, artistic director of the Old Globe Shakespeare Festival in San Diego.

Ullmann conceived Der Zerbrochene Krug while in a concentration camp. "In two years," Conlon says, "he wrote twenty compositions. He inspired the creation of a cultural community. Although he wrote in the camp, the works were never performed. They were first found in the '70s. I've done some works by him at Juilliard, but The Broken Jug has never been performed in America. A forty-five-minute comedy, it is a sharp piece of social criticism." In future seasons, Conlon will conduct operas by Schreker and Braunfels.

"This all started for me fifteen years ago," Conlon tells me, in his dressing room, relaxing after a highly successful concert at the New York Philharmonic in October, in which he led the orchestra in a concert performance of Eine Florentinische Tragödie, based on a play by Oscar Wilde. "I fell in love with this music in 1992, while I was in Cologne," Conlon recalls, having heard a piece of Zemlinsky's being played on a car radio. He was so enraptured by the music that he had to pull his vehicle off the road and listen to the rest of the piece without distraction. "I couldn't believe that here I was in my forties and I had never heard this music before!" he exclaims. "I don't blame anyone for not knowing of it. Here I was, someone who ate and drank music since he was eleven years old, discovering something that I didn't know was out there."

Conlon dove into the repertory, recording nine of Zemlinsky's operatic and orchestral works with the Gürzenich Orchestra-Cologne Philharmonic for EMI. "They gave me an opportunity to go deeply into a composer," he says - "especially one whose work was not done. It is rare that one can get into a corpus of works like that. It sealed it for me. I found I wanted to go back time and again to this music, to hear things I hadn't heard before."

Conlon was struck by how much music that had been banned was still out there. "We have written what we think is the history of twentieth-century music without knowing a whole body of work that was overlooked. We have been walking right over riches in our own musical heritage. It's a cliché nowadays to say there are no lost masterpieces, but that is simply not true. Every time there is a war, there are losses to civilization. What's different here is that we are dealing with music. While it may exist on paper, if no one performs it, it is still lost."

During his tenures at Cologne, as general music director of the city leading both the Gürzenich Orchestra and Cologne Opera, and at the Paris Opera, as principal conductor, Conlon made every effort to integrate these works into the repertory. He strives at the Ravinia Festival, where he has been music director since 2005, to include suppressed music. This past summer he conducted a series of concerts featuring the works of Erwin Schulhoff. Last fall, he led a presentation of Viktor Ullmann's Kaiser von Atlantis in Houston, in partnership with Houston Grand Opera. At Juilliard in December, he led dance performances to the music of Zemlinsky and Schulhoff, as well as the overture to Schreker's Die Gezeichneten (The Stigmatized), as part of a two-year residency there.

But what he is doing at Los Angeles Opera is taking this mission to a new level. He owes this opportunity, he says, to its general director Plácido Domingo. "When Plácido came to me with his kind invitation to go to L.A.," Conlon explains, "he was so enthusiastic. I said to him that there were two things that if I came out I'd have to commit myself to. First I wanted a commitment that we would do Wagner. Los Angeles had never had a Ring. Now we are doing a lot of Wagner. We did Tannhäuser last year, Tristan this year, then Lohengrin, and a complete Ring cycle in 2010. There has to be a line [of Wagner's works] that will go through every year."

The second half of his request was more daunting: "I told him that I would like to produce as many works as possible by composers who were suppressed by the Nazis." It was an interesting balance to the first request, since there are still audiences sensitive to the Nazis' propagandizing of Wagner's music. "Plácido was very open-minded about this. He didn't know that much about them. And that's the shame of it - most people don't! I wanted to make sure we had a strong financial base." Domingo suggested that Conlon meet board member Marilyn Ziering, a prominent Beverly Hills philanthropist. "Go talk to her and explain your vision," he told Conlon. It was a good match. "She is an extraordinary woman," says Conlon. "Her deceased husband [Sigi Ziering] had been in a concentration camp, then came to America and made his fortune." In fact, Sigi Ziering had survived the Riga ghetto and several camps. He had been chairman of Diagnostic Products Corporation, which was sold to Siemens in 2006. Conlon admires Marilyn Ziering "as an angel and as a close friend." She kicked off the campaign by donating $3.25 million. Since then the company has raised an additional $750,000. "Her commitment, I think, showed everybody that we were serious. And we are just starting."

Conlon is pleased that Zemlinsky is being performed at all. "I grew up in the Bernstein era," Conlon adds. "He was effective in his implementing interest in many composers. He did a lot for Copland, Carl Nielsen and Mahler. He took a chance when he said, 'You are going to listen to this.' It was the force of his personality. I owe that model to him. I made a decision four or five years ago that if somebody insists, then we can make it happen. I am happy to be the provocateur. But it takes the passion and courage of many people to change. And it has to be a committed performance. This is not mere tokenism. I don't conduct anything I don't love."

There was no question, watching the fifty-seven-year-old Conlon on the podium in October at the New York Philharmonic, that he absolutely believed in what he was doing, and so did the audience. I attended a Friday matinée, which, with an audience comprised mostly of superannuated ladies in too-youthful Chanel suits, can be seen as the domain of the rigidly traditional and the staunchest defenders of the traditional canon. But as Zemlinsky's opera ended the concert in a fanfare of glorious sound, Conlon was treated to a surprising ovation: more than half the audience was standing up, applauding with enthusiasm. A similar reaction occurred in L.A. during Florentinische Tragödie. It's proof that the music the Nazis deemed degenerate is powerful enough to generate passion in a new era. "To see an audience on its feet does my heart good," Conlon says, clearly moved by the experience. Also gratifying has been the response of musicians, in particular some Germans who came backstage to thank him for doing it. "We also have been robbed of this music," a German singer told Conlon. "That is the power of this music for people."

It seems difficult to believe now that the Nazi leaders considered this music to be immoral. "They didn't know anything about music," Conlon says. "I wouldn't give them the benefit to say there was any substance to their claims. You don't destroy music because you don't like it. It was purely political, in preparation for genocide. I would like to deny the Nazis this posthumous victory. Still, they have succeeded to a degree that is unacceptable, in wiping these composers' works off the face of the earth. In certain respects, if their music is not played, it's not out there. They so damaged the environment that it's taken half a century to reconstitute itself. As long as there are people who don't know the minds of these composers, the Nazis' victory over them still stands."

BROOKS PETERS is a freelance writer based in the Hudson Valley, where he runs an antiquarian bookshop, Brooks Books.