Author: Madeleine Fremuth

© New York Times / Redux

The Exilarte Center will present the documentary about Julius Bürger and the current Exilarte exhibition at the Long Night of Research on May 24, 2024.

Lecture & Documentation: Julius Bürger – expelled and rediscovered. A Viennese composer returns.

7 p.m., ARTHOUSE-KINO,
campus of the mdw
University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
Anton-von-Webern-Platz 1,
1030 Vienna

The documentation provides insight into the life and work of the Jewish Viennese composer Julius Bürger, who had to leave Austria in 1938. He was able to gain international success in the USA, where in 1984, 39 years after its creation, he received the composition prize from the University of Indiana for his “Variations on a Theme by C. Ph. E. Bach”.

The film documentation was created in connection with the first performance of Julius Bürger’s orchestral works in Vienna, in August 2023 in the ORF’s large broadcasting hall with the RSO under the direction of Gottfried Rabl.

Exhibition: TRIANGEL OF THE VIENNA TRADITION | ZEMLINSKY – SCHÖNBERG – HOFFMANN

5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.,
Exilarte Center
Lothringerstraße 18 / 1st floor,
1030 Vienna

At 5 p.m. guided tour of the exhibition

Admission free!

Links: https://langenachtderforschung.at/station/4106

© Arash Amiri

Gustav Klimt’s golden era in Vienna combines resonant images from Liszt, Mahler and Richard Strauss. The young woman from his expectation – is she the mysterious beauty that Arnold Schönberg describes in his early opus? And the Garden of Eden from the Tree of Life – is that the place where Elisabeth from Walter Brich’s Hesse setting has already been?

The atmospheric figures from Gustav Klimt’s works that adorn the new Tree of Life wing are the starting point for a journey through the ups and downs of love – the path through paradise!

The soprano Arabella Fenyves and the pianist David Hausknecht interpret the still unknown musical treasures of the exiled composer Walter Bricht, returning them to the Viennese art song repertoire.

Friday, April 5th, 2024, 7 p.m.
Bösendorfer Salon
Bösendorferstraße 12 | Canovagasse 4,
1010 Vienna

Admission free!
Pre-registration: Eventbrite

Artists:

Arabella Fenyves, soprano

David Hausknecht, piano

Works by:

Walter Bricht, Arnold Schönberg, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Franz Liszt

© Chris Boyes

Dance band arrangements by members of the Auschwitz Men’s Orchestra played by musicians from the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater & Dance under the baton of Oriol Sans.

Monday, May 13, 2024, 8 p.m.
Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna
Dorotheergasse 11
1010 Vienna

The ten short pieces on this program were arranged by Polish political prisoners who were members of the Auschwitz Orchestra. They used popular German hits of the 1930s and 40s – tangos, waltzes and foxtrots arranged and orchestrated for a dance band that played Sunday concerts for the Auschwitz garrison near the villa of Commandant Höss. The resulting manuscripts, which I began researching in May 2016, are stored in the collections department of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Occasionally the prisoners signed these manuscripts with their prisoner number, e.g. B. Antoni Gargul, a viola player and Polish soldier (5665), or Maksymilian Piłat (5131), a bassoonist with a conservatory diploma who played in the orchestra of the State Opera and the Baltic Philharmonic in Gdansk after the war.

In the musical realization of these manuscripts for tonight’s performance, we retained the original instrumentation as much as possible and made only very small changes in the event of obvious errors. You hear these works, silent for over 70 years, as close as possible to how they sounded in 1942 or ’43 when they were performed at Auschwitz 1. The lines spoken by our singers are taken from testimonies and interviews with members of the Auschwitz Orchestra conducted in the post-war period.

We would like to thank the Copernicus Institute, the Exilarte Center, Dean David Gier, the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater & Dance, and the Global Tour Fund of the School of Music, Theater & Dance for making this concert possible.

Patricia Hall, 2020

Artists:

Oriol Sans, conductor

Musicians from the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater & Dance

Moderation:

Gerold Gruber

We are pleased to present the musical treasures from Exilarte Zentrum as well as the book “Music of Exile – The Untold Story of Composers Who Fled Hitler” (Yale University Press, 2023) by the renowned exile researcher and author Dr. Benjamin Michael Haas will now be presented in New York.

We would like to thank our supporters from the USA: Schirmer – Wise Music Group, American Society for Jewish Music, Hebrew Union College, Heller Museum, Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music, among others.

Thursday, May 9, 2024,
7:00 p.m.Hebrew Union College
1 West 4th Street (at Broadway)
New York, NY10012

Registration under: info@hmlf.org

Greeting:

Janie Press, Holocaust Music Lost & Found
Gerold Gruber, founder of exil.arte and head of the Exilarte Center of the mdw

In conversation:

Benjamin Michael Haas, author
John Mauceri, conductor

Interpreters:

Theodora Nestorova, soprano
Josipa Bainac, mezzosoprano
Ulrike Anton, flute
Alex Fowler, violoncello
David Hausknecht, piano

About the book:

What happens to a composer when persecution and exile mean that his true music no longer finds an audience? In the 1930s, composers and musicians began fleeing Hitler’s Germany to build new lives around the world. The process of exile was complex: although some of their works were celebrated, these composers had lost their familiar culture and were forced to confront xenophobia and a completely different creative terrain. Others, far less fortunate, found themselves in a kind of internal exile – composing under a ruthless dictatorship or in concentration camps and ghettos. Michael Haas sensitively records the experiences of this musical diaspora. Torn between cultures and traditions, these composers created music that was a synthesis of old and new worlds, some of which are core to today’s repertoire, while others have disappeared into the drawer. From the musicians who were interned in Great Britain as enemy aliens to the brilliant Hollywood compositions of Erich Wolfgang Korngold to the Brecht-inspired theater music of Kurt Weill, Haas shows how these musicians shaped the sound world of the 20th century – and offers a moving documentation of the war’s unpredictable impact on culture.

About the author:

Benjamin Michael Haas, PhD was a record producer and recording manager at Decca and Sony for many years, and was vice president of Sony Classical in NY in 1994/5. He is a multiple Grammy winner and initiated and directed the Decca recording series “Degenerate Music”. From 2002 to 2010 he worked at the Jewish Museum Vienna as a music curator. In 2013, Yale University Press published his book “Forbidden Music – the Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis.” From 2000 to 2015 he was Director of the Jewish Music Institute at the University of London and in 2015/16 Research Associate at University College London, School of Jewish and Hebrew Studies. Since 2016 he has been a senior researcher at the mdw’s Exilarte Center, which he co-founded.