Austria was the home of many of Hitler’s most important musical victims, some of whom have already become established as culturally historic figures. Yet others still await their discovery or, more often, their re-discovery. There are large gaps within Austrian musicology or performance-practice where these musicians have not been rightfully incorporated or given credit for their contributions.
“The society exil.arte lets us hear voices again that were silenced, and brings music that was brutally suppressed to our ears – and thereby also to our hearts.”
Thomas Angyan (former Artistic Director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, 2005 – 2020), quoted from his laudation at the awarding of the 2010 Bank Austria International Art Prize to exil.arte
Exilarte operates as a centre for the reception, preservation, research and presentation of composers, performers, musical academics and theatre artists who were branded as ‘degenerate’ during the years of the ‘Third Reich’. Only within recent decades has Austria started to address this issue. The assessment and restitution of such a multi-facetted cultural inheritance, extending from the 19th century through, operetta, film music and ‘chanson’, cabaret, and the developments of the ‘Second Viennese School’, ‘Jugendstil’, ‘New Objectivity’ and much more is an enormous, multi-disciplinary undertaking.
Exilarte’s purpose is to restore these important missing links to the chain of Austrian music-history.
