Preface
‘Should what's German and true be forgot, its memory be the Master's lot’ ( Was deutsch und echt wüßt keiner mehr, lebt's nicht in deutscher Meister Ehr ) is Hans Sachs's final admonition at the end of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and could have been understood as a veiled warning from the anti-Semitic Wagner to non-Jewish Germans on the cusp of Jewish emancipation. But Sachs's lines spoke just as strongly, perhaps even more resonantly, to Jews eager to contribute to what they had long perceived as a shared cultural heritage. In only 65 years, such intentions would be shattered and the loss would be felt by more than just the German nation.
As the producer for the recording series entitled ‘Entartete Musik’ released by London/Decca, I found myself confronting works by composers who had inexplicably vanished from the repertoire since their banning in 1933. My first encounter with some of this material took place in the mid-1980s when I began producing recordings of early orchestral works by Alexander Zemlinsky with Riccardo Chailly and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (now the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin). That Zemlinsky was considered at all was thanks to the advocacy of the orchestra manager, Peter Ruzicka. When I was first shown the scores, I was slightly baffled. Chailly and Ruzicka were at the time both inquisitive musical progressives and the works they were considering reminded me more of Dvořák than their usual enthusiasms for more visionary twentieth-century composers. The fact that Zemlinsky was Schoenberg's teacher and brother-in-law offered an acceptable rationale and the recordings were surprisingly well received and were followed by Schoenberg's Gurrelieder . Then, as co-productions with DeutschlandRadio , (or RIAS, as it was then known), there came projects with Ute Lemper and John Mauceri, intended as the beginning of a series of the complete stage works of Kurt Weill. Disagreements with the Kurt Weill Foundation in NewYork led to the idea being dropped and rather than return the designated budget to London/Decca, I pleaded that we should use it explore other composers whose names I kept encountering while researching Weill. I had begun to suspect that Weill was only the tip of a potentially large iceberg. I put this proposal to the president of the label, Roland Kommerell, who was not only German, but also a nephew of the literary historian Max Kommerell, former secretary to the poet Stefan George and later a close associate of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. For whatever reasons, Roland Kommerell clearly appreciated that money put into this particular large-scale recovery would be well spent. I remain grateful to him for his trust and faith in both the idea and my work. Assisting me with advice and scholarly support was the ever helpful and indefatigable Albrecht Dümling, who remains one of the first and foremost German academics to have dealt fearlessly and objectively with this period of cultural history. The composer Berthold Goldschmidt, with whom I would subsequently work very closely, not only took me through his scores bar by bar, but was able to offer sobering accounts of life in Germany before 1935 and later as an émigré in England. The integrity of the recording series would have been unthinkable without him. Additional support came from Thomas Gayda and others, some of whom came from Peter Petersen's ‘Music Exile Project’ at Hamburg University while others came from within London/Decca itself.
Though we were not the only label examining repertoire banned by the Third Reich, we were the first with international distribution and the financial wherewithal to record large-scale operatic and orchestral works. The series ran for nearly 10 years resulting in a total of 30 different projects and won many awards. The conductors Lothar Zagrosek, John Mauceri, Riccardo Chailly and Charles Dutoit along with the singers Ute Lemper, François le Roux and
‘Should what's German and true be forgot, its memory be the Master's lot’ ( Was deutsch und echt wüßt keiner mehr, lebt's nicht in deutscher Meister Ehr ) is Hans Sachs's final admonition at the end of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and could have been understood as a veiled warning from the anti-Semitic Wagner to non-Jewish Germans on the cusp of Jewish emancipation. But Sachs's lines spoke just as strongly, perhaps even more resonantly, to Jews eager to contribute to what they had long perceived as a shared cultural heritage. In only 65 years, such intentions would be shattered and the loss would be felt by more than just the German nation.
As the producer for the recording series entitled ‘Entartete Musik’ released by London/Decca, I found myself confronting works by composers who had inexplicably vanished from the repertoire since their banning in 1933. My first encounter with some of this material took place in the mid-1980s when I began producing recordings of early orchestral works by Alexander Zemlinsky with Riccardo Chailly and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (now the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin). That Zemlinsky was considered at all was thanks to the advocacy of the orchestra manager, Peter Ruzicka. When I was first shown the scores, I was slightly baffled. Chailly and Ruzicka were at the time both inquisitive musical progressives and the works they were considering reminded me more of Dvořák than their usual enthusiasms for more visionary twentieth-century composers. The fact that Zemlinsky was Schoenberg's teacher and brother-in-law offered an acceptable rationale and the recordings were surprisingly well received and were followed by Schoenberg's Gurrelieder . Then, as co-productions with DeutschlandRadio , (or RIAS, as it was then known), there came projects with Ute Lemper and John Mauceri, intended as the beginning of a series of the complete stage works of Kurt Weill. Disagreements with the Kurt Weill Foundation in NewYork led to the idea being dropped and rather than return the designated budget to London/Decca, I pleaded that we should use it explore other composers whose names I kept encountering while researching Weill. I had begun to suspect that Weill was only the tip of a potentially large iceberg. I put this proposal to the president of the label, Roland Kommerell, who was not only German, but also a nephew of the literary historian Max Kommerell, former secretary to the poet Stefan George and later a close associate of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. For whatever reasons, Roland Kommerell clearly appreciated that money put into this particular large-scale recovery would be well spent. I remain grateful to him for his trust and faith in both the idea and my work. Assisting me with advice and scholarly support was the ever helpful and indefatigable Albrecht Dümling, who remains one of the first and foremost German academics to have dealt fearlessly and objectively with this period of cultural history. The composer Berthold Goldschmidt, with whom I would subsequently work very closely, not only took me through his scores bar by bar, but was able to offer sobering accounts of life in Germany before 1935 and later as an émigré in England. The integrity of the recording series would have been unthinkable without him. Additional support came from Thomas Gayda and others, some of whom came from Peter Petersen's ‘Music Exile Project’ at Hamburg University while others came from within London/Decca itself.
Though we were not the only label examining repertoire banned by the Third Reich, we were the first with international distribution and the financial wherewithal to record large-scale operatic and orchestral works. The series ran for nearly 10 years resulting in a total of 30 different projects and won many awards. The conductors Lothar Zagrosek, John Mauceri, Riccardo Chailly and Charles Dutoit along with the singers Ute Lemper, François le Roux and
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