Leo Yablans: Exploring the History of Exiled European-Jewish Composers (First Findings)

My summer research project analyzes a number of atonal pieces by European-Jewish modernist composers exiled by the Nazi regime, such as Arnold Schoenberg, György Ligeti, and Stefan Wolpe. I plan to posit these pieces vis-a-vis biographical information about the composers, the history of the Nazi party’s persecution of Jews, and numerous aesthetic and literary theory texts by authors such as Immanuel Kant and Edward Said. The goal of this project is to better understand how selected composers articulated their profound emotions regarding persecution and exile through their music.

Up to this point, my research has focused exclusively on the history of music and antisemitism in the Third Reich, as well as my selected composers’ – Arnold Schoenberg, György Ligeti, Stefan Wolpe, Hanns Eisler, and Walter Braunfels – various experiences with antisemitic persecution in Nazi Germany, and exile from such. My method for discerning broader historical information of Nazi-Jewish persecution predominantly relies on two sources: Michael Haas’ Forbidden Music, and Erik Levi’s Music in the Third Reich. Through these sources, I have gained a broader understanding of the Nazi party’s attacks of Jewish and modernist composers, as well as those composers’ general experiences with such exile. I then found more specific biographies about my selected composers, which include, but are not limited to, Brigid Cohen’s Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora, Sabine Feisst’s Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years, and Richard Steinitz’ György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination. These biographies, filled with primary documents such as letters and general writings by the composers regarding their exile, allowed me to specify my understanding of their experiences.

This approach has also allowed me to diversify my list of selected composers using the degree of their exile: for instance, while Schoenberg left Europe in 1933 as a world-famous composer and was thus able to enjoy a relatively cushy life in America, Ligeti, only a teenager at the outset of World War II, was enslaved in a Nazi forced-labor battalion, with the rest of his family deported to Auschwitz. I plan to use these disparate experiences with exile as methods for analyzing the aesthetic qualities of their pieces I select. For example, Ligeti’s Requiem, full of atonal polyphony, creates an incomprehensibly brutal mass of sound, by far the harshest of any piece I plan to analyze – a musical aesthetic that perhaps reflects the severity of his situation with the Nazis relative to other selected composers. I look forward to exploring this idea further as I continue my research.

With this information now apprehended, I plan to move onto the next phase of my research, in which I will read selections from the aforementioned theoretical texts, among others, in order to characterize that biographical information with philosophical terms.