Exiled composer's music performed nearly a century after fleeing Nazis

Ideas53:59ARC Ensemble: The Forgotten Music of Exiled Composers

For the last 20 years, members of ARC Ensemble have dedicated themselves to recovering the forgotten works of exiled composers. Recently, the ensemble revived the works of Frederick Block — music that hasn't been performed publicly in nearly a century. *This episode originally aired on Dec. 19, 2023.

*Originally published on Dec. 20, 2023.

In the fall of 2022, Simon Wynberg scoured the special collections of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts searching for musical scores that have been lost to time and circumstance.

As his finger traced a list of composers, one name in particular caught his eye: Frederick Block.

"I had never heard of him," Wynberg recalled.

Wynberg is the artistic director of Toronto's celebrated ARC Ensemble — Artists of the Royal Conservatory of Music — a group that has dedicated itself to recovering the lost and forgotten music of largely unknown composers, most of whom fled Nazi-occupied countries. 

"You had these composers who were extraordinarily well-trained," said Wynberg, "very, very talented, and whose careers were simply cut short through no fault of their own."

The composers and their music were labelled degenerate by virtue of their Jewish origin. 

Kurt Weill, Hans Gál and Arnold Schoenberg were just a few of the most well-known composers forced to run for their lives in the face of the Nazi onslaught.

However, there were many other lesser-known composers who were lucky to find safe havens, but never regained the stature and success they enjoyed in their home countries.

"This is music that springs from a deep need to demonstrate birthright, along with the necessity to accommodate new and complex situations and the bewilderment of learning strange new languages," writes Michael Haas in his recently published book, Music of Exile: The Untold Story of Composers who Fled Hitler.

"This is not just music written by exiles, this is indeed the music of exiles."

Forbidden music 

Before the Nazis came to power, Jews had participated in every sphere of German and Austrian music life — as performers, conductors, composers, arrangers, publishers, teachers and musicologists.

As soon as the Nazis took over, they purged the German and Austrian music and cultural scene — along with every other sphere — of all Jewish influence. Jews and the music created by Jews, were banned. 

"To write authentic music," said Wynberg, "you had to be a German, qualified as an Aryan. It didn't matter what it sounded like, just the fact that it had been written by a Jew classified it as degenerate." 

Frederick Block (1899-1945) was an up-and-coming Austrian Jewish composer in Vienna during the 1920s and '30s. But in March 1938, when the Nazis occupied Austria, he was forced to flee.

"I saw the list of [Block's] works," said Wynberg, "piano quintet, string quartets, piano trios, six operas, orchestral works. I went through his material and I thought, 'Wow, this looks really, really promising.'" 

Wynberg took photographs of some of the scores and returned to Toronto where he presented his most recent discoveries to the ensemble, which is made up of senior faculty of the Royal Conservatory of Music's Glenn Gould School. "Everybody was impressed." 

Introducing the ear to new composers 

The ARC Ensemble recently featured three of Block's works — a string quartet, a piano quintet, and a suite for clarinet and piano — at a 20th anniversary performance at Toronto's Mazzoleni Concert Hall. According to Wynberg, it was the first time in nearly a century that Block's pieces were performed in public.

The group also performed a string quintet by the noted German composer Walter Braunfels (1882-1954). Another anniversary concert is scheduled at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts in Kingston, Ont.

The jury is still out when the musicians first rehearse a new work, said ARC cellist Tom Wiebe. "There can be some combination of curiosity and maybe some puzzlement or even some skepticism." 

"Part of me is just saying, let's give this composer a chance. This is somebody who gave it their all and was a very skilled composer who really felt they had something to say. And so just for humane reasons, you want to give somebody a good look. You don't want to just discard the idea of playing their music because you haven't heard of them." 

Therein lies the raison d'être of ARC: to expand the canon beyond composers like Bach and Beethoven — to make room for those we've never heard of.

"I love nothing more than to play something nobody else has played," said ARC violinist Erika Raum, who has been with the ensemble since its establishment. 

"I love learning it from scratch. I get to decide the rules. It's simultaneously a feeling of responsibility, but huge freedom too. And you feel like a kid in a playground. There's nobody else here. It's all yours. Go for it."

For Raum, each performance is also a collaboration with the composer.

"If you're going to play Bach, you have to collaborate with Bach. So right now we're collaborating with Block. It doesn't matter that the composer is dead. We can still have this relationship. It amounts to the same thing. He's sending us his instructions as clearly as he can. We are reading them as clearly as we can, and in that way we are colleagues."  

'The test of now' 

For Wynberg, integrating this music into the repertoire is a matter of righting a wrong and correcting the historical record. But he insists this is not an act of memorialization. The choice of composers and works are based first and foremost on the quality of the music.

"I think it's extraordinarily unfair that people with that kind of talent and that sort of training are pushed aside, which is exactly, of course, what the Nazis wanted," said Wynberg. "I think by continuing to ignore them, you're really fulfilling all the Nazis' hopes and expectations that they would be forgotten." 

So far, Wynberg and the ARC Ensemble have helped to bring to light the works of more than two dozen forgotten composers and hundreds of unknown works. 

But do the works of an unknown composer pass the test of time? Wiebe prefers to think of it in different terms. 

"Why does the test of time have to be the test for greatness? Because for somebody's work or composition to survive the test of time depends not only on its quality, it can depend on the breaks that they got. And so up until we've performed quite a few of these pieces, you could say it didn't stand the test of time until now," he said.

"And who knows how well it will be known after we've performed and recorded this. It might be forgotten again, but that doesn't mean that it's not great music. So I'd rather think about the test of now than the test of time when it comes to the music that we perform." 

The future of much of this music remains in question. In order to find a wider audience and become part of standard classical music repertoire, a work has to be performed often and recorded. This week, ARC records Frederick Block's chamber works, for release in the fall of 2024. This will be the first ever commercial recording of his music, according to Wynberg.

"Once it's recorded," he said, "it has a chance of being embraced."

"Without a live performance or recording, it has absolutely no chance. So we're putting our foot on the first rung of the ladder and hoping that other people will take it up further."
 

This episode was produced by Alisa Siegel.